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17 August 2018 at 19:55 #63785
You may have driven me to drink, my friend!
I hang my head in apology 😳
After two months of complete abstinence, I confess that I have just restocked what passes for my cellar* and have opened a bottle or two in the past week. In my case ’twas my brother led me astray, swooping in from France on a whirlwind visit, bearing products of the vine. It would have been churlish of me to spurn the gift, after all – and I can withstand most things except temptation 😉 . Following puro’s example, I may well settle down to view the first episode of the coming season with a glass of some mellow red beverage to hand.
Despite the misgivings expressed above, I am looking forward to seeing what Chibnall has in store and how Whittaker embodies the Doctor, and will do my best to follow your example and maintain a positive attitude. The gods forfend that I should venture into ARSE territory. At the very least I will withhold judgement until I have seen a fair number of episodes.
Thank you for the welcome back. It is good to be here again and to see the Forum beginning to come back to life after the long fallow period. In the intervening months I haven’t even been re-watching old episodes – in fact I seem in retrospect to have spent most of my spare time during the past few months in the garden, because there has been plenty to do in spite of the long drought in this region, and I am definitely getting slower in my old age. The high point was probably the afternoon spent, in a temperature of 35 degrees C, cleaning out the garden pond and restocking it with plants. Result: one very muddy, smelly but surprisingly cool** Mudlark, some briefly traumatised but ultimately much happier frogs, and a greatly improved water feature, with clear though still slightly greenish water containing a fresh crop of oxygenating plants and embellished with a dwarf water lily and a miniature bulrush for the dragonfly and damsel fly larvae to climb up. I did leave some gunge in the bottom for the frogs to hibernate in come winter, but the rest went to fertilise the flower beds.
This straying further and further off topic, but what was Thane’s verdict on Ashes to Ashes?
*A shelf in what was originally a walk-in pantry but now serves as a general glory hole
** which brings to mind the Hippopotamus song ‘Mud, mud, glorious mud, nothing quite like it for cooling the blood’ (Flanders and Swann, for the uninitiated)
16 August 2018 at 20:26 #63779@thane16 @ichabod @blenkinsopthebrave
Although not particularly spoiler averse, in this case I decided not to watch the interviews with Chibnall and the cast for fear it might create preconceptions, even a prejudice, about the way the Doctor and companions will be played, and what puro says about the giggling etc. suggest that I was probably right in my decision. I would prefer to approach the coming season with something approaching an open mind, at least on that score
On the other hand I am aware of some of what has been written about Chibnall’s plans for the show, and I share your apprehensions about what is to come. Unless it becomes formulaic, or proves too much of a regression to the past rather than a development in a new direction, I will probably continue watching; but I fear that, compared with the richness and complexity, not to mention controversies, of the Moffatt era, it may provide meagre food for discussion here, let alone material for bonkers theorising.
4 August 2018 at 21:41 #63719The one thing to be said for the generally unbecoming and often hideous school uniforms which most of my generation in Britain were obliged to wear back in the day, is that at least bullies couldn’t seize on our – or our parents’ – choice of clothes as a pretext for picking on people. Our sartorial self-expression in school hours was limited to how far we could subvert the intended neat uniformity, usually by contriving a casual, not to say slovenly look 😉
17 March 2018 at 21:16 #63294@janetteb @winston and @jimthefish have pretty much summed it up. Every actor has brought something different to the role and that fact, along with the vision of successive show runners and writers, is how the show has managed to survive for so long – because it has evolved and expanded in scop0e. There can be no universal ‘best’ Doctor, because viewers are individuals, and each will have their own opinion according to which incarnation resonates the most with their experience and personality. For many, such as @blenkinsopthebrave , ‘their’ Doctor is the one they first encountered as a child. I am old enough that my first Doctor was Hartnell’s, but if I am asked to name those that had the most impact on me I would say, in chronological order, though not in order of precedence, that they were the second (Troughton), the fourth (Tom Baker), the eleventh (Matt Smith) and the twelfth (Peter Capaldi) – and I would have to mention, also, John Hurt as the War Doctor, who brought his own gravitas to the part. If forced to choose just one I would probably have to say ‘Capaldi’, because in my opinion his version of the Doctor was probably the most complex and nuanced, but I would hesitate in doing so.
That doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate all that the Tenth Doctor was – though for me Tennant’s mannerisms did begin to grate slightly towards the end; nor do I wish to argue you out of your opinion that he was the Best. You and I are different people with different views and a different experience of life, so both of us are equally entitled to claim that we are right 🙂
23 February 2018 at 18:06 #63200There is also the problem that there you can’t guarantee that there will always be a sledgehammer to hand when you need one, and a sledgehammer is a pretty cumbersome thing to carry around on the off chance that you might encounter a weeping angel. You would also need safety goggles, because a stone chip in the eye would certainly cause you to blink 😉
Of course, the Tardis could no doubt manufacture the necessary if the Doctor were actually expecting to find weeping angels, but so far that hasn’t been the case.
6 February 2018 at 19:54 #63103Strictly speaking, this is not Doctor Who news, but there is a Doctor Who connection. The first episode of a new drama, Collateral, airs next Monday on BBC2 and, according to the Radi0 Times (dead tree edition), it is a thriller which poses questions about the experience and treatment of migrants and immigrants in Britain. The writer is David Hare and the Who link is in the cast list, which includes Billie Piper, Carey Mulligan and John Simm. Chances are with those credentials that it will be worth investigating.
24 January 2018 at 09:48 #63036Sad news indeed to read on waking. A great writer who wrote with vision, clarity, depth and profound insight, and she wrote beautifully.
I have loved her novels and writings since I first discovered The Left Hand of Darknessin the early 1970s and her books, which fill almost an entire shelf in my library, will continue to enrich my life as long as I have eyes to read.
9 January 2018 at 17:45 #63002Sonic earrings? We can only hope! The ultimate in cool, and so discreet 😉
8 January 2018 at 19:50 #62994When it comes to the ear rings, presumably the Tardis has the means to manufacture the requisite jewellery, but a sonic screwdriver or hi-tech Tardis intervention is not strictly necessary to account for the ear piercing; all that is needed is some kind of antiseptic to swab the ears, a sterile needle, something to mark the spot(s) on the ear lobes and a steady hand plus, if you are a terrestrial mortal, sleepers to keep the holes open until they heal – but the last might not be needed for Time Lords, when the expenditure of a teensy bit of regeneration energy could speed the healing process up. I just hope that the Doctor does not ever decide that tattoos would enhance his/her appearance (a personal prejudice).
As for the costume as a whole, I think that @bluesqueakpip is probably right, and that this particular look will not survive long. My first impression was that it looked a bit gimmicky, though I like the coat, but I can well imagine the Doctor thinking ‘Wheee! now that I’m regenerated as a woman (again?) I can dress as I like without looking out of place among the pudding brains’.*
* Though, given the Time Lords’ notion of formal dress on their native planet, I can well understand the Doctor’s usual instinct would be to tone things down (the 6th and 7th incarnations excepted).
6 January 2018 at 22:10 #62979When I watched the episode it crossed my mind that Rusty must have been extremely fortunate to survive what seems to have been more that a billion years, given that most of his kind tended to end up as sentient mulch in the sewers. The artwork for his life support system reinforces the impression I had that there were faint echoes of Davros’s life support system in The Witches Familiar – without the snakes, of course.
6 January 2018 at 21:56 #62978Many thanks for the pics, particularly of the production artwork. One of the secondary delights of Doctor Who, for me, is the design work down to the smallest particulars. Quite often I devote one viewing of an episode just to that aspect, so that I can pause the recording at frequent intervals just to examine and savour the details
6 January 2018 at 21:48 #62977Seconded 🙂
3 January 2018 at 22:52 #62962As small a step as it was, the girls on the council estate where I grew up – few of whom would end up at the Girl’s Grammar – were given a role model in Sarah Jane and how sometimes it’s right to talk back to people.
Agreed; I just wish that it could have been a larger step, for all concerned.
My mother and one of her younger sisters won scholarships to a local grammar school in the 1920s, and my grandmother made their school uniforms and earned the money to pay for their text books and other school necessities by working from home as a dressmaker, because my grandfather’s wage, which he gave my grandmother in full, was barely enough to pay the rent and keep food on the table. They – my mother and aunt – had a pretty tough time of it, between one world and the other, and they had to leave school and start work at 16, because there was no way that the family could have afforded to support them through higher education. But it was my grandmother who had the vision on their behalf, even if it was a fairly limited vision by our standards, and we of the next generation reaped the benefit.
So I honour them, and am well aware that it is owing to them I started life a rung above the majority on the ladder of life, and with a broadly feminist outlook. I also realise now that I wasn’t sufficiently aware of the social pressures and constraints on the majority of the girls of my generation and those following; I suppose that I assumed, in my privileged ignorance, that they were aware of the options and had made their choice. Here I have simply stated my reaction to Doctor Who at that time, whilst acknowledging that for others it was a more progressive influence.
3 January 2018 at 21:33 #62960Not alien to me because -see my post above – I lived through it, even if in a privileged position; and I don’t think the subject was ‘over-egged’ exactly, just treated clumsily by people viewing the issue from a largely contemporary perspective.
As for Jo Grant, she may have represented a slight advance in thinking, but she nevertheless irritated me considerably; and though Sarah Jane was a further step in the right direction, I still wasn’t wildly impressed. Which opinion would probably lead trolls to brand me as a ‘feminazi’ or worse, though I have never been particularly aggressive; just standing fast by my principles when challenged 🙂
3 January 2018 at 20:53 #62959I may have been a bit harsh in my judgement, because it is difficult to convey to people who didn’t experience it how things were in the 1950s and 60s, and it was perhaps asking too much of a Christmas special to convey the difference between then and now with the subtlety it really requires. What is today in the open, challenged and fought over was then, in the 1950s and early 60s, largely unacknowledged and accepted, and a few minutes in a 60 minute Doctor Who episode which is for the most part concerned with other themes does not really allow enough time to illustrate the difference.
Born in 1942 and growing up in the 1950s I was, I suppose, vaguely aware of the prevailing attitudes, but I was largely cocooned against them, because I was fortunate enough to be born into a family where it was taken for granted that my education as a girl and my options for the future were at least as important for me as for my brothers. I suspect, in fact, that my parents may have regarded these as more important for me, because they were aware of the obstacles I might face. Certainly they, and my father in particular, did all they could to support and encourage me in my ambitions, once I had decided on what I wanted to do. They also ensured that I went to a girls’ secondary school with high academic standards, where the teachers did all they could to foster in us a sense of our own worth and potential. It was only when I got to university – around the time that Doctor Who was conceived -that I was fully confronted with overt sexist attitudes, and by then I was old enough and well enough armoured to defend myself.
Those school friends with whom I kept in touch went on to forge successful careers of their choosing but, looking back, I realise that there were many in my year, even in a school such as we attended, who were influenced and hampered by prevailing attitudes. I am at fault for not realising at the time how much that mattered.
2 January 2018 at 14:43 #62944On the issue of over-egging the sexism I thought it was ironic and necessary.
I agree with everything you and @ichabod say about the importance of the issue, and that it was useful, in the context of this episode to illustrate the differences in attitude between the original Doctor and the Twelfth – who seems to have learned a lot from Clara’s prompt cards, although the social insensitivity which he displayed, and which she was trying to counter, was across the board. The basis of my criticism was, not that it was done, but that it was done rather clumsily in what was otherwise an anything but clumsy and un-nuanced episode, and that it was played primarily for laughs.
The first Doctor seems to have been conceived as having the kind of attitude towards woman which a gentleman of his apparent age in the early 1960s might have been supposed to hold towards women – or at least ‘ladies’ as opposed to women of the working classes; simultaneously idealising and patronising them and having definite ideas about the limits of their fragile brains and bodies, but always courteous. This attitude was very much internalised and in the Doctor’s case was expressed, for example, in subtle traits such as his apparent deafness sometimes to Barbara’s suggestions and his manner of addressing Polly as ‘my child’. It seemed to me a bit out of character for him to say the kind of things he said here, especially when in the presence of Bill.
Underlying this, of course, were the largely unspoken assumptions which were pervasive in society at the time the programme was first conceived and that, despite the fact that the first producer was a woman – and a very forceful and influential one – crept into it. Some companions had more agency than others, of course, and it is no coincidence that my preferred companions of the BG era were Romana, who was a Time Lord and portrayed as equal, if not superior to the Doctor, and Leela, who may have been an ignorant ‘savage’, but was depicted as intelligent, a quick learner, and very resourceful, if sometimes a bit too aggressive for the Doctor’s liking.
What is different between the 1960’s and now is, I think, that among people who hold such attitudes, the sexist bias tends now to be much more in the open and aggressively expressed, amplified no doubt by social media, because it is a back-lash response to the increasingly more active, widespread and outspoken feminist movements of the past four or five decades.
As for the kind of attitudes you describe in your school, among your contemporaries some of it, at least, is a kind of unthinking and uncouth bragging that, with any luck, a good many them at least may outgrow – and when it comes to objectifying the opposite sex girls can sometimes be just as crude. As for the elders well, I’m afraid there appear to be some who are doing their best to reinforce the perception, once widespread over here, that there were an exceptionally large number of thoroughly unreconstructed males in Oz*
* No doubt an unwarranted slander.
1 January 2018 at 20:35 #62934I don’t think that I have ever come across the variety of pear you mention but I will look out for them, assuming that they are available in the UK. The ones in my fruit bowl (actually an old brass preserving pan) at the moment are Conference, but I like most pears, including the ones my parents used to refer to as ‘slaverchops’, which should be self explanatory. The hard-fleshed ones, in my opinion, are better poached, though – preferably in wine with spices.
Even the juiciest pears cannot compare with a really ripe and juicy mango, though, and my father was of the opinion that the only way to eat the latter was first to strip off and get in the bath.
1 January 2018 at 10:30 #62932this time realized the connection with the truly brilliant 1945 film by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger “A Matter of Life and Death”
Yes, that struck me, too; and the stairway in the Testimony looked like an overt reference, even though – unlike the stair to Heaven in that film – it wasn’t a moving escalator.
My post yesterday evening was over-long, but even so it omitted many of the points in the notes I scribbled immediately after viewing. That was one; another was the symbolic significance of the dropped ring – equivalent to the discarding of Smith Doc’s bow tie – but that had already been noted by @bluesqueakpip .
At risk of annoying people, and being argued down, I also feel just a tiny bit vindicated by the recovery of the Doctor’s memory of Clara; my reasoning all along being that the memory was simply blocked (neural block), not erased, and remained latent. The Testimony could remove the block, but I don’t see how they could restore something which no longer existed, unless of course it had been cheating and had already harvested his memories mid-life. The mere reappearance of Clara wouldn’t have worked except perhaps to raise an itch, as had already been demonstrated.
Another minor detail which seemed significant was the fact that the point at which the original 1966 footage merged with the modern centred on human emotion and the First Doctor’s question to the cybermen ‘.. love, pride, hate, fear; have you no emotions, Sir? ‘ And when it comes to empathy or sympathy, it was the First Doctor, not the Twelfth, who noticed that the Captain was in shock after experiencing sudden, inexplicable translation to the Antarctic and his first exposure to the Tardis, and who went to his assistance.*
I agree with all those who have commented that the sexist attitudes of the First Doctor were exaggerated to a cartoonish degree, and this was one of the few jarring notes in the episode, even though played for laughs, but I can remember the treatment of the female companions throughout most of the BG era being a constant source of irritation to me. Lip service may have been paid to the intelligence of many of them, but they were not often given a chance to apply it, and even when they were given a proactive role it usually got them into trouble so that they were reduced to screaming a lot and having to be rescued.
*Brandy, even Aldebaran brandy from the Doctor’s hidden stash, might not now be recommended in cases of shock, but it seemed to be the standard remedy in fiction of the time and earlier.
31 December 2017 at 20:47 #62922It is now 8.37 in the evening here, and those of you in the Antipodes will already have seen the New Year in some time ago, while those across the pond still have a while to wait. I have already started on the champagne (solitary drinking, tut, tut!), so the pub seems the appropriate place to wish everyone on the D W Forum all the very best for 2018. At the moment it may not appear as if there is much to be optimistic about, but I echo @janetteb ‘s sentiments; may this coming year be the year it starts to get better. And as @scaryb says
the drinks are FREEEEE
and life can sometimes look better through the bottom of a glass
31 December 2017 at 20:28 #62921The trouble with arriving six days late at the party, when the discussion is far advanced and so much has been said and so eloquently, is that it is difficult to add anything original or to tag everyone whose comments have chimed with my views. The best I can do is to set down my initial thoughts and reactions from my own perspective, and to apologise for anything which might appear to plagiarise what others here have already written, very eloquently.
My hopes for this episode, based on what I had read beforehand, were mingled with some slight apprehension, lest it fail to do full justice to Peter Capaldi’s last hurrah, but my worries, slight in any case, were of course unfounded. It was a lovely and fitting send-off and I, who used to be notorious for my ability to remain stone-faced through the weepiest of weepies, found myself suspiciously moist-eyed at times (well, how else can you react to a depiction of the Christmas Truce?). Capaldi was magnificent – and @jimthefish
I totally salute Capaldi’s performance. I could happily have had another year of him
expressed my sentiments exactly; Bradley, in my opinion, conveyed the essence of Hartnell’s Doctor brilliantly, without being too slavish an impersonation, and I concur entirely with @pedant ‘s opinion of Gatiss in the role of the Captain.
It doesn’t really need stating again that this was neither a normal light hearted Christmas diversion nor a conventional adventure full of hazard, unless you count the brief encounter with the unshelled Daleks on Villengard and with Rusty, still resentful that the Doctor had isolated him by turning him against his own kind; and yet there was so much going on, on so many different levels, and so much for the viewer to unpack – not least in all the incidental details and allusions harking back to episodes in the 12th Doctor’s life and those of his predecessors; * And of course there were all the jokes, both obvious and subtle, and the little digs at fans: the traditional reaction of the Doctor on seeing the changes a successor had made to the Tardis – ‘It’s hideous’ – this time uttered in unison with the equally inevitable ‘It’s bigger on the inside’ from the Captain; and the parodying, through the medium of the first Doctor, of all the bone-headed cracks about ‘Nurse Who’ and complaints about the sonic sunglasses (his ‘What’s ‘browser history?’, and Capaldi Doc’s reaction caused my brother almost to fall out of his chair laughing).
It was the Doctor himself who brought what element of danger there was in the story, not just because he is always dangerous, but in this case because of the potential effect of the dual reluctance to regenerate on the integrity of space-time. But that was a relatively minor element because, braided all through the narrative were the reflections on mortality and the persistence of memory, a final, profound meditation on a recurrent theme during the Moffat era.
Refusal of the first Doctor to regenerate would, of course, create an irresolvable paradox – and it is significant that the 12th had no recollection of that refusal – so the Tardis brings his later self, experiencing a similar reluctance though with very different feelings and reasons, to where he needs to be in order to find a resolution; and the consequent meeting of the Doctor with himself creates the disruption of the Captain’s timeline, so that he may be one of the catalysts of their eventual decisions.
The first Doctor, facing regeneration for the first time, is afraid and uncertain whether there is any point in his continuing, and his initial impression of his much later incarnation, followed by what he learns from the Testimony concerning the ‘Doctor of War’ and the ominous titles he has accumulated over his lifetimes, do nothing to reassure him. His conversation with Bill on Villegard seems a crucial turning point, when she hints broadly that his actions and influence are, or will be an important factor in ensuring that the evil, which he suspects is the dominant trend of the universe, does not entirely prevail. He does not really understand what she is saying, perhaps, until he is given a demonstration of a possible different meaning to ‘Doctor of War, and of how just one deliberate and subversive small adjustment in the timing of the return of the Captain to the battlefield can make a difference – maybe to just one life as far as he and his later self know initially, but with the revelation of the Captain’s name they, and we, know that it will have far greater repercussions down the decades. Life and the universe may not be a fairy tale but, just sometimes, people are enabled to live more or less happily ever after.
For the 12th Doctor, weary of centuries of struggle, it takes the recovery of his memory of Clara and a forceful reminder of how much he has meant to those who have travelled with him before he is ready to accept the prospect of yet another lifetime, and then we are treated to a wonderful final declaration of his philosophy, incorporating elements of many of his previous speeches to others**, but this time to his future self, before we see him rewarded for his decision.
‘We can only hope’, he said in answer to the Master’s exasperated, ‘Is the future going to be all girls?’ And, ‘Oh, brilliant’! says his renewed self in delight, on catching sight of her reflection in the Tardis console monitor.
*I was very chuffed to discover how many of the easter eggs listed in @wolfweed ‘s link I had spotted on first viewing.
** I refuse to accept his prohibition on pears, though, and ate one at breakfast this morning – without dribbling any of the juice down my chin.
30 December 2017 at 21:49 #62904Hi, everybody!
Late to the party as so often, but it’s been a hectic albeit highly enjoyable week, spent in an atmosphere of familial harmony and goodwill but with little time for TV of my choice. In the end I was able to watch Twice Upon a Time on Wednesday evening*, but there has been no opportunity to digest what I saw or reflect on my response until now, and it really needed at least a second and more tranquil viewing, which was achieved earlier this evening, and an opportunity to read through all your comments on the episode to date – in itself a very rewarding exercise.
Knowing how long it usually takes me to order my thoughts into comprehensible prose, any post commenting on the episode which I started now it would probably take me until stupid o’ clock in the morning (UK time) to finish, so I’ll leave it until tomorrow. For now, let it suffice to say that I was not disappointed.
* My sister-in-law was thoroughly bemused. She seemed initially to be under the impression that we wanted to watch an episode of ‘House’, and didn’t seem much the wiser after my brother and I attempted to explain Doctor Who to her. She was born and brought up in India and has lived in France for the past 44 years, so her ignorance on the subject is understandable, and a timely reminder that not everyone has been touched by the phenomenon that is Who.
23 December 2017 at 15:48 #62701Oh, lucky, lucky you!
Sadly, I will not have the opportunity to see Twice Upon a Time until the 26th. My youngest brother and sister-in-law are staying with me at the moment, but on Christmas day itself we will all be travelling down to Suffolk to join my other brother and family, including niece, nephew and great niece, for a traditional Christmas dinner – and, since they are not Who fans, I will have to possess myself in patience. But the day after that my visitors will have to join me in watching the recording or else go and occupy themselves elsewhere for the duration while I indulge, no doubt with something fortifying to drink and a box of tissues to hand. For now, all that remains for me to do in the way of preparation is to make a large batch of Florentines – my annual seasonal specialty – and then I can relax.
So I wish everyone here a very Happy Christmas, with much merriment, good company, plenty of good things to eat and drink, and a respite from all that is worrying in the outer world; and of course a happy/sad viewing of Capaldi Doc’s final appearance.
1 December 2017 at 22:26 #62543@bluesqueakpip , @whisht, @wolfweed
General Cutler is an idiot.
He is all of that, but my first thought was that he is an example of a common – at the time – stereotype of the totally unimaginative and by-the-rule military officer who is so mentally and emotionally incapable of processing such a truly out of the ordinary experience as this that he either refuses to acknowledge it at all or resorts to rationalising it in mundane terms. Compare Colonel Breen in Quatermass and the Pit.
Having never seen this before I found it unexpectedly gripping – more so than The Keys of Marinus; and given the limitations of the medium and the budget, the impression conveyed of Antarctic wilderness was remarkably effective, even though, like you, my second thought was that the Doctor, Ben and Polly were decidedly underdressed for an Antarctic blizzard. On the other hand, with the benefit of all the subsequent years of accumulated Who-lore we might postulate that they are protected by a field projected around the Tardis, just as in recent series we have seen people able to step safely out of the Tardis into the airless vacuum of space. The translation field of the Tardis seems to extend over a considerable distance, after all.
This first appearance of the cybermen, even though expected, was startlingly spooky, and I can see now why some people think this first incarnation to be more effective than the later, more conventionally robotic designs.
1 December 2017 at 21:34 #62542Congratulations on the upgrade and on successful navigation of another year! Sorry about the acne, but it does tend to go with the territory – and with any luck is a short lived phase :-;
24 October 2017 at 22:50 #62240This is rather late in the day to be commenting, I know. I’ve been very much in catch-up mode, though playing by the rules in that I watched the episodes at roughly weekly intervals.
My recollections of early Who are vague, to say the least, but given the dates of transmission I can be certain that this is a story which I have never seen before, and it has been an interesting exercise. The first Doctor who made a real impression on me at the time was Patrick Troughton’s incarnation, so it has been a pleasure to see Hartnell in the role again and to be reminded how good he could be in conveying that impish delight and curiosity, as well as to be see again how ‘young’ he was compared with his AG incarnations who have been tempered and scarred by so many more centuries of knowledge and experience. It has also been salutary to be reminded of the degree to which the companions could, from the very first, drive the narrative at times.
Thanks to @bluesqueakpip , for passing on the fascinating insights and additional information from the audio commentaries, which have added greatly to my appreciation. I have been trying to think myself back into the frame of mind in which I might have watched this in the 1960s – which, given that my desk top computer screen is twice the size of my family’s TV screen at the time, is tricky. The relative crudity of the effects would not have bothered me because at the time, as Pip noted in her comment on episode 4, the production values were much closer to theatre then than now, when ‘realistic’ or cinematic standards are the norm.
The Keys of Marinus is not really a single, coherent story. It has the loose structure followed later by The Key to Time, in which a series of discrete stories is loosely linked by a McGuffin. Here there isn’t really much to indicate that the individual episodes even take place on the same planet, and the quality – or at least the degree to which my modern self found them engaging – is variable, but I do not think that my 1960s self would have been so critical, and even now the second episode and the trial sequence had considerable impact. The story also provides plenty of ethical and philosophical questions to ponder, though nothing is hammered home in too blunt a fashion
24 October 2017 at 21:34 #62239It seems that we think alike about the 12th Doctor’s resistance to the prospect of regeneration, and for very much the same reasons. Growth and change are a part of life’s process, and on the whole are to be welcomed; but the abrupt changes involved in the successive regenerations of the Doctor are not of the same order as gradual evolution in the process of ageing – which every incarnation of the Doctor also experiences to some extent – and so must, if we think about it, be as hard if not harder to face than the prospect of death and the possibility of final extinction. So damn right, if I were the Doctor I would be less philosophical than was Matt Smith’s Doctor about the prospect, or than the fourth Doctor, for that matter.
Evidently we share a birthday, you and I, since it was last Sunday that I notched up my three quarter century (the synchronicity even extended to our state of health, because I was recovering from some kind of mild stomach upset and so not really in a state to feel up to celebrating in proper style). But I share that feeling of a threshold crossed, and the sense that there is so much still to do and to experience, and perhaps little time to achieve it, especially as time seems subjectively to pass ever more rapidly – the past year faster than ever. My own musings recently on the theme of memento mori have circled around the realisation of how much individual insight and historical knowledge is lost when any individual dies, but a Time Lord has the advantage of at least being able to carry that forward through successive regenerations, even if s/he chooses to edit the memories.
Incidental and off topic observation. I don’t tend to get many birthday cards these days, even from my closest relatives, who are not the best at remembering anniversaries, but two which I received this year featured owls. As far as I am aware, the people who sent them are not aware that I have a particular liking for owls, so I am struck by the coincidence and wonder if there is any significance in it 😕
26 August 2017 at 20:59 #61807Nostalgia time 🙂 I have not only heard of Round the Horne, I recall it and its predecessor, Beyond Our Ken, with considerable fondness and I still find it funny, being old enough to get all the references. It ran 1965-1968, although I listened to it regularly only from 1966 onward when I was engaged in post grad research and living most of the time with my family in Norfolk. It was broadcast on Sundays around lunchtime, and we used to listen to it while preparing Sunday lunch. Memory of it still evokes the smell of the Sunday joint roasting and the clatter of plates and cutlery as we laid the table. My brother has tapes or CDs of most of the episodes, and can quote many of the sketches in their entirety.
I suspect that many of the more risqué puns and double meanings whooshed over some listener’s heads, but Mary Whitehouse, the notorious campaigner for ‘public decency’, took great offense and tried to get the BBC to take it off air. Fortunately and commendably the Director General paid her no attention.
16 August 2017 at 09:21 #61727Erratum: Having just re-read my post above, I see that in my haste to hit ‘submit’ I failed to spot the inadvertent and misleading omission of a couple of words. It should have read … adaption of his and Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens, since they were, of course, co-authors of the said work 😳
15 August 2017 at 14:09 #61724Not exactly Doctor Who, but David Tennant is to star in Neil Gaiman’s adaptation of Terry Pratchett’s ‘Good Omens’
29 July 2017 at 14:44 #61534@nick @Thane15
To the best of my recollection, all I have ever seen of The Tenth Planet are one or two clips, so my knowledge is based almost entirely on the transcripts and the synopsis on the BBC official website, but the discussion above has prompted me to go back to these sources, and the first thing that strikes me now in the transcripts is how very rushed and low-key the lead up to the regeneration scene is. When Ben comes to release the Doctor and Polly from the cybermens’ space ship the Doctor is apparently unconscious or asleep, and what he says on waking is cryptic, to say the least.
‘What did you say, my boy? ‘It’s all over’. That’s what you said. No … but it isn’t all over. It’s far from being all over’
Without further explanation, he than announces that he must get back to the Tardis immediately and rushes out.
Given that sequence as a starting point, I agree with @jimthefish that it is perfectly possible, with only minor tweaks and a bit of timey-wimey juggling, to insert a whole new adventure without material alteration to the original narrative. The trailer for the Christmas Special points to how this will probably be done, when Capaldi Doctor says, (from memory) ‘Something has gone very wrong with time. We’re trapped inside a single moment’. The first Doctor can meet the twelfth on his way from the Antarctic base, experience whatever the episode has in store, and still be back before Polly and Ben reach the Tardis. Furthermore, there seems to me to be no harm and even some merit in reworking the actual regeneration scene or scenes a little to create a more impressive and fitting send-off for the first Doctor, more in keeping with the regenerations of his successors.
One further thing to note is a discrepancy between the synopsis on the BBC site and the transcripts. According to the former the Doctor says, just before he regenerates ‘No, I can’t go through with it! I can’t! I will not give in.’ This line of dialogue isn’t in the transcripts, so unless it was in the original script and dropped from the episode, there has evidently been some slight retconning of the synopsis to conform with the predicted theme equating the attitude of the two Doctors to their approaching regeneration
27 July 2017 at 20:34 #61491If I can only find the time, I badly need to re-watch series 8 – 10, and no doubt I could even now review and evaluate Capaldi’s Doctor analytically and in detail; but that compilation brings home why, for me, after more than 50 years of watching on and off, his incarnation of this mercurial, eccentric alien – erratic, funny and at the same time profoundly serious – has had the greatest impact. It isn’t just the subtlety with which he has been able to evoke echoes of all the previous Doctors whilst bringing something extra of his own, it is that of all my favourite Doctors, his is the one to which I have had a strong emotional response – the one who speaks powerfully to and for me personally.
It is, no doubt, very much a product of Peter Capaldi’s understanding of the character as a long-term fan, coupled with his abilities as an actor, but I think that it may also be the result of a particular sympathy between his and Moffat’s vision of the role. Whatever it is, it adds up in my opinion to the quintessential Doctor.
18 July 2017 at 20:53 #61054Your description of your reaction to the news made me smile. Being less pessimistic than you I was half expecting it, but before the announcement I would have said that I wasn’t greatly concerned either way as long as the actor cast was up to the job so, although I didn’t actually yell out loud, the rush and glow of satisfaction I felt came as something of a surprise.
For me it isn’t so much a matter of gender politics as that it opens up exciting new possibilities in the development and evolution of the show. It just remains to be seen how well Jodi Whittaker can convey the essential qualities of the Doctor, and on that score I feel pretty optimistic. It just saddens me that so many people seem unable to grasp the concept that there is no hard and fast division between what is masculine and what is feminine; it is a broad spectrum even in human beings, let alone gender fluid aliens from an ancient civilisation.
Is she going to get to keep that wonderful Yorkshire accent?
I hope so, and I’m pretty sure she will. As far as I am concerned, the fact that she is from Huddersfield in West Yorkshire is another point in her favour. That is the area my paternal grandmother’s family hails from and, incidentally, not far from where I was born, and I still feel an affinity with the region.
It has been interesting to observe, during my lifetime, the way in which regional accents, as you say, have become less of an issue in Britain. During the war, at a time when it is said newsreaders donned evening dress to read the six o’ clock news, there was an uproar when Wilfred Pickles, who had a very pleasant Yorkshire accent which was seemingly perfectly acceptable in his usual radio show, was given the job of reading the news. The prissy ‘RP’ accents of actors, radio and TV presenters, often as not the result of elocution lessons, seemed perfectly normal to me in the fifties and early sixties, but now sound absurd.
17 July 2017 at 21:28 #60967triumphantly pulling out the packet of ginger nut biscuits from the back of the closet which she was looking for all along.
Any Doctor who liked ginger nuts would have my unqualified approval from the off!
17 July 2017 at 18:34 #60937May I echo @jimthefish ‘s sentiments. Greetings, and welcome in from lurkerdom 🙂 And there is no need to feel apologetic about the length of your post; it was excellent and well worth reading, and I agree wholeheartedly with everything you say.
17 July 2017 at 13:35 #60898I think that there will be record ratings this Christmas.
You are almost certainly correct, and I suspect that for every viewer lost because they cannot get over their fixed views on gender and what constitutes masculinity and femininity, alien or otherwise, there will be others who reconnect or, indeed, connect for the first time.
As for preferring an attractive man in the role, having been born in 1942 I never had the privilege of watching as a child, let alone a teenager, so never really considered the fanciability or otherwise of the Doctor a factor, though I confess to a slight weakness for Capaldi’s Doctor – which would probably count as cradle snatching given our relative ages. One of my slight niggles with Tennant’s Doctor was that he verged too often on Romantic Hero mode for my taste.
Just noticed a slightly embarrassing typo in my post #60885, but then perhaps I could try passing it off as wordplay on Who.
17 July 2017 at 13:15 #6089617 July 2017 at 12:11 #60885For those who have not yet seen it, there is an OP by Colin Baker on the Graun website and, as his earlier tweet indicated, he is among those delighted by the casting of Whattaker.
17 July 2017 at 11:56 #60883Master: Is the future going to be all girl?
Doctor: We can only hope.
It surprises me a little that so many seem surprised at the casting of a woman as the Doctor. The possibility has been telegraphed fairly clearly and with increasing frequency over the past few years and, speaking for myself, I’m very much looking forward to seeing what Jodie Whittaker will make of the role. Like @jimthefish, I wasn’t looking forward with much optimism to Chibnall taking over the running of the show, because I haven’t been particularly impressed so far by his writing for it or for Torchwood, but this has reignited my enthusiasm.
To my shame, perhaps, I haven’t seen Attack the Block, or any episodes of Broadchurch, and am not aware of having seen Whittaker in anything else – though I may have done so without it registering – but just the glimpse in that introductory video was reassuring, as are the very positive opinions that so many who are familiar her work to date have of her abilities as an actor.
Now it remains to be seen who will be her companion(s). I would have been very happy to see a revived Bill, and the possibility has been left open, given that the Heather entity apparently has the ability to reinstate her in her original human form, but that doesn’t look likely, at least in the immediate future. I was amused, though, by one tongue-in-cheek argument against a female companion which I read earlier today on another site; ‘ … the episodes wouldn’t be very long, because two women would just go in there and fix the problem right away, instead of all that silly running around’.
16 July 2017 at 14:01 #60731Add my congratulations to those already accumulated. Very best wishes for the double celebration!
6 July 2017 at 22:59 #60443The Master-Missy relationship is, I think, fairly straightforward – insofar as Moffat loops can ever be described as such. The indications in the text are that Simm-Master will regenerate into Missy and that she remembers enough to realise this. She claims to be a bit hazy about the details, but then she has never been particularly scrupulous when it comes to telling the truth, and in the incident of the dematerialisation circuit she certainly remembers the confrontation as seen by her earlier incarnation – a very curious kind of double vision..
The main question is whether she carried over the memory of her death at the hands of her earlier incarnation, or whether the trauma of that event had erased all recollection of the details. If she did remember, then it makes her declaration for the Doctor all the more poignant a gesture; truly without hope, without witness (other than his/herself), without reward.
Simm-Master says ‘Don’t bother trying to regenerate, you got the full blast’, and their laughter could be seen as a mutual acknowledgement of the absurdity of their situation: the ultimate suicide pact. But as Moffat has said, more than once, the Master always escapes from seemingly final death, and often without explanation, so we will no doubt see him/her again if we stick around. If Miss did remember enough about her former existence to anticipate this end, though, what’s the betting that she had made provision accordingly?
6 July 2017 at 22:16 #60442I agree with @blenkinsopthebrave, that in the exchange between Bill and the Doctor the real meaning is in what is left unsaid but is understood, because in teaching/learning, travelling together and in peril of their lives, with the Doctor having risked his own for her, they have come to know one another well. What Bill says is only half the sentence and there is an implied ‘but’, to be followed by the unspoken ‘in my own way I do care for you, deeply; it was all worth it and am grateful’. The Doctor’s ‘Yeah’ is all she needs as reassurance that he understands.
The Doctor’s ‘Without hope, without witness, without reward’ is at once a statement of fact in his predicament, an affirmation of his principles, and a way of steeling his nerve for what is to come. It doesn’t mean he has a death wish; his anguished cry when he survives against the odds and then feels himself start to regenerate is evidence to the contrary. He doesn’t even want to change from the person he currently is. When he says this he is expecting to die, probably without hope of regeneration, without even the reward of knowing for certain if his death achieved anything significant; and facing imminent attack from hordes of cybermen he doesn’t have time to waste feeling good about himself or his actions. In the urgency of the moment it is no more than a statement of what he believes at the core of his being is the right thing to do.
5 July 2017 at 11:55 #60392re the dematerialisation circuit. I have just watched that bit again and it looks as if I was mistaken and Missy does in fact produce the circuit from a pocket in her skirt and give it to Simm master. If I had given more thought to the matter I would have realised by the end of the episode that this was the only logical explanation.
If the ‘very scary lady’ was Missy, as I think we are meant to assume, Simm Master would not have had time to profit from her advice before he regenerated, but his subsequent incarnation(s) would remember it. He did in fact point out the paradox; ‘You know you basically have me to thank for this’.
My only remaining query with regard to this matter is, did Missy have her own Tardis? She had certainly been without one since her ‘execution’ and her imprisonment in the vault, and before that we only saw her using quick and dirty methods to travel in time and space. Did she carry a spare anyway? or did she pinch the spare from the Doctor once she realised that there was another Tardis in play? I doubt if it was handed over by him in that hand clasp because, like a confession dial (although I really liked that suggestion, @winston ), it is a bit to big to conceal in the palm of a hand, and he couldn’t have known at that point that she would need it.
Query: For that matter, did she remember being killed by her former self, or was that particular memory lost in the trauma of regeneration and/or because of the timey-wimey nature of the event?
Finally, what was up with the cloister bell sounding at the end of the episode as the Doctor left the Tardis? A warning against his attempt to stop the regeneration process? Or a response to the presence of two different incarnations of the Doctor? (My apologies to all concerned if this has already been discussed and I have somehow managed to overlook the fact)
4 July 2017 at 22:52 #60374Missy grabbed the Master by the lapels and slammed him against a wall. Her exact words then were, ‘A very long time ago a very scary lady threw me against a wall and made me promise always, always to carry a spare dematerialisation circuit.’
I thought she then picked his pocket to produce said spare circuit and held it up in front of him, and I assumed that for his own devious reasons he had been a little economical with the truth when he claimed that he couldn’t leave and had been stuck on the ship. I’ll have to watch that bit again.
She did tell him that her stabbing had been very precise and that had time to get back to his Tardis before he regenerated. I think that we were intended to infer that he would regenerate into her, thus creating another timey-wimey Moffaty loop.
It is ambiguous, I agree. My reading was that the Doctor didn’t, indeed couldn’t have known that the cyberman was Bill, though he must have realised immediately as soon as he saw and recognised what it was that this was how Bill had been ‘repaired’. The long pause before she replied ‘I am Bill Potts’ looked significant, though, and I think you are right that it was his question and the memories it triggered which enabled her to recover a full sense of her own, human identity. The process doesn’t appear to have been instant, though. There was evidently a period of confusion between that moment and the point at which she came round in the barn, having seemingly forgotten what had been done to her.
3 July 2017 at 23:54 #60323I defer to your superior knowledge of BG Who. As I wrote earlier, I have never seen the episodes in which the Cybermen were first introduced, only clips and synopses.
I was going on Bill’s reference to ‘programming’, but also on something the Doctor said in World Enough and Time, when he first encountered Bill as cyberman without realising who it was.
‘Bill Potts. You’re a cyberman. You’re part of a neural net. Can you find her.
Which suggests at least the initial stages of a hive mind and some loss of individual identity. Perhaps Moffat had his perceptions of the Mondasian cybermen coloured by later re-imaginings; he certainly presents the Doctor as being impressed by Bill’s ability to retain her sense of self within the cyberman shell.
3 July 2017 at 23:12 #60318I don’t know about her being turned back into a human ‘it’s only atoms’ – I don’t think that power has been established for Heather/pilot, nor can it be as easily extrapolated as the idea that, being a creature who can travel anywhere in time and space, she can drive the Tardis.
Well, this is the Whoniverse, so it doesn’t necessarily have to conform to even the most outlandish scientific conjecture, nor do I know what Moffat had in mind, but I interpreted this in the light of my slightly obsessive reading of science fiction over the past 60 years or so, and specifically with reference to the novel World’s End by Joan D Vinge.
The ‘puddle’ which absorbed Heather was a form of sentient, or semi-sentient ‘smart matter’ – imagine something like artificial intelligence at a quantum level which, if such a thing were to exist or to be created, might be capable of directing the fundamental reorganisation of matter/energy. Its primary purpose in the drive of a space ship is to circumvent the limitations the light speed constant in order to travel the universe, just as, in a different way, the Tardis does. But it needs a higher intelligence, a pilot, to direct it and, having absorbed Heather for that purpose, it now has the knowledge and insight to reconstruct Bill as a human being, whether as her original, corporeal self, or as an entity capable of transcending space and time.
Whilst it may not be possible to deconvert a Cyberman, Bill “proves” it is possible to undo the emotion/neural network control functions, free the Cyberman and giving them back their free will as cybernetic human beings.
I’m not entirely sure about that. Bill said that she could feel pressure of the programming, and I got the impression that she was having to fight to retain her sense of identity. I suspect that, in time, with nothing much left to sustain her sense of identity but her brain and a rudimentary nervous system, she might have succumbed.
3 July 2017 at 22:13 #60313… has the man become lost, becoming nothing but an ever-changing role, always changing, always dying, always a story rather than a real person.
I agree, although, as the Doctor himself once said ‘We are all stories in the end’
As @tardigrade noted, the Doctor’s unwillingness to change was foreshadowed in Bill’s insistence that she did not want to go on living if she could not be herself, and even more strongly in Simm Master’s refusal to accept a change of heart and the possibility of redemption in his future self, to the extent of committing suicide at one remove. From a human point of view that is understandable. Even one regeneration would be more than most could tolerate. Imagine having undergone some life-threatening experience – a major heart attack, say – and coming round to find oneself in another body, with memories and knowledge more or less intact, but with a different brain and endocrine system, so that one’s emotions, personality and reactions were subtly different. Many people no doubt wish at times that they had been born into different circumstances, or that life had offered different chances or, at a more trivial level, that their physical appearance had been different; but how many could even imagine or desire that their core selves, that which gives them a sense of who they are, could be different. As @janetteb put it:
Regeneration, the changing of that which is most fundamental to us, or perception of ourselves, would not be easy.
As individuals we develop and change as life shapes us, and such change is not necessarily unwelcome if the result is enriching, but abrupt change would be profoundly disconcerting.
In sum I, too, think that, with the story coming full circle, so to speak, the role of the first Doctor will be to reconcile the 13th Doctor to the inevitable.
1 July 2017 at 22:31 #60160@peter @wolfweed I certainly took what the Doctor said to mean that he had expanded the definition of what constituted a human to include people with two hearts, not redefined it.
For that matter, the people on the ship are Mondasians, so are terrestrial humans sufficiently similar, anatomically and genetically to appear the same to the cybermen tasked with identifying those suitable for conversion? Note: I have never seen The Tenth Planet, so I’m unsure about such details.
Incidentally, I thought the question of all the various discrepant accounts of the genesis of the cybermen was dealt with quite neatly by explaining it as convergent evolution – which might also account for why the Whoniverse is cluttered with remarkably humanoid species (I always had a soft spot for Alpha Centauri as the exception to that tendency)
1 July 2017 at 22:19 #60158The question of the loss of 17 seconds on Floor 1056 remains open, but if anyone prefers not to see it as a continuity error, Missy and the Simm Master were not only together on the ship but touched several times – the last time fatally – and that alone could have caused a time distortion according to canon lore.
1 July 2017 at 22:10 #60154First impressions, though I feel a need to watch that again a s a p.
This may not have been quite as good, technically speaking, as World Enough and Time, but in many ways I found it more emotionally gripping. Perhaps that response was coloured by the knowledge that this was Moffat’s and Capaldi’s penultimate episode, but I don’t think that was the whole of it.
Capaldi was, in extremis, brilliant, and Michele Gomez no less so, conveying with subtlety the ambiguity of Missy’s wavering between the on-the-brink-of-redemption former friend of the Doctor and the attraction of her former self in the form of the Simm Master – and Simm here showed what he could have made of the Master had he not been pushed into that OTT performance. Maybe, as @bluesqueakpip says, there is a plan B and s/he will somehow survive to be the bane of the future Doctor’s lives, but at the moment it appears Missy and the Simm Master are condemned to a paradoxical existence, with Simm Master regenerating into Missy, only for them to kill each other and recycle in an endless loop. Even if, as @wolfweed suggests, Missy passed her ring to the Doctor, it is difficult to see how that cycle could be broken.
Bill’s plight was beautifully conveyed by showing her as she saw herself whenever the story centred on her, and only revealing her as a cyberman when the viewpoint was that of another character. Her fate approximated to what Tolkien, in On Fairy Stories termed a ‘eucatastrophe’ – a sudden turn from what seemed like certain tragedy to hope. She is released from her cyberisation to roam the universe with Pilot Heather like Clara with Me, but with the option of being restored to human form – which leaves things open for next season.
The Doctor, in his turn, faces what could be a final death combating seemingly insuperable odds ‘without hope, without witnesses, without reward’, because that is the essence of who he is. If he can save even a few children for however short a while, any sacrifice is justified. But when he finds himself still alive in the Tardis he not only doesn’t want to go, he doesn’t want to change any more. It is undoubtedly to much to hope that, as a result, he regenerates into himself, and it probably would not work in the circumstances, but a girl can dream 🙂
In the final scene, even though the rumours had led us to expect it, the appearance of the First Doctor out of the frosty mist came to me as a surprise at this point, and I confess that I punched the air. It even occurred to me to wonder if the regeneration sequence could come full circle and the thirteenth Doctor be the first; but that is just a flight of fantasy, I’m sure, and probably would not survive inspection in the light of day.
For all that the episode was leading to the fall of the Doctor, the mood was leavened with some delightfully playful lines. Missy: ‘I’m in two minds; fortunately the other one’s unconscious’; or, Master: ‘Is the future going to be all girls? Doctor: ‘We can only hope’.
30 June 2017 at 20:57 #60055You really shouldn’t stroke my ego; it encourages a vanity which is quite inappropriate in one of my years – or any years for that matter.
But I would never be so ungracious as to spurn a compliment – so *glow*
That is truly heart-warming, and testimony to the fact that social media are not dominated by the mean-minded, even if the latter are a noisy and toxic presence. I just wish that this kind of compassion and empathy were more commonly extended to humanity in general, though it is human nature to identify with the individual and with those with whom one has a direct connection.
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