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15 December 2023 at 22:51 #75034
cauliflower cheese. It’s a marvellous dish!
Can’t argue with that, it made me the Mudlark I am; likewise the Macra(ni) Cheese, regarding which the only terrors were my best friend and me when it appeared on the school dinner menu 😜
Looking forward, maybe the Toymaker’s phantasmagorical legions to come will include that well known Greek/Gallic hybrid the Gorgonzola
15 December 2023 at 10:21 #75025There’s no way no14 is going to stay put when the Earth is once again under threat (checks fobwatch) I think this is the BBC not having the courage of its convictions when casting a black lead
Well, if RTD is to be believed, that isn’t the way they are thinking at the moment https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/sci-fi/doctor-who-david-tennant-return-newsupdate/
The way I understand it, the bi-generation, allowing the old version of the Doctor to hand over responsibility and retire, was a gentle and symbolic way of putting the past of the show with all its accumulated complications to bed before a reset – and the fact that it is intended to be a complete reset has been trumpeted for months. Naturally RTD and everyone concerned have been keen to promote the show, but to all appearances they really do have great confidence for its future with Ncuti Gatwa. Judging by what we have seen of him so far he looks completely right as the Doctor and, as @whohar says, and for the reasons he stated, there is no sign that tokenism has been a factor in the casting.
14 December 2023 at 11:24 #75010I hadn’t read this before posting my ‘educated guess’ but it seems we are both spot on in our thinking, at least as regards the foundling theme. Great minds and all that 😉
13 December 2023 at 21:20 #75007I hasn’t realised it was for Children in Need but, yes, most appropriately Doctorish. Like you, the first thing I thought of when they announced the name of the new companion was Ruby Tuesday, and I have to wonder if the song planted the idea in RTD’s mind. The haunting lyrics could prove very appropriate
13 December 2023 at 15:52 #75003Judging by the video, an enormous amount of work must have gone into the set and the FX, whether CGI or prosthetics or a mixture of these. I ended up watching it frame by frame, and the amount and fineness of the detail, particularly in the decaying woodwork of the ship, is staggering. After the episode airs I can foresee myself re-watching the whole thing in the same way.
13 December 2023 at 15:34 #75002There certainly has been a flood of advance material – publicity to attract new viewers or to encourage viewers who abandoned the show to return, no doubt.
Maybe I’m being over cautious; it’s just that I seem to recall that trailers and clips released in advance, and all discussion thereof, used to be quarantined in the Approved Spoilers forum
13 December 2023 at 11:44 #74997The video of the Goblin’s Song posted by @blenkinsopthebrave and some of the incidental details it reveals, plus other information released have sparked an idea about the plot of the forthcoming Christmas Special.
Firstly there is the unusual name of the 15th Doctor’s new companion, Ruby Sunday, and secondly the title of the Christmas Special, The Church on Ruby Road, and the recurrence of the name Ruby is surely not coincidental. We have also been told that there is some mystery in Ruby’s past. My educated guess is that Ruby Sunday is a foundling, origin unknown, and that her name derives from where she was abandoned, i.e. in Ruby Road and probably in the church or at its door, and the day of the week on which she was found – Sunday being most likely if it was the church
Given this information it is unlikely that the Doctor could resist trying to help Ruby by following up the few clues they have, starting with the Church, and using the telepathic/mind reading abilities of the Tardis to recover her subconscious infant memories. This leads them to what Ncuti Doctor refers to as a ship, and which looks in fact like the interior of a very dilapidated 17th or 18th century sailing ship, and thus to the goblins.
So what if Ruby was in fact another intended victim of the goblins and either rescued by someone who then left her in sanctuary to be found, or left in Ruby Street to be collected by/teleported to the goblin’s ship but rescued before this could happen
13 December 2023 at 11:08 #74996Interesting but, um, for the sake of the spoiler averse perhaps it might have been more appropriately posted in BBC Approved Spoilers. I have a theory about the plot of the Christmas special based on this and other scraps of information let fall in the advance publicity but will post it there, just in case.
most fairy tales were quite remarkably gruesome, after all.
Indeed they are, unless bowdlerised to protect the supposedly delicate sensibilities of the very young. If they are anything like I was the little ghouls will probably lap this up with delight.
11 December 2023 at 22:24 #74966They were all different, but they were all Who.
Indeed they were and continue to be.
As already indicated, I rate this episode pretty highly and I’m not sure what my further musings are worth, but here goes anyway.
The Giggle had a nice mix of who-ish ingredients. There was plenty of action with an occasional joke, and the behind-the-sofa quotient was more than adequate, though more creepy and alarming than outright scary; an infinite regression of ill lit, dark panelled corridors and doors leading to more corridors is the stuff of nightmares, not to mention murderous, cannibal puppets – ‘babbies want to eat’. There were also moments of reflection and, touched on at the core, a major social issue
In the dissemination of the time bomb planted by the Toymaker, from Logie-Baird’s mechanical system, trialled only in a few initial pre-war BBC broadcasts, to cathode ray to LCD, plasma and LED, TV to computer monitor screen, the technology changed but the transmission was all, culminating in the internet and the world wide web with all their potential benefits. Except that the means for every individual on the planet to express themselves to a global audience has also given a voice to all the worst and most toxic nastiness in humanity. We are all too ripe for the exploitative games of a Toymaker, and the Doctor’s accusatory catalogue of these worst of human characteristics had echoes of the 12th Doctor’s magnificent speech in The Zygon Inversion.
When it comes to the portrayal of the Toymaker himself, Neil Patrick Harris conveyed perfectly that air of sinister and lethal playfulness, even if there was a hint of Batman’s Joker in the ‘Spice Up Your Life’ interlude – and whether the latter is a good or bad thing is a matter of opinion.
The bi-regeneration is clearly seen as controversial in some quarters and may be a self indulgent cop-out on the part of RTD but, as the Toymaker said of the similar cop-outs in the deaths/non-deaths of Amy, Clara and Bill, ‘Well that’s all right then’, and I see no harm in having the 10th/14th Doctor in reserve, with the possibility at least of a very occasional outing in future. I doubt if there is any danger of a full blown spin-off, because I can’t see Tennant being up for it. Meanwhile the sentimental side of me thinks the old Doctor deserves to stop running for a while and enjoy a taste of a more or less normal family life. Long ago he was a grandfather and before that, presumably, a father – or mother, and later on he had a clone daughter though he didn’t get to enjoy her company for long; now he has a best friend, an honorary niece and, for better or worse, a mad aunt .
In a wider context the bi-regeneration of the Doctor – not to mention the twinning of the Tardis – seems to fit in with a general theme of singularity and doubling, unity and duality, binary and non-binary. Key quote in the episode: the Doctor to Kate and the assembled UNIT staff; ‘The universe is not binary’, though even the Toymaker, an agent of chaos, is bound by the rules of the game, and it takes two to play. It also takes two to defeat him – two individuals who are paradoxically one person. And prior to this, when it came to dealing with the metacrisis, where one person could not contain the Doctor/Donna it took two linked people, mother and non-binary daughter, to cope and realise a solution.
10 December 2023 at 11:07 #74920Binary, doppelgangers, bi-generation – I’m sensing a theme here
Exactly the same thought had occurred to me 🙂
Your mention of The Magic Shop sent me this morning to my overstuffed bookshelves and to a hefty tome – 1148 pages – containing the collected short stories of H G Wells. It belonged to my father originally, and for once I managed to snaffle it before my brother got his paws on it. As for whether the encounter in the disappearing shop turned out well or otherwise; the father may have retained a lingering sense of unease but Gip, as the mysterious Proprietor said, was after all the Right Sort of Boy.
The Toymaker’s marvellous and slightly creepy shop in this episode, does seem to hark back to a long literary tradition of mysterious and sometimes sinister toyshops and toymakers.
9 December 2023 at 23:12 #74907Thanks . Lord Voldemort’s Book of Resurrection Spells it is, then – that is, if I can find it on my double-stacked book shelves. 😉
9 December 2023 at 23:03 #74906This is an episode that I definitely want to watch again before attempting to comment at any length, and in any case it’s getting late and time I finished my glass of wine and started thinking about cocoa and bed. I get the impression that RTD has reined in the tendency he had before of going OTT with the pyrotechnics to just the right amount and his touch has become even surer; the result here was dazzling.
For some time I have had a good feeling about Ncuti Gatwa, and on the evidence of this introduction I don’t think there is much chance of his disappointing us
9 December 2023 at 22:44 #74902@juniperfish @blenkinsopthebrave
The hand with the red painted fingernails picking up the tooth is an almost exact and obviously intentional parallel to the final scene in Last of the Time Lords, where we see the Master’s funeral pyre and then a close up of his signet ring lying on the beach, and a hand with red painted fingernails reaching to pick it up. I seem to remember speculation then that it was the Rani, but was the mystery ever solved?
9 December 2023 at 17:48 #74884Perhaps The Celestial Toymaker is back to do battle with a member of his(her) own species…
Ooh, like it 🙂
8 December 2023 at 21:16 #74853On the subject of The Celestial Toymaker which came up in the discussion of The Wild Blue Yonder, it has been confirmed that animated versions of the lost episodes are to be made.
7 December 2023 at 22:29 #74847ps1l0v3y0u Yes, plagiarism is not the least of Geoffrey’s sins, and where other sources failed him he shamelessly filled in the blanks by inventing his own ‘facts’ out of the whole cloth. The result is a racy narrative of its kind, but woe betide they who take it at face value.
7 December 2023 at 22:13 #74846I guess regeneration is plastic only within core Shobogan DNA variations.
That’s exactly on point, I think. If Time Lords were capable of taking on on the appearance of any and every life form they encountered they would be only a few steps removed from zygons, whose ability to morph has a very different biological basis.
Where the Time Lords are concerned, the idea of imprinting is both appealing and very plausible. The ordinary people of Gallifrey, the baseline Shobogans,on the very few occasions they have been depicted, have as far as I can recall been shown as uniformly white*, and for the Time Lords this is presumably also the baseline, but the latter have, over the millennia, encountered multitudes of humanoid aliens of all types and skin shades who might have influenced the range of physical appearances they could adopt.
In such circumstances it seems highly unlikely that what we tend to perceive as ‘racial’ differences would be a cause of discrimination among them. Someone whose friend has regenerated is unlikely to significantly change their behaviour toward that friend simply because their skin colour and/or facial characteristics have altered radically. In any case, all the indications are that Time Lord prejudices are mostly to do with class and their assumption of superiority.
* But if I failed to notice on first viewing that Nathaniel Curtis’s skin tone and facial features differed slightly from the North European norm, maybe my powers of observation are not particularly reliable 🙂
7 December 2023 at 10:23 #74837@whohar @ps1l0v3y0u
Irish lore, including sources such as The Tain, would certainly be a rich vein to mine.
Where RTD is concerned the sources would be more likely Welsh, but at any rate it seems as if he will be straying in the general direction of folk tales next season. The interview in the dead trees version of the Radio Times provides a bit more detail. At the edge of the universe, where the boundary between the real and the not-yet-real is thin, the Doctor’s invocation of the salt superstition clearly will have consequences.
I’m surprised that anyone is kind to Geoffrey of Monmouth, at least when it comes to his cheek in calling his work of fiction a ‘history’ 😉
6 December 2023 at 23:14 #74833Your suggestion of LeGuin’s Gethenians as a lens through which to view the Time Lords of Gallifrey is interesting and illuminating but, though the term gender fluid may apply to the people of Gallifrey, unless I have misunderstood the term I’m not sure that it describes the people of Gethen.
As currently established, Time Lords have the latent ability to present as male or female – or possibly even intersex, but they can only switch from one to the other when they regenerate. Between regenerations they are stuck in the same form for the duration.
Gethenians differ in that, if they are normal, they are simultaneously male and female all the time, true hermaphrodites, and every individual can be fully functional as either. During the few days of the month when they are in kemmer they develop the sexual characteristics of one or the other. For the rest of the month they are a unitary male/female and functionally asexual unless, of course, they are pregnant.
To reimagine the Gallifreyans on such lines would be an amazing step, though to say the least it would be difficult to retcon the canon to that extent after 60 plus years. The outrage it would cause in the ARSE brigade and beyond would be delightful to witness 😈 , while for those who like at least a hint of romance or sexual tension between Doctor and human companion it might be a bit of a damper.
As you may know, Ursula LeGuin said later that she regretted using the male pronoun for the Gethenians. On the other hand it fits the situation in the novel because the first person narrator in the novel is a human male from Earth and a major point is the fact that, because of his cultural conditioning and biological assumptions, and because of the Gethenians’ indeterminate appearance, he finds it difficult for a long time to perceive them as other than male.
5 December 2023 at 18:33 #74814As I recall the most recent deployment of the HADS function prior to this was in The Magicians Apprentice, when the Tardis was fired on by Daleks. Missy, with Clara in tow, employed a different sneaky system to exit the scene
5 December 2023 at 11:51 #74808I’m actually finding myself weirdly disconnected from the episodes to the extent that I’m wondering what they are for exactly.
This question set me pondering in the early hours. I came to the tentative conclusion that, because these three episodes are intended to mark the 60th anniversary, the return of a generally popular Doctor and companion pairing along with references to the past provide an appropriate tribute, before a significant reset with Ncuti Gatwa in the forthcoming season. Also, as @scaryb suggests, it is reassuring territory to lure back existing fans of the show before a plunge into the new.
At the same time, RTD does seem to be setting up situations and themes which could be carried over into future episodes. The business with the salt is one such, though maybe only for the next episode, in which it looks as if the unreal may be about to invade the real in our corner of the universe thanks to the intervention of a certain Eternal. The Doctor’s worry about the possible consequences of his invocation of the salt superstition reminded me a little of Pratchett’s Hogfather, in which, for a while, every casual mention of the kind of quasi-mythical entity commonly invoked to account for an annoying occurrence causes its physical embodiment to materialise.
4 December 2023 at 17:08 #74783@jimthefish Yes, the last episode of The Celestial Toymaker is also available on BBC i player, along with all the other surviving and reconstructed BG episodes
4 December 2023 at 16:41 #74778Sorry about the multiple posts, but I just wanted to add that, like @jimthefish , I very much like @devilishrobby ‘s suggestion that this and the previous episode might be part of a scenario devised by the Toymaker, thus providing a link between the three specials. I’m not entirely convinced about The Star Beast, since it was based closely on an old graphic story, but in this episode the apparent changes wrought by the initial encounter with Newton certainly indicate that we ‘aren’t in Kansas any more, Toto’. Bur then when were we ever, where the Doctor is concerned?
4 December 2023 at 16:27 #74777As for the fuss about the casting of the young Isaac Newton, I really can’t see the problem. I wasn’t previously familiar with Nathaniel Curtis and on first viewing I truly didn’t notice the colour of his skin, and it’s not even as if his features are markedly un-european, so why the fuss? Granted he bears little resemblance to the portraits of Newton, but how often does an actor playing an historical character look like the original? In the TV adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s novels about Thomas Cromwell Mark Rylance looked nothing like Holbein’s portrait of the man, and it didn’t matter a jot.
4 December 2023 at 16:11 #74776Finally, space and time to put some of my thoughts into writing.
Once again, there was nothing complicated about this episode, it was just a good Doctor Who story, well executed in all respects, and with Tennant and Tate in top form, the double act all the more effective in what was essentially a two hander. As @jimthefish noted, it recalled elements of Midnight, Listen and Flatline, but it was none the worse for that as far as I’m concerned.
It was enough to draw me in completely, and I remained fully immersed for the duration, emerging at the end of the 60 minutes with a slight shiver to realise that my heart rate had increased, even though one knew that the Tardis was bound to turn up again in the nick of time, the only remaining tension then being when the Doctor, preoccupied with the Tardis controls, would notice that the ‘Donna’ he had pulled aboard wasn’t the original – and there was more than just the size of her wrists to betray this.
It had all the ingredients to be properly scary: an abandoned and apparently very old spaceship with vast echoing spaces, sudden unexplained noises and enigmatic PA announcements triggering reconfiguring of the interior, and extreme and imminent danger signalled by the Tardis engaging HADS and departing. And for fans of running in corridors it was a feast, with corridors aplenty. When the Tardis scarpered was the point at which many viewers were probably muttering, ‘Don’t do it, stay together, stay put; it’s obvious that if you go wandering off it won’t end well’, but this is the Doctor, so curiosity must be satisfied.
Doppelgangers are always unsettling, and morphing doppelgangers even more so. Some found the ‘arms too long’ effects very funny, but for me they added an extra frisson of horror. Afterwards, in Doctor Who Unleashed , they showed how the prosthetic arms were constructed, based on scans of the actors’ arms and hands, and in close up the hands, in particular, looked very realistic. They could even be operated to flex, although I’m not sure how much this was apparent in the relevant scenes. I very much appreciated also the subtle as well as not so subtle indications which, from the first, betrayed the differences between the doppelgangers and their originals. I don’t know why some people say that Catherine Tate cannot act, she managed this quite effectively.
A second viewing of such an episode can’t have quite the same effect, but it did provide an opportunity to appreciate some of the detail properly. At one point I noted that, in a scene in one of the dark service corridors, the actors’ breath was visibly condensing – or appeared to be so. This was filmed on some of the hottest days of the record summer heatwave of 2022, so conveying the sudden drops in temperature must have been difficult.
Question: The Doctor has more than once been to the end of the universe, timewise, but never before to beyond the edge of the universe, spatially. That this is possible is waved away by mention of ‘camboolian flat mathematics’, but what does it actually mean? The universe is still expanding, so what kind of dimension is it expanding into? and do the spaceship and people within that hypothetical dimension create a mini-universe of their own?
Small niggle: the horse headed captain is portrayed as a skeleton, but in the absence of matter of any kind, even hydrogen, and in what one presumes is a temperature of absolute zero, wouldn’t a corpse be freeze dried and mummified, rather than decay to a skeleton?
4 December 2023 at 11:43 #74772It looks as if the Doctor was right; it’s all wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff
‘Wobbly spacetime’ may help resolve contradictory physics theories | Physics | The Guardian
Will post my reactions to The Wide Blue Yonder as soon as I have the space and time. Problems with plumbers, problems with my Tivo box and overseas Christmas correspondence pending.
3 December 2023 at 11:31 #74755Granted, and I will allow that, his mind distracted by the urgency of the moment, he can be forgiven some confusion between old London, or even modern central London, and the whole of Greater London with it’s vastly larger population.
Under no circumstances should this be taken as evidence that age = senility 🙂
3 December 2023 at 10:57 #74752…. “mavity”. Surely, that joke/word is first uttered by Newton after they have flown off, so why are they playing with it on the spaceship?
My assumption was that their encounter with Newton and Donna’s joke (Boom Boom!) had altered history, with consequences yet to be seen. Otherwise it would have been pointless.
As for the word itself, presumably it’s intended to derive from mass rather than weight so isn’t entirely nonsense, although it did also remind me a bit of the Children in Need sketch, with the Kaled technician trying every combination of the letters in Kaled except the correct one. (Hope that doesn’t count as a spoiler; apologies if it does).
2 December 2023 at 09:32 #74730😀 But was it not The Phantom Raspberry Blower of Old London Town? I rest my case.
While I’m here, I second @miapatrick in thanking you for the ear worm. And now I keep seeing an old B&W TV screen and an unfeasibly elderly police sergeant (same tune, more or less)
1 December 2023 at 16:59 #74726less sure about the damage to the streets just getting healed up.
Yes, I baulked a little at that. It is one thing to halt the ongoing damage by aborting the spaceship’s take off sequence, but how would that that magically cause the riven streets to seal up? It was one of the minor nits I was determined not to pick, but now that you mention it ….. 🙂
1 December 2023 at 16:49 #74725Yes, we have strayed into nit-picking territory and I vowed I wouldn’t do so, at least for this episode, but once tempted I’m afraid I find it hard to resist, so forgive me if this once I ignore the cones and warning tape and dive into the rabbit hole. Then I will go away and sit quietly in my corner.
It’s the London Town in this particular context which grates on my English ear. As @whohar says, and I noted earlier, people, especially in the Home Counties, will talk of ‘going up to Town’ and people might also talk of ‘spending an evening on the Town’, but the ‘London’ in such instances would be tacitly understood, never stated. They would usually if not always be referring to the West End (shopping, theatre etc) or the City aka the Square Mile (finance and business), or perhaps Westminster (Parliament, Government offices etc). These are pretty much the areas which constituted the whole of London in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century, when it extended beyond the medieval city but before its rapid expansion to engulf all the surrounding villages and towns, so ‘London Town’ as an inclusive term might then have been in common use. Now it would be just London, or Greater London according to context unless you were in London itself, in which you would might refer to a particular district or borough.
But when I started thinking about it, it seemed even odder. The Doctor refers to the use of the Dagger drive destroying 5 square miles, or the whole of London Town and 9 million people. Five square miles is indeed the approximate area, give or take a square mile, of the City and West End, but in no sense the ‘whole of London’, and 9 million people is the population of Greater London which is approximately 607 square miles in area. The Doctor first bumps into Donna in Camden Market and later tells Shaun Temple he needs to go North, so the crash/landing site of the space ship and the centre of destruction is not even in London town in the old sense.
As @ps1l0v3y0u says, and as I suggested in an earlier post, it could well all be just an RTD tease.
29 November 2023 at 21:27 #74707Next Week’s edition of the Radio Times, dead tree version, has now landed on my doorstep and contains a feature on the new design of the Tardis interior. As far as I can discover it isn’t available in the on line version, but I am pleased to report that it sounds as if those intriguing circular, irising portals will indeed be used to access other areas/dimensions of the Tardis. For the time being the irising opening of the portals doors will be achieved by special effects, but they hope in time to find a means of working them for real.
The fact that everything is accessed by ramps would be very convenient if Shirley Bingham were ever to need to travel in the Tardis has only just occurred to me, but it is confirmed that she will be returning
P.S. I’d Forgotten that Ruth Madeley was also in /RTD’s Years and Years
29 November 2023 at 12:49 #74701maybe it originates in the home counties and London
People certainly used to, and presumably still do, speak of ‘going up to Town’ when visiting London for purposes such as shopping or meeting friends, but not ‘London Town’, which sounds distinctly odd in a modern context except, as you say, in songs and poems. Another such reference very familiar to me is in The Ballad of John Gilpin, by William Cowper.
John Gilpin was a citizen Of credit and renown. A train band captain eke was he, Of famous London Town
I knew most of that ballad by heart before I even learned to read, because it featured in a Ralph Caldecott picture book which was one of the few books I had in my early, wartime years.
To account for the Doctor’s usage one could weasel ones way round the problem by assuming that in the heat of the moment his capacious memory threw it up randomly from his large store of knowledge of London past, present and literary, but it is a bit of a stretch.
Incidentally, the writer of the lyrics of A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square, Eric Maschwitz, whose varied career included a spell working for the BBC, played a small part in the beginnings of Doctor Who
28 November 2023 at 22:49 #74694@pufferfish @jimthefish @ps1l0v3y0u
That reference to ‘London town’ is indeed weird. I confess I missed it at the time – possibly I was so engrossed that my mind filtered it and I just heard ‘London’ – but I checked the transcript and, yes, there it is. But even if the writer hadn’t been RTD, I’m not sure that it can be counted an Americanism. I know that in the USA, for historical and geographical reasons, the terms ‘city’ and ‘town’ have a significance different from that in the UK, but no American writer would refer to New York and its boroughs as a ‘town’, so why would they so term a conurbation the size of Greater London, even if this hypothetical American was confused by references to the City of London (granted city status by charter in 1067), the City of Westminster and the various boroughs.
Maybe someone’s thoughts were straying to song lyrics at the time – A Foggy Day, and A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square, both refer to ‘London Town’. Or perhaps it was just RTD getting in a dig at London centricity. *
* Is there such a word? I must check the dictionary.
27 November 2023 at 21:16 #74676I shall be on the lookout for similar transgressions in the coming weeks…
🙂 I’ll join you. I can be hawk eyed when it comes to transatlantic cultural false notes
27 November 2023 at 21:07 #74675Rose: Presumably she chose the name herself when she transitioned, but the choice could very well have been influenced by another of the suppressed memories she inherited from her mother – Donna would certainly have heard a lot about Rose from the Doctor. Agreed. the name also served as one more item in the pile of coincidences which clobbered the Doctor and drew him into the whole adventure. Whether it is really more than that, I’m doubtful.
If it does signal a return of Rose, I’m not enthusiastic. It’s not at all that I disliked Rose as a companion, but I wasn’t a big fan of the romantic build up in her relationship with the Doctor, and the big emotional parting left me dry eyed, I’m sorry to say. I think that to bring her back might be a step too far, like the tenth Doctor’s long drawn out farewell, when ‘I don’t want to go’ would have been enough.
On the other hand, I welcome the return of Donna. She is among my favourite companions for the very reasons that many others dislike her; her stroppiness, mouthiness and readiness to stand up to the Doctor. The tragedy of her parting I did find truly affecting, and I’m glad to see the metacrisis resolved.
27 November 2023 at 17:41 #74671Donna’s laptop could have been a Chekov’s laptop, but I doubt it in this case. Perhaps she had been reading emails or browsing the internet and something she read prompted her mind to drift off and ponder the matter of her sense of loss and of something ominous approaching. At any rate it provided a setting for her monologue rather than her just standing or sitting and staring at nothing in particular.
Yes, ‘The Boss’: an open invitation to speculate. Since we know that the Toymaker is to feature in the third special, perhaps it’s him, and in that case the stuffed toy monsters which Rose makes in the shed which is her personal space could potentially have relevance, beyond the suggestion that they emerged from the suppressed memories she had inherited from her mother.
But prior to the reference to ‘The Boss’, the Meep says cryptically that a creature with two hearts is a rare and special thing. The Meep has two hearts but is the only surviving one of it’s kind. It* knows the Doctor also has two hearts because he mentioned the fact, and even if there are other species with this peculiarity, the context implies that it is news of the Doctor in particular which would be of interest to said Boss. So the Boss is presumably an enemy of the Doctor or, perhaps, a Timelord him/herself. Maybe the Master?
Whether or not the Meep ever gets to see or contact the Boss again remains to be seen, but it certainly survived ejection from its space ship – we saw the parachute – and it might go to ground on earth and escape detection.
* The Meep’s preferred pronoun is the definite article, which is not a pronoun, so for the time being I will use ‘it’, no disrespect to species or gender intended
27 November 2023 at 16:57 #74670When you say
….. some of you do analyse too much, just sit back and enjoy!
it sounds as if you think analysis somehow spoils or detracts from enjoyment, which I assure is not the case. As @craig points out, this forum was set up precisely to provide space for people who want to analyse, theorise and speculate, and in fact it is difficult to construct interesting and entertaining theories, bonkers or otherwise, without some degree of prior analysis. It’s all part of the fun. Which isn’t to say that bonkerising is obligatory and shorter posts restricted to expressions of opinion are also welcome. And if you or others of like mind prefer to skip reading analytical posts and theories there is no reason why you shouldn’t do so.
Speaking solely for myself, analysis is usually an automatic part of the process in reading a novel or watching a tv show or film. If I’m not sufficiently engaged to analyse a work of fiction – or non fiction for that matter – it will generally fade fairly quickly from my memory, but maybe that’s at least partly my academic training.
26 November 2023 at 22:41 #74661PS. I love the new look Tardis console room – uncluttered and clinical in a hark back to the original, but with masses of space for interaction. I always got the feeling that the claustrophobic interior of Whittaker’s Tardis had been designed by someone who never took it further than a visual concept, without considering the actors who had to use the space
26 November 2023 at 22:20 #74660It’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.
24 November 2023 at 18:35 #74597This may be of interest to those who are fans of the original theme, assuming they haven’t already seen it.
23 November 2023 at 17:24 #74575@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.
23 April 2023 at 21:18 #74109@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.
20 September 2022 at 23:07 #73408Your 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.
19 September 2022 at 21:25 #73406For 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.
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’.
22 May 2022 at 22:33 #7316822 May 2022 at 22:22 #73167Like 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.
22 May 2022 at 21:54 #73166Children 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.
22 March 2022 at 21:40 #72961We 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.
18 March 2022 at 22:11 #72940@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 😡
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