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@mirime @nick

This is straying a long way of topic, but no, I find it hard to believe that anyone could mistake a Welsh accent for that of Lincolnshire 🙂  Nor, for that matter, is the Norfolk accent, rural or urban, anything like the Cheshire accent.  The fact that I seem to have inherited traces of the latter is entirely down to my mother and my relatives on her side of the family, because I have never lived there, whereas I did grow up in Norfolk. My mother was born and grew up in Stockton Heath, near Warrington, but her mother and maternal relatives were from the Hartford/Cuddington/Delamere area, and from Kelsall before that, and her father’s family were originally from the Audlem area, near the Shropshire border. My grandmother and those of her sisters who were still alive in my childhood all spoke with the rural accent, and by all accounts my grandmothers gt gt grandmother, who died in 1875 at the age of 90, spoke broad Cheshire dialect.

@wolfweed

Faced with the task of trying to make statistical sense of the dating and distribution of the many hundreds of Roman coins found in the township I am researching, I found it more tempting to follow your links and to attempt the quiz.  My score was 10/10 😀  (and I didn’t cheat). The only one I wasn’t entirely sure of was the name of the pub, as it  hadn’t registered in my consciousness but, given the date of the ice fair and a certain naval battle which had taken place nine years previously, it wasn’t difficult to make an educated guess.

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@thane15

I would hear “I et lunch” (spelled eat pronounced ‘et’). Does anyone know about this? Common in the UK?

Fairly common, I think, but it depends on where you are in the UK.  There is, as you are doubtless aware, a huge variation in regional accents, so much so that, for example, someone with an acute ear can pinpoint accurately which part of Norfolk a native of that county comes from, and even I, with my tin ear, can tell the difference between a rural Norfolk accent and the accent of a native of Norwich. For others it all gets lumped into one East Anglian accent. *   The same is true of any county in the UK.  As @pedant and I commented when we were discussing regional dialects an accents a few weeks ago, there has, though, been a smoothing out and merging of accents over the past few decades, and the true dialects seem to be disappearing rapidly

On reflection, I think my pronunciation of ate is probably nearer ‘et’ than ‘eight’.  I have a slight but detectable regional accent which usually flummoxes people. Since people always said that I sounded exactly like my mother, to the extent that when we were together people couldn’t always tell which of us was talking unless they could see whose mouth was moving, I presume it is basically Cheshire, though I may have picked up a trace of Norfolk also. Someone once commented that my pronunciation of roof was pure Norfolk.

While on the subject of accents, I presume that the translation function of the Tardis field was in operation, because the accents of both aristocrats and hoi polloi in Regency London would have been different enough for the speech of Bill and the Doctor to stand out and Bill, at least, would have found the 18th century/early 19th century cant used by thieves and ragamuffins largely incomprehensible.  Dickens conveys at least a flavour of it in the speech of Fagin’s gang of urchins in Oliver Twist, and other early novels of his portraying Londoners.

 

* The only actors who I have ever heard producing anything approaching an authentic Norfolk accent were a woman who was a classmate of mine in school (played the Nurse in our final year production of Romeo and Juliet and went on to train as an actor in London) and, pleasingly enough, Patrick Troughton. Usually they resort to a generic yokel ‘mummerset’ accent.

 

 

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@blenkinsopthebrave

And that is why we see so many black characters on the streets and on the ice–to draw our attention to the whole question of slavery … It is not supposed to be a documentary on the actual demographics of London in 1814.

The theme of slavery in one form or another was certainly a thread in the narrative, but the setting was the Thames, close to the London Docks, and I agree with @pedant that the portrayal in this episode of the ethnic mix in that district and at that time was pretty accurate. It would have been much the same in the dock region of any large port in Britain, but London in particular was already a becoming a cosmopolitan city. There seems to be a vague but widespread perception that the population everywhere in Britain was pretty much lily-white until the arrival of MV Empire Windrush in 1948, hence Bill’s surprise that London was blacker than she expected. But as the Doctor said, history has been whitewashed.

Whatever her initial fears, Bill was in no danger of being seized and carried off into slavery, only of encountering racism – as indeed she did, though, significantly, not amongst the poor. Although the wealth of several cities – Bristol in particular – and of many prominent families was founded in the slave trade and/or in the profit from sugar plantations worked by slaves in the Caribbean, chattel slavery had not existed as a recognized institution in England since soon after the Norman Conquest. For a time there was a certain amount of ambiguity surrounding the status of slaves brought to Britain by their owners, but that was eventually resolved in the case of Somerset v Stewart in 1772, when the King’s Bench ruled that chattel slavery was not supported by either common law or statute law.  Any slave who set foot on English soil was de facto free from that point on and could not be reclaimed by their former owner. *

@thane15

As regards my observation that the Doctor called Bill ‘River’ at one point, there seems to have been something odd going on. It turns out that my hearing was not at fault when I watched the broadcast on my TV yesterday evening. This this was an episode which I felt deserved an immediate re-watch, and it was equally clear, though not stressed, in my recording of the broadcast. I even replayed the sequence to make doubly sure that my ears had not deceived me (it was when the Doctor asks Bill to make the decision as to whether or not to free the monster fish).  In the light of morning I decided to check it again on iPlayer, on my computer, with subtitles, and equally clearly he says ‘Bill … Miss Potts’  so, thinking that I must after all have been hallucinating  I went back to my recording of the broadcast, which confirmed that I *had* heard it correctly. I guess therefore that it was simply a case of Capaldi fluffing aline, which has now been redubbed, and it was not intentionally significant.

* As a side note, there were two famous bare-knuckle boxers in Britain who were black, Bill Richmond and Tom Molyneux, both of whom had been born into slavery in the USA. Richmond was given by his owner to the 2nd Duke of Northumberland and thus, by implication freed, and Molyneux was freed by his owner after winning substantial sums from him through his prowess as a boxer. Neither managed to beat Cribb, the then champion in Britain, but Richmond prospered, married an Englishwoman and eventually bought a pub. Molyneux, sadly, succumbed to alcoholism and died young.

 

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@nick

I agree that the story was relatively slight, if pared down to the discovery and subsequent resolution of the threat to London. It was, though, a sufficiently substantial and sturdy frame to support what I saw as the real substance of the episode; the widening of Bill’s horizons, with the Doctor as her sometimes unreliable guide and mentor, the development of her understanding of who and what the Doctor is, including a demonstration of the fact that he does not always practise what he preaches – as when he tells her that  ‘Passions fight, reason wins’ – then promptly decks Lord Sutcliffe for insulting her; and also, as in the previous episode, the examination of ethical questions raised by the situation. It is noteworthy that, as in Kill the Moon, it comes down in the end to a single decision: whether or not to save a creature when sparing it entails a potential threat to human life, and just as in the former case he left the decision to Clara, he places the burden of decision on Bill.

The production values – the realisation of the scenes on the frozen Thames and the sheer amount of attention to period detail – were, incidentally, first rate (at least, as far as I am any judge)

One further random and probably completely irrelevant observation which I forgot to mention in my previous post. In the last scene we got a first clear view of the whole of the doors of the vault. For some reason I was reminded irresistibly of the Bombe machine designed by Turing at Bletchley Park to help in cracking the Enigma code.

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That was another highly entertaining and very satisfying episode – a pudding with nicely balanced ingredients and richly studded with plums. Once again the real monster wasn’t Tiny, the loch-less monster, the gigantic creature beneath the water which, whether of alien or terrestrial origin, was only hungry, tormented and acting according to its nature, but the aristocrat who was exploiting it – and the exchange between him and the Doctor was a neat exposition of the ruthless side of the early industrial revolution for anyone who is tempted to romanticise it.

There was more dialogue than action but, for what my opinion is worth, it was pin-sharp and there was scarcely a word which was superfluous as it revealed more of the Doctor to Bill and more of Bill to us, the audience; and there were some cracking lines along the way.

Doctor: [as they exit the Tardis] ‘Your species hardly notices anything’  – cue cut to the Tardis screen and the unnoticed alert showing a life form detected along something like a mile of the snaking curve of the Thames.

‘It’s not really wrestling unless it’s in zero gravity – with tentacles’

‘Yeah, my hair was cringing’ [after the Doctor tried to get ‘down with the kids’]

And, of course, the Doctor’s eloquent speech to Lord Sutcliffe, to which Sutcliffe responded like a tutor evaluating a pupil’s exercise in rhetoric, followed by,  ‘It’s enough to move anyone with an ounce of compassion  … so it’s really not your day, is it?’ – the response of a very self-aware sociopath.  It was a speech which nevertheless impressed Bill, as a counterbalance to her earlier glimpse of the Doctor’s dark side.

When the Doctor has explained something of the Tardis’s unpredictable nature and that she is a bad girl who seems to seek out trouble, Bill’s response is that ‘I think I’m low key in love with her’; and I think I may be low-key in love with Bill.

Random observations:

Of course the Doctor would entertain the street urchins be reading to them from Struwelpeter 😈 – and the copy from which he was reading came, no doubt, from the same pocket as the cup of tea he produced in The Witches Familiar.

Who spotted that at the point of decision when the Doctor wanted to attract Bill’s attention he absent-mindedly called her River, before correcting himself and addressing her as Miss Potts?

The close parallel between the scene where the Doctor and Bill are tied up and trying to retrieve the sonic screwdriver and the scene in Deep Breath. where he and Clara were in a very similar situation.

Since those diving suits were of a design getting on for a century later than 1814 and had no visible means of air supply, they were presumably provided by the Tardis who seems to have a liking for wrapping advanced technology in a retro design shell.

And finally, just one little nit pick: since the Thames in the early 19th century was little more than a gigantic sewer, how did all those cute little bioluminescent angler fish, let alone the river/sea monster, survive in it?

 

 

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@ichabod

Though I think he’d play some quieter, more meditative work too, in those quieter times.  But we’ll never see those . . .

Perhaps we did, though – in that final scene of The Woman Who Lived when we saw him in meditative mood, alone  and playing his guitar in the lighted interior of the Tardis, framed by the star-sprinkled blackness of space.

If liking the guitar, the sunglasses and the tank are a hallmark of a lack of standards then, like you and puro, I am similarly lacking 🙂

 

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@mersey

Some of the clues we perceive no doubt exist only in our overactive imaginations, but some do prove eventually to have significance within the narrative. On the other hand, one of the examples you cited, the toy soldier in Listen, is a clue in the strict Ariadne sense, because it was one of the tangible links in the somewhat convoluted time line of the narrative, and it was left to us to follow the thread. That was one of the things I particularly liked about that story; that it ended with some questions left open, and the threads were not neatly tied in a bow.

Other clues are the ‘Easter eggs’ embedded in the background – things which are not essential for the casual viewer or newcomer to understand, but which will be meaningful to the long-term fans.  In The Pilot, the Doctor’s study was full of such hinted references to his past. The photos of Susan and River were the most obvious, but there were the busts of Shakespeare, whom we know he met, and Beethoven, whom he claims to have met, although we haven’t as far as I can recall witnessed the meeting.  The Rembrandt self portrait is probably another such reference since, as @missrori informed us, he met the artist in a Big Finish story.  The prominent placing of the painting and the alterations in the background to which you objected certainly suggest this. In Smile, the presence of another painting, The Raft of the Medusa, might or might not be significant. It was one of many recognisable artworks and historic artefacts in that jumble the refugee colonists had saved to bring with them as their cultural heritage from Earth. Possibly it was there because the cyberised version from The Day of the Doctor was at hand for the Prop team to use again; or possibly it was significant because it depicted people who had escaped from a disaster, only for things to go horribly wrong. It is up to us to decide.

Thematic interpretations are of a different order.  The writers, production team and actors present their work, and we are free to understand it as we may and as our experience and imaginations suggest.  The reading of the underlying themes of a series in terms of the symbolism of the Tarot, or of Egyptian mythology is an interesting  and potentially illuminating way of understanding it, even if it goes beyond the conscious intention of the authors. Stories in which every meaning is dictated, every t crossed and every i dotted, and in which nothing is left to the imagination of the reader or viewer are seldom very satisfying.

 

 

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@craig

Not long ago I, too, lost a couple of posts, but in both cases it was after I tried to edit out typos. It has made me a bit more cautious about trying to do any editing after initial submission, but so far there has been no further problem.

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@jimthefish<b></b><i></i><u></u>

I think the ££-joke is probably meant to signify a sense of humour … and a sense of humour signifies autonomous intelligence

That makes a lot of sense and, although I didn’t consciously note it at the time, it may have been something which registered subliminally as supporting my conclusion that the emojibots/vardies were not only intelligent but self aware.

@ichabod

Yes, the vocabulary which we use in attempts to define ourselves – and potentially other species – as thinking beings does need greater precision.  It doesn’t help that although neuroscientists are making great strides in the description and architecture of the brain and how it functions, we seem to be no closer to understanding or agreeing what consciousness actually is.

My basic definition would be something like ‘the ability of the mind to examine, analyse and form theories about itself’, but I’m not sure that this gets us very much further.  A sense of self and an ability to extrapolate and attribute that awareness to others certainly isn’t confined to homo sapiens, and the ability to solve problems is clearly shared by other species. At least one species of crow – I forget which – has been observed practising deceit, acting in a way designed deliberately to mislead other crows as to where it has stashed a food supply.

Language is necessary, I think, for this faculty to develop more fully. I was fairly precocious in learning to talk and it may not be entirely coincidental that my earliest memories can be dated to around the time of my second birthday and possibly before. My youngest brother, on the other hand, was comparatively late in learning to talk, and he claims to remember nothing before the age of five.  I guess that the emojibots would have a fairly sophisticated machine language with which to communicate between themselves and with the vardies, and in the process of communicating with the human colonists on more or less equal terms, would rapidly develop a language less limited than emojis.

It isn’t too difficult to imagine a machine intelligence that is self aware, but much less easy to imagine how that awareness might manifest itself, since the machine mind might have the potential to develop very differently from the human mind.  In considering the implications of this episode I suppose that I have been trying to think myself into a machine mind, but it’s not an easy thing for a messy wet brain to do.

 

 

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@bluesqueakpip

Valid point. I wasn’t being entirely serious, but my detailed agricultural knowledge for what it is worth is in part that of an archaeologist/historian and in part derived from youthful observation of more traditional practice.  Such of my extended family and their friends who were farmers and whom I knew were in a rather different line – small scale hill farming in Yorkshire mostly, so sheep and dairy rather than arable.

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@zeyra

I am very sorry that the fear of terrorism appears to be having such an affect on your life, because that is precisely what the terrorists want: to create an atmosphere of uncertainty and fear in the population. The best way that ordinary people have of opposing them is to carry on living as normally as they can, rather than cowering in fear of what, statistically speaking, is unlikely to happen.

For nearly three years during the 1970s I lived in Belfast, in Northern Ireland, during the height of ‘The Troubles’, when almost every night we heard the sound of gunfire and the explosion of car bombs, some of it very close by where I lived.  It made life inconvenient sometimes, because there were armed soldiers on the streets and security checks in every shop, cinema and theatre, but as far as possible life continued as normal and most people refused to be intimidated, despite the real possibility of being killed by a car bomb or a paramilitary fanatic.  That possibility was much higher then, in that relatively small community, than the is possibility now of being involved in a terrorist attack in western Europe or Britain.

Think of it this way: although the recent terrorist attacks in France and other countries have had a devastating effect on the lives of those involved, statistically you are far more likely to be involved in a car accident or something equally mundane than to be the victim of a terrorist attack, so to live in fear of such an attack is to harm yourself unnecessarily.

 

 

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@pedant

Experience has taught me that placards are a very unreliable metric.

True, but experience plus placards are a bit more reliable. I have been living here for long enough, I think, to be able to gauge the temper of this ward and this constituency.

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@pufferfish

I wasn’t aware of that fact. How wonderful!

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@zeyra

Yes, I have been following the election, as I follow politics in Europe generally, although I am probably not as well informed as I ought to be. The newspapers and TV news programmes in Britain don’t cover French elections quite as extensively or in as much depth as they do elections in the USA, which is regrettable.  We in England are also distracted at the moment by local government elections on May 4th, and now a General Election in June to complicate matters further, not to mention the bitter arguments between those of us who wish to remain within the EU and the misguided people who voted, by a small majority, to leave. I think I am right in saying, though, that most of the people here who do take an informed interest in wider European affairs are hoping very much that the polls are accurate, and that Macron will win the presidency by a handsome margin. He may be relatively unknown in the political arena, but the prospect of LePen, following on Brexit and the election of Trump is too worrying and depressing to contemplate.

It may be relevant to add that one of my brothers has lived and worked in France for 45 years and now, finally, after the British (Scots and the citizens of my home city of Norwich excepted) have so stupidly voted to leave the EU, is applying for French citizenship.  It has been an interesting process, since it seems that he is required to supply accurate documentation of his ancestry going back at least two generations before him.  As the keeper of the family archive I have been helping him in the process 🙂

@pedant

The Left and the Labour party in England may be clueless and in disarray, but if the forest of Labour placards round here is anything to judge by, I don’t think the results of either the local council election or the General Election are in doubt.  The unofficial motto of the city is ‘Do Different’, and Clive Lewis is pretty popular round these parts.

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@pufferfish

Thanks for that. I assumed that it was a variant of Keziah and that it had an appropriate significance, but the only work of reference I have to hand wasn’t very helpful, since it gave the meaning as cassia without reference to the primary significance.  Strange, because in general it seems to be informative and fairly reliable on names of Hebraic origin. I should have googled it instead 🙂

If I may be permitted to stray off topic briefly, the work I consulted is a fascinating volume which, judging by the date of publication – 1902, and according to the title page the 99th edition – probably belonged to my great grandmother, since her daughter, my maternal grandmother born in 1882, did not marry and set up home independently until nine years later. The title is Enquire Within Upon Everything and it is a household reference book which covers an astonishing range of subjects, out-Beatoning Mrs Beaton; not just a very wide range of household hints, including diseases and how to concoct remedies (highly dubious), but intricate matters of social etiquette, the rules of card games and much, much more.

 

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@thane15

No, I don’t think you got hold of the wrong end of the stick I proffered though, as you see from the above, posted almost simultaneously with yours, I took them to be sentient from the first, and that the Doctor, whether he foresaw it or not, did them a favour by removing a layer of conditioning which was preventing them from realising that sentience fully.

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When I wrote post #56698 above I don’t think I had drunk enough coffee, because I meant to clarify the sense in which I was using ‘intelligence’. It was probably evident from the context, but if not, I meant conscious, self-aware, sentient as well as capable of reasoning, but as machines – dry brains, not wet brains, as the Doctor put it.

I have been assuming that both the vardies and the emojibots had been designed to be so from the first, this being necessary for them to carry out their intended functions, so that programming them to serve was analogous to conditioning human minds from birth to think in a certain way, in which case the Doctor’s term slave was not wholly inappropriate.

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@tardigrade @thane15

The Doctor talked to and about the emojibots and the vardies as if they were intelligent, although whether they were supposed to be independently intelligent or together formed a composite intelligence wasn’t entirely clear, and in that light the reboot could be seen as a liberation.

I understood the vardies to be some form of self-replicating universal constructor, designed to utilise elements of the environment of the planet both to reproduce themselves in the manner of a living organism and to terraform the planet and construct an environment suitable for human life – including the buildings in this instance. It is one of the ideas posited as a hypothetical solution to the problems of extra-terrestrial colonisation.  The emojibots, which the Doctor described as the interface enabling communication between the vardies and the colonists, could have been constructed by the vardies also, once the terraforming etc. was complete, but it seemed to me that we were intended to understand them as having a considerable degree of autonomy and the potential for self-determination.

The problem arose from the fact that their initial design had included programming or conditioning to serve the colonists, and in the context of the utopian philosophy of the colonists that included ensuring their happiness* as a primary imperative. But machine intelligence is unlikely to be the same as human intelligence, particularly when it comes to abstract and emotional concepts such as happiness – with the consequences we saw. By rebooting them the Doctor removed that programmed imperative, so freeing them to interact with the colonists on equal terms; and since they had built the environment he saw them as having first rights of ownership.

One question which was not addressed was whether the planet which had been barren and effectively devoid of life, like Mars, for example, although capable of being terraformed and adapted for human occupation, or whether it had already supported some form of indigenous life.  If the latter, it raises a whole new package of ethical concerns.

 

*  I’m not sure about the meaning of Kezzia, but the names of all the other ‘shepherd’ colonists referred to in the opening scenes on the plant had an overt element of cheerfulness, happiness or good will.

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@zeyra

In what I wrote above there was a sentence in which I omitted a word which made nonsense of what I wrote and so, bearing in mind that English is not your first language, and in case you were confused, the fourth sentence should have begun: ‘I too, had a tendency to day-dream in class and let my mind wander … ‘

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@zeyra

You are certainly not alone because I, also, was not very good at maths – even though I did in the end manage to narrowly pass the necessary examinations.  I loved physics and the biological sciences; chemistry not so much, but that may have been partly because my teacher in that subject was not very good at her job. The deficiency in mathematical ability meant that I could never become a physicist, so I became an archaeologist, combining my love of history and the past with a discipline which required scientific method.  And I, too, had a tendency to day-dream in class and let my wander in paths that had nothing to do with the matters the teacher was trying to impart.  I cannot claim to have made more than a very slight contribution to the advancement of knowledge, but you should always remember that it is the dreamers, whether in the sciences or the humanities, who are the ones who provide the inspiration for human progress.

 

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@whisht

A promise he’s kept by staying on Earth for 50 years.. so made around 1967? kinda the time he first regenerated…. purely coincidental I’m sure….

Coincidence or not, the same thought struck me some time ago.  William Hartnell’s last appearance as the Doctor was in November 1966 in The Tenth Planet, after which he regenerated, and The Tenth Planet saw the introduction of the Mondasians – the proto-cybermen. And what have we been promised?  Admittedly the story was set in what was then the future – the 1980s, I think, but I  have a spine-prickling feeling that the dates are significant.

I disagree in the matter of emojis, in that I think they *are* a significant theme, not least because one of the critical points of the story is the problems of communication between beings of different origin.  Even between human beings whose mother tongue is different there are difficulties, as anyone who has been faced with translating a work written in one language into another knows. Language expresses the way we think but also influences it and ultimately is a product of culture.  Emojis above all convey mood and emotion, and it is easy to see how an artificial intelligence, lacking hormones and all the other things which influence our mood and emotions, might misinterpret things.

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@pedant

The cyberman special edition, from the Under Gallery, perhaps

That suggestion gives me an excellent excuse to view it again and have another close look – but any excuse for a re-watch suffices 🙂

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@nerys @thane15

I agree with you on the subject of Donna. Of all the AG companions so far, she was the one I most warmed to, with Rory and Amy coming second (in no particular order).  On present form, though, I think even she may be superseded by Bill, who displays a delightful combination of earthy practicality and wonder, and probably has the potential for emotional depth as well.

I have been trying to resist the temptation to nit pick on this episode, but I regret to say that the will is weak.  In the introductory scene on the planet Kezzia, returning to the city, says that she and her vardies have just pollinated three miles of wheat, which suggests that the writer, Frank Cottrell-Boyce and Moffat, not to mention the rest of the production team, are somewhat deficient in their knowledge of agriculture. Passing over the minor niggle that a farmer is more likely to refer to acres or hectares of wheat rather than miles, there is the matter of pollination. Wheat and other cereal crops, like all grasses, are wind pollinated and require no intervention on the part of insects or micro robots – and what kind of planet with what kind of atmosphere has no weather and no wind?  When she says this she is walking through a crop which, as far as the eye can see, is in full ear and ready, or nearly ready to harvest; but on that score we might suppose that a planet with two suns might have no appreciable seasonal variation, so that crops could be sown, ripen and be harvested at any time of year.

In passing, it would seem, also, that in this future the lower jaws of human skulls, like those of Time Lords, remain firmly attached even when the skull has been completely de-fleshed.

I will now slink away and do penance for my irreverence.

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@geoffers

do any of our resident eagle-eyed art people know what the huge wall painting is, in the very furthest background

It’s The Raft of the Medusa, painted by Gericault in 1818/19 currently in the Louvre.  A bit tricky to make out at first, because it’s been stood on its side and there are various objects in the way, but identifiable if you pause the screen and tilt your head to the left.

It’s a rather odd choice of picture for optimists hoping to found a utopia to choose to take with them because, although it depicts survivors of a disaster, the story behind it is pretty gruesome. The Medusa was a frigate in the French Navy which ran aground off the coast of West Africa in 1816. Around 150 of the crew escaped on a makeshift raft, but their supply of food and water was minimal and by the time they were rescued only 15 were still alive. Some had succumbed to dehydration or jumped or fallen overboard, and some had been killed fighting among themselves or been murdered, and the flesh of the dead had been eaten.  It was a huge scandal in France at the time.

The painting pretty much made Gericault’s reputation.

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@juniperfish

Strictly speaking, the Doctor and Bill are not going back to the Victorian era. At the time of the frost fair of 1814 George III was still technically king, though in a somewhat precarious state of health – hence the Regency, his grand daughter Princess Charlotte, at that time second in line to the throne, was still alive and Victoria’s parents were yet to marry so she wasn’t even a twinkle in her father’s eye.

I am sorry to say that like you I have never got round to reading Erewhon but, according to the summaries and commentaries I have read, the relevance to Smile could be at more than one level.  It was, as you say, written as a satire on Victorian society and in form has some resemblance to Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. The society described is presented as a kind of utopia but on closer examination is hardly that, although not exactly a dystopia either, and one of its features is a belief that reliance on machines is harmful to society – in contrast to the optimistic views of the Victorians themselves at that time.

@jimthefish

I suspect the cornfields were chosen because its a dramatically useful human shorthand for fecundity, harvest, home, safety

Van Gogh’s cornfield, possibly, although I suspect that landscape near Arles had more to do with his state of mind when he painted it; but to me the expanse of grain in Smile conveyed something else; namely prairie fields, mechanised agriculture and agribusiness on an inhuman scale, which fits the context equally. If I think of harvest, home and safety I am more likely to recall the fields of my childhood, which were still small, bounded by banks and hedgerows and shelter belts of scots pines, and the wheat in the field at the back of our house was not the short variety bred now for the big harvesting machines, but tall enough for my five or six year old self to disappear into and the haunt of corn-crakes and harvest mice. Massey-Harris combine harvesters were a thing of wonder to my brothers and me and our friends, and some farmers in the neighbourhood were still using old-style reaping machines, drawn by horses or little Ferguson tractors.

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@zeyra

what is the average age here ? Just being curious

I’m not sure what the average is, but there are people here of all ages, from those in their teens like yourself, to a few like me who whose status is verging on the antique.  What ever our age, experience and other interests, what we all have in common is the love of Doctor Who and a desire to discuss the show or just an interest in reading the views of others, so in that respect, at the very least, you should feel at home here.  Apart from that, everyone is welcome to discuss whatever music, other TV shows, films or books they wish and, as you have probably noticed already, there is also a site for talking about all the other topics you might discuss and debate in a pub.

 

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@missy

Hang in there!  If my experience is anything to go by the dry eye does clear up eventually.  The first eye to be done was much the worse affected and the syndrome lasted about six weeks. With the other eye it was, as I said, only a problem first thing when I woke in the morning.  Hypromelose, incidentally, is the active ingredient in the eye drops my pharmacist recommended, not the brand name, and they were quite different from the medicated drops prescribed by the ophthalmic surgeon

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@wolfweed @thane15

The resemblance between the Van Gogh painting and the opening scene on the planet does not seem all that close to me.  On the one hand the painting is full of swirling movement, from the swooping curve of the path into the foreground and back, to the wind rippled wheat and the wind-tossed crows, and the sky has the hazy, bruised look and sense of turbulence of an oncoming thunderstorm.

On the other hand the scene which confronts the Doctor and Bill when they emerge from the Tardis is almost entirely static under a clear, windless summer sky and the machine cut path leads arrow straight through the wide expanse of the wheat field to the city.  The beautiful curving lines of the city itself contrast with the symmetrical geometry of the wheatfield, but they are unmoving, pristine white and unsullied by any sign of life – literally as it turns out.

The inspiration for the visual images of the clouds of microbots was almost certainly a murmuration of starlings.  For anyone who has never seen this phenomenon, it happens when tens of thousands of starlings flock to roost in the evening.  Before coming to land they form a cloud swooping back and forth in perfectly coordinated but ever changing patterns; it is a mesmerising sight.  The winter before last there was a large flock roosting on one of the office buildings in Norwich, and I saw them a couple of times when I happened to be in the city centre around sunset.  On the first occasion they were perfectly silhouetted against a clear winter evening sky and people just stopped wherever they were on the street to watch them.

@countscarlioni

The ending might seem rushed but, as I wrote in my first post on this thread, it was often thus in old-style Who, and in this case was perfectly logical.  The problem was the result of evolution in the self programming of the robots, so the obvious solution was to reboot them, and given the urgency of their predicament, there wasn’t time to launch into an explanation before he acted. And at least the screwdriver was being used appropriately as a tool for fixing something broken.

@thane15

I go to the Graun to read Dan Martin’s blog.  Occasionally I read some of the BTL comments to get the ‘feeling of the meeting’,  but since the flavour is usually sour, I rarely waste further time there.

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@miapatrick

There is a vault. What is behind it is very important and needs protecting.

Yes, it seems from the hints we have been given so far that the Doctor is protecting whatever is in the cabinet in the vault from potential external attacks, and not guarding the earth from what is in the vault.  His first assumption in The Pilot, when the Heather/space ship fuel entity trickled down the steps of the basement, was that it was aiming at what was in the vault, and he was relieved to realise that this was not the case.

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I meant to note, in passing, that the name of the ship ‘Erehwon’ – is the title of the book by Samuel Butler and the reverse of nowhere, which is in turn a more or less direct translation of the Greek word utopia.

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@pedant

The same thought came immediately to my mind; vashta nerada

A cautionary tale for anyone who might have the hubris to attempt to build utopia, not to mention the potential drawbacks of depending too much on artificial intelligence (the Singularity ?).

I would have thought that this episode would satisfy the perpetual whingers who want more science fiction and more of a traditional plot in Doctor Who, but no; from a quick glance at the first comments on the guardian blog it seems that the resolution of this potentially disastrous situation – the Doctor, with the aid of his sonic screwdriver, rebooting the emojibots and the varda – was a narrative cop out (and no doubt the words deus ex machine will be bandied within the next hour or so).  But unless I am becoming senile and my memory is at fault, it was often thus:  the Doctor spends a good deal of time escaping immediate danger and assessing the problem, sees the solution in a flash of inspiration and at the last moment, resolves it by reversing the polarity or whatever.

As for me, I thoroughly enjoyed it and thought it a very well written and constructed episode with a satisfying plot,* visually impressive if you like futuristic but fairly minimalist architecture,  and plenty of subtle and not so subtle jokes, and I can’t wait to view it again.

I am also getting more and more intrigued by the character of Nardole and the hints concerning his hitherto ambiguous relation to the Doctor.  Is he the external conscience – the jiminy cricket – keeping the Doctor to his promise and duty in guarding the contents of the vault?

* even if the outline was to some extent predictable for anyone who has read a lot of the science fiction written in the past 50 years or more.

 

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@missy

Re the cataract surgery: I had problems with dry eye syndrome after the first eye was done – as you say, it felt sometimes as if I had grit in the eye, but on the advice of my local pharmacist I used hypromelose drops, which were very effective in alleviating the problem. With the second, right eye, there have been fewer after effects, though for several weeks the eye was so dry when I woke that it felt as if the eyelid was sticking to the eyeball, but again, the drops were very effective.

The benefits have been twofold. The yellowish haze which obscured things has gone and, as @nerys says, colours suddenly seem brighter, truer and more vivid, but also I can *see* clearly for the first time in nearly 60 years without having to resort to glasses.

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@smallgreenplant

*sigh* there’s a noob error…

Not to worry. Code occasionally appears in posts, sometimes for no obvious reason, but you have a chance to delete it. For the first four minutes or so you will see ‘edit’ top right, next to the post number, and if you click on that you can make corrections, whether it is intrusive code, typos or whatever.

 

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@smallgreenplant

Welcome 🙂  I was like you – lurked for ages before finally plucking up the nerve to dive in, but it has been well worth it, if somewhat time-consuming.

The bird on the desk does have something of the pigeon about it when I come to think of it; more turtle dove or collared dove, though, than the portly wood pigeons which frequent my garden and snaffle more than their fair share of the food I put out on the bird feeders. The resemblance is no closer than it is to a Raven, though.

I seem to recall that Huginn and Muninn came up as a topic and as the spring board for theories in discussions of Series 9, prompted initially by the hints of Norse mythology in the trailers preceding it, but your suggestion here is intriguing and acceptably bonkers: one bird on the Doctor’s desk which might represent a raven – even if the resemblance isn’t very exact – and could conceivably refer to the events of Face the Raven, and a missing second bird, Muninn, representing the memories that the Doctor has lost.  Far fetched, but appealing.

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@talkativetraveller

As Missy says, welcome to the forum and we look forward to seeing you around and reading your views  As for getting to know the format, if you scroll down the Home page you will see listed all the various sites dedicated to the discussion of different topics, both Who related and other, with a brief explanation alongside.  This site, for example,is primarily for people who want to show Who inspired artwork or fan fiction, and the Sofa is the best place for introductions and for general chat about the show.

Discussions of each individual episode is separate, so you should be able to avoid spoilers relating to those you haven’t yet seen, and if you want to read discussions of episodes in previous seasons and perhaps add your own comments, just click on Forums on the bar at the top of the Home Page and you will see them listed.

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@missy  Yup, cataract surgery.  The left eye was done at the beginning of January and the right eye at the end of February.  The implants are lenses which also correct for my astigmatism, so the results have astounding.  My distance vision is now crystal clear and pin sharp for the first time since I was in my early teens, and I no longer need specs for driving or watching TV and films. Speaking purely in visual terms, I now see Doctor Who in a whole new light 🙂

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@countscarlioni

Re the bird on the Doctor’s desk; if it is meant to be a raven it was modelled by somebody who had never looked at one.  The size appears about right as far as I could tell, and it appeared to have a heavy beak similar to that of a corvid, but the legs and the neck are much too long, the body insufficiently chunky, and the overall stance is also too upright.  I had another look at that sequence and paused on the desk to see if I could identify the species, but with no success. The nearest I could think of was that it might be what you would end up with if you created a hybrid between a very small goose and a small pheasant, so maybe it is an alien bird 🙂

@mersey

While I was investigating the bird I took the opportunity to have a good look at the Rembrandt, and the circles looked to me a bit like embossed metal shields, with perhaps just a hint of the Gallifreyan about them. The Doctor in his times has met Leonardo and Van Gogh, so perhaps he met Rembrandt also, and this portrait was the result of the encounter. The version we know could have been painted subsequently, identical in almost all  respects, with the circles retained in outline for the purpose of composition, but omitting an element which might have raised questions.

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@Morpho

We live and learn 🙂   I had no idea that those early versions of ‘An Unearthly Child’ had survived and have spent the last hour or so busily investigating. It is misleading to call them ‘pilots’ though, since they certainly are not in the sense we now use the term and I was somewhat confused at first by your reference to them as such.  They are simply recordings which were aborted for technical reasons, or rejected because they didn’t meet Newman’s standards. I haven’t had time yet to watch any of them properly, but in the snippet I did watch the problems they had with the doors of the Tardis, which were referenced in ‘An Adventure in Time and Space’, were very apparent.

I don’t think that there was ever any question that the Doctor and Susan were not intended to be alien, though.  The Doctor stated that  they were, explicitly, and I think that it is in only in one of the abandoned versions that Susan says only that they are from the future.  Her problems in school, which attracted the interest of her teachers, was that she exhibited a curious mixture of cluelessness about things that most people took for granted, with knowledge that was far beyond anything expected of someone her age and at her supposed level of schooling.

@wolfweed

Love it, and well spotted.  The poetry of the Old Testament and physics.  ‘Because of the rhymes’.

 

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@missy

PC breathing on a record (LP.)

Unless my brand-new eyes were deceiving me that was a 78 RPM gramophone record, not an LP – just a small incidental joke thrown in for those who can remember 78s and old-style gramophones, I think.

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@bluesqueakpip

The third of your possibilities is definitely the most likely in my opinion, and if so, maybe the Tardis herself then decided it was cool. As you point out, ever since that point it is the way she has translated whatever is the Gallifreyan term, whether or not the Gallifreyan term is itself an acronym.

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@whisht

Apologies for not responding earlier to your comment concerning The Ship Who Sang.  As I remember, in the latter novel the core of the ship and its pilot was the brain and nervous system of a human woman who had been born severely disabled but brought up from infancy as a cyborg and trained for this eventual role.  The ‘smart matter’ in Joan Vinge’s novels is an engineered form of semi-sentient matter which, like the Tardis,  is not anchored in space or time and, as the motive power in interstellar ships, could bypass relativistic restrictions and so enables travel between star systems across the galaxy – which seems to have some similarities to the persistent puddle seeking a pilot and a passenger and able to pursue the Tardis.  ‘Smart matter doesn’t really feature in The Snow Queen, except insofar as the secret of it has been lost, but it does feature prominently in the sequels.

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@pedant

On the subject of the Doctor’s forgetting and the effects of the neural block, I don’t think that we disagree quite as much as you seem to think we do.  If you look again at what I wrote above, I don’t dispute that he couldn’t *see* her or recall what she was like, even when face to face with her in the diner. He did remember, though, that there was someone who was with him in certain adventures, and he remembered the events leading up to his attempt to use the neural block on that person and the reason why, because he told her so in so many words. He also had a lingering sense that she was somehow important to him, though the how and why eluded his grasp completely.

All I mean is that we have been given a number of pointers to suggest that there is still a buried awareness in his subconscious mind which responds to certain events or what would otherwise be direct reminders and may in some instances influence his actions. I suspect that you may still be harking back to the original debate in the discussion of Hell Bent, in which at first, I admit, I read too much into the signs of that subliminal response, but of course if  you disagree that there is evidence of even a subliminal awareness,  we must agree to disagree and leave the matter there.

I

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@redlemons

As far as I am aware he can revisit any time or place he has visited in the past, and even remain there for quite long periods, so long as he does not intervene directly in his own time line or try to alter anything which is a fixed moment, which would, of course create serious problems. He can even meet and interact with past incarnations of himself in certain carefully engineered circumstances, as we saw in Day of the Doctor, when the Moment brought three versions of the Doctor together in an attempt to find an alternative way to bring an end to the Time War.

Time in the universe of the Doctor seems to be a pretty elastic and forgiving medium for the most part, else he would be pretty restricted in his ability to travel through it.

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@geoffers

he still doesn’t technically remember clara, i’m guessing, but he does remember donna, quite well, and the moment when he decides not to mind-wipe her memories was a call back to that, methinks…

Well, in the moment when the Doctor hesitates as he reaches out to wipe Bill’s memory, the music which we hear is Clara’s theme 🙂

As I have maintained throughout, all the evidence suggests that his memory of Clara has been not been completely obliterated – possibly because the neural block had been configured initially for a human brain, and she may not have been completely successful in ‘reversing the polarity’.  He can no longer recall what she looked or sounded like, or how he felt about her; he can no longer *see* her.  When he was talking to her in the diner, though, he could remember details of at least some of their adventures together, including the events which led up to his decision to use the neural block on her and the reason for the decision, which was to protect her.  There is still a subliminal memory which can be evoked by certain situations or trigger events.

@arbutus

(Did anyone else notice her question about if the Doctor is from another planet, how is it that TARDIS can stand for “time and relative dimension in space”? I did a little fist pump when she came out with that!)

So did I 😉  Since it was Susan in An Unearthly Child who first explained that the bigger-on-the-inside police box was called a TARDIS and why, I assume that the acronym was a translation into English of a corresponding Gallifreyan acronym, but I don’t think that it was ever explained specifically as such.

@redlemons

Bill said The Doctor had been there 50 years but 50 years starting when? It had to be after Danny and Clara died. I thought they died in 2016… Hum?

*ahem*   He’s a Time Lord with a machine which travels in time and space and, as he explained in the lecture on time which we saw, for him at least the concept of time as a one-way sequence of one-after-the-other events is an illusion. He’s been dodging randomly or not so randomly from the past to the present to the future and back again ever since Barbara and Ian followed Susan to Forman’s scrap yard.

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@kharis

the Doctor was interested in her because being confused, having questions, LEARNING made her smile.  It was that she DIDN’T get it and smiled that made him interested.

That is another, valid way of looking at it, and in the end it amounts to the same thing.

I agree with you, in that increasingly I get the impression that learning and a university education is being seen as just a means to obtain a piece of paper for a material end. For some that was always the case, and for the already wealthy and privileged it could be and still is a step on the way to success in politics or in business, with the opportunity for self-indulgent fun along the way, but it is sad if the concept of learning for its own sake and for the delight of discovery is being lost.

 

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@kharis

“Not supposed to get involved”

I took that to be a general principle.  The Doctor is supposed to concentrate on the job in hand – whatever that is in the context of the gizmo he is monitoring in the vault – and not to concern himself with individuals.  But when has that ever deterred the Doctor when something or someone engages his interest?

@pedant  –  and ichabod,  if and when she has seen this episode

The notion of a sentient, or semi-sentient element in the drive of a space ship harks back to Joan D. Vinge’s The Snow Queen and the ‘smart matter’ which is the motive factor in the lost secrets of the star drive.  I don’t think that this is referred to specifically in The Snow Queen, but it is central to the plot of the sequel, World’s End.  It doesn’t, of course, necessarily follow that Moffat was aware of this, but ‘great minds’ and all that …

 

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@miapatrick

Loved the clockworkesque Nardel

Yes, that was a detail which didn’t fully register with me on first viewing: the mechanical whirring as he first ushered Bill into the Doctor’s study, and the dropping of the loose component.  It explains how he was re-embodied. From the neck down he is now an android – but I have no doubt that minds here which are quicker on the uptake than mine will have noted that already and there will be a sighing and a shaking of heads at my obtuseness.

Watching for the second time I appreciated even more fully the gradual build up in pace from the leisurely pre-title sequence, in which Bill enters the study and we follow her gaze lighting on the various items hinting at the Doctor’s identity and past, from the photos to the Tardis to the bunch of old sonic screwdrivers in the pen holder. Then comes the sound of the Doctor’s guitar, the opening bars of Beethoven’s fifth with feedback, and then –  which made me smile – the Doctor enters, carrying an old 78 HMV gramophone record.

His interest in Bill which caused him to summon her to his study and offer to tutor her seems logical.  What teacher worth his or her salt would fail to notice someone who, among all the puzzled frowns, seemed to ‘get it’ and smile.  Bill may not be enrolled as a student but she is clearly very bright. In the rapid cut sequence which records her progress in the ensuing months, the glimpse we get of the percentage marks on the physics papers she submits to the Doctor – all in the high 80s and 90s – are ample demonstration of this. She gives no explanation of why she did not consider applying to university, but it isn’t hard to think of possible reasons why she might have been deterred.

Things to ponder.  The Doctor made a promise, but to whom, and why. Presumably the protection of earth is involved; so is the mysterious cabinet or whatever it is, with the massive metal hinges on doors embossed with Gallifreyan script, a gateway/barrier or a containment facility? It evidently needs adjustment from time to time and has an alarm system which interprets a student vomiting outside as a biological attack.

Poetry and physics, poetry and mathematics, same thing … ‘because of the rhymes’; and the Doctor’s perception of time chimes with an eccentric notion I have entertained for a very long time, so elicited a broad grin from me.

 

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@janetteb

by some Timey Wimey, Moffaty trickery he might regenerate before the Christmas Special but still be the Doctor for the Christmas special

That possibility had crossed my mind, also, but as you say it may be wishful thinking.

Now I’m off to for a second viewing of The Pilot, in order to savour the details and all the little Easter eggs at leisure(whilst possibly munching a few pieces of chocolate from mine).

 

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@juniperfish

Oh, and what the frilly heck is in that vault?

Yes, indeed; and the Doctor ‘has promises to keep’, for the purpose of which he has been in place for fifty, -or is it seventy? – years and counting. No doubt we will find out in the coming weeks, but it is a tantalising and hugely promising start to the season.

I am still gasping at how much was packed in to this episode, so effectively but with such economy.

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Breathless.  For me this had everything, pretty much pitch perfect. The obvious but not too laboured allusions to Susan – at last- and to River, echoes of the very first episode as well as the one which launched the revival with Rose, and the crucial decision which determined Bill’s future with the Doctor hinging on the subliminal recollection of Clara, hauntingly referenced by Clara’s theme – as @pedant notes above.  Not to mention a helter-skelter, pleasingly scary adventure to introduce Bill to the wonders of Time and Relative Dimensions in Space – fast paced and not too complicated, but with plenty of layers and nuances for those who want to analyse it.

And, as @pedant says, Bill rocks.  If this is a portent of things to come she could well turn out to be one of my favourites, if not the favourite companion to date

 

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