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3 November 2016 at 22:54 #54550
The boyfriend and April’s grief would relate to people still alive, their father’s have hurt them, and are alive. So Charlie? Why didn’t it fully materialise?
From Charlie’s conversation with Matteusz I gained the impression that his feelings about his people are ambivalent. In the first episode he said that they were learned and cultured, but what he says now suggests that they might also have been coldly rational. Love was a commodity to be traded and he, as a prince, was a pawn at their disposal – rather as, in medieval Europe, the daughters of kings were assets to be used to cement alliances in arranged marriages. I guess, therefore, that Charlie’s sense of loss might not be as strong as that in some of the others in the gang.
What we have been told so far leads me to suspect that Charlie and Miss Quill might be of different but closely related species, rather as if H. Neanderthalensis had survived into the modern era alongside H. Sapiens Sapiens. One is innately aggressive and combative, the other, as I have suggested above, unemotionally rational. The two might look very similar, but the inborn differences would give rise to very different societies.
3 November 2016 at 22:00 #54549The earlier episodes of Upstairs Downstairs were, I think, pretty accurate with regard to that kind of London household – i.e. upper class but not in the grandest aristocratic style. Later on a certain element of sentimentalism tended to creep in.
The best thing about Downton Abbey was the Guardian blog, where above and BTL people took full opportunity to make fun of it; otherwise it was infuriating. It was full of anachronisms, quite apart from giving a totally distorted view of the relations between the servants and ‘the Family’, and there was no real sense of how this kind of grand country house functioned at the heart of a large country estate. Even the living-in servants were, as depicted, too few for a house of that size.
Out of curiosity I looked up the census records for Highclere Castle, the house which featured as ‘Downton Abbey’. In 1911, even though the family was not in residence at the time, there was a housekeeper, five housemaids, a stillroom maid, a cook, kitchen maid, scullery man, under-butler and a footman. With the family in residence the number of servants would have been almost doubled, and when the family were entertaining visitors, additional help might be brought in from the village. Beyond the house itself were a coachman, 2 stablemen, a chauffeur and a mechanic living over the stables plus, living in the garden bothy, 6 gardeners who would have been regularly in an out of the kitchen delivering produce and taking orders from the cook. Elsewhere on the estate were the steward, the lodge-keepers, gamekeepers, estate carpenter, dairy maids etc. etc.
Nor did DA accurately reflect the rigid hierarchy that prevailed among the servants. The ‘upper servants’ in such a large household – the butler and housekeeper, the ladies maids and valets – tended to keep themselves apart, and often took their meals separately in the housekeeper’s room – known irreverently as ‘Pug’s parlour’. Further down the ranks there were carefully observed gradations – first footman, second footman, upper housemaid, second housemaid and so on, with the scullery maid the lowest of the low.
Relations between the servants and their employers on these big estates varied a good deal, but at best they were paternalistic. Those between ladies’ maids or valets and their employers could be confidential, and upper servants who had been in service to the family a long time might be allowed a certain latitude, but for the rest, especially the women, it was a case of hard work, exhausting hours and strict discipline. The best that can be said is, that for girls who went ‘into service’, especially in rural areas, it was seen as good training in skills which would be useful when they got married, and in the meantime they earned bread and board and at least a pittance to save for the future. My maternal grandmother, born 1882, was the second to youngest in a family of ten* and most of her sisters were in service before they married. In the case of my grandmother things did not go so well: the story goes that she was told by the housekeeper, ‘Th’art too proud to be a servant, Maggie’, and she ended up assisting her mother who, after her husband died in 1900, earned her living as a dressmaker and doing upholstery and soft furnishings in the big houses of the area – which is largely how I come by all this information.
The people who had it worst were the servants of British middle class families who could only afford to employ one or two servants. The mistress of the house who, unlike her French counterpart, had probably never been taught cookery or how to manage a household, tended to demand the impossible – and then wonder why she had a ‘servant problem’.
World War I was the turning point, at least in the cities where women were positively encouraged to go out and work in the factories where, they earned much better money – as depicted in Upstairs Downstairs.
* not counting an elder half-sister who was illegitimate, born when my great grandmother had just turned 16 and brought up by her grandparents; but that is another story.
3 November 2016 at 18:32 #54544@thane15 @pedant
Your words are persuasive. It appears that all seven seasons are available on Netflix, so if I decide to avail myself of the month’s free trial I will be able at least to get a taster. After that, unless I decide it is worth subscribing, the full, gigantic box set is available at a not too exorbitant price* and I will be able to watch at my convenience, even if it takes a year or more.
For a start it could be a project for the dark days of January/February, when there is nothing to do in the garden and the urge to hibernate beside the fire is strong. My conscience may prick slightly at the thought that I need to finish writing up the research project which has been neglected for more than a year now, and which I was planning to get back to after Christmas – and for the record, I’ve never been much good at multi-tasking, so it is likely to be a case of one or the other – but I doubt whether that will trouble me much 🙂
* I went so far as to check this morning
2 November 2016 at 13:16 #54511I watched Victoria, partly to see what Jenna made of the role, and partly because V interests me as a historical figure; her journals and letters bring her so vividly to life.
It stuck pretty closely to the known historical facts – there is plenty of material to draw on, after all – although Jenna is a lot prettier than the young Victoria and at times I’m afraid I lapsed into seeing her as Clara in fancy dress; but gorgeous Rufus Sewell * made a convincing Lord Melbourne, even though he looked a good 15 years younger than Lord M did at that period, and I rather liked Peter Firth as a somewhat sinister Duke of Cumberland, plotting to get himself appointed Regent.
I gather there is to be a second series, but whether I will watch that remains to be decided.
* Yes, I’m that shallow 😉
2 November 2016 at 12:56 #54510In theory, yes, but 144 episodes over seven seasons looks a bit daunting, and I scarcely have the time, even now, let alone the stamina for binge watching on that scale. I find it difficult enough not to fall behind with current shows I want to watch 🙁
If I ever become completely house bound, perhaps then …
2 November 2016 at 00:14 #54505My copy of next week’s Radio Times, which arrived to day, has a five page feature on this, and an offer of a month’s free subscription to Netflix. I am tempted because, although I would normally avoid dramas about the Royal family, whatever the writer’s credentials and however lavish the production, it is Matt Smith and also Claire Foy, who was very good as Ann Boleyn in Wolf Hall.
1 November 2016 at 23:50 #54504the revamped Coal Hill is looking suspiciously like Sunnydale High these days
I am in no position to comment on the Buffy comparisons, because I have never watched Buffy * but I did get the disconcerting feeling that the metamorphosis of Coal Hill into an Academy in smart new buildings had transformed it into an American High School. If that is what British schools are like now I wouldn’t know; my schooldays are so far in the past that I cannot use them as a basis for comparison and, as L P Hartley observed, the past is another country.
What in particular did strike a dissonant note was the glimpses we had of the classroom set-up. It seemed to me odd for sixth-formers to be sitting at desks in serried rows with the teacher invigilating in front. Is this usual? In the sixth form at my school, unless it was a lab practical, we sat around a large table with the teacher at the head, and classes were more like seminars, with everyone actively participating in discussion.
Suddenly I feel old and clueless 🙁
* Yes, I know, my loss by all accounts, but when that show aired I was working long hours in a demanding job, and the time I could spare for TV viewing was very limited.
1 November 2016 at 23:07 #54503I think the flash-vision of Miss Quill with quills and Charlie with other protuberant face-markings in “For Tonight We Might Die” was of their actual forms,
The question remains open, and certainly I would not rule out that possibility. Quill, the name of her people as well as that adopted by the woman herself, could be a direct translation of their own name for themselves, and derive from the fact that they were spiny; nevertheless, still lean towards my original view, which is the same as that of @tardigrade . The flash glimpse we got of the alien forms followed immediately on April’s realisation that, since they claimed to be aliens from another planet, their original forms might be different, and it seemed consistent with her immediately preceding mental pictures in that it was a trifle derivative – humanoid, but with added spines and nodules suggested by the name. I agree that it would be fun if the disguise were to slip fractionally when they were under stress, and we may yet learn the truth of the matter. Miss Quill spoke to her sister of when they were ‘in the nest’, so why not avian, or reptilian, or arthropod? 🙂
The fact that all the members of the gang have suffered some form of traumatic loss is indeed a potentially powerful factor in the dynamics of the group and their development as a team but, for me, the pace of the episodes so far has meant that the way in which their back stories have been established has seemed a bit forced and contrived. Equally contrived is the way in which the only four human members of the gang happen to represent four different ethnic or national groups – not inherently unlikely in a school in Shoreditch, or even in the school round the corner from where I live in Norwich (also converted recently into an Academy), but it might have looked less neatly artificial if they had coalesced from a larger group. No doubt it all comes down to budgetary considerations and the practicalities of TV production, not to mention the expectations of an audience impatient of slow drama, and I am probably being hypercritical 😕
30 October 2016 at 14:16 #54474The best of the three so far, I agree; and I was relieved that the horror element had been toned down a little after the in-your-face gore of the second episode. That said, the arms/tentacles of the alien entity, resembling a cross between umbilical cords – as you also noted – and strangling vines out of a tropical rain forest, were more than sufficiently unpleasant without the addition of mucous slime for extra yuk; alien slime has become a bit of a cliché and it seemed to me unnecessary.
As @craig says, there was a bit more focus on exploration of character, which is to the good, but in the case of the gang it strikes me as bit hurried and broad-brush still, so that there is a tick-box, stereotypical feel to it . What we learned of Miss Quill is indeed more nuanced and interesting. So she is the survivor of an ultra-competitive and ruthless species in which siblings battled for supremacy in the nest, sometimes to the death, and ‘niceness’ is not an admired trait. She is inherently and not just by choice a fighter, frustrated by the inhibitor inserted in her brain. Her ‘sister’ also confirmed that her human appearance is a disguise, facilitated by morphic resonance. Ram’s verdict on her abilities as a teacher were also interesting: ‘She is the worst teacher I ever had, she does barely anything’ – and we have already seen her scathing sarcasm in and out of class, which tends not to be helpful in a teacher. In the first episode her disconnection with the class was also signalled, with the glimpse of her looking at cat pictures on her phone* after having given them a problem to work on. Overall, her cultural ignorance is less apparent than is Charlie’s, but we see her reading The Hunger Games and wondering whether it is a factual account. There is no doubting her resourcefulness and efficiency, however, when a threat to Charlie demands it – though we have been given no reason to suppose that she would come to the rescue if he were not involved. Maybe, just maybe, prolonged contact with humans will have a softening effect, as it did in the case of the Doctor.
There remains some doubt as to whether the alien was really the Lan Kin. Miss Quill, confronting her ‘sister’ implied that it was not: ‘You made one mistake, that is not how the Lan Kin works. The Lan Kin aren’t a people; you’re a person’. The analogy she uses instead is a chameleon, using camouflage and catching prey with its long, sticky tongue.
Souls, yes; but that can be interpreted many ways. The alien is obviously exploiting the belief that the essence of an individual survives death but, as the cautious Tanya observed, another explanation is possible. My take on the matter is that the alien, Lan Kin or otherwise, is telepathic and empathic, drawing on the memories of the targets and the emotions attached to the memories to construct images of the dead, but exploiting empathy in a negative way to feed on the psychic energy of unresolved grief.
*and as everyone knows, the internet consists of tubes, and the tubes are full of cats.
29 October 2016 at 22:53 #54472The title relates to The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, a story in a ballad by Goethe. The sorcerer goes out, telling his apprentice to draw water from the well, but the apprentice thinks to spare himself the labour by casting a spell on a broom, making it carry the bucket and do the work. Unfortunately he doesn’t know how to stop the broom drawing water, and things get out of hand. The ballad is the inspiration of a symphonic poem by the French composer Dukas, and the music was used in the Disney film Fantasia, in which Mickey Mouse featured as the apprentice.
In this case the Magician is the Doctor and Clara the apprentice who, faced with Missy, finds herself a bit out of her depth. In the following episode the Witch is, of course, Missy, and Clara the Familiar – in folklore a servant spirit in the form of an animal
29 October 2016 at 01:20 #5444729 October 2016 at 01:17 #54446my teacher always encourages me to use words like ‘somewhat’, ‘therefor’, ‘whereas’, ‘moreover’ etc.
All power to you and your teacher!
Words are wonderful, and a large vocabulary and the skill to deploy it flexibly and appropriately are valuable assets. Conveying your meaning simply and clearly does not mean restricting your choice of words – for that purpose the more you have at your disposal the better. The main thing to avoid is giving people the impression that you have swallowed and are regurgitating a thesaurus or, still worse, resorting to ‘management speak’ 🙂
As for being an ‘odd person’. When I was around 12-13 I was told that I was ‘peculiar and talked like a book’ – and that was one of my friends; goodness knows what the others thought! Despite being considered an oddity I cruised reasonably happily through my school career, and positively flourished afterwards, and I hope that the same is true for you.
29 October 2016 at 00:41 #54444There was rather too much gore-splatter in this for my taste. If they intend to go down the horror route, I would prefer it to be delivered with more nuance – M R James rather than ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’. Ultimately this is a matter of personal preference and may seem hypocritical from someone who watches Game of Thrones, but it is all to do with context. The violence and (relatively limited) gore quotient in GoT is, give or take a few supernatural elements, intended to convey the reality and cost of dynastic and internecine warfare and its effect on the ‘little’ people in a medieval and early post-medieval society – think the Hundred Years War, the Wars of the Roses, the Thirty Years War, or even the English Civil War. Where the fantasy in ‘Class’ is concerned, I just feel, like @juniperfish , that what is suggested or implied would be more effective, if less viscerally shocking, than what is explicit.
That is not to say that I found nothing engaging in this episode, still less that I am giving up on it – I’m with @pedant on that score. There were some good jokes at the expense of Ofsted etc. especially the robot inspector, though how Miss Quill failed to spot that he was a robot at the outset escapes me; to me it was so evident that I was yelling at the TV screen. The tattoo-dragon as metaphor for steroid abuse was an interesting angle, and I felt that they could have done more with this, rather than going for the more obvious and literal; but, again, that is a personal view. And I liked the dramatic irony of the coach’s advice to Ram, to ‘face your demons and you conquer them’: wishful thinking on his part, as it turned out.
At a more general level, the exploration of the personal lives and problems of the student still seems to me a bit stereotyped and superficial, but it is early days yet and, for the present, Tanya is the one who is for me is the most fully realised and sympathetic. Realistically, on the other hand, almost any group of 14-18 year olds who faced these horrors would probably have been reduced to traumatised, catatonic wrecks, regardless of their personal circumstances, and in no state to face whatever might come through ‘the bung-hole of time’, so suspension of disbelief by stout cables is in order.
28 October 2016 at 23:09 #54443(But seriously: I think that is what writers call “a joke” )
Exactly so 🙂 Perhaps I should refrain in future from trying to make an oblique joke about a joke, or at least add a smiley to signify intention 😳
28 October 2016 at 21:07 #54440It has taken me a while to get round to it, but I have finally watched Class 1 and 2 end to end.
Last week was a trifle hectic and evolved into a prolonged celebration of my birthday, spread over several days. My visitors left on Monday morning, but it has taken me several more days to unwind and get myself organised once more.
Back to the subject in hand. In my case the jury is still out, but there was more than enough in this first episode keep me watching. There was a great deal packed into it and in consequence, to my mind, the pace seemed rushed and the establishment of the individual characters lacked subtlety, but I can understand why that was the case. There were, on the other hand, some deft touches, including the cinematic use of (normal) shadows to prefigure the manifestations of the Shadow Kin – echoes of the Vashta Nerada in Silence in the Library? There were also almost subliminal hints as to how the abnormal at Coal Hill School was being rationalised: the policeman glimpsed on the premises as the pupils were arriving – because people had been disappearing – and the firemen in the aftermath of the Prom. The Doctor’s appearance was nicely judged, because of course he would have saved the last two members of their species; and who better than he to warn against genocide as a solution to a threat, who had in another reality brought about the genocide of two species, one of them his own. He was there to establish the background and the terms of engagement but, although it was no doubt irresponsible on his part to leave two somewhat compromised aliens and a group of teenagers to deal with the consequences of his past activities in the locality, he cannot be everywhere to pick up the pieces, and this is no doubt a scenario replicated many times and places in the whoniverse.
I did love the flash vision of Charlie and Miss Quill in their native alien forms. Miss Quill has quills!
I took this to be April’s imagining of what an alien might look like, the quills suggested by Miss Quill’s name, just as when told that Charlie was a prince among his people she visualised him in a crown, seated on a throne. It struck me as significant also that, as @miapatrick noted, when Charlie described the Rhodia as ‘a cultured, learned society’, she pictured them all dressed in school uniforms – so not even sixth-formers ?*. When I was her age the image brought to my mind would probably have been of himation-clad philosophers strolling and debating in the Peristyle of the Athenian Agora, or teachers and students in the setting of an Oxbridge university quadrangle, or perhaps French intellectuals arguing in a fug of pungent cigarette smoke at a café table on the Rive Gauche. It conveyed the impression of a naïve and somewhat literal imagination, which was probably the intention.
@puroandson
Miss Quill’s ‘I am War itself’ reminded me of the Doctor in his ‘oncoming storm’ aspect, but she has a long way to go yet before she qualifies!
puro the younger
… generally I haven’t noticed this “you’re right” or “no, you’re not right” expression. As if the person writing: “you’re right” has some final word on the matter.
I think that when people say ‘you’re right’ they usually just mean ‘I agree with you’, but I take your point. It could be interpreted as an assertive statement, as if to say, ‘no other point of view is valid’.
Final, random observation, of significance to British members of the forum only, if any. Why Sheffield? I’ve heard posher accents than Charlie’s, but if they wanted to be convincing, couldn’t he and Miss Quill have managed at least a faint approximation of a south Yorkshire accent?
* When I was in the sixth form, back in the Palaeolithic era, we still had to wear uniforms; not the same uniforms as those lower down the school, but almost equally hideous. How times have changed 🙂
16 October 2016 at 13:27 #54243@puroandson @arbutus
As @pedant indicated, ‘pulling’, as in ‘pulling a pint’ refers, in the strictest sense, to the process by which non-pressurised ale is drawn or syphoned up from the casks to taps at the bar. This is done by means of a device known as a beer engine which consists essentially of an air-tight piston chamber operated by those tall handled levers which, if you are at all familiar with British pubs, you will have seen on the bar.
If the casks are at the same level as the bar, then gravity alone suffices.
With keg beers the beer is forced up under pressure, and is poured from a small tap with a lever which opens ands closes a valve.
@arbutus The term is sometimes used in a looser sense for any alcoholic drink dispensed by the pint or half pint, but I confess I have never before come across the expression to ‘pull a gin and tonic’ One lives and learns 🙂
15 October 2016 at 21:26 #54225A pedant writes: pulled up to the bars, ie drawn – hence draught
Exactly so. You tempt me to release my inner pedant 😈
I’m with you wholeheartedly on the subject of keg beers. I vividly recall the reaction following the introduction of the disgusting Watney’s Red Barrel: a triumph of popular activism, and who remembers Red Barrel now?
I’ve been meaning to add some observations on the subject of memory becoming history and what is lost in the process; but I’m a bit rushed at the moment as I have visitors arriving on Monday for a week’s stay. Recently I’ve been concentrating on getting the garden back into some kind of order and letting all housework go hang, but I would rather they didn’t find the flat a complete tip when they arrive. As it is, I suspect they think me a complete slattern.
15 October 2016 at 19:42 #54223Ah, the winter of 1962-63, the coldest of the 20th century in the UK, and one of the coldest on record and another landmark in my memory, when in some places even the water mains froze and water had to be brought round in bowsers. A whisky mac would definitely have been in order.
It was my second term at university in Edinburgh and I was lodging in one of the 19th century tenements near The Meadows. My room had high ceilings, no double glazing, and the only heating was a double-barred electric fire on a meter which gobbled shillings – a heavy drain on my student grant; I think I ended up wearing every pullover I possessed at once and looking like a fuzzy chrysalis. At least I had a student grant to live on, as well as tuition paid. We didn’t realise at the time how very fortunate we were.
I see the difficulty. In the UK most if not all pubs have cellars in which the draught beer is kept and from which is pumped up to the bars, though at one time the barrels would have been in the tap room and the beer drawn directly from them. Bottled beers are ideally, though not always, kept at the correct temperature in chill cabinets.
Thinking back, of the five houses we lived in during my childhood and teens, three had cellars (they were relatively old houses). In one of the other two the water supply was from an artesian bore with a constant overflow into a cistern in the garden. The water temperature was constant and, since we did not have a fridge, anything we wanted kept cool in summer, such as butter and milk – and beer, was put in the cistern. Some people thought this arrangement a bit strange.
15 October 2016 at 10:36 #54212@puroandson That list seems like overkill to me – as you say, this isn’t the arctic. On the other hand, people used to a warmer climate might tend to feel the cold more.
Statistically speaking, the range of temperatures encountered in southern England in November is likely to be between 7 to 11 degrees C, and in December 2 to 8 degrees. Further north it tends to be slightly cooler but not drastically so unless in the highland areas. Occasionally in November we get daytime temperatures in the high teens or below freezing, though the latter is becoming increasingly rare. The coldest weather tends to be in January – February, although even then thermal underwear is rarely necessary unless you live at altitude or work outdoors in exposed conditions.
Re ‘warm beer’ : It is likely to become warmish if you sit nursing it for too long in a warm room instead of drinking it 🙂 Whether cellar or room temperature, I find it infinitely preferable to the mass produced American and Oz lagers I have encountered and now avoid, but chacun a son gout. Warming the beer on the hob, as @cathannabel ‘s father-in-law used to do would produce something approaching mulled ale, which was a traditional winter drink; another way of heating it was set a jug of ale by the fire, heat a poker to red heat and then thrust the poker into the beer. For a more luxurious version you could add a little brandy and some warming spices such as cloves and cinnamon.
As for shandy, I think we invented it, or else it was invented independently in more than one place. Speaking of which, in August 1946 we were spending a holiday in Wales, where the extended clan had rented a large bungalow on the coast of Pembrokeshire by way of celebrating the first post-war summer. One hot day my father was drinking a ginger beer/ale shandy and I asked to try it. He gave me a sip, thinking I would put me off alcoholic beverages until I was of a more suitable age (I was not yet four). ‘Ooh, nice’, I said, ‘may I have some more?’ And so I can blame my father for starting me on the beer 🙂
13 October 2016 at 19:18 #54195@puroandson
that warm British stuff
What is this of which you speak? If, as I fear, you are referring to cask conditioned ale, then you have uttered blasphemy 😯 It should be served at cellar temperature – i.e. cool, but not ice cold, since refrigeration kills the taste – and the beer also, for that matter, since it is not pasteurised. Of course, if you do not like the taste, then you might want it killed, but then it would be a waste of good beer 🙂
In the Moldovarium Pan-galactic Gargle Blasters are no doubt freely obtainable for those who seek a blissful, if temporary oblivion; otherwise I’m more than happy with a pint (or three) of cask conditioned bitter from a good local brewery in a pub where the cellar man knows his job 🙂
24 September 2016 at 23:00 #54021@puroandson
Yes, it was more than a little frustrating. I am fit enough now to tackle the larger and more time-consuming tasks consequent on the months of neglect and am beginning to get things back under some kind of control, but there is still much to do before I can even begin the routine Autumn tasks.
I designed the garden to be informal – nothing regimented or too obviously manicured – but that informal look requires maintenance. Leave it for any length of time and ‘informal’ starts to verge on jungly wilderness; the thugs of the horticultural world overwhelm the more choice and delicate specimens, plants self-seed in rather too much profusion and in inconvenient places, and weeds proliferate and grow to gigantic size. A gardener’s work is never done, alas, and I won’t have much opportunity before winter sets in to just stop and smell the flowers.
23 September 2016 at 20:51 #54004@puroandson @arbutus @blenkinsopthebrave @missy
I love these few weeks when the year is on the cusp of Autumn, especially when the weather is as perfect as it has been here for the past few days. Last week it was unseasonably hot, with high humidity and temperatures in the high 20s to low 30s C. Now the weather is calm, with hazy sunshine and temperatures around 18C-21C, and in late afternoon and early evening the colours in my garden seem to glow with an especially vivid intensity, the raking light enhancing the intensity of the foliage on the Acers and the Nandina Domestica ‘Firepower’, and the pinks of the Japanese anemones, the sedums and the nerines. It won’t last long; the leaves on the trees are starting to turn colour, but while it lasts I’m always happy. Maybe the fact that I was born in October has something to do with it.
20 September 2016 at 18:37 #53977He knew that the Doctor wouldn’t shoot, so he sacrifices himself and sends Galifrey back to where it belongs.
Not so. What caused Gallifrey and the Time Lords, including Rassilon, to return whence they came was the breaking of the link which connected them to earth – think the snapping of elastic, or of a wire under extreme tension – and what broke the link was the Doctor firing on and destroying the gizmo which sustained it.
I’m not entirely sure that the Master knew that the Doctor wouldn’t shoot to kill, either. Immediately following Rassilon’s rejection of his plea to be included among the Time Lords in their transition to a higher state of being it looked to me as if he was in a state bordering on panic, thinking that the Doctor might be about to shoot him and urging him to shoot Rassilon instead. He did cooperate by moving when the Doctor told him to get out of the way, but whether or not he understood what he (the Doctor) intended isn’t clear.
What he did do, however, was save the Doctor from Rassilon’s retaliation. The disappearance of Galifrey and the Time Lords following the breaking of the link was not instantaneous, and the Doctor was clearly resigned to being killed; but the Master told him, in turn, to get out of the way, attacked Rassilon and was drawn back with him to Galifrey and the last day of the Time War. His motives were probably mixed: a last minute impulse to protect his one-time friend coupled with a strong desire for revenge on Rassilon. Rassilon evidently survived the encounter or else promptly regenerated – unless, of course, the reset in Day of the Doctor occurred before the events of the End of Time; in which case the death and regeneration of Tennant Doc never happened. Which creates an interesting paradox.
17 September 2016 at 13:40 #53948What say you on the Hybrid- if there really is a Hybrid – being half Human half Dalek
This wasn’t addressed to me, so apologies for butting in with my unsought opinion. As I see it, though, if the Daleks did succeed in using Human DNA to breed a new variety of Dalek, the results would indeed be chimeras- or hybrids if you like, but not, I think *the* Hybrid
17 September 2016 at 13:31 #53947surely it was the Master who defeated Rassilon?
I think that you are forgetting the sequence of events. The Doctor gate crashes – or rather, skylight crashes – the party just as the link with Galifrey is established and Rassilon and the High Council appear. After making a brief attempt to persuade the Master of his folly, he uses Wilf’s gun to fire at and destroy the white point star diamond which is amplifying the drumbeat signal and is thus the crucial element in the Gate apparatus. This destroys the link, and Galifrey and the Time Lords are pulled back to where they belong
Even after Rassilon has foiled his plan to gain control of the Time Lords, it takes a while for the Master to realise that they, the Time Lords have used him for their own ends, going back in time to implant the drumbeat signal in his brain, and that they have no intention of rewarding him by including him in their further plans. It is only at the last minute that he turns against them, steps aside to let the Doctor take aim at the diamond and, as the TLs disappear, attacks Rassilon and is sucked back with him into the Time Lock.
12 September 2016 at 23:05 #53920Why go to the barn in the first place? Why not go right to the Citadel and call Rassilon out there, without putting innocent locals in the (possible) line of fire as at the barn?
I’m not sure that I can add much of substance to what @puroandson (both) have already said, but perhaps I can expand a little on the points they made
When confronting an enemy/preparing for battle, it is best to do so on a ground of ones own choosing. If he had gone directly to the citadel he would have been in the territory of Rassilon and the High Council, the advantage would have been very much on their side, and there would have been no witnesses. Instead he forced them to come to him at the barn in the dry lands, where representatives of people who mattered to him were assembled to witness.
Admittedly the Doctor took a risk, gambling on the likelihood that the army would take his side when it came to the crunch, and he had no right to expect or demand that other people put themselves at risk also, but they came to him of their own accord, knowing the danger, and they stood with him, and that was their choice and their right. Rassilon, when threatening the Doctor, discounted them entirely, ‘…no witnesses’, – just as, in The End of Time, he was prepared to consign them and the rest of the universe to oblivion in order to ensure the survival of himself and the Time Lords. Here, though, the Doctor provided an opportunity for them to assert themselves. It may have been incidental to his principal objective, but in extremis they were his friends and allies and I don’t think that for a minute he took them for granted.
10 September 2016 at 23:03 #53907why “they’ll kill you!” isn’t that clear to me
I took this to be the generic ‘they’ with which ordinary people who lack power or influence tend to refer to Authority. Furthermore, Rassilon, as one of the founders of Time Lord culture resurrected, would appear to be the focus of something like a personality cult, having been accorded almost god-like status, and when the Leader is the centre of a personality cult, blame tends in any case to be deflected onto to his or her henchmen, whether because people are genuinely fooled by the propaganda, or because it is too risky to place it where it primarily belongs. Certainly the High Council seem to have been more than willing to cooperate with Rassilon, and the Doctor holds all of them responsible. All of them end up being sent into exile.
9 September 2016 at 14:56 #53888@puroandson (son)
Thank you for the welcome back. I’m doing well; fully mobile once again, even if my spine remains a bit stiff – and there is not much that can be done about that. The weather where I am remains, as it has been for much of the summer, fine and pleasantly warm, and likely to remain so for the next ten days or so at least. Today it is 23C, with sunshine and a southerly breeze. It won’t last until November/December, but I hope that your soccer trip goes well, despite the inevitable cold and damp.
I agree that the woman in the barn knew what she was talking about when she said ‘They’ll kill you’ – I’m sorry if I gave the impression that I was arguing otherwise – and I think that the Doctor was well aware of the risk. I agree also with @pedant that the hostility of the High Council, and of Rassilon in particular, was rooted in fear. As he (pedant) pointed out, people who seek and obtain absolute or near absolute power tend to develop a paranoid mindset, suspicious of anyone they cannot control or who they think might even remotely be a threat to their power, and the Time Lords have never had much success in their attempts to control the Doctor.
When the Doctor first left Gallifrey he probably didn’t seem much of a threat, even if he was inclined to meddle in the affairs of the universe, and sometimes the Time Lords even found a use for him. Over the centuries, though, his reputation grew, along with his power to influence the course of events and the number of occasions on which he managed to thwart the plans of the Time Lords, culminating in the events in The End of Time which you referred to, when he confronted and defeated Rassilon himself. From that point, if not before, Rassilon must have viewed him as a personal enemy. His popularity among the ordinary people in and after the Time War could only serve to strengthen the High Council’s perception of him as a threat to their supremacy and, to cap it all, during his ordeal in the confession dial, he openly defied them (note his words as he emerged from the teleport booth) and was prepared to endure four billion years of torture – whether subjective or real-time – rather than give them the information they wanted.
Like you I have always much preferred social history to the kind which ignores the lives of ordinary people, and that is where archaeology can contribute to building a rounded picture of the past. I have also spent a good deal of time since I retired in collaborating with cousins on both sides of my family to discover more about the past of our families, going back to the 17th century; not just names and dates, which aren’t of much interest in themselves, but their occupations and the communities they lived in, as well as significant events in their lives. One of my distant relatives – a weaver and cousin of one my great, great, great, great grandfathers – was a prominent radical writer and agitator in the early 19th century before the rise of the Chartists, of whom he disapproved, for some reason.* But I digress.
Puro solo. re paranoia: I think that a distinction can be made between full-blown paranoia which, as @pedant says, is a symptom of some types of mental illness, and the paranoid state of mind which is manifest in the kind of personality disorder which drives many of the powerful or would-be powerful, and which seems to be rooted in a deeply underlying, and probably unacknowledged sense of inadequacy and insecurity.
*perhaps because they didn’t accord him the respect which he thought was his due – I get the impression from his writings that he came to have a rather inflated idea of his own importance
8 September 2016 at 20:20 #53873@puroandson @ichabod Your discussion of the hybrid has set me thinking.
To summarise: the Matrix is a vast and powerful computer onto which the minds of deceased Time Lords are uploaded and, as I have understood it, these minds form a major part of both its software and its operating system. It generates forecasts or predictions which are mathematical probabilities, although at least some of these predictions are referred to as prophecies and, like most prophecies, are somewhat Delphic in their ambiguity.
In ‘Hell Bent’, at the meeting in the council chamber, the General says ‘The hybrid is a creature *thought* to be cross bred from two warrior races’, and the assumption is that these two races are the Time Lords and the Daleks – an assumption which, as the Doctor later points out, has a serious flaw. The General then goes on to say, ‘All matrix prophecies concur that this creature will one day stand in the ruins of Gallifrey. It will unravel the web of Time and destroy a billion billion hearts to heal its own’. So the Time Lords do not know the identity of the hybrid, and they certainly don’t identify the Doctor as such. They do, however, think that the Doctor has more information, hence their plot to capture and torture him into revealing what he knows, and they do so now because, having hidden Gallifrey near the end of the universe when the hybrid is likely to manifest itself and the events foretold come to pass, the question has become a matter of urgency.
At the end of ‘Heaven Sent’ the Doctor says ‘… the hybrid is me’ – ambiguous on the face of it, especially as he later teases Me by suggesting that she is the hybrid; but for what it is worth, in the subtitles on the Blu-ray, the m in me is lower case. ‘In Hell Bent’, in the Cloisters, he tells Clara the story of the student at the Academy who disappeared for four days into the Cloisters and saidwhen he re-emerged, that the Sliders had spoken to him. The implication is, of course, that the student was the Doctor-to-be and (maybe) that he had discovered, or that the Sliders had imparted to him the information that he was destined to be the hybrid.
ichabod, I think that your original assumption that
he originally fled Gallifrey because he was afraid that the hybrid “forecast” meant *him* so he was afraid of finding out in some terrible way that it *was* him, and that if he didn’t leave, he would destroy his home world (per the prophecy) just by being there
is more or less correct. The Time Lords had no reason t0 identify him as the hybrid, and at that stage may not even have suspected that he knew who or what the hybrid was, and he lived for many several centuries more on Gallifrey before leaving, which does not suggest that he was in fear of his life. My take on the subject is that his leaving was an attempt to avert the prophecy, certainly, but that a more immediate reason, prompting the timing of his departure, was as he sometimes stated, the fact that he had become bored and restless and realised how much of a misfit he was in Time Lord society. Insofar as it was an attempt to escape what was predestined, it led inevitably to an Appointment in Samarra, because ultimately the words of the prophecy were fulfilled, if not in the way anyone expected. In his attempts to undo Clara’s death he travelled to the end of Time and stood in the ruins of Gallifrey, and he destroyed billions of hearts in his determination to avenge her death and heal the wounds of his loss, the hearts being his own.
If the non-Time Lord population of Gallifrey feared that the Time Lords might kill the Doctor it was not because he was thought to be the hybrid; they would have had ample opportunity to attempt to do so earlier if that had been the case. I suspect that their reasons had more to do with the outcome of the Time War. The Time Lords knew that he had stolen the Moment, and even if they were aware that there had been two time streams, that in one the Moment had been used, and that in the other Gallifray had simply been sequestered in a time bubble, they may not have been particularly grateful for the way in which their continued existence had been achieved. The Doctor was a war hero to the grunts in the army and to the general population, but the attitude of the Time Lords towards him had always been, at best, ambivalent.
8 July 2016 at 18:30 #53196The Govt explicitly excluded the NHS from the scope of TTIP
Indeed they did, but whether they were justified in giving such assurance when the terms of the deal are still being negotiated is debatable. According to some accounts I have read, there are legal experts who are not sure that this would be possible. Anyway, I wouldn’t trust this government to know their arse from their elbow or to organise the proverbial.
I fully agree on the subject of doctors as managers, though; and if my relatives in the medical profession are anything to go by, the great majority would much rather devote themselves full time to the job of treating patients and saving lives. It makes nonsense of such policy aims as ‘practice based commissioning’.
8 July 2016 at 14:54 #53193To forestall any indignant protests, I acknowledge an error in the above. I should have specified that the statement about Saxon and Danish place name derivations applies to England and, to some extent, lowland Scotland. Wales and the Scottish highlands, not so much
8 July 2016 at 14:30 #53189@puroandson I’ve just realised that I didn’t address your query about the pronunciation of Derby. In the UK it is indeed pronounced Darby, with a long a. A lot of place names here are not pronounced as they are spelt, probably because the origin of the names is generally Anglo-Saxon or Danish, or a combination of both, and while both spelling and pronunciation have evolved over time, the changes in spelling have not kept pace with the changes in pronunciation. To take just two examples from my home county of Norfolk, Wymondham is pronounced Windum, and Happisburgh is pronounced Hazeboro, which thoroughly confuses people from outside the region – much to the amusement of locals. In Domesday Book (1086) they are Wimundham and Hapesburc respectively. Norwich, the city where I live, is pronounced Norrich, though anyone who has lived for any length of time in the UK would know that. In Domesday Book it is Norwic.
8 July 2016 at 11:27 #53184Congratulations on achieving yet another distinction! Onward and upward 🙂
And I fully agree with you about the negative emphasis in the Remain campaign; it was a horrendous mistake. I think I read somewhere that it was on the advice of an American campaign ‘advisor’, but I may be mistaken on that score.
@puroandson Re the EU and the NHS. There are, or were, concerns that TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership), the proposed EU/US trade deal, might affect the NHS, either forcing wholesale privatisation, or at the very least making it very difficult if not impossible in future, to bring NHS services already contracted out to the private sector back ‘in house’. These concerns are also discussed here. Nobody knows for certain; the terms of the deal are still being negotiated, so nothing is definite, and since it will need the agreement of all members states of the EU it may not even go through. In any case, if we are out of the EU the question is academic.
7 July 2016 at 21:23 #53163Any optimists who believed that leaving the EU would free money to be spent on the NHS may be facing disillusionment
The full details can be found here
6 July 2016 at 00:54 #53111@lisa Oh, this is getting beyond ridiculous. Professor Dougan is not an ‘EU lawyer’; he is an academic, Professor of European Law at Liverpool university, who happens to be one of the foremost authorities on EU law in the country. And, in case you were unaware of this fact, the title Professor in the UK means that he is head of his Department.
6 July 2016 at 00:06 #53110@whisht @puroandson
I did it! I walked into the city and back, a round trip of just over two miles, towing a laden wheeled shopping bag on the way back. I tucked a folding walking stick into the bag in case of need, but it wasn’t required, My legs felt very slightly unsteady to begin with but … freedom, and no pain 🙂
@lisa I looked in around 4pm intending to write a response to your posts #53065 and 53076, but after reading post #53105 I felt a need to step back, take several deep breaths, go for a walk around the garden and then find something else with which to occupy myself for an hour or two. Without going into detail, suffice it to say that I disagree, quite strongly, with many of the points you make. The EU is an unwieldy and flawed institution and the global economic crash has caused serious problems within the Euro zone but, as I see it, it has overall been of net benefit to its members, socially as well as economically – and I have been around since well before the EEC came into being The problems caused by global economics, the deregulation of the banks and financial sector which led ultimately to the 2008 crash, and the social and economic policies adopted by successive UK governments have led to the obscene and widening economic and social gulf in the UK, and the EU is not to blame for that, though it was the anger and disaffection that this caused which tipped the balance in the referendum. The Murdoch press and other right wing tabloids, as outlets for the views of people opposed to the EU, either ideologically or from vested interest, have encouraged, even promoted the belief that the EU and not our own government is the cause of most of the problems we face. People kicked back, and with good reason, but they were facing the wrong target.
I do not dispute that there are doctors and nurses and teachers etc. who voted leave, although demographic analysis after the event suggests that they were more likely to be aged over 50. There are also well informed doctors, teachers and other professionally qualified people, including myself, who voted to remain, and to suggest that we did not know what we were voting for is, frankly, offensive. There were also many on both sides who were not well informed. Neither campaign was well conducted, and neither did anything to clear the fog, but it was the leave campaign in particular which resorted to outright distortion and lies. And yes, immigrants were perceived to be an issue, if not the issue, among some of the electorate, as attested by any number of vox pop. interviews on radio and tv.
But to return to my original intention:
As @pedant pointed out, dredging and desilting of rivers in the UK is not controlled by the EU. The management of rivers used to be the responsibility of local river boards composed of local farmers and landowners, but in 1997 it was transferred to a national body, the newly created Environmental Agency. The European Water Framework Directive is concerned, among other things, with environmental matters – the reduction or elimination of pollution in rivers and the establishment and/or maintenance of a healthy aquatic ecology where possible, with less stringent objectives where human activity makes this unfeasible. It does not preclude or ban the desilting of rivers where necessary and any bureaucratic hold-ups or failures in that respect can be laid at the door of the Environmental Agency and the Treasury which funds it
The link is to an introductory page, but if you navigate around the site you will see that among other matters the Directive is also concerned with flood control and prevention – including research, the exchange of knowledge and experience between member states and the funding of works.
Dredging is, in any case, not a very efficient method of flood prevention since it simply shunts the problem further downstream into someone else’s back yard. Increased rainfall has led to a rise in the frequency and severity of floods, but there are other contributory causes. It has been demonstrated that trees on hillsides absorb enormous amounts of rainwater and thus control the rate of run-off. Deforestation of the hills, which began in prehistoric times, means that the water from rain falling on the hills reaches the rivers very rapidly. Field drainage above the valley floor also contributes to the rate of flow. In the river valleys themselves, flood plains have been built on, and water meadows, which were designed to flood seasonally and sometimes included elaborate water management systems, have been abandoned or drained. Reforestation of hills and a return of river basins to a more ‘natural’ state would, therefore help to mitigate the extent and severity of floods, and though farmers and others whose livelihoods were impacted would have to be recompensed, the benefits would outweigh the enormous cost of major floods.
That’s it for tonight; it’s getting late and although I had intended to comment on your post #53076, I had better leave that until tomorrow.
4 July 2016 at 15:17 #53088Still on the subject of BREXIT but in a somewhat lighter vein and highly appropriate in relation to the main purpose of this Forum, people might like to check this out.
Much to consider in the posts since yesterday evening (UK time) and I will respond when I have time. Meanwhile I need to replenish food stocks and the main question is, whether or not to risk walking to the city centre and back without a walking stick.
3 July 2016 at 22:32 #53062@puroandson
You mentioned subsidies to farmers. Among the EU monies available to farmers in the UK were grants for the preservation or restoration and management of ecological habitats and diversity – heathlands, wetlands, hedgerows and mixed woodland. During and after the war, farmers were encouraged to bring marginal land into cultivation and, as agricultural machinery became larger, hedgerows were ripped out to make large ‘prairie’ fields, field margins and headlands were ploughed and pasture and meadow land ‘improved’. Agriculture and other forms of development have also resulted in the destruction of a much ancient woodland. This destruction of habitats and the use of pesticides and fertilisers have resulted in the steep and in some cases terminal decline of native species of birds, insects and plants which I have witnessed in my lifetime, with goodness knows what knock-on effects to the ecological balance. The grants from the EU to farmers have helped in various ways to mitigate this decline, but I have no confidence that they will be replaced by money from the UK government.
3 July 2016 at 21:58 #53061I’m responding here to your post on the Music forum, since this seems a more appropriate place
Johnson didn’t expect to win the Referendum. For Johnson it would be an honourable loss, alignment to an influential bas of the party and then…power!
And his face the day following the Referendum spoke volumes – a man on whom had dawned the meaning of the saying ‘Be careful what you wish for’.
And it turns out that not only did the Remain party have no contingency plan in the event of a vote against them, neither was there any consensus or coherent plan among the Leavers – though perhaps that isn’t so surprising when one considers the terms on which their respective campaigns were conducted.
The referendum was the result of a cynical ploy by an inept prime minister to keep a faction of his party in line and was exploited by an unprincipled chancer, and both got their come-uppance. On my way back from a hospital appointment last Wednesday I was chatting to the taxi driver, who said that he had voted Remain but couldn’t help taking some gleeful satisfaction in the fact that the government and powers-that-be had received a well-deserved kick up the arse. Fair enough, but as an exercise in democracy it was a travesty, and I have little hope that the government will draw the correct conclusions. Whether or not the disaffected were persuaded that the EU was the cause of their problems, the EU is not inherently responsible for the economic and social policies pursued by successive UK governments over the past 36 years, and since I doubt very much that the Tory leopard is about to change its spots, and the Labour party seems at present intent on tearing itself apart, leaving the EU is likely to make life even more difficult – in the short and medium term at the very least – for those who are already heavily disadvantaged. There seems to me to be a real danger that the political climate could get very nasty indeed.
Sigh! I had resolved not to join in the discussion of the referendum and the politics thereof, and now that I have I shall probably regret it, but I may as well let it stand.
3 July 2016 at 20:42 #53060Has anyone here in the UK been watching The Living and the Dead? The first episode was broadcast last Tuesday on BBC 1, but all six are available as a box set on i player and I watched them over the last couple of days as a welcome and absorbing alternative to contemplating the aftermath of the referendum.
It is a ghost story written by Ashley Pharaoh (Life on Mars; Ashes to Ashes) and directed by Alice Troughton (no relation) who directed The Doctor’s Daughter and Midnight, as well as episodes of Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures. There are echoes of MR James and of Thomas Hardy – Far from the Madding Crowd in particular – which Pharaoh has mentioned as being sources of inspiration, as well as something of Nigel Kneale, and it is filmed in a very cinematic way, both evocatively beautiful and creepily atmospheric. The story itself is convoluted enough to have come from the pen of Moffatt, and even at the very end, just when it seems as if all has been resolved, there is a truly shocking twist which, only with hindsight, would anyone realise had been prefigured by a blink-and-you-missed it image. I recommend it.
The title music is The Lyke Wake Dirge, which in itself always gives me the shivers.
29 June 2016 at 11:01 #52979@ichabod He left out my favourite: ‘short-fingered, cheeto-faced, ferret-wearing shitgibbon’
I’m not sure what a shitgibbon is, but it sounds appropriate.
25 June 2016 at 11:10 #52908@puroandson
I actually meant in the EU!
I suspected as much, which is why I added the bit about the EU. The fact that your question specified England rather than Britain left it a bit ambiguous though.
When the EEC was established originally, in 1958, the UK government opted not to join France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. Subsequent governments in the 60s decided that this had been a mistake, but their applications to join were blocked, chiefly by General de Gaulle, who famously decreed ‘Non’ (he wasn’t very fond of the British).
For the record, I voted Remain, for the reasons specified by @pedant and because many of the EU regulations which the Eurosceptics have been bitching about concern – in no particular order – human rights, environmental safeguards, food safety, employees rights and safety in the workplace
25 June 2016 at 10:15 #52906@puroandson
So how long has England been in the UK? Help?
Answer: 309 years, since the Act of Union of 1707 which united Scotland and England politically and economically. The two countries had shared a monarch since 1603, when James VI of Scotland succeeded Elizabeth I as James I of England by virtue of being the great grandson of Henry VIII’s sister, Margaret, who had married James IV of Scotland, but they remained only loosely linked politically.
The Scots had invested a sizeable percentage of their capital in the Darien Scheme, an attempt to establish themselves as a powerful trading nation by founding a colony on the Isthmus of Panama. The venture failed disastrously and, as a result, it was easy to pressure the bankrupt aristocracy into agreeing to a full, formal union.
England already claimed sovereignty over Wales and Ireland, but that is another story, and neither had been unified kingdoms in quite the same sense as Scotland.
The EU developed, through various treaties, from the EEC, aka the Common Market, which Britain joined in 1973.*
* The electorate were given the opportunity to vote on this in a referendum in 1975, and voted to stay by a conclusive margin.
20 June 2016 at 18:49 #52815@arbutus @blenkinsopthebrave @StitchInTime @puroandson @missy Thank you all for those kind words; it’s good to be back and I hope to contribute more to the conversation in the next few days. Re-watching Doomwatch and Edge of Darkness after such a long interval has been an interesting and rewarding experience which perhaps merits some comment once I have collected my thoughts. As for season 9 of Who; so far I am only up to The Girl Who Died, but have been struck afresh by how much of the themes of the last three episodes is prefigured in these earlier stories. I had watched all the episodes at least twice when they were first shown, but now realise what a big difference it makes to re-watch them all in relatively rapid sequence. I will need to go back to the original discussions before I venture to add anything further but maybe, just maybe, I will find something to add. Watch this space 🙂
20 June 2016 at 18:22 #52814@StitchInTime @Puroandson
There is another point to consider. Apart from all the other pointers in the text, the possibility that River knew from the first that it was the Doctor, and was simply teasing by pretending not to recognise him, can be ruled out by the consideration that, if such had been the case, it would have removed all the impact and, indeed, made nonsense of that pivotal moment of realisation when, in the silence following her hyperbolic rant, she became conscious of the intent regard of the person beside her, turned and finally understood Who it was, even before the Doctor’s murmured ‘Hello, Sweetie’. It was wonderfully acted and a real tear-jerker, as many people noted at the time.
19 June 2016 at 18:34 #52766@missy It is an interesting theory, but I’m afraid @grannym is right; the text doesn’t support it. River is clever, but even the cleverest person may be blind sided by their assumptions and expectations.
River had contacted a surgeon specifically, and was puzzled and irritated that the person she assumed to be the surgeon in question had evidently not received any information about the case. The Tardis – who probably knew exactly what she was doing – had arrived close to the location where the surgeon’s capsule was expected to land, and when Nardole mistook the Tardis for the capsule and the Doctor for the surgeon, the Doctor went along with it, probably out of curiosity. As he and Nardole were disappearing round a bend in the street, a man carrying what looked like an old-style doctor’s bag emerged from a side street and asked a passer-by if they were expecting a surgeon.
We later learn from River’s conversation with Ramone that they had also been looking for the Doctor (code name ‘Damsel’), but this was a quite separate quest. River may have summoned the Tardis, which would explain why she was not surprised to find it, but what prevented her from recognising the Doctor himself, despite his attempts to make himself known, was the fact that, as far as she knew, the twelve regenerations rule was inflexible. Even though she was hoping, or even expecting the Doctor would turn up in the vicinity of the Tardis, she took it for granted that it would be either one of the incarnations which she had known in the flesh, or one which she recogniised from her intensive research following the events of ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’ – one of the twelve whose pictures she showed Ramone. Since she evidently knew nothing of how the war on Trenzalore ultimately played out, the last thing she could have expected was for him to appear with a new face. That it took a while for the penny to finally drop is therefore not surprising, and it does not mean that she was being uncharacteristically obtuse.
19 June 2016 at 17:30 #52764It occurs to me that now that it is safe for me to sit on a sofa*, it is time that I checked in to say hello to all and a very belated but appreciative ‘thank you’ to @puroandson @StitchInTime and @missy, plus anyone else I may have overlooked, for their good wishes in the aftermath of my op.
I have now reached the stage of being able to dispense with the crutches except for longer excursions outdoors, although still more tortoise than mountain goat, and it will be a while yet before I am fully fit.
I have been doing more reading than watching of box sets so far, so I have not yet caught up on the backlog and only just started on my re-watch of season 9 of Doctor Who, though it has been a revelation watching episodes for the first time in HD and with a decent sound balance. I have, however, binge watched all the surviving episodes of Doomwatch (early 1970s) as well as the original TV production of Edge of Darkness – viewed for the first time since it was originally shown (and repeated) in 1985. I’ll give my thoughts on these later, if anyone is interested.
* sofas are generally to low and squashy to be suitable seating in the weeks immediately following a hip operation.
25 April 2016 at 14:58 #51893@thedentistofdavros @missy @ichabod
Ah, the ghost stories of M R James – so deliciously, skin-crawlingly creepy! I imagine that the original readings by candle light or firelight must have been the cause of many disturbed nights among the listeners.
I, too, have fond memories of the Christmas ghost stories on TV. The one I recall most vividly is ‘Lost Hearts’, though they were all done well. and I wish that the tradition had been continued longer. There was a second adaptation of ‘Oh whistle and I’ll Come to You’ shown Christmas 2010 and, more recently, there was the adaption of The Tractate Middoth’ by Mark Gatiss which aired on Christmas Day 2013, but there are so many more stories they could use.
If anybody here remembers the early 1970’s TV show ‘Doomwatch’, I have just bought the boxed set of the surviving episodes which has only recently been issued. I missed many of the episodes when it was originally shown, because it coincided with one of the periods when I did not always have access to a television set, and I am looking forward to spending some of my idle hours of convalescence in binge-watching it and filling in some of the gaps. The reviews I have read suggest that it still has impact, despite the wobbly sets and ‘cardboard’ effects typical of that era, not least because the issues addressed are still relevant.
12 April 2016 at 19:34 #51638@ichabod “Eye in the Sky” is showing in the UK from this coming Friday (15th) – I don’t know about the US. From what I have gathered it is about a drone attack, examining the legal and moral issues from the viewpoint of the various people involved in authorising and orchestrating it – politicians, military officers and the drone pilot etc.. The theme and the fact that the cast includes Helen Mirren and Alan Rickman augur well.
29 March 2016 at 21:39 #51535@StitchinTime @janetteb Many thanks to you both, also, for your good wishes.
There should be no lack for reading matter to occupy me. There is a growing stack of recently purchased books – fiction and non-fiction – which I have been adding to against the day, and once I have finished these, my personal ‘library’ includes at least 1400 novels and collections of short stories as well as an assortment of biographies, works on social history, popular science etc .* if fiction should pall, so that I can revisit old favourites, or perhaps open books last read so long ago that it will be like discovering them afresh.
*not to mention a great many archaeological tomes and periodicals, of course, but somehow I don’t think that I will be cracking any of them open in the coming months.
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