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  • #74660
    Mudlark @replies

    It’s so good to be back, seeing familiar faces/avatars returning, and to have, finally, a new episode to discuss. It’s been a long wait.

    Welcome, too, to @b10essee  and  @unitpicker: I hope you will have fun here and find participation rewarding.

    As for the episode, I enjoyed it hugely, borne along by the sheer energy in the production and cast – and if in hindsight there were possible nits to pick, who cares!  Moreover, with a Disney budget it was possible to throw everything, including the kitchen sink, into the special FX, and it was spectacular enough, perhaps, to realise RTD’s vision. *

    Yes, the monster(s) of the week plot was a little on the straightforward side considering that this marked the 60th anniversary, the only complication being the twist and reveal: the alien warriors who we were led to believe were the baddies but weren’t, and the Meep, cute enough to induce hyperglycaemia, who turned out to be not at all nice – though still cute in a psychotic kind of way.

    The heart of the story, though, was the dynamic relationship of Donna and her family with the Doctor and, ultimately, the resolution of the metacrisis/metacrises.  @scaryb found the initial, expository sequences a little clunky, but for me they evoked an elegiac mood which I found moving: the Doctor with his enduring regret at the loss of a friend who had meant so much to him, and Donna, thankful for a secure and rewarding family life but with a persistent, aching and increasing sense of loss, of some element of wonder and fulfilment that was missing.

    Things, of course, quickly become too hectic and urgent for that mood to persist, and on the way to the climactic ending there are also comedic moments, such as Sylvia’s panicky and clumsy attempts to prevent her daughter from seeing the Doctor when it is already far too late. As for the climax and resolution, I found it all perfectly satisfying: the women, mother and non-binary daughter, sharing the metacrisis, have the outgoing ability to release and be free of it.

    Bonuses:  The verbal avalanche of technical-sounding gobbledygook as the Doctor, Donna and Rose work frantically to halt the dagger drive and take-off. If you were able to follow it or, as I did, had the sub-titles turned on, it was utterly absurd and very funny.  Also the upgraded sonic screwdriver, now able to create screens to view and manipulate 3D diagrams, and to construct protective screens.  I took the latter to be force screens which seems to make more sense in an SF context, although the visuals were ambiguous and they may have been solid.  Yesterday afternoon, before I watched The Star Beast, I watched the two Peladon adventures from the Pertwee era (on which I may comment elsewhere), and noted with amusement that the sonic screwdriver was then being used solely for the purpose implied by the name.

    * I hope that by limiting the non-UK viewers to those prepared to cough up for a subscription to Disney plus         those with the know-how to get round that limitation they aren’t limiting potential viewers.

    #74597
    Mudlark @replies

    This may be of interest to those who are fans of the original theme, assuming they haven’t already seen it.

    #74575
    Mudlark @replies

    @janetteb   And now part 4 is up.

    @translatorcircuit   Am looking forward to watching the  Dalek episodes this evening. I gather they have been edited to cut out some of the padding as well being colourised (horrible word).   It will have to be on iPlayer on my computer, though, as my Tivo box is currently on the blink -probably expired of old age – and for some reason I can’t access Freeview either. Fortunately the computer can be linked to a large HD monitor so it won’t be too much of a hardship.

    #74109
    Mudlark @replies

    @janetteb @winston @blenkinsopthebrave

    Sad indeed.  I always enjoyed ichabod’s posts and insights, and when the forum comes fully to life again, as I trust it will when the show returns in the autumn, her contributions will be greatly missed.

    Thanks, janette, for relaying the news; I had missed it in January and have just been reading some of the obituaries.

     

    #73408
    Mudlark @replies

    @dentarthurdent

    Your views on Moffat’s writing coincide pretty much exactly with mine. I, too, love the ‘puzzle boxes’ and the densely layered plots which repay multiple re-viewings – so much more satisfying than simple narratives, though I concede that the latter can be very entertaining. As for the accusations of misogyny, I, born in 1942 and raised feminist almost from the cradle, failed to see any. In fact, I think he is pretty good on the whole at writing female characters and there is a small, inner bad girl part of me that would love to be River Song – after all, we do share a profession, although I might justifiably criticise her methods  😉

    Last Christmas is one of my favourite episodes among the Christmas specials, too.

    Chibnall suffers in contrast in coming directly after this high point. He is by no means a bad writer and no doubt there are many who prefer his approach, but it seems to me that he has failed to understand the inner essence of the Doctor or the show as a whole as it has developed, and that may be in part why Whittaker has not, as Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi did, conveyed any real sense that she is very old and contains the experience and knowledge of all her previous incarnations. In commenting I have tried not to be too critical and to focus on what was positive, but it is telling that the numbers of people commenting here as markedly decreased, and that for me, personally, whilst episodes written by Moffat or during his tenure as showrunner remain clear in my somewhat erratic memory, most of those since Chibbers took over tend to be somewhat hazy.

    #73406
    Mudlark @replies

    For the record, there is an interview with Steven Moffat in today’s Guardian in which, among other things, he discusses with good humour some of the more negative responses to his take on Doctor Who and Sherlock.

    @blenkinsopthebrave

    Thanks for that link.  The ingredients could, in theory, add up to an exciting send-off for the thirteenth Doctor and I will certainly watch it, but I await it with muted expectations. ‘Blessed are they who expect nothing for, either way, they will not be disappointed’.

     

    #73168
    Mudlark @replies

    Re. the above. I meant to include a link to the aforementioned report

    #73167
    Mudlark @replies

    @dentarthurdent

    Like you, I tend to prefer science fiction/fantasy stories set in an imagined future to those with a historical setting, but not for the reasons you cite. For me, as an archaeologist and historian, it is the inaccuracies which are jarring, and there generally are at least a few inaccuracies or anachronisms.

    That said, I thought that Demons of the Punjab was one of the better examples and, given that the historic reality was so horrific, quite sensitively done. But the ‘demons’ seemed shoe-horned in and an unnecessary distraction in that context. I got the impression that, as in Rosa, the thinking was that ‘This is Doctor Who, so there must be a monster in the story’.  In fact, in the earliest episodes of the Hartnell era the stories set in the past were notably lacking in monsters, and I don’t think monster, bug-eyed or otherwise, featured at all the original concept until the Daleks proved such a success.

    #73166
    Mudlark @replies

    Children are good at joining the dots.

    Today’s Observer/Guardian has a report on an eight year old Ukrainian boy who, with his family, has just been evacuated from their village near Kharkov after living in a basement since the start of the war. He spent much of the time there drawing, and there is a photo of him and one of his drawings – of what are unmistakeably Daleks.

    #72961
    Mudlark @replies

    @janetteb

    We don’t get dust storms as such, but occasionally, if there is a dust storm in the Sahara and the wind is in our direction, the fine particles which get lofted into the upper atmosphere get carried here. If it then rains it brings these particles down to leave a fine deposit of pink or orange powder over everything. If it doesn’t rain, then the sky just turns a lurid shade of pink or orange but the dust doesn’t reach ground level.

    As for Time Team, hmm; my feelings are somewhat mixed. The programme has greatly raised the general level of interest in archaeology and has given people a rather more realistic idea of what archaeological excavation really involves than the average documentary on the subject, which is admirable as far as it goes, but there are problems. For a start, the artificial time constraint of three days is a major drawback, even though some prior documentary research and geophysical survey is evidently carried out in advance. True, the majority of excavations in Britain these days are carried out under pressure and to a deadline in advance of commercial development, but a deadline of weeks or months, not days. The result in this case is that corners are cut as regard methods and one of the most important aspects of excavation, which is the recording, isn’t shown at all. In fact I know that little or no recording is done by the team, and this and all the clearing up is left to local archaeologists, who generally have enough on their plates already and are therefore not too happy about that aspect, however useful the information produced.

    One of the first principles drilled into baby archaeologists is that ‘excavation is destruction’. Each site, of however common a type, is unique, and therefore each excavation is like an experiment which cannot be repeated exactly. If the observations of the stratigraphy and the finds are not recorded in meticulous detail in writing, photos, plans, drawn sections and three dimensional potting, then information is lost forever and the results unverifiable. I envy those of today who have the advantage of being able to use computers as aids to recording, and drones for aerial photography, which would have made my job so much easier back in the day (the 1970s and 80s).

    Sometimes when people ask me what I think of the show I acknowledge the positives but add that if I were directing an excavation now I would think twice, on the evidence I had seen, about employing any of the team as diggers.

     

    #72940
    Mudlark @replies

    @janetteb  @dentarthurdent et al 

    Just checking in to say that I, too, am still alive and kicking, gradually emerging from my winter dormouse torpor, though I can’t say that I’ve been in a particularly cheerful or optimistic mood, given the current disastrous and distressing state of affairs in eastern Europe.

    As far as possible I’ve been distracting myself with work in the garden, such as I can manage these days – which I’m thankful to say is a great deal more than I was capable of last year. I even got round to washing the car on Tuesday, only for it to rain all day Wednesday, dumping a film of pink Saharan dust over everything. Not conducive to an improvement in my mental outlook 😡

    #72905
    Mudlark @replies

    @dentarthurdent

    This episode was for me a very effective introduction to this new chapter in the Doctor’s lives and to Bill – so much so that Bill became almost immediately one of my favourite companions among all who have accompanied him in his adventures. With hindsight we know why he chose to spend so long teaching at a university and, judging by his spacious, and well furnished room, he had managed to embed himself very comfortably in a privileged niche in that setting – far better situated than most university lecturers in Britain these days, alas. His teaching style must undoubtedly have been unique and I would love to have attended his lectures; no wonder Bill was entranced.

    I don’t know whether you noticed that when he is hesitating over whether to wipe Bill’s memory we hear Clara’s theme – maybe another hint that the memory of the latter is lurking only just below the threshold of his consciousness ?

    #72892
    Mudlark @replies

    @janetteb  Hello (waves)

    Sympathetic vibes over you no-good/horrible evening. In my opinion committee meetings are a pain at the best of times even when the chair is efficient at keeping trouble makers in check – and not themself the problem – which is why I have always tried to avoid any situation requiring committee work, and preferred to remain at the pointy end of my profession rather than going for promotion to a better paid  admin post.

    As regards the spoon joke; as you say, it refers back to Robot of Sherwood. The Tardis arrives in Sherwood Forest, 12th century, and almost immediately an arrow whangs into the Tardis and Robin Hood emerges from behind a tree. Having accepted that the blue box is not a conjuror’s illusion, he then tries to take it at arrow point. When the Doctor refuses to yield Robin challenges him to a sword fight, to which the the Doctor responds, ‘I have no sword. I don’t need a sword … because I am the Doctor – and this is my spoon. En garde’. And proceeds to fight, spoon against sword, with moderate success. Hence, several billion years later in Hell Bent when Gastron says, ‘You will lay down your weapons’, he drops his soup spoon.

    @dentarthurdent  The Nokia to which I referred really is an antique – 17 years old and given me by my colleagues when I (unwillingly) retired, so as you may imagine the upgrade has, from a technological point of view, taken some adjusting to. Until recently the basic phone was adequate for my needs because I used it chiefly when travelling, but nowadays it seems to be assumed that everyone has a smart phone, and I have been finding it increasingly difficult to manage without a one, not least because banks now seem to require it if you want to make on-line purchases, which is a problem now that I am largely house-bound because immuno-compromised.

    #72885
    Mudlark @replies

    @thane16 (alias syzygy) puro

    A reciprocal, though belated halloo. It is good to see you here again; you have been missed.

    I guess you are right that the Doctor used his sonic/wearable technology and/or psychic paper to obtain money. On the face of it that would be fraud, but if, as Kate once said, he is ‘on the [UNIT] payroll’, maybe it would come under the heading of ‘expenses’.

    I agree that the New Year special was fun, with an intriguing premise and interesting characters, and I enjoyed watching. It is nevertheless telling that, like the majority of episodes of the Chibnall era, it hadn’t really stuck in my memory and I had to go to the archives to remind me, and that for me points up the difference between Chibnall and Moffat as writers and show runners.

    In other news, I have finally retired my antique Nokia and surrendered to the lure of a smart phone so, when not in the throes of seasonal dormouse syndrome and curled up with my furry tail round my nose, I have been busy playing with my new toy. Whatever anyone says, it ain’t entirely intuitive, even for one who is reasonably computer savvy, so in the end I’ve had to download a User Manual 😕

    #72876
    Mudlark @replies

    @dentarthurdent

    I remember getting a fair amount of stick for my opinions on what was or was not remembered, but it still seems to me obvious that the the neural block  was just that; a block and not an erasure of memory such as poor Donna suffered, who retained no recollection at all of either the Doctor or her adventures with in his company. My opinion was further reinforced by a subtle hint in the first episode of the subsequent season and a more direct pointer in the following Christmas special Twice Upon a Time.

    The understanding which I took away from Hell Bent was that the neural block, whatever its intended effect on Clara, had created in the Doctor the mental equivalent of a blind spot where Clara was concerned but nothing like a memory wipe.  Consequently he was unable to focus on her – in effect she was a hole in his mental vision – and his recollections of their experiences together were somewhat slippery, but those recollections were not so incoherent that he could not give a fairly complete account of his last, desperate attempts to bring her back from death. It also seemed to me that the diner itself, recalling associations with Amy and followed by the direct confrontation with Clara herself, triggered a subliminal awareness which, reinforced with all the clues presented to him subsequently and culminating in the dematerialisation of the diner and the appearance of his own Tardis with the portrait of Clara in the painted memorial on outer shell could hardly fail lead him to a kind of recognition. When he turned away from her and she went sadly through the door into her Tardis control room, it seemed not so much that he had failed to recognise her as that the recognition was affectless; there was no possibility of their resuming their former relationship and she understood this. And therein lay the tragedy.

    Whether that is what Moffat intended to be understood is anybody’s guess, but for me the worth of any work of fiction lies as much in what the reader or viewer understands and takes from it as in the intention of the author, and so I will stand by my opinion.

    It is quite a while since I last viewed this episode, but I seem to recall one detail which I don’t think was mentioned in the discussion thread. When the Doctor recovers consciousness in the desert we first see things from his point of view, and one of the concerned faces looking down at him is, very briefly, that of Clara. It is only the briefest of glimpses, but perhaps significant

    #72603
    Mudlark @replies

    @dentarthurdent

    It was me, not Miapatrick, who remembers living in a house with no electricity 🙂 .  I suppose that for most people now it is hard to imagine, but at that time there were still many houses in remote rural areas in Britain which were not yet connected to the grid or even to a gas supply. I was born in 1942, in the middle of the war. When my parents first married they lived in lodgings in one room, so when I was expected * they had to find somewhere else to live, and in wartime it wasn’t all that easy. What they had to settle for was a farmhouse, situated about a mile from the nearest village and nearly half a mile from the road, which had been unoccupied for several years owing to some dispute over a will. Apparently they got it rent free for the first few months because they had to make it habitable, but fortunately my mother was in nest-building mode.

    My parents were both born in 1915, and as it happened my mother had grown up in houses without electricity, where lighting was by gas, cooking was on a coal-fired kitchen range, and washing was done in an old-fashioned copper, with water supplied from a single tap in the scullery and heated by a fire lit under the copper, and ‘the facilities’ were a privy at the bottom of the garden. At least we had indoor plumbing, and the coal-fired kitchen range had a back boiler to heat the water.

    I know about the dangers of confabulation when it comes to memory, but those early visual childhood memories are very vivid and mine alone, with the exception of the memory of the Christmas tree – and even in that case I could describe the room in greater detail than my mother could remember. They relate to everyday things which no one else had any reason to remember, such as sitting on my potty on the flag stones of the kitchen floor, with the doorway to the inner hall and the cellar door behind me to my left, a leg of the kitchen table immediately to my right, and the legs of people passing back and forth to my left. In fact, as I said above, the recent photos and floor plans I saw this year checked out exactly with those early memories.  I’m a lot less sure about some of my more recent memories, though.

    After we left that remote farmhouse we moved to a rather better equipped house in a village near Halifax where my father worked, and we lived there for two years until we moved to Norwich in the winter of 1946/47. I had never been back there until just before Christmas 1968 when, as a break from my post-graduate toils, I stopped off on my way back from Edinburgh to stay for a week or so with family friends who had a small hill farm not far from where I was born.  My father, who regularly returned to Halifax on business, picked me up on his way home, but stopped at a certain point on the road where it overlooked a valley with a row of houses on the opposite side. He didn’t say anything, but I immediately recognized the house where we had lived when I was between the ages 2-4, and my first thought was, ‘They’ve built a garage over my sand-pit’.

    * provisional name Stinky apparently, though I was never going to adopt that as my user name

     

    #72601
    Mudlark @replies

    @scaryb @miapatrick

    I’ve been pondering the notion that Bel and Vinder are the Doctor’s birth parents and it would certainly work. I’m not sure that the Flux itself could be the operative factor in transforming the hypothetical Doctor embryo, because  Awsok stated that it – and presumably its effects – were spatial, not temporal. Swarm and Azure, on the other hand, are temporal agents and clearly bent on monkeying around with time itself, and who knows what side effects that could have. Furthermore, after so much of the universe has apparently been destroyed by the Flux, it’s going to take a comprehensive timey-wimey reboot to restore the status quo – even perhaps involving that wormhole towards which the Division space station is heading – and in such circumstances anything is possible. It’s quite conceivable that Bel, with or without Vinder, could be hurled into another universe and far back in time. Vinder’s current predicament, trapped in a Passenger, might also be a factor.

    Then I got to thinking that if Bel is human and Vinder is not (or vice versa), that would make the Doctor …. a hybrid 😮 .

    At the end of Heaven Sent, after the Doctor broke through the barrier from the confession dial onto Gallifrey he said ‘The Hybrid …. is me’, which, given the existence of Me, was ambiguous. Later, in Hell Bent, the General says, ‘All Matrix prophecies concur that this creature [the Hybrid] will one day stand in the ruins of Gallifrey. It will unravel the Web of Time  and destroy a billion billion hearts to heal it’s own’. That statement could apply more or less to the Doctor after his 4 billion year ordeal in the confession dial and after he had travelled to the end of the universe in his attempt to bring Clara back to life. But what if Chibs has taken the concept of the Hybrid and given it his own twist. In The Timeless Children the Doctor stood in the ruins of Gallifrey and, because this was the result of the Master’s extreme reaction to his discoveries about her, was indirectly the cause of its destruction. She is also the reason the universe is now being destroyed, in the course of which billions upon billions of lives must have been lost. And the Web of Time is also taking something of a hammering.

    Just a thought 😈

    #72586
    Mudlark @replies

    @janetteb

    ‘Twasn’t me who likened university studies to banging my head against a brick wall. In fact, as I said, I mostly enjoyed my time there as an undergraduate. Post graduate research was a different matter. I enjoyed the research itself, but for the most part I was working in isolation with no-one to bounce ideas off, apart from my brief trips back to Edinburgh to consult my supervisor and use the libraries. Many of my contemporaries had chosen subjects on the basis of those which they had done well at in GCE A level, and maybe they felt differently, and maybe I was lucky. At the age of 16 I had set my heart on becoming an archaologist, so I was studying exactly the subject I wanted to, and with an end in view. Like all students in the faculty of Arts in Edinburgh, we had to take two other first year courses; in the case of Hons Archaeology a language, ancient or modern, and one other (I chose Social Anthropology as being reasonably relevant). Unlike most other Hons courses, we also had to do part of the Honours courses in History and Fine Art, neither of which I found particularly onerous. Fine Art, in fact, was a breeze. From a very early age I had been browsing my mother’s books on art history, and found when it came to it that I had unconsciously absorbed a great deal of information on artists and their work.

    @dentarthurdent

    Intriguing that you should have had an accurate dream relating to early childhood. I have never had such a dream, though I can remember certain dreams which I can date from when I was four or younger. I also have quite a few memories dating from when I was two – or even younger, according to my mother when I asked her for verification concerning one when I was carried down from my afternoon nap and taken in to the sitting room to see the Christmas tree. These memories are largely visual, like short video clips, and I was never sure quite how accurate they were until this year. One of my brothers came across a recent estate agent’s description, with photos, of the house on the Yorkshire moors where we lived when I was born, and which we left at least six months before my third birthday.  It confirmed that my memories were entirely accurate. I could pin-point, on the plan and in the photos, exactly where I was when the ‘video clips’ in my mind’s eye were recorded –  e.g. where my pram was when I sat in it watching my mother at the kitchen range, or where I was standing, next to the kitchen door from the inner hallway, when I watched my mother at the kitchen table cleaning the  oil lamps: no electricity – or telephone – in those primitive days and in that remote location, though we did have indoor plumbing thanks to a handy spring just uphill from us.

    #72585
    Mudlark @replies

    Once again we are jumping back and forth between multiple narrative threads – six in this case, but now that we have a firmer idea of what is going on and where everyone fits in it isn’t so much of a problem and I enjoyed this episode, even if it wasn’t up to the standard of last week. And visually it was gorgeous.

    Of the various threads, that of the Doctor was the most compelling, as much because of the interaction between her and Barbara Flynn’s Tecteun as in the information imparted which involved another info-dump interspersed with the Doctor’s desperate questions and assertions that, despite the odds, she will save everyone and everything; an assertion which, at this stage, comes across as sheer bravado in the face of the overwhelming evidence, though she will undoubtedly manage it somehow.

    As for Tecteun, @juniperfish , I don’t think that your comparison with Mengele is all that inappropriate, even in this context. She is every bit the amoral scientist for whom anything is justified in the search for knowledge. Watching The Timeless Child I remember wondering about the series of regenerated children we saw, and whether she was in fact killing them successively in order to study the process.

    The Prentis thread was satisfying in revealing his relevance to the story and the reasons for the closing down of UNIT. He is, almost literally, the (grand) serpent in UNIT’s garden. And  Craig Parkinson does understated evil really well. He evidently has the means of time travel, also, which made me wonder whether he might not be a Time Lord gone *really* to the bad. But all is not lost, because Kate is still on the case, working under deep cover – and with a shout out to Osgood!

    Yaz’s globetrotting quest was great fun and she, Professor Jericho and Dan  work really well as a team. Like @jimthefish though I did wonder how, after being stranded in 1901 with little but the clothes they arrived in, they had managed to find the wherewithal for that expensive travel. Foreknowledge of things like horse racing results and stock markets might have been lucrative if they had even a small store of cash to invest, but 2021 currency wouldn’t have been of much use. The nit-picking imp on my shoulder also prompted me to wonder how. when they broke into the Aztec pyramid, they found a handy candle already burning on the altar to provide light – or did I miss Yaz producing and lighting it? And if so, why not an oil lantern or similar?  Entertaining as those interludes were, though, their quest contributed little to any furtherance of the story except a date, December 5th – not entirely coincidentally the date of the final episode – and in linking up finally with Williamson and his tunnels. I suspect that this thread, apart from proving some entertaining interludes, was little more than padding to keep them in the frame.

    Vinder’s, Bel’s and Karvanista’s threads are subsidiary but not entirely inconsequential. Vinder discovered why Swarm and Azure were harvesting people – to provide energy for their conquest of space. ‘We are Time’, says Swarm the Ravager, and Time is indeed the ravager of all things, since entropy wins in the end. Bel and Karvanista’s threads also serve a purpose in introducing the final attack by the Sontarans.

    Finally, going back to the Doctor’s story, I can hardly be alone in thinking ‘chameleon arch’ when we saw the fob watch, but I suppose that, if it holds all the information of the Doctor’s life pre-memory wipe, it functions in much the same way.

    #72565
    Mudlark @replies

    @dentarthurdent @scaryb

    I know that dream all too well. I’m at school or university and I’m about to sit an exam but realise that I haven’t attended any of the classes in that subject and I’m going to have to wing it somehow.

    I certainly enjoyed my time as a university student in Edinburgh, both work and play, and the only classes I skipped were lectures on French language (one of my ancillary subjects), because those were on ground I’d already covered in doing GCE A and S levels. In fact you couldn’t sit any exam without a document certifying that you had ‘duly performed’ the necessary class work – i.e. attended tutorials and written the required number of essays. They couldn’t really check up on lectures attended – except in the case of Hons. Archaeology, which were more like seminars anyway because the number of honours students was so small.

    #72563
    Mudlark @replies

    @blenkinsopthebrave

    Here is the bonkers theory: what if Doctor Ruth was the immediate predecessor to Hartnell, and, as part of escaping from Division, somehow managed to regenerate (into Hartnell) while simultaneously escaping, but in a way that denied Hartnell the knowledge of Division.

    I agree with you that Ruth Doctor is probably the immediate predecessor of Hartnell Doctor, but all the information we have to date points to something a bit more complicated than a direct transition. For one thing, as @scaryb points out, if the Brendan analogy is an exact reflection of the the Doctor’s experience, Ruth Doctor probably didn’t escape the Division, because she, or whoever was Hartnell Doctor’s immediate predecessor underwent a forcible and complete memory wipe and she or he regenerated as the child in the barn whom we saw in Listen and who, in later lives as the War Doctor and then Capaldi Doctor, remembered and returned to it.

    Going back to The Timeless Children, after the Master has told her that she is the Timeless Child, she protests,

    ‘I know my life. I know, I know who I am.  …  I remember my home. I remember growing up. I remember you and me at the Academy, together.

    The Master then confirms,

    ‘That happened. It just wasn’t your first life’.

    Then, when she sees Ruth Doctor in the Matrix, she asks,

    Where do you fit into all this? Were you me all that time ago? Were all my memories of you erased? Did they force back into becoming a child?

    As for Ruth Doctor’s Tardis taking the form of the police box, that was presumably so that the viewers could identify it immediately, because otherwise it doesn’t make sense. Unless my memory is at fault, it only took that form when Hartnell Doctor and Susan first visited Earth. We could, of course, explain that inconvenient fact by supposing that, by pure coincidence, Ruth Doctor’s Tardis assumed that form when she sought refuge on Earth, but it’s a bit of a stretch. Unless, maybe, the Tardis, being unconstrained by any concept of linear time, was remembering forwards.

    #72520
    Mudlark @replies

    I’ve just been re-reading some of the comments on the previous three chapters and was reminded of this evilly bonkers theory proposed by @devilishrobby in the discussion of The Halloween Apocalypse

    What if it turns out the Doctor as the timeless child is in fact not only the progenitor of the Timelord race as the current past story seem indicate, but is in fact some kind of hyper evolved Gallifreyan who was sent back in time and this is all part of some kind of perverse  reaction of the universe to set things up.

    and realised that in the light of developments in the subsequent three chapters this idea, bonkers as it undoubtedly is, is looking all too plausible 😮

    #72513
    Mudlark @replies

    @blenkinsopthebrave

    Returning to the subject of Awsok, I’ve been looking again at what she actually said in that brief interlude. After saying in effect  that this universe is ending and there is nothing that the Doctor can do about it, so she might as well give up trying, she goes on to say, The Flux was not an accident. It wasn’t a naturally occurring event. It was made. It was placed ….  because of you’ . In next week’s edition of the Radio Times the brief introductory comments on Sunday’s TV shows include one on the next chapter of The Flux and the story so far, and it is critical of this tendency to ramp up the importance and singularity of the Doctor in the overall scheme of things, ‘as though she’s the Time Lord equivalent of Harry Potter’. As if it isn’t enough that she is the source of the Time Lords’ ability to regenerate, she is now the cause of the destruction of the universe. I confess that there is a part of me which agrees with this sentiment and is a bit uncomfortable with the direction in which Chibnall has taken things. What happened to ‘just a madman in a box’?

    #72512
    Mudlark @replies

    @miapatrick

    re Clair, the impression got from the latest chapter was that they were saying she’d seen them in a vision, which is why she knew them, and then got sent back in time.

    Yes, you’re right; I’d missed that detail. She says that shortly before the night she met them in the street in Liverpool she had a premonition, a succession of disconnected images – stone angel statues, a blue box, etc. etc.

    On the other hand, as you say and I assumed, it makes more sense as a Moffat style temporal loop – unless, of course, she never makes it back to the present day. If the plot required that she has, or claims to have psychic abilities, in this case to account for her being with Professor Jericho at the moment of the Angels’ attack, I suspect that Moffat would probably have explained her ‘premonition’ as a partial break-through from memories which the Doctor had tried to erase . But this is Chibnall, so Who nose.

    @blenkinsopthebrave @jimthefish

    Research of one sort or another was what I did for a living, and sometimes I still get the urge 😉

    #72493
    Mudlark @replies

    @blenkinsopthebrave and @miapatrick

    As regards the Division, they clearly aren’t the Big Bad in this context, but I don’t get the impression that they were/are entirely a force for good.

    I’ve been doing some backtracking through previous episodes to refresh my memory on what we know of them so far. Our first encounter with them is in Fugitive of the Judoon, although they aren’t named and their wider significance isn’t apparent at this point. What we do learn is that Jo Martin’s Doctor, in the guise of Ruth, is being hunted across time and space by the Judoon, acting on behalf of an organisation represented by Gat. When Whittaker Doctor asks her who is Gat, Ruth replies, ‘I worked for her once’. The Doctor : You’ve got a job?  Ruth: ‘Oh, Sort of. Not one you apply for, and not one you can ever leave. Believe me, I tried’  So evidently the reason she has been on the run is because she has, if fact, gone AWOL from the people or organisation in question.

    Things become clearer in The Timeless Children. After the Master has finished his exposition of the Doctor’s origins and the origin of the Time Lords’ ability to regenerate, he shows her a recording from the Matrix archives. We see a person, identified in the cast list as Solpado, stating that ‘The Policy of the Time Lords is clear: strict non-intervention in other worlds and times. However, policy and reality sometimes diverge. There are times when it is necessary to intervene. That is the purpose of the Division.  She then goes on to warn, ‘The Division does not exist. The Division does not have operatives. We are not even here’.  After which the recording is redacted, although the Master says that the deleted data had taken up a large amount of space.  So, the Division is an ultra secret organisation and it is implied that the Doctor was a member because, in the Brendan allegory, as his memory is being wiped, the camera pans to the inscription on the clock which he has been given as a retirement present: For services to the Division. Joining the dots, presumably this is the job that Ruth Doctor had and from which she tried to abscond. I get the impression that she was the last of the pre-mind wipe Doctors.

    In The Halloween Apocalypse we learn that Karvanista is a member of the Division, so a) it is still operative, and b) it was not, or is no longer, a purely Time Lord affair since other species are involved; Maybe it wasn’t even a purely Time Lord initiative in the first place.

    In Once Upon a Time, the Doctor relives an episode in which she is the leader of a military style unit  tasked with re-taking the Temple of Atropos and capturing and incarcerating Swarm and Azure, the Ravagers. Because in her present life she has no memory of this, she visualises the other members of her team as the people she has been with most recently, namely Yaz, Dan and Vinder. But when she catches sight of her reflection what she sees is Ruth Doctor, who was presumably the former self who actually took part in the actual raid, which leads us to the conclusion that this was a Division operation. We also catch a brief glimpse of Karvanista, whom we know as a member of the Division,  and if he did indeed take part in that successful operation, must have done a great deal of time travelling in the interim – or else the Lupari are a phenomenally long-lived species, since this all took place something like 2000 years ago at least.

    So the Division isn’t wholly bad, in that it has fought against the Ravagers and temporal chaos, but the secretiveness has a sinister aspect, and the fact that Ruth Doctor, not to mention the Rogue Angel had sufficient doubts about it to want out suggests, at the very least, that it had/has been infected by the worst aspects of Time Lord arrogance and corruption. The Big Bad is/are presumably either those who unleashed Swarm and Azure to wreak havoc or those responsible for the Flux, assuming they are not one and the same. In that regard the role of Awsok, the character played by Barbara Flynn, remains an enigma.

     

    #72492
    Mudlark @replies

    This, for me, was a definite improvement on last week, not least because it made maximum effective use of the scare potential of the Weeping Angels. The synopsis in the Radio Times made me think immediately of The Daemons from the Pertwee era and it did indeed have some elements in common with that story, but this was, of course, part of a much more complicated narrative and, whatever ones age, the Angels are an order of magnitude more frightening than those gargoyle look-alike Daemons* ever were.  As @blenkinsopthebrave has noted, there were also  some outstanding performances from the supporting cast.

    Now that we are more than half way through the story of The Flux it is becoming easier to see how at least some of the  multiple pieces of the puzzle which have been introduced in previous episodes fit together, and this certainly helped enjoyment of the episode. For one thing we now have an explanation of how Claire knew the Doctor in 21st century Liverpool, although the Doctor did not know her. It was for the same reason that when River Song encountered the Doctor for the last time it was, for him, the first time they had met: a temporal loop. The only mystery yet to be solved is how Claire gets back to the present day without ageing. @miapatrick When she sees the Doctor again in Liverpool  she may have been going home from work the long way round because it was Halloween, but she clearly didn’t come from 1967 the long way round, or she would have been in her late seventies or eighties. Presumably the Tardis will be involved.

    I’m still not sure how much Bel’s story contributes to the whole, unless it is that her viewpoint gives us an idea of what is going on elsewhere in the universe. So far I have found it a bit of a distraction. Maybe @blenkinsopthebrave is right, however, and it will turn out that she and Vinder are crucial in finally saving the day.

     

    *They looked a bit like a bookend I possess in the form of one of the devils ornamenting the gallery on the west front of Notre Dame cathedral. His name is Godfrey and he sits on a shelf in my study, and I’m rather fond of him.

    #72441
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    @craig

    May I add my voice to those of @blenkinsopthebrave and @cathannabel . Please don’t give up on the show. Doctor Who has had its lows in the past, only to survive and flourish again, and however disappointing Chibnall’s run has been – and it has been his misfortune to follow immediately on the highs of Moffat’s tenure – there is always hope that, after his years away doing other things, RTD will return with fresh enthusiasm for the show and full of new ideas for its future continuation.

    #72440
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    @davidwho

    Welcome to the forum, the home of bonkers theories.

    I like your suggestion that the reason the name of a Timelord is not normally revealed is that it can be used to gain access to secret information.  It is reminiscent of the old belief in some cultures that to know a person’s real name was to gain power over them, so that everyone also had a use-name by which they were known to all but their most intimate friends.

    I don’t know if you have discovered the discussion on the subject of Capaldi’s Doctor, summarising our views at the end of his run. If not, it can be found by clicking on Forums, which will take you to all the archived comments on episodes, listed according to the successive Doctors.  You are certainly far from alone here in thinking that his was among the greatest incarnations.

    @ichabod

    It’s good to see you surfacing again, and I agree with you about the sound balance and quality. My hearing may not be as acute as it once was in the upper registers – it is a long time since I was last able to hear bats squeaking – but it is only in drama that I ever normally have any difficulty in following what is said, and then I have to resort at times to sub-titles. In particular I tend to have trouble following Jodie Whittaker’s speech, not because of the accent – I was born not far from Huddersfield – but because of the speed of delivery; sometimes I even yearn for the bad old days when TV and film actors still ar-tic-u-la-ted the dialogue as if on the stage of a large theatre.

    Like you, also, I am looking forward to RTD taking over and hoping to hang on until then. I am three years younger than you, to the day*, but not in the best of health at the moment.  It’s not that I have found nothing to enjoy during Chibnall’s run, but I rapidly came to the conclusion that he doesn’t really have the right kind of imagination for science fiction/fantasy, and doesn’t fully ‘get’ the essence of Doctor Who and what makes it special.

    *you probably won’t remember, but we have a birthday in common.

    #72437
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    @miapatrick

    My sympathy and condolences in the loss of your mother. You must still be in shock, but it is good to know that visiting this forum helps provide some distraction, however brief, from everything which you are currently having to deal with.

    #72409
    Mudlark @replies

    Judging by Martin Belam’s recap and an initial quick scan of some of the comments BTL, it seems that there are a lot of people who found this episode completely baffling, with a confused structure and too many chunks of exposition, and although – with the aid of subtitles – I didn’t find the gist of it too difficult to follow, on another level I can see why.

    Chibnall’s intention was presumably to convey the bewilderment of those tangled in a completely disrupted time stream, being wrenched constantly and randomly between past, present and future, while the Doctor, who has at least some idea of what is going on, tries to keep her companions safe, prevent Swarm and Azure from creating further havoc with their tampering and, at the same time, recover further information about her forgotten past. In this he certainly succeeded, but I am left with the feeling that all this could have been achieved more economically and with greater clarity for the viewer. He seems to be aiming for Moffat style levels of complexity without the particular skills to achieve it. I couldn’t help wondering what the children who watched made of it, although no doubt most of them took it in their stride; they usually do, even when the adults flounder.

    One of the more confusing factors is the way in which Yaz, Vinder and Dan are visualised as active and knowledgeable participants in events in which predate their existence. In the case of the Doctor, reliving events of which she has no conscious memory, it is understandable she should visualise companions she knows in place of her actual companions in the Division, whose identity she cannot recall. But there seems no obvious reason why  Vinder should see Yaz, whom he has only just met, in place of people he actually knew, in a past which he can remember only too clearly. On the other hand, at least we now know how Vinder came to be in the isolated outpost in which we first encountered him.

    The Cybermen and the Daleks made cameo appearances, exploiting the disruption of space and time in the same manner as the  Sontarans but to rather less effect; but I did like the sight of Daleks levitating along a forest track. * The Weeping Angels are also in on the act, sinister as ever, and this time stalking Yaz for some as yet unexplained reason. The role of the Mouri/Moirae as stabilisers of Time is now fairly clear, but what is not so clear to me is why Time should have needed to be stabilised prior to the advent of the Flux which, if I understood correctly, is in any case a spatial agent. Chibnall’s concept of the relationship between space and time is definitely not one which could stand up to scientific scrutiny, but I’m happy to go along with it for now, disbelief suspended on a fairly strong cable.

    Nice to see that Craig Parkinson, formerly the corrupt cop ‘Dot’ Cotton aka ‘the Caddy’ in Line of Duty, has been promoted to Grand Serpent, evidently a ruthless dictator. Maybe he is up to the job, but as an example of evil he is certainly no match for Swarm, who is now channelling Milton’s Lucifer in his ambition to ‘reign in Hell’.

     

    * Well, the sight of Daleks tripping over tree roots and rabbit holes would rather undermine the implicit threat.

    #72336
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    @brewski

    Bonkers, yes, but in the best possible way 🙂  An alternative reality as the context of so much that has happened in recent Doctor Who episodes would suit me all too well, and would be a very happy solution to some of the questions raised by Chibnall’s clumsy attempt to set a permanent stamp on the show.

    It’s not that I have any problem in principle with the Doctor having a back story which we were previously unaware of, but I have found it difficult to come to terms with this particular back story and, more to the point, the way it was presented in an indigestible lump of what @phaseshift so aptly describes as chixposition, although the fact that it was delivered by a decidedly unreliable narrator provides a possible get-out clause.  A few days ago I decided that I needed to refresh my memory of The Timeless Children by re-watching it and today, as a preliminary, I re-read some of the original discussion and discovered that I hadn’t contributed. Not sure of the reason – it may simply have been Real Life getting in the way, but equally it may have been that I was too busy trying to swallow the implications. And, yes, I do realise that trying to reconcile everything in the Doctor Who canon, such as it is, is a futile exercise 🙄

    #72323
    Mudlark @replies

    That was somewhat hectic; a bit like one of those science fiction or fantasy novels which are narrated from multiple points of view and skip between them with such dizzying frequency that one keeps on having to back-track, but the pieces are beginning to link up. I enjoyed it and found myself more fully engaged than has generally been the case since Chibnall took over. Visually it was again amazing, and I wonder if the production team had the same budget to play with as they would have done with a normal season of 10 or more episodes.

    @jimthefish said

    we finally saw the excellent Doctor that seemed to be trying and failing to come out for the last two years

    and I agree. This was a portrayal of the Doctor which I found, for the first time, entirely convincing and consistent; something which we have seen only occasional glimpses before.  It also seemed to me that there was a lighter touch and sense of fun in the dialogue, much missed in the last two seasons.

    John Bishop as Dan Lewis is already proving his worth as a companion, but I am beginning to wonder whether those who think that there is more to him than he seems on the surface may be right. He has only just met the Doctor, but already she appears to have a surprising degree of trust in him, and he has a remarkable degree of self confidence for someone supposedly new to the world of time travel and menacing aliens; confidence enough, at any rate, to go off and attempt to deal on his own with the problem of massed Sontarans in Liverpool – which he manages with a fair degree of success, even if Karnavista does have to rescue him from certain death in the end. Maybe the key is in Liverpool itself and perhaps a link between Lewis and Williamson, whose tunnels are evidently destined to play a crucial part in the resolution of the plot.

    As for Karnavista, I have rather taken to him, even though I am more of a cat than a dog person. Perhaps it is the combination of grumpiness and the charm of a furry face. I found the edgy banter between him and Lewis amusing, but it does look as if perhaps the role of guardians of humanity has been imposed on the Lupari by some outside agency and that they strongly resent it, or why their ambivalent attitude?

    My take on the Flux at this point is that it is a disruptor of time rather than a destroyer of worlds, although it could of course be both. If so, it makes some kind of sense that the Sontarans could cross a distance of 30 trillion light years, taking a short cut via a convenient spacio-temporal rift. At any rate, it seems as if several apparently different agents have been ready and waiting to take advantage of the chaos.

    The theme of disruption of time brings us to the newly introduced Temple of Atropos and the Mouri. @bluesqueakpip has beaten me to it in pointing out the equation Mouri = Moirae, the Fates in Greek mythology. The dedication of the temple to Atropos is not exactly a subtle hint.  I will need a second viewing to count the number of Mouri, although clearly there are more of them than the Moirae, who number only three: Clotho, who spins the thread of life; Lachesis who weaves the fabric which determines the chances in life, and Atropos, representing the inescapable end for every individual, who cuts the thread. Collectively the task of the Fates is to ensure the proper order of life, which certainly fits the context here. With time and all proper order in disarray, no wonder the Mouri are glitching and in need of repair. Something which Swarm and Azure are evidently bent on exploiting for their own sinister ends.

     

     

    #72293
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    @jimthefish

    Yes, if we are comparing the various iterations of the Doctor, Davison’s is the one who springs to mind, but although his characterisation might seem relatively low key, I always had a firm sense of Who he was, and that is something which I still don’t get with Jodie’s Doctor. Your observation about gestural shorthand and her passivity, at least to date, strikes me as spot on.

    There is also a certain inconsistency. She can be self assured and capable of improvising on the fly – after all, she built herself a new sonic screwdriver from materials to hand, without the aid of the Tardis, but at other times she so often seems to be floundering. Her tendency to think aloud, which I guess is intended to convey her ability to calculate the solution to a problem at lightning speed, as illustrated by Missy in The Witches Familiar, in fact conveys the opposite impression.

    I agree with you that the grandiosity of statements such as ‘The earth is protected [by me]’ is absurd on one level. I think Tennant Doc was the first to say this, and it did make me wince at the time. But if you are going to make such a claim you should at least sound as if you mean it and can deliver.

    #72292
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    @dentarthurdent

    It’s a long time since I last viewed Time Heist, but it remains in my mind as one of the more memorable ones of the Moffat/Capaldi era; the plot was so ingeniously and elegantly constructed, the production very stylish and, like you, I found much to savour in the dialogue. I don’t recall feeling that it was a come-down after Listen, although it is very different

    If you want to investigate the original discussion on the episode, it can still be found under Forums, on the third page of 12th Doctor episodes. The episodes aren’t listed in the order in which they were shown, which can be confusing.

    #72287
    Mudlark @replies

    @scot-c

    Welcome to the forum.

    It occurred to me, also, that it was a little strange that the Lupari, at least as represented by Karvanista, weren’t particularly enthusiastic or consistent in their attitude to humanity, given their assigned role as protectors. Karvanista doesn’t seem to like even his assigned human very much. On the other hand, that makes him a more complex character, which is all to the good.

    It also seemed a little odd that the Doctor wasn’t aware of their assigned role, given her long standing interest in  Earth and its inhabitants and the number of times our species has been under threat in the Whoniverse.

    @jimthefish

    I agree with almost everything you say. My comments so far may have come across as more negative than I felt because, despite the lack of structure in this opening episode, I did enjoy it on the whole, especially now that I have had a chance to re- watch it; and visually it is, as you say, spectacular, and I’m a sucker for views of the galaxy as seen through the Hubble telescope.

    Where I am not so sure I agree is in this: throughout the past couple of seasons I have tried to be positive, but I’m still not convinced that Jodie Whittaker has nailed the character of the Doctor, although I think that has a good deal to do with the writing. There have been several occasions when she has seemed close to it, but my general impression is that her Doctor lacks some of the depth and complexity we have come to expect, and in particular an underlying sense of gravitas. When she says, as in this episode, that Earth ‘ … is protected … by me’, it didn’t come across with the force and authority conveyed by previous incarnations; it felt more as if she were trying to convince herself as much as her opponent.

    @juniperfish

    When I argued the case against the multiverse as an explanation of inconsistencies in the narrative my memory was clearly glitching*, because I was overlooking the role of a parallel universe in Rose’s story and, going back to the days of Tom Baker’s incarnation, e space. But I still think that the argument holds. These parallel universes march with ours, and there is nothing to indicate that they have an earlier or vastly different origin not linked to our own. In any case, travel between them is evidently an exceptional event. Even the theory of alternative time streams, which is allowed for in the canon, is linked to our own universe; the hypothesis being that every decision point results in the branching of two probabilities, but all originating in the same aboriginal starting point.

    * My excuse is that I am no longer a night owl and it was late, but I suspect that the long months of shielding and near isolation have dulled my faculties more than a little.

     

    #72283
    Mudlark @replies

    @juniperfish

    As @bluesqueakpip says , Williamson’s tunnels do exist, date from the 1820s, and are nothing to do with mining.

    Williamson, who was a wealthy businessman in Liverpool, bought an area of undeveloped land in the Edge Hill area of Liverpool and proceeded to build houses there of very eccentric design, and to excavate an extensive series of tunnels, mostly by the ‘cut and cover’ technique – i.e, by excavating large trenches in the sandstone and capping them with brick vaulting. They had no obvious purpose, but he is supposed to have said, as he does in this episode,  that it was a way of providing work for the unemployed, including discharged soldiers who had fought in the Napoleonic wars.

    This was before the Poor Law Act of 1834 which instituted the workhouses, so the system at the time would have required the unemployed and destitute to seek relief from the parish where they had been born, often rural parishes which would have been reluctant to meet their obligations, so Williamson, if the story is true, would have been regarded as a philanthropist, even if the work he offered was pointless and poorly paid, and the principle decidedly flawed.

    In Ireland, twenty or so years later during the famine, similar make-work schemes were used in one or two areas as a means of providing paid work for the destitute and starving, on the principle that this was better for their moral welfare than to be reliant on poor relief or charity. There are evidently some who still think that way 🙁 .

    If the purpose of the tunnels was not to provide work for the unemployed, maybe Williamson did have knowledge of some future catastrophe in which they would be needed. Who nose?

    #72282
    Mudlark @replies

    @juniperfish

    Yes, time can be rewritten but, so far as we have been told, only in very narrowly defined circumstances – that is, if the change is not perceptible to the universe as a whole; otherwise the results of any attempt are catastrophic. The rewriting of events in ‘Day of the Doctor’ were possible because, as far as all observers in the universe were concerned, the change made no difference. Gallifrey had vanished and the Daleks massed against it were gone, and how this had happened made no difference.  Granted, the mutability of future events is perhaps a rather fuzzier matter, but I would have thought that the same principle applies; if an event has been witnessed by observers, especially observers from the past, it cannot be changed in any major particular. Otherwise we run into a version of the Grandfather paradox.

    As for the age and size of the universe, I doubt if we can get round that by citing theories of a multiverse. As I understand it, all such parallel universes, whether directly contiguous or at several removes and however diverse in nature, would come into being at the same point, – and there would still be the problem of how to pass from one to another. The Tardis can access bubble universes, as we have seen, but I has it ever been suggested that it or anyone else can cross dimensions to a wholly different universe?

    That said, events in Doctor Who clearly take place in an alternative reality,* but it seems to be an alternative reality within our own universe, as the episodes set in a recognisable past and featuring real historic characters demonstrate. Even if we stretch credulity and allow that the universe in this alternative reality is so very much vaster and older than our reality allows, the distance that the Sontaran armada would have to travel is the distance which light would take to travel thirty million, million years and, as I said, I don’t think that even a Tardis could cope with that kind of mind boggling challenge.

    To conclude, I realise that you probably think that I am taking this far too seriously, but I enjoy playing around with these kinds of ideas, and my tongue is at least straying in the direction of my cheek 😉

     

    * either that, or we have all been regularly subjected to memory wipes, to obliterate all knowledge of the numerous times that we have, in our own lifetimes, been faced with extermination, enslavement or cybernetic upgrade by alien monsters

    #72275
    Mudlark @replies

    For me on first viewing this episode amounted to an information overload delivered much of the time at a machine gun rattle. I may be getting old,* but my hearing is still pretty good, and even so at times I had to resort to subtitles to keep track of what was going on, which didn’t help. There were plenty of intriguing and very promising elements, but the overall effect was as if Chibnall had thrown everything *and* the kitchen sink, into a giant washing machine and set it on a rapid cycle, and the result was, as @devilishrobby and @craig have already said in different ways, a somewhat incoherent muddle.  However, as the story is set to play out over five more episodes, it is undoubtedly better to reserve judgement and hope for better things to come, and for all the pieces link up into a satisfactory whole. And, thanks to the insights in the second paragraph of @bluesqueakpip ‘s post above, I can at least expect to gain more benefit from a second viewing.

    All this is not to say that I didn’t find anything to enjoy so far. It is good to see Yaz, as sole companion, expand into a more rounded and assertive character, and given more scope to display the competence which has, up to now,  been  little more than hinted at.  John Bishop, as Dan Lewis, despite a tendency to groan-worth punning, looks a promising  addition to the gang, and it was also a minor delight to see Dan Starkey back as a Sontaran, even if the Sontaran isn’t Strax.   There also seemed to me to be a little more sparkle in the dialogue than is generally the case with Chibnal’s writing.

    Without particularly looking for them I found a few nits to pick, and although I know that when it comes to Doctor Who it doesn’t do to dwell to much on matters of continuity, it seems odd that the Doctor is apparently unaware that the Flux cannot, in fact, threaten the end of the earth or even the universe – or does her amnesia extend to events even in her relatively recent past?  In ‘The End of the World’,  during her Eccleston incarnation, she witnessed the end of the Earth 5 billion years in our future, and she has been to the end of the universe, or as near as any living being could, in ‘Listen’ and again in ‘Hell Bent’ and, as Flanders and Swann put it in ‘The First and Second Laws’ [of Thermodynamics], ‘Yeah, that’s entropy, man’, and not some mysterious force  which defies the laws of physics.

    O.K, I can overlook all that if I make an effort, but what really shook me was the statement that the Sontaran fleet was 30 trillion light years away. That is not only vastly further that the currently perceptible limits of the universe,  it would imply that the universe is more than 2000 times older than calculated or even feasible on the evidence. And if such distances were possible, I doubt if even Time Lord technology, bending every law of physics, could get the Sontarans to the Crimean War in time for the next episode 😈

     

    *Background chorus of ‘Don’t kid yourself, lady, you *are* old; no ‘getting’ about it’

    #72202
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    @cathannabel

    So very sorry to read your sad news and, like others here, offer my sympathy and condolences in your devastating loss.

    A funeral should, ideally, be the celebration of a life, and in that context quotations from or references to the Doctor, the epitome of all that is life affirming and humane, are a lovely idea. I am rubbish at remembering verbatim quotes, but can endorse the recommendation by @dentarthurdent of the transcripts at http://www.chakoteya.net , which have have found an invaluable resource.

    #72171
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    @nerys

    To be fair, the Fatal Natal Day, as it came to be known, was 79 years ago (less 11 days), in the middle of the war and, as I said, several years before the NHS came into being; and the regime in hospitals at that time tended to be more authoritarian and strictly regimented than it is now. Nor, I think, was that hospital necessarily typical; it had something of a reputation locally, as my mother subsequently discovered. No. 1 brother was born in the other hospital in Halifax, and her experience there was much better.

    My experience of hospitals has been fairly extensive and varied: (counts on fingers and toes) 13 stays of up to 6 weeks, plus numerous day procedures, and it has all has been pretty good on the whole. The grimmest was probably the Royal London Hospital, and even that was not too bad. The best in some ways was the time in Edinburgh which I mentioned. For some reason female students were housed in the small ward reserved for nurses and attached to the Nurses Residence and, since for much of the time I was the only seriously ill patient there, the staff had little to do except dance attendance on me. The food was good, too, and served in style. Afternoon tea, for example, was served on a tray covered with a dainty cloth, with a full porcelain tea service, little sandwiches, and scones or cake. Come to think of it, that may account for why I got so many visitors around that time in the afternoon 🙂

    *If you have ever watched ‘Call The Midwife’, the London Hospital is featured in several of the episodes set in the later 1950s, I was there a couple of times c.1958/59, and can vouch for the fact that at least the nurses’ uniforms are authentic for the period.

    #72161
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    @dentarthurdent

    Just to say that I have greatly enjoyed reading your commentary on your marathon re-watch of Doctor Who episodes.

    Given that I have spent the greater part of the past two years mostly housebound I had the ideal opportunity to do something similar, but for some reason I haven’t. In fact I have watched very little television of any kind, and instead have spent the time obsessively reading, while the programmes I record to watch later accumulate. Funny how one reacts to such situations.

    #72160
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    @devilishrobby

    Re your post 72157:  that is the first time in many years that I have seen/heard anyone use the word nesh. In fact, I don’t think that I have ever known anyone other than my family use it. I’ve always assumed that it was northern English dialect, since my father’s family were from Lancashire/West Yorkshire, and my mothers from Cheshire, with a small infusion of Welsh and Lancashire.

    On the other hand, I’ve never come across it in the sense you use.  In our usage it always had the very precise meaning of ‘extremely sensitive to cold’ or,  by extension, being afraid to go out in cold weather. If you felt it necessary to bundle up in excessive clothing when going out in winter, you were ‘nesh’. I will have to look it up in a dictionary of dialect 🙂

     

    #72146
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    @thane16

    Greetings Puro.  Forgive me if I find your account of that episode funny, in a blackish sort of way. That hospital sounds to have been gruesome; one a par with the one in which I was born, six years before the inception of the NHS.

    My poor mother was not to know. She was new to the area and, of the two hospitals in Halifax (Yorkshire, not NS), she selected the one she passed every day on her way to work, which was a pleasant looking building surrounded by well kept gardens. Appearances were deceptive; it was the former workhouse hospital, and the attitudes of the staff had not much changed. I won’t say that her experience was medieval: in the medieval period she would almost certainly been attended by a midwife and/or family members; maybe Dickensian would be a more apt comparison.

    After being given an enema *and* a massive dose of castor oil (with predictable results) she was left all day in a room on her own, yelled at when she did finally call a nurse, and when someone eventually did look in on her late in the evening, at a point when things had got critical, she was yelled at again. It’s a wonder that a) I was born intact and healthy and b) that she didn’t immediately go off me and reject me as the cause of all that misery.

    At the end of all this she got a brief glimpse of me before I was whisked away to the nursery, and she was transferred to the maternity ward, where she was left to shiver all night under a single blanket (October in the Pennines and no heating to speak of), not daring to ask for another. And was then yelled at again by the nurses, after the Matron (an uber-dragon among a dragon breed) had been on her morning round of inspection and given them a dressing-down about the same insufficiency of blankets.

    I can well understand your mother fainting in those circumstances, and glad that there was a supply of slivovice to bring to the rescue. My experience of hospitals has been fairly extensive, although nothing to compare with yours, but my mother also had to endure a good many alarms and excursions – more than I really appreciated at the time – but when, three weeks into my first term at Edinburgh University I was whisked into the Infirmary there, she was similarly incarcerated in Norwich, after the latest spinal crunch. We ended up corresponding (no mobile phones in the Neolithic period), each more worried about the other or – as my mother put it, more lepidopterous.

    As you say, human contact and human warmth is of the utmost importance in such circumstances, but maybe I have been particularly fortunate, because there have always been friends and/or family to supply it – especially that time in Edinburgh, when new friends as well as business contacts of my father’s were in frequent attendance, distant friends and even my old school teachers wrote and, although my mother couldn’t be there, my father did trek up from darkest East Anglia to hold my hand, and the nurses, to a woman, spoiled me atrociously.

    I apologise for having been AWOL so long, but it’s been a difficult year. I have been lurking, however, and reading fairly attentively, and things here seem to be looking up.

    And there are, after all, deer in the deer park in Mudlark manor; muntjac to be precise. A mixed blessing, because they do tend to go in for unauthorised pruning.

     

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    Mudlark @replies

    Happy New Year everybody, although I hesitate to utter those sentiments aloud for fear of tempting fate. Certainly the immediate future doesn’t look particularly rosy, but thank you, @winston, for listing some of the positives of 2020.  I’m not entirely sure that slopping around in pyjama bottoms counts entirely as one of those positives: at least I did my best to maintain civilised standards by wearing my best silk kimono over the sleep wear 😉 .*

    Revolution of the Daleks this evening will come as welcome relief after the Who-less desert of the past twelve months, although like you, @blenkinsopthebrave , my expectations are somewhat modest. and I am hoping to be pleasantly surprised.

    Now I’m off to refresh my memory by re-watching Resolution, since I gather that the two  are to some degree linked.

     

    *One of my French nephews, who has kept in touch by email, was impressed, imagining me drifting around like a slightly decadent late 19th century Romantic.

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    Mudlark @replies

    @blenkinsopthebrave

    Once again, you beat me to it.

    I subscribe to the Radio Times (dead trees edition) and the issue for 5-11 Dec. arrived yesterday afternoon. Having started to browse it this afternoon and read the fairly lengthy article linked to the cover, I was wondering whether to post here about it. Much of the article in question is taken up with rehashing the history of these most menacing yet engaging of monsters, but it also addresses the reasons for this recent tweaking of the design and makes it clear that any resemblance between the new-look Dalek and the self-assembled Dalek of Resolution is indeed not coincidental. According to guarded hints dropped by Chibnall, although Resolution and Revolution of the Daleks are stand-alone episodes, they are very much linked.

    Speaking for myself alone, I’m rather taken with the new look.

    @devilishrobby

    🙄  But then we already know that the Dalek sewers on Skaro are/were/will be revolting  (cf The Witches Familiar)

    As for the scheduling of the holiday season episode, filming was completed late last year, so I presume it will be aired either at Christmas or New Year – probably the latter. Filming of next year’s eight episode series began this month, though for obvious reasons there will be no overseas location work involved.

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    @blenkinsopthebrave

    Strangely enough, it was this k.d.lang track that was running through my brain for much of yesterday, and I even thought of signing in to post it myself, not being aware that you had already done so several days previously 🙂

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    @thane16 (puro)

    Good to see you too, but I’m so sorry to read the news about your mother. As you say, it hits hard whenever it comes, and if, as I suspect,  you were not able to be with her at the end, as has been the case in so many C-14 deaths,  it must compound the sense of loss. You are in my thoughts or, as the Quakers say, I hold you in the light.

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    @blenkinsopthebrave

    In one sense, yes; we can breathe again and experience at least a brief interval of euphoria.

    On the other hand, Davros and the Daleks are still out there, lurking, and unless the Orange One resigns in a massive fit of the sulks, there are still 73 days in which he can continue to ignore the ravages of the Covid 19 virus and a lot of people will not, in fact, get to live, in which case all we can do is hope that he will devote what energies he has to golfing and filing vexatious (and futile) law suits rather than pursuing a scorched earth agenda.

    As for the future, at least sanity will be restored in the USA, to the relief of much of the globe, although if the two senate seats up for grabs in Georgia don’t go to the Democratic candidates in the run off in January, Mitch the Turtle will remain in a position to obstruct virtually everything the new administration tries to do, so the initial rapture has perforce to be modified, alas. The less said about the political scene on this side of the pond the better, but that is largely our local problem.

    But for today, at least, we can celebrate, my digestive system seems to be behaving for the first time in what seems like months, and I am well on the way to becoming more than a little tipsy.

    Incidentally, I don’t generally engage with twitter and don’t tweet – I can think of plenty of other, more enjoyable ways of wasting my time – but I do sometimes follow up links to particular tweets or twitter threads.

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    @blenkinsopthebrave

    Strange that it should have occurred to you to post this particular clip at this particular time 😉 , although for some reason it does seem apt and has the effect of pouring balm on my troubled soul.

    Rassilon  had at least achieved much of benefit to his people – or so we are led to believe, even he had outlived his time and become a psychopathic megalomaniac in the process. The same cannot be said to excuse others who might come to mind in this corner of the spacio-temporal continuum.

    I came across a link to twitter which pursues a similar theme, although sadly I cannot remember where I found it and haven’t been able to relocate it to post a link here. I cannot hope to equal the brevity and wit of the originals, but it began with a Goodbye Cruel World tweet (possibly snark, but it is hard to be sure) to the effect: how could an ungrateful nation reject someone who had done so much for the people of the USA?  The writer was therefore leaving in disgust. What followed was a series of tweets suggesting where the Orange One might seek asylum. Perhaps he could go to Russia; no, the people of Russia didn’t want him; maybe Turkey? Turkey didn’t want him either;  which was followed by a succession of suggested countries. each of which in  turn rejected him, until one finally suggested the moon might take him; but even the Seleneans weren’t prepared to harbour him and referred him to Mars, whose inhabitants were equally reluctant. It ended with him being ejected from the solar system and then the galaxy, with the remote possibility that he might find harbour in Andromeda.

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    @thane16

    Puro; as @blenkinsopthebrave says, it’s great to see you back in the pub and to be reassured that you and yours are surviving the vicissitudes of the pandemic. At least Aus managed to cope pretty well with the initial onslaught of the virus compared with us in the UK, notwithstanding the recent upsurge in cases in Victoria.

    Your reappearance has also reminded me that it is probably time that I dropped in to down a virtual pint and demonstrate (if there was anyone wondering) that I am still in the land of the living and coping reasonably well.

    At the start of lockdown I expected to spend a lot of time vegetating on the sofa watching TV and catching up with box sets and programmes I had previously recorded, but in fact that hasn’t been the case. I have, however, been reading an enormous amount – many, many books from my shelves that I read years ago and wished to be reacquainted with, as well as new books on the ‘to read’ pile. I guess that it just goes to show that I am above all else a reader and always have been. Earlier this year, though, when Netflix offered almost the entire output of Studio Ghibli, I did take the opportunity to catch up on the films I hadn’t previously seen as well as some that I had.

    Much as I enjoy the company and conversation of family and congenial friends, I’m generally happy in my own company, so isolation has not in itself been a problem.

    @winston

    Your description of playing dodgem in the supermarkets raised a smile and sounds all too familiar. According to the haematologists I’m in a fairly high ‘at risk’ category and should be shielded and self-isolating, but I do have to venture out for the occasional shopping expedition when I run out of fresh produce (and booze). I always aim to go early, so as to be at the front of the line when the supermarkets first open and there aren’t too many people about. Based on my limited experience, observance of the requirement to wear face coverings in shops and enclosed spaces is almost 100 per cent here, but people aren’t always so careful about following the directional arrows or keeping their distance, so it does sometimes call for nifty footwork.

    For various reasons I haven’t been able to do much gardening lately and my patch is looking a bit dishevelled, but one afternoon I looked out of my study window and was startled and delighted to see a female Muntjac deer standing on my lawn. Muntjac are an introduced species in the UK which has become naturalised and increasingly common in this region of England. But it is still a very unexpected sight in a suburban garden less than a mile from the city centre – even though the gardens round here are well established, with many mature trees.

     

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