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9 June 2024 at 00:11 #76134
That was highly enjoyable, starting off, lightly enough, in the style of regency romance – if more Georgette Heyer than Jane Austen, or perhaps as Ruby enthused, more Bridgerton, (though I can’t speak for the latter, since I have never watched the show). Even the avian aliens would have been fun and quite appealing if it had not been for their resort to serial murder in their desire for kicks, and in any case it was a foregone conclusion that that the Doctor would find a way to thwart them.
What made this episode for me, ultimately, was the way in which, threaded through this relatively lightweight but entertaining plot was the delicately handled build up to the touching and emotional devastating conclusion, and the success of this was largely down to the way that Gatwa and Jonathan Goff subtly conveyed their connection, from the first, flirtatious exchanges to the harrowing self sacrifice of Rogue. The term is ‘chemistry’ I think*. The impact was all the more more powerful for Rogue and his altruistic action being in stark contrast to the behaviour of the Finetime brats in last week’s episode. In Regency costume Rogue looked Byronic (check out the portraits) which was no doubt the effect they were aiming at. I hope that the Doctor will succeed in tracking him down before too long, I much prefer him to Captain Jack.
As others have noted, in these monsters-of the-week-there was a distinct echo of the Family of Blood, and a there was also a similarity in the uncharacteristic vindictiveness with which the Doctor contemplated a punishment for both.
@thane16 Thanks for pointing out the variations on the Doctor Who theme in the music at the duchess’s ball. With my tin ear I probably wouldn’t have spotted them. With regard to the background music, I first watched the episode this morning on i-player, viewed on a large screen monitor connected to my computer, then again on my TV this evening. On the computer sound system the music was intrusive to the point of being annoying; on the TV sound system the balance was fine.
*Don’t pay attention if I fail to keep up with modern terms and references. It has recently come to my attention that I am a month older than Joe Biden, which apparently means – at least in some quarters – that I must be in the late stages of dementia. It would be unladylike to post my response here, but I imagine it is the same as that of Biden behind closed doors.
7 June 2024 at 22:08 #76094It was actually the Moff who originally came up with the idea for the episode and suggested it to RTD a good many years ago, but they decided at the time that the budget wouldn’t stretch to realising the necessary FX. Maybe Asimov’s stories were an influence*, but I agree with @scaryb, that what they probably had in mind was a certain type of upper class English family, especially pre-WWII upper class families, who seemed to think that demonstrations of affection would weaken the character of their offspring and sent them away to boarding school from age 8 in order to ‘build their character’. Any overt manifestation of affection they might receive was from their nannies who cared for them from babyhood until they were dispatched to school. The young Churchill barely knew his parents growing up** and was famously devoted to his nanny. The Finetime brats were probably reared by robots anyway.
Lindy’s reaction to the realisation that the Doctor and Ruby were together could be construed as surprise at the idea of two people meeting in the flesh, but I think that we were meant to read it as disgust at the idea of a black man and a white woman sharing a space.
Woodlice would be insulted by any comparison between them and the creatures devouring Lindy’s friends. They are harmless and benevolent creatures which perform a useful service in munching on decaying wood and helping in the recycling of organic matter. Slugs are OK when confined to the compost heap where they perform a similar service, but when I find them munching on my prize plants I take no prisoners, and some can be cannibalistic, as I discovered when I first found a group of them feasting on the remains of one of their own which I had dispatched earlier. The partial carapace on the backs of the Finetime creatures is similar to the ‘saddle’ on the backs of slugs, which in turn is a vestigial shell, as in snail shell, and in addition the creatures are covered in slug-like slime. Admittedly slugs don’t have anything resembling legs, but then the appendages on the creatures aren’t really legs so much as a fringe on their skirt. So I’ll stick with ‘slugs’ as the nearest approximation. 🙂
*It’s a long time -well over fifty years – since I read the books in question. I still have them lurking somewhere on the top shelf of my SF collection so, if the cheap paperbacks don’t disintegrate when handled, perhaps should read them again.
** Probably just as well, given the character of his parents..
7 June 2024 at 13:49 #76088@janetteb re the no hugging: I knew of the policy regarding teachers and the like – not that I recall teachers ever hugging pupils when I was small, but it’s surely not taboo for parents and close relatives ? Perhaps this was a society in which wealthy people mistook over indulgence in material things as the best way of demonstrating parental love.
@blenkinsopthebrave @janetteb Boring explanation: perhaps the orange in the Doctor’s and Ruby’s clothing was chosen simply to make them stand out against the predominantly pastel and muted tones of Finetime
7 June 2024 at 13:23 #76087The advance publicity on the Radio Times web site also refers to an organisation or corporation called Triad Technology which will unleash ‘the greatest evil of all’. So unless the Tardis has gone to the dark side, I’m now imagining the Susan Twist character as the sinister CEO of a corporation which has perhaps taken over from Villengaard after the latter was destroyed. After all, she was the face of the evil ambulances.
Or – going out to the tip of a very slender limb here – she’s Ruby’s mother 😈
6 June 2024 at 18:50 #76082Did anyone else get the vibes of Luke Skywalker fighting the drone with his helmet on in the Falcon?
I’ve just been reading through the comments again to refresh my memory and noticed this, which I’d forgotten.
Yes, when I saw Ricky fighting of the dot first time it immediately recalled the image of Luke Skywalker with a light sabre, though not that scene in particular, I admit.
6 June 2024 at 16:51 #76081Susan Twist appears yet again in the cast list for next Saturday’s episode. Maybe all will be revealed in the two-part finale, or maybe it has been just a protracted tease, with no other significance.
6 June 2024 at 16:36 #76080Very late in arriving on the scene this week (life etc,…) but at least it has given me time to read and reflect on everyone’s reactions and theories.
For me this was another winner, third in a row, and RTD appears to be on a roll now and not pulling his punches. As it did with @juniperfish and Prof. Wilson in the link given us by @craig, this episode struck me from the off as satire, and pretty dark satire as it turned out, taking some social tendencies and attitudes to extremes. It opened gently enough, with the washed-out pastels of the colour palette symbolising the insipidity of this most vapid and superficial end of social media. Nothing unfamiliar or remarkable in itself, except that it seemed to constitute the entire existence of Lindy and her friends. Judging by what we saw it seems doubtful if the partying which occupied so much of their days involved face to face interaction, even if or when they were all gathered in one physical location – just each dancing on their own in their individual bubble. Lindy’s surprise in meeting Ricky in the flesh certainly suggested as much. In fact these people didn’t seem to be friends in any real sense or depth, just a circle who validated each other’s self image while chatting inanely.
Lindy, of course revealed herself eventually as a complete sociopath, with not a spark of empathy or real concern for others, and as far as could be seen the same was probably true of most of her group to some degree. Ricky was an exception, and his altruism doomed him. Prof Wilson called them toddlers, and they did indeed have all the solipsism, desire for instant gratification and practical inexperience of toddlers. The difference between them and the space babies was that despite their extreme physical immaturity the latter had, with the help of Nan-E, developed a sense of responsibility and a the ability to deal with their environment.
This set me to pondering the question of how much sociopathy and psychopathy are inborn and how much the result of nurture (or lack of it), and in this case I felt it could to a large extent have been the latter. These were the offspring of wealthy parents who had indulged them in everything material that they might want, imbued them thoroughly with all their social values and prejudices, but seemingly provided them with little of practical or moral worth. There doesn’t seem to have been much in the way of physically demonstrative affection either, since Lindy and co. were unaccustomed to hugging. A very dysfunctional kind of parenting.
Given such an upbringing, cushioned from anything at all unpleasant and cocooned in bubbles from birth – first the bubble of wealth and social segregation, and then twofold in their individual social media bubbles and the literal bubble of the force field which protected Finetime from the world beyond – it’s no wonder they had failed to develop into rounded and fully functional young adults. Lindy was so infantilised that she couldn’t even navigate her immediate environment with out step-by-step instruction.
At the end, those who had escaped the predatory slugs stood no chance. For all their self-elected leader’s talk, they lacked the knowledge and even the most basic skills to survive, let alone make a new life as pioneers in the wild. They were destined either to fall prey to whatever perils lurked in those woods and hills or to starve to death. They were horrible people but also pitiable, and I felt the Doctor’s frustration and sorrow at their rejection of him and his offer of rescue.
On another tack, I am surprised that there were people who didn’t notice the racism until it was pointed out to them afterwards, but in Doctor Who Unleashed RTD said that he had wondered how long it would take viewers to pick up on the signs, such as the uniform whiteness of Lindy’s circle and the reactions to to the Doctor when he first appeared.
1 June 2024 at 00:05 #75963All power to your convalescence, but I, too, advise taking things gradually 😉
I’m curious as to why you think that the witchy lady wasn’t an older version of Ruby, because that seemed to me to have been indicated fairly plainly. Granted that when the witchy lady first appeared she conveyed a very spooky vibe, but once it became clear that she was always going to maintain that distance of 73 yards, and once Ruby had come to terms with this follower and even realised how she could use her to thwart the fascistic Roger Ap Gwilliam, any resemblance to the weeping angels pretty much vanished, leaving us with a far less threatening enigma. In fact after Ruby accepted her as simply another mystery factor in her life I began to see this watcher semper distans as an almost protective presence.
Towards the end of the episode, when Ruby in old age visits the site of the now dilapidated Tardis* with her carer, it seems she has begun to have an inkling of the meaning of this ghost-like presence which had haunted her for so long, ‘I’ve been thinking I know why. The woman. … Why she’s here.’ Then the scene switches to the care home where, dying, she sees her constant follower at last approach and holds out her arms in welcome.
What follows seemed to me fairly explicit. We hear the sound of the monitor flatlining, followed by a rapid sequence of flashed images from Ruby’s life in reverse order, indicating a journey back in time. So far, so weeping angels, except that we end up where we began, and now we are seeing things from the witchy woman’s point of view as she sees young Ruby and the Doctor emerging from the Tardis. What she says then makes it clear that her intentions were all along benign, and crucially she ends with, ‘And look at me, I was so young’. So who could the watcher be other than an older version of Ruby, whether in the most straightforward sense or in a more complex timey-wimey way. It is presumably significant that on this second occasion she appears before the Tardis door opens, whereas the first time she appeared only after the fairy circle had been broken and young Ruby had read a couple of the scrolls.
Whether the Doctor knew more on this second time around than he did the first time is an interesting question. The dialogue is the same up to the point where he mentions Roger Ap Gwilliam, but he stops short of the reference to him leading the world to the brink of nuclear war because Ruby interrupts to stop him treading on the fairy circle. While this is going on the old woman on the skyline is whispering ‘Don’t step, don’t step ..’, surely too softly for either the Doctor or Ruby to hear, but perhaps it registers subliminally for one or both of them. Agreed, it may be significant that the Doctor seems to have a slightly better understanding of the fairy circle on this second occasion, but equally it could be simply because the sequence was interrupted, the ring was not broken, and his wits are less scattered in consequence.
*protected by a perception filter?
31 May 2024 at 14:11 #75955Please tell me you’ve been chased from a temple by a giant boulder.
Hand on heart I assure you that I have never been chased by a giant boulder or run the gauntlet of a series of booby traps on any of the sites where I have worked – but then I have never tried to steal a valuable artefact from an ancient temple. That kind of thing tends to be disapproved of in the profession. The only find that I ever kept as a souvenir is a medieval hazel nut, one of several preserved with other organic finds in the waterlogged gunge filling an eleventh century cess pit. The rest went to the finds shed as was proper, so my conscience isn’t too uneasy.
31 May 2024 at 01:07 #75948River’s immortal line from The Husbands of River Song, “I’m an archaeologist from the future, I dug you up”.
Yes, I remember grinning broadly at that line 😀 I would love to have had River’s sonic trowel, too, way back in my digging days. There is a lot to be said in favour of the trusty forged tang WHS 4 inch pointing trowels, (never on any account choose a trowel with a riveted tang) but they wear down remarkably quickly and I got through a good many in the course of my early career.
31 May 2024 at 00:21 #75946@blenkinsopthebrave @juniperfish
I have been twisting myself into a pretzel trying to get my head around the logic of Ruby being her own mother in the manner suggested, but any way I look at the paradox it seems to end in a completely closed loop with no beginning and no end – not even Ouroboros, because the ring has no head or tail. If there was a hypothetical entry point in time when the sequence had a beginning, then I don’t see how Ruby-the-mother at that initial point could have been her own child
But no doubt I’ve overlooked something crucial. I never did get round to studying formal logic.
30 May 2024 at 23:43 #75945Re the significance of Ruby’s DNA; across the entire population of the earth variations such as eye and skin colour or facial features are minor and insignificant in the human genome. As we now know, even the differences between modern humans and neanderthals were not such as to prevent successful interbreeding. (As an aside, regarding the Cheddar Gorge skeleton to which you referred, it’s not surprising that at least some of the mesolithic population of Britain were dark skinned, because they were descendants of relatively recent migrants from much further south who moved in as the ice sheets retreated)*.
As for the Tardis being stumped by an unfamiliar DNA profile, I doubt it. She and the Doctor have been knocking around the universe for long enough to become familiar with most if not all intelligent species, and we can assume that Time Lord science is sufficiently advanced to be able to detect any hybridisation – and in any form of genetic coding other than DNA for that matter.
Having said that, there is always the remote possibility that Time Lords labelled any intelligent humanoid life form as homo sapiens – or what in their language equated with homo sapiens.
Sorry to be so boringly pedantic but trust me, I’m an archaeologist 🙂
29 May 2024 at 23:37 #75925The problem with the idea that Ruby might be a Time Lord, whether the Doctor’s mother or his sister or any other relative is, as I noted in an earlier post, that the visual projection of the Tardis analysis registered her under ‘species’ as ‘homo sapiens’ – and I did pause the recording and look carefully. Before I checked it did cross my mind that she might be Susan’s daughter, but even if Susan was too young when she left Gallifrey to have been confirmed as a full Time Lord, not having been exposed to the Untempered Schism or whatever, she would presumably still have Time Lord DNA (or equivalent), and her hypothetical offspring would therefore not register as human.
Further to my suggestion that there was a split in the time line – and for ease of reference I will refer to the Ruby whose life we followed as Ruby I and her hypothetical alter ego as Ruby II – I realised that I may not have made it entirely clear that neither Ruby I or Ruby II is likely to have understood on their own that theirs was not the only time line, and only when they merged at death would they realise that there was a way in which the dystopian line could be nullified. So it could only have been the merged self which returned to the point of division
I had another look at the final scenes to check the details and realised that I had blinked* and missed something; to whit the flashed sequence of images from Ruby I’s life since the arrival of the Tardis in Wales. This is obviously a reference to the notion that people at the point of death see their life flashing before their mind’s eye, but in this case the sequence is in reverse order, a rewind indicating a physical return to the crucial event, – physical at least insofar as old Ruby I+II is sufficiently corporeal for other people to see see, speak and respond to her. It is not explained how this is possible, and presumably we were supposed to just accept it, but since we are free to speculate, the fact that Ruby has had some experience of travel in time and space might be a factor.
I made a note of old Ruby I+II’s exact words as she watched her younger self emerging from the Tardis. ‘I’m sorry I took so long. And I tried so hard. What else could I do? It took all these years, all these long years.’ It seems she might have thought she could intervene at an earlier stage to correct things, but that it was only possible once both versions of Ruby had lived their lives to the end. Then, as the Doctor approaches the fairy circle, she whispers repeatedly, ‘Don’t step, don’t step’, which Ruby I obviously doesn’t hear but maybe registers subconsciously.
The simpler and relatively boring explanation is, of course, that there was only one version of Ruby, and that she alone went back to the crucial event in order to create an alternative time line. This is probably what RTD had in mind, but I don’t find it as satisfactory.
*Good thing that there were no Weeping Angels nearby.
26 May 2024 at 23:28 #75906This time, Ruby sees Old Witchy Ruby before the circle break and therefore knows (without knowing why) to stop the Doctor breaking the fairy circle, and this time the Doctor knows to tell Ruby not to read the circle’s messages out loud.
Yes, I think that the merging of the two timelines brought about a kind of recursion and that, on the second time round, the alternative life involving Roger ap Gwilliam bled somehow back into the other, so that Ruby had a subliminal awareness, triggered by the sight of her alter ego stalker, which led her to stop the Doctor from treading on the fairy ring. The first time around she didn’t see her until after the circle was broken. What the Doctor knew to begin with, whether that differed on the second occasion, and whether he had any hand in shifting the points on the railway tracks, so to speak, remains to be seen. Since it involves time lines the latter is certainly on the cards. The switching points analogy only goes so far, though, and I prefer to visualise the implied dual narrative as the digging of a bypass channel on a river in order to avoid a flood.
I haven’t seen Dark but it sounds just the kind of thing that appeals to me. The only problem is that now that we have such a myriad of choices I never seem to have time to watch even a tithe of all the programmes I want to watch, and as it is I already have an unwieldy number of recorded but unwatched shows accumulating on my TV box
Good to see you here, Puro, (should have said that earlier) and I’m glad that your husband is doing well, though it must obviously have been stressful at the time.
You mentioned The Flip Side of Dominick Hyde, and that came to my mind also when, for a brief instant, it occurred to me, too, that Ruby might be her own mother. Then I realised that although, if time travel were possible, a man might be his own father, that couldn’t possibly work with women – unless, of course, we are talking about parthenogenetic cloning, in which case she would strictly speaking be her sole parent’s identical twin.
26 May 2024 at 18:28 #75901So sorry to hear of your heart attack; my commiserations and I hope that you make a complete recovery, and that soon. Such an event is very alarming and discombobulating but, if it’s any comfort or reassurance, I started having severe angina attacks 13 years ago and what I think in retrospect was a minor heart attack, but angioplasty in 2012 was completely successful and since then I have had no further trouble in that regard.
26 May 2024 at 18:17 #75899I agree that the fact that they didn’t use ageing make up or prosthetics to age Ruby is probably deliberate and significant. I have always looked a good deal younger than my age, or so I’ve repeatedly been and am still told,* but I certainly looked somewhat older than that by the time I turned forty.
* It was highly annoying when I was in my twenties and being mistaken for my 16 year old brother’s younger sister; later not so much 🙂
26 May 2024 at 17:59 #75898I too wear a plain gold band on the third finger of my right hand, but for different reasons again. It is in fact made from the gold of three wedding rings; those of my mother, my maternal grandmother and my grandmother’s mother who was born in 1841 and married in 1862, so it is a link across four generations of my family. The long span is because my grandmother was second to youngest in a large family, born when her mother was in her forties, and my grandmother was 33 when my mother was born. Obviously that is highly unlikely that there is anything like such an explanation here, but in any case we only only saw the inner side of witchy Ruby’s ring, so it could have been a signet ring or even been set with a stone (but see below)
Having now watched the episode a second time, my reading of the relationship between Ruby and the old and witchy’ Ruby who follows her is this. In one speculative theory of multiple universes, every decision point in a person’s life generates an alternative path – in effect a whole alternative life, so that when the thread of the fairy circle was broken Ruby’s and the Doctor’s time lines split into two. The doppelganger was the Ruby who would have lived, or perhaps did live if the circle hadn’t been broken, who perhaps continued travelling with the Doctor and had a very different life until in old age she was able somehow intrude into the other Ruby’s life from the point of divergence, as a constant reminder and a warning. That purpose was in part fulfilled when the Ruby whose life we followed was able to use her to scare off Roger ap Gwilliam and put an end to his sociopathic intentions, and the frightening off of the others before that was in order to a) put the idea into her head in the first place, and b) isolate her and cut her off from all support and relationships which might have diverted her from achieving that purpose. After that Ruby had to live out her life to the end, though still accompanied by her alternative self.
When old, witchy Ruby saw her younger self emerge from the Tardis she said something like ‘I’m sorry, but it was all I could do’. Their two alternative selves could never meet or approach close enough to see one another clearly because of the time paradox – the same reason that 15th Doctor could not go back to Totters Lane in 1963 to meet his earlier incarnation, and at least one reason why he said that he could never take Ruby back to the church on Ruby Road on the Christmas day she was found. But when the Ruby whom we followed finally reached the end of her life the two could meet and merge and rift in their time lines be healed. At the point they merged we heard the beeping monitor flatline.
How the old, alternative Ruby was able to achieve this haunting of her other self is, of course, not explained, but it does reinforce the idea that there is something other-worldly about her and the mystery of her origins.
26 May 2024 at 00:21 #75878I’m a bit haunted by the messages from the fairy circle which Ruby reads out. They are: “I miss you” and “Rest in peace, Mad Jack”. Surely no one misses fascist Prime Minister Roger Ap Gwillam.
Except that when Ruby reads out that message Roger ap Gwilliam is some twenty years in the future. In retrospect I interpreted this as ‘Remain bound and buried spirit of Mad Jack and don’t rise again to disturb us’ or, in a timey-wimey way, wishing the same of the future prime minister.
25 May 2024 at 23:47 #75876Apologies for not seeming to acknowledge that you raised the point about Ruby recognising the Susan Twist before I did. You posted while I was writing the above.
25 May 2024 at 23:39 #75875That was very, very good; certainly one of the Who classics despite the absence of the Doctor for most of it – though of course the same is true of Blink and Turn Left. There was a twist, too, though not at the end.
The beginning, with the breaking of the circle, the disappearance of the Doctor and the appearance of the mysterious figure next to the dead tree, was unnerving. Then the pub scene, which brought to mind the opening scenes of’ An American Werewolf in London led us to expect an overtly supernatural theme until the realisation that it was all an elaborate wind-up by the locals, – except that the references to ‘Mad Jack’ would later turn out to be significant, not to mention the Doctor’s earlier, in the context seemingly anachronous reference to Roger ap Gwilliam
Ruby’s growing sense of bewilderment and loss of security as she seemed to be abandoned, first by the Doctor, then her mother and then, when rescue seemed to be at hand, by Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, all recalling the original abandonment by her mother, was all too well conveyed, as was the briefly glimpsed effect on all her subsequent relationships, until she finally she realised what she had been primed all along to do.
The ending might seem abrupt, and the explanation of the reversion to the beginning not immediately obvious, but I took it that once old Ruby had finally met and merged with her doppelganger self the purpose of that split in the time line had been served and the loop could be closed, so everything reverted the point of divergence.
Random points: Ruby thought she had seen the hiker (Susan Twist) before, which seems to confirm significance of the recurrent appearance of this actor, and Mrs Flood also makes an brief appearance, which means her character is still in play.
Roger ap Gwilliam in some ways recalled the character played by Emma Thompson in Years and Years, even though the threat she posed as a prime minister was of a slightly different order.
The scenes with old Ruby to me recalled Clara in the first (original) ending of Last Christmas
Ruby thought she had seen the hiker (Susan Twist) before, which seems to confirm that the recurrent appearance of this actor has significance, and Mrs Flood also makes an brief appearance.
25 May 2024 at 21:52 #75868Anyone checked out the name of the Welsh village for Thomasite Llareggyb meaning? I don’t have head for unlikely combination of consonants.
Llareggyb is the name of the village in Under Milk Wood, by Dylan Thomas (hence Thomasite, I presume. The y in Welsh is pronounced more like u. Try saying it backwards with the double L as in English pronunciation 😉
Thoughts on the episode to come.
23 May 2024 at 23:29 #75840“The One Who Waits” is Susan.
Anything is possible, and in a recent Radio Times piece Carol Ann Ford was reported as saying that if the call came for her return she would be up for it, but even if the references to her so far do herald her reappearance, I doubt that it will have such a weighty significance.
In the context of recent episodes it seems clear to me that The One Who Waits will be closely linked in some way to Toymaker and Maestro, the pantheon of quasi-deities to which those two belong, and to the oncoming legions which the Toymaker threatened. Also perhaps to the Meep’s ‘boss’. I’ve been wondering about the significance of Henry (H)Arbinger, the boy being tutored by the piano teacher in 1925, who claimed that Maestro was his daddy, who vanished at the snap of Maestro’s fingers, and who reappeared briefly 38 years later, peering round a door at the dancers in Abbey Road studios and then quietly retreating. Maybe no more than a harbinger, but nevertheless an enigma to be kept in mind.
I suspect that we won’t know until all is revealed in the two part finale which, on the strength of the advance publicity, promises to be RTD’s OTT pyrotechnics dialled up to an unprecedented level.
One to watch might be the ubiquitous Susan Twist, who will be appearing yet again in next Saturday’s episode. Not for one minute do I buy the explanation that her recurring appearances are because of a shortage of available actors.
22 May 2024 at 23:00 #75833The moon and the president’s wife. As @juniperfish noted above, this references something that Missy said in The Magicians Apprentice, when she was telling Clara how long she had known the Doctor, ‘… since he stole the moon and the President’s wife …’ I seem to remember that the Doctor later disputed this, saying that he didn’t steal the moon, he lost it, and it wasn’t the President’s wife, it was the President’s daughter.
The opening scene with Carson leading the blinded John Vater for me recalled a number of World War I paintings. The best known is Gassed, by John Singer Sargent, which is in the Imperial War Museum, but there are two or three others which depict just two soldiers, one blindfolded and the other leading, which are almost an exact match for the image, but I don’t have links at the moment.
As for how anyone could be injured in a one-sided war, Carson said something about the mines moving about, presumably self-propelled, which would present a hazard all on it’s own, and then in permanent fog, where it is difficult to see much and everyone is on edge, there is the risk of ‘friendly fire’. Compounding the problem are the Villengaard algorithms, because where combat is assumed and the weapons are programmed to make their own decisions, and where in the spread sheets only the profits from the sale of such weapons are important, the human cost is merely a matter of acceptable levels of loss.
I’ve been pondering the question of how this war of illusion started. The Doctor gave a very sketchy and incomplete explanation but, given the context, it isn’t all that difficult to fill in the blanks. A poorly briefed advance party arrives on a new planet for reasons unspecified – possible future colonisation? religious conversion of hypothetical indigenous life forms? This being the Church Militant in a very literal sense they arrive armed and armoured and ready for possible trouble. Patrols are sent out to explore, and with limited visibility in the permanent fog people get nervous. Before long someone with a twitchy trigger finger starts firing at shadows. Perhaps someone is injured, but in any case it isn’t long before the machines and algorithms have taken over and after that nobody thinks to question why the supposed enemy is never seen because, as the Doctor said, they had ‘faith’- in this case not just faith in the religious sense and faith in the church/army hierarchy, but faith in the machines and the AI which controlled them.
20 May 2024 at 12:40 #75803Legal next of kin is generally decided by closest generic relative – or spouse/civil partner – but in cases of adoption, it’s adoptive family
True in our present day earth, and I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. But this is the whoniverse in the far future and on a distant planet, so the writer is free to make up the rules as serves the plot 😉
20 May 2024 at 12:28 #75802Does this imply Ruby has human DNA, because the researchers would have identified any anomaly?
On a re-watch of Space Babies I paused on the image of the Tardis scan to see if I could make out any details. Under species scan it definitely said Homo Sapiens, and the DNA scan showed what appeared to be a normal double helix. What was odd was that under Age the scan appeared to say 10 years – though admittedly it was slightly blurred so I couldn’t be absolutely certain. There was also the figure 68%, but I couldn’t make out what it referred to.
19 May 2024 at 22:34 #75787The inability of the ambulance AI to identify Ruby’s next of kin was clearly supposed to be significant, and not simply down to the fact that she had just arrived on the planet and the information was lacking in their records. In fact, since the ambulance was able to identify her date of birth and calculate the years that had elapsed, rather than just assessing her biological age, it was apparently able to access an unfeasibly vast database containing the records of every human being since such records began,
The ‘next of kin’ referred to were, I assume, specifically her birth family – the family which Ruby had hoped the researchers on ‘Long Lost Family’* could trace for her. Like the ambulance, and as Davina McCall reported to her in The Church on Ruby Road, they drew a complete blank – no documentary evidence and no DNA match. The only direct clue so far as to her origins is that, when the Doctor went back a third time to the scene where she was found, the person leaving the scene turned and pointed directly at him. So whether or not that person was the mother, it was apparently someone who knew or was known to him.
*I think that is the title of the TV programme in question.
19 May 2024 at 15:43 #75779Yes, the first mention was in The Doctor Dances. Captain Jack used a blaster to open a locked door in the hospital. The Doctor explained to Rose that it was a ‘ Sonic blaster, 51st century, weapon factories of Villengaard’. Jack noted that the factories were destroyed when the main reactor went critical and the Doctor then added that there was a banana plantation there now, ‘I like bananas, bananas are good’ – which come to think of it is something that the eleventh Doctor might have said
18 May 2024 at 23:33 #75768Thanks for the reminder of that poem. It has a particular resonance …
Ruby is pulling snow, ephemeral beautiful snow, through time and space and memory.
If only RTD has the delicacy of touch to realise this emerging theme1
18 May 2024 at 22:58 #75767the problems of recreating conditions in London at that time would almost certainly have posed too many problems.
oops! Note to self, proof read before submitting 🙄
18 May 2024 at 22:51 #75766Perhaps this wasn’t quite top tier Moffatt, but it was still very good indeed and, as was the Moff’s stated intention, generated a surprising degree of tension, notwithstanding the knowledge that the Doctor must inevitably survive. Even though I had exposed myself to multiple spoilers and had a good idea of what to expect, I was fully engaged and on the edge of the sofa throughout.
No doubt there will be the usual complaints about the social and political messages embedded in the narrative, but sadly they are needed more than ever and I don’t think they were too blatant. Eisenhauer warned of the dangers inherent in the growth of the military/industrial complex way back in the 1950’s, not that much notice was taken then or since because, as the Doctor said, ‘War is business’, and it’s all good if it drives the economy. And where weapons and materiel have been stockpiled there are always people who can find a pretext for putting these products to use. Then come the deaths and the inevitable ‘thoughts and prayers’ – the mantra of those with no true empathy. Whether not religion provides a pretext for war or helps to fuel it – well, that very much depends on who professes that religion and how they interpret it’s tenets.
As others have noted, there were lots of delectable call-backs, beginning with John Francis Vater’s laconic ‘Dad skills’, which is how Capaldi Doctor explained his ability to send the child Danny to sleep in Listen’, so yes, it seems that the idea of the Doctor as father and family man may be coming to the fore. The concept of hand phones – mobile phone technology implanted in people’s hands – was, I suspect, inserted by RTD, because it figured previously in Years and Years, perhaps inspired originally by the manner in which people mime phoning.
18 May 2024 at 20:40 #7576218 May 2024 at 20:22 #75760Occam, almost certainly. Take the weather conditions, for example; nobody under the age of sixty will have any direct recollection of them*, and even if it occurred to the production team, the problems of recreating conditions in London at that time would almost certainly have posed too many problems. The snow in the Tardis might, at a stretch, be seen as a nod in that direction, but in reality the latter is clearly going to be a significant recurring theme.
As for the costume anachronisms, that is pretty much par for the course with TV wardrobe departments when it comes to historical drama. The attitude seems to be that so long as it is in the general style of dress which people associate with the decade in question, that is enough. Hairstyles, for that matter, are almost always wrong.
When I nit-pick about such matters, as I tend to do here, it is usually in a spirit of mischief.
*I’m old enough to remember the winter of 1946/47, which was probably not quite as bitterly cold, but equally prolonged and with even more snow which accumulated and lay for months.
15 May 2024 at 22:19 #75725Having just reread the whole thread I realise that I had overlooked your comment about the poor CGI rendering of the snot monster. In the ‘Doctor Who Unleashed’ feature on the episode, which I have now watched, it showed how it was done, and it wasn’t CGI at all, just the traditional man in a costume covered with layer upon layer of gunk and slime. If there was any CGI involved at all it may have been in the effect of the slime streaming off the monster as they tried to blast it out of the airlock.* We have become so accustomed to the increasing realism of good CGI that old fashioned people in rubber suits are no longer enough for the suspension of disbelief, alas.
* In reality, once the outer hatch of the airlock opened the decompression would surely have been pretty much instantaneous and the poor monster would have had no chance of hanging on; it would have been blasted out in the manner of the Alien in the first film. But in this case of course it had to be saved.
15 May 2024 at 14:49 #75720The costume anachronism is a very minor point and can easily be explained away by the fact that for Ruby 1963 is as far in the past as 1902 was for me in 1963. Faced with the Tardis’s vast wardrobe she would just have picked the style everyone tends to associate with the 60s. Or, more prosaically, that’s how the costume designers were thinking. In fact the style with the very short skirts was introduced by Courreges in 1964 and popularised by Mary Quant in 1966.
This morning I skimmed the BTL comments on Martin Belam’s recap in the Guardian (depressingly negative as ever), and there was one point raised which I had missed. In February 1963 Britain was still knee deep in snow and everything was frozen solid. One of my chief memories of that winter in Edinburgh is of the daily battle across the Meadows to lectures in driving snow. But in the alternative time line maybe it wasn’t the coldest winter of the century.
15 May 2024 at 14:10 #75719Re the babies not developing physically, I think that was explained but I need to go back to pick up on it exactly.
The transcript of the episode is now up so I have just checked. The nearest thing to an explanation is the Doctor saying, ‘The crew went home. They abandoned ship and left you guys behind. I don’t know why, but they left the birth machine running, so you lot grew up but stayed the same size’.
This suggests that that the lack of physical development is connected to the abandonment of the station, but the how and why is not explained. Perhaps we were supposed to assume that growth was stunted by some artificial means because space was limited but if so one would expect them to be diminutive six year olds, not still babies who needed to wear nappies.
I guess RTD just thought ‘talking babies running a space station would be a cute idea for an episode’, and wasn’t bothered about the rationale.
13 May 2024 at 23:23 #75700Wondering if the Margaret Lockwood reference was meaningful but can’t see anything on her IMDB that would suggest any link. The Lady Vanishes?
I doubt it in this particular context, but it does have a certain resonance. Margaret Lockwood was indeed in the cast of Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938 IIRC), but the film the tea lady referred to was The Wicked Lady which was hugely popular in Britain when it came out in the mid 1940’s. In it, ML starred as the titled Lady in question, who decided to spice up her rather boring life by moonlighting as a highwayman – so shades of Me in The Woman Who Lived.
13 May 2024 at 23:05 #75699As so often, I’m late to the party, but for what it’s worth I thought this episode an improvement on the Space Babies and on the whole I enjoyed it. The basic concept had a lot of potential, but it was as if RTD, having seized on a good idea, never developed it so far as to explore all the implications. As @cookgroom @miapatrick and @juniperfish have already noted, if Maestro first manifested in 1925, then that is the point at which the music presumably died and history diverged, and it is unlikely that by 1963 the Beatles would have ever got together or considered music as a viable way of making money, even as a step towards a more conventional career. Who would be interested in buying their records if enjoyment of music had been so long repressed? Then again, once Maestro was banished back to whatever Olympus this particular pantheon regard as home, was history supposed to spring back into the time line we know, or continue on a divergent path?
@jimthefish and @juniperfish I imagine you have both seen the interview in which RTD specifically referred to Once More With Feeling and said that he wanted to do something similar with Doctor Who. Whether or not he is capable of pulling off anything similar- and on the evidence he is no song lyricist – DW doesn’t lend itself to that kind of treatment. The Buffy episode worked as a one-off, not just because it had a supernatural explanation which fitted the context, but because the fact that the characters were propelled into singing of their inner thoughts and feelings helped further the plot. In the Devil’s Chord the song and dance sequence at the end was just about justified by the theme of the episode but it was clumsily tacked on, cued by the Doctor’s somewhat contrived reference to ‘a twist in the end’,* rather in the manner of the lighter kind of 1920’s and 1930’s musical comedies. It’s to be hoped that this kind of thing won’t be a regular occurrence. I did, though, like the conceit of the markings of the Abbey Road zebra crossing as piano keys.
On the plus side, Nguti continues to dazzle – surely the most joyous incarnation of the Doctor yet, eclipsing even Tom Baker, although we saw glimpses of a more sombre and thoughtful side. And I relished Jinkx Monsoon’s turn as Maestro. Yes it was OTT, wondrously so; not just chewing the scenery but masticating it to pulp, but that goes with the territory if you are a divinity, even in a minor pantheon. If you are a god you can behave as outrageously as you like, give or take the few rules dictated by customary lore.
Finally, if I were being hypercritical – and in my advanced state of crumblitude my memory could be at fault – I would point out that Ruby’s outfit looked a bit more 1964 than February 1963, while her hairstyle was more late 1950s. A geometric haircut ala Mary Quant would have gone better with the dress, but she did ask for a beehive.
*And yes, back in the day I did risk back injury doing The Twist, and on at least one occasion to The Beatles ‘Twist and Shout’. Sad, no?
12 May 2024 at 22:18 #75654This was by no means as dire an episode as @whohar led me to expect – far from it – and my opinion of it improved on second viewing. Compared with The Eleventh Hour or Rose, it was a lightweight introduction to a new season, but they set a high standard. What carried it and raised it above average, though, were Nguti’s Doctor and Millie Gibson as Ruby. The talking babies were technically effective, so I’m not sure why I found them slightly creepy and not totally convincing, but that said, the child who played Poppy was a real charmer. The allusions to the politics of the ‘pro-life’ brigade (every sperm is sacred and we’ll protect you from conception to birth, but after that you’re on your own, Kiddo) and cockeyed policies regarding refugees and asylum seekers may have been a bit obvious, but not a problem as far as I am concerned
As is often the case with RTD, the ideas were not quite fully developed, and my inner nit-picker kept nagging at me: why had the babies failed to develop physically past the age they were when they were abandoned ? – if this was explained I missed it; and how come they felt the absence of mother and father when, in all but genetic terms, they had no parents? It is plausible that a massive ejection of gas could propel a space station in a given direction – action and reaction and all that – but how were they proposing to slow it down and guide it into orbit once they had reached the destination planet? But that’s just the way my mind works. As for the snot monster, it was suitably scary, and yes, the link between bogeyman/monster*, and bogey/dried snot occurred to the mind of my inner child before it dawned on the Doctor, but did RTD really have to go there? Compare the wit in so many of Moffatt’s scripts.
So far, so good.
* The term ‘bogeyman’ probably derives from a middle English word bogge or bugge, meaning scary apparition – see also the Yorkshire dialect Boggart. Whether or not there is a direct connection with bogey/dried snot, or the USA English booger, I have no idea.
13 April 2024 at 20:58 #75512It seems that Ruby is to be joined by another companion in 2025
Doctor Who confirms Varada Sethu casting with first look at season 15 TARDIS trio | Radio Times
Query: does the fact that the Jinkx Monsoon character is named Maestro have significance – or is it just a piece of misdirection?
Meanwhile, not so long now until May 11th
4 January 2024 at 22:51 #75251the diving suit exploit was – improbable (I’d guess impossible), without a support crew on the surface.
Perhaps there was more to the diving suits than was apparent. For a start, the design was anachronistic – more 1890s than 1814 – so they were presumably supplied by the Tardis and could therefore have incorporated Time Lord technology. Certainly the Tardis seems to have a preference for retro design, as seen also in the space suits worn by the Doctor, which doesn’t mean that they are as primitive as they appear.
3 January 2024 at 00:24 #75229Yes, the coronation of QEII saw a major boost in the sale of TV sets in the UK. As you may remember, this featured as a major plot device in The Idiot’s Lantern, where the Tenth Doctor and Rose inadvertently end up in London in 1953. It was also the case in Norfolk where we lived, although there was no transmitter serving the area at the time, so those who did purchase a TV set probably viewed everything through a snowstorm of static. As for my family, we listened to the proceedings on radio before heading to the village for the local bucolic celebrations. And yes, almost everything then on TV had the greater impact of novelty, so the first Quatermass series must have had an almost seismic shock effect, though I don’t remember hearing of it
When it came to Quatermass II I was well aware and remember each week waiting impatiently for an account of the latest episode from more fortunate classmates who did have TV sets.
2 January 2024 at 23:01 #75226Thanks for the tip regarding the DVD. I didn’t realise that anything other than stills survived of the original Quatermass Experiment, because the only method of recording in 1953 was by filming either the live action or the image on the TV screen, and the resulting picture quality was sometimes more than a bit fuzzy. The same applies to Quatermass II. I had – maybe still have – a Penguin paperback with the scripts but I never saw them as broadcast because we didn’t have a TV until 1957. VERA, the video recording system developed by the BBC in 1958 was presumably used for recording Quatermass and the Pit, before they switched to a better system developed in the USA. I watched a live broadcast re-creation of The Quatermass Experiment on BBC4 in 2005, which I think was faithful to the original, except that the Tate Modern was substituted for Westminster Abbey in the climax. Only just now, when looking it up to check the date, did I realise that the 2005 cast included David Tenant, when he already knew that he would be the 10th Doctor.
That sounds horrifyingly claustrophobia-inducing. The cellars of that house were always a bit creepy, although the extreme effect of Quatermass on on our excursions into them didn’t last very long. The main and relatively well lit part was in regular use because there was a stone shelf which, in the absence of a refrigerator, was sometimes used for keeping food chilled, and my brothers also used it as a darkroom for developing photographs. The really spooky parts were the unlit compartments to the side of this main cellar, one of which contained a large and particularly sinister looking furnace/boiler for the central heating system installed c.1910 – never used by us because, even if the system had been proved safe, it reportedly gobbled about 1 cwt of coal or coke a day – not practical in a 1950s post-war economy.
The nearest things in spookiness which I have experienced as an adult archaeologist were some of the abandoned and isolated sites I was required to research and survey before I was forced, kicking and protesting, to retire. Among the worst were WWII defence installations which were being assessed to to determine whether they should be designated as historic monuments. One in particular which I remember was a well preserved coastal battery in Suffolk dating from 1940; pretty much everything was still there except the guns, but the compartments to the rear – magazine and accommodation for the crew etc. – were below ground and flooded. I had a torch and wellies but baulked at the prospect of actually wading into the murk. Who knows what lurked beneath the surface of that dark water.
1 January 2024 at 22:20 #75216Quatermass and the Pit: I’ve never seen the film, so I can’t comment on that, but I remember the live TV production featuring Andre Morell as Quatermass and Cec Linder as Roney very well indeed – December 1958/January 1959, so I would have been 16 and my brothers 11 and 13. We can still quote bits of the dialogue. It was chillingly effective and probably gained from being shown in weekly instalments with cliffhangers. The effects were remarkably good given the limitations of TV at the time.
@dentarthurdent What you remember is the closing scene of one episode. Sladden had been trying to drill through a bulkhead into the sealed compartment at the front of the alien ceramic vessel without success, then the bulkhead started to rotate and open, apparently of its own accord, revealing the mummified corpses of three tripedal, horned insectoid creatures hanging in the remains of some kind of organic webbing, then one slips suddenly, making everyone, including the audience jump. Quatermass said, if I remember correctly, ‘It’s all right, they’re dead; they’ve been dead a very long time’ – fade to credits.
At the time my brothers and I were expected to take turns each evening in going down to the cellar to fetch the coke for the hot water boiler and solid fuel cooker. The cellars were extensive, only partially lit, and the coal cellar was at the far end. Oddly enough, during the weeks Quatermass was on whoever’s turn it was always seemed to have an excuse to take someone with them.
27 December 2023 at 21:50 #75169If what I have read is correct, I doubt we need spend time fretting about this Doctor’s costume. It will be like the British weather; if we don’t care much for what he is wearing this week, just wait a while and it will change.
On another tack, is the name Flood significant? It has reminded me that when I was aged around 11-12, way back in the Palaeolithic era, I had a class mate at school whose surname was Flood. Maybe it’s her – but then again, probably not. According to Doctor Who Unleashed, and as @devilishrobby has already noted, Mrs Flood does have a part to play in what is coming, but an NDA is in force, so we will have to wait and see.
As for The Five Doctors, the mention of that episode made me realise that I had never actually seen it, and having looked it up I don’t think I’ll bother, so thanks everybody for saving me from a time better spent on other pursuits.
26 December 2023 at 22:05 #75146You are, of course correct; Susan is unlikely. But then it’s easy to lose count of how many times London has been devastated or been almost destroyed and recovered in the past/present/future of the whoniverse 😕
26 December 2023 at 21:28 #75144Mrs Flood. Definitely not the Rani, it’s *never* the Rani 😉 It’s difficult to see how she could be River either; we’ve seen both her death and what she said was her last meeting with the Doctor before her death, when he took her to the Singing Towers. She survives digitally, saved in the Library computer, from which she can evidently finagle her way into any other virtual environment – but into a house in a London street which coincidentally happens to be next to where the family of the latest companion of the Doctor lives? Susan is possible. If she was 15 in 1963, and assuming a normal age progression since then, without any complications caused by time travel, she would now be 75 which would certainly fit, assuming also that she has acquired a London accent since the 1960s, when her speech was drama school RP. The Master – possibly, if chameleon arched, but I doubt it. Too twinkly. My bet is that RTD is going to blind side us with something out of left field.
Ashildr’s empty cradles are a red herring, I’m afraid. The infant and child mortality rate in medieval Europe, even without the Black Death, was horrendous, that’s why the general life expectancy at birth then was so low. It’s not that everyone snuffed it promptly at age 35. But now, as usual, I’m starting to be boringly pedantic. Sorry!
Forget my mention in the post above of the 1911 heatwave in England. Houdini was in the UK a few years before that, but in 1911 he seems to have been on the east coast of the USA, where the summers tend to be hotter in any year.
26 December 2023 at 16:30 #75141The Doctor dances, with not a hint of the Drunken Giraffe, he even sings, and – pace @kharis – this is the Doctor now, enjoying life, freed by the bi-generation from the last traces of PTSD and angst and ‘absolutely’ himself, as he said in his first moments. So I agree entirely with the seemingly almost universal opinion that Gatwa owns the character in this fifteenth incarnation.
This was a very digestible Christmas feast, not too heavy but with enough substance to satisfy and enjoy, and the fourteenth Doctor’s invocation of a superstition at the edge of the universe continues to resonate, different laws of physics may apply, and so we have goblins bimbling by in a rickety, time-surfing ship which defies mavity.
According to Terry Pratchett goblins are not bad, just misunderstood and maligned. RTD evidently disagrees, because his goblins are the traditional sort, mischief working, accident causing, and with a taste for human flesh, especially babies garnished with coincidence. What’s not to like, since all comes right in the end, and with a neat little time loop as a bonus. It seemed entirely appropriate that an ingredient in the almost instant bond which formed between the Doctor and Ruby was the further coincidence that both are adopted foundlings of unknown parentage. I guess that one theme of the coming season is likely to be the Ruby’s search for a resolution of the mystery of her birth, but will RTD venture so far as to investigate the Doctor’s origins pre-Gallifrey?
Incidentals: The ‘long hot summer’ the Doctor spent with Houdini; 1911 was a famously hot summer if that fits – I must check. And I nearly laughed aloud at the blink-and-you miss-it moment when one goblin sotto voce corrects the singers pronunciation of ‘scones’.
25 December 2023 at 22:37 #75132who is Anita Dobson playing?
The name of the character, Mrs Flood, gives no clue as far as I’m aware, but perhaps a former – hitherto unrecorded? – companion of the Doctor on his travels. Or, given the number of times the Doctor has saved London from alien threats, maybe just someone who hasn’t been afflicted by the collective amnesia which seems to afflict the general population on such occasions
25 December 2023 at 22:26 #75131Yes, The Carol of the Bells, which we heard in the introduction when baby Ruby is left at the church and again at the other end of the time loop when the Doctor returns her to the church porch – presumably the church choir singing. I wonder whether the choice here was deliberate, given that it is a Ukrainian song in origin – although I think the original words refer to Spring, not Christmas.
22 December 2023 at 21:14 #75097Just discovered that I forgot to buy an essential ingredient for the stuffing 😬, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t time to stop by and wish everyone here on the forum a peaceful and joyous Christmas and a hopeful New Year.
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