SPOILER, SPOILER, SPOILER...

@nerys well if rumours are true……. arrrgh hmm will have to slip over to spoilers to respond to your last comment in the previous post

@nerys  @blenkinsopthebrave  Agreed; self-doubt rooted in a lively self-awareness that I don’t recall seeing much of in previous AG Doctors.  I get the sense of a very complex and sensitive subjectivity in this Doctor, and that’s part of both the hesitance and the impulsiveness that I see there.

@wolfweed  Old lady: I already knew that bec…[Read more]

@nerys

I just happened to watch it the other night. I knew the idea was there, but got lucky in my choice of which episode.

@nerys

But how does that explain what happened last week on Mars, when the TARDIS was largely absent? How were Iraxxa and Friday able to understand the Brits, and vice versa?

River – Angels Take Manhattan, when the vase was translating: “Gift of the Tardis – it hangs around”.

@blenkinsopthebrave:  Capaldi’s first outing as the Doctor has one important characteristic that has stayed with him throughout…self-doubt.

Forgive me if I am misquoting, but I remember Nardole telling the Doctor that  he knew everything. The Doctor replies that he doesn’t. Nardole answers that he always acted as though he knew everyt…[Read more]

@Nerys  Yeah, pretty stretchy all round, but that’s DW for you, and it was a cheery little “Tarzan and Gunga Din at King Solomon’s Mines” story with a more accurate take on Victorian Empire building.  Except for the beach ball part . . .

@nerys  I apologize in advance for my ignorance: Would it have been historically accurate for a soldier like Vincey to be serving in a Victorian-era regiment?

Gatiss talked about this in an interview — but he came across an article about a young boy who was adopted by a regiment in — somewhere in Africa of the middle east (?) who did, in fact,…[Read more]

@nerys

Would it have been historically accurate…

Actually, @wolfweed posted a very interesting article about just that question, over on the Spoilers thread at #59056

@nerys  Who will heal the Doctor?

Probably nobody, fully, until he heals himself — by regenerating; turning the page on 12.

Damn it!

@thane15   Our hybrid is humming right along tonight (well, night for me, anyway).  I didn’t care for Seinfeld, but I do like “the bar man is the therapist”.   And you’re so right about that shabby coat — at lea…[Read more]

@nerys

I agree with you that there’s a lot the resonates with this episode, especially on a second viewing. Everything about it is about being fake, nothing is what it seems. Even the Doctor (at the start). Even Bill’s memory of her mother isn’t what it seems. It’s her fantasy of her mum (albeit enabled by the photos the Doctor took). Much like…[Read more]

Well, I’m a little late to the party, having only now managed to watch all these three episodes, and to read the threads on each (over two nights).

Everybody has come up with such great, insightful (and bonkers) ideas that I don’t have much to add, although it just occurred to me that the Munks (© @thane15) have done the world a great service -…[Read more]

@nerys  Don’t feel confused or bad about liking this episode.  There’s a lot to like about it, even with its arguable dodgy bits (which most Who stories have anyway).  🙂  This one has really been growing on me, in a way that “Pyramid at the End of the World” hasn’t.

Bill’s pure image being based on a fiction she came up with is important.  A…[Read more]

@nerys  I think the Doctor’s basic problem is that he is lonely for his own kind. Missy is the only one left

Well, Gallifrey is back so there are TLs for company if he wants to make some kind of a deal for visiting; but if we take “his own kind” to mean other *rebel* TLs who’ve broken away from Gallifreyan rules and attitudes, then I’d agree th…[Read more]

@nerys

Well with respect to the way that  the Doctor has always been avoiding his own kind even when he

was very young by hiding out in the Cloisters on Galifrey  just indicates to me that he’s

never missed them really all that much.  No doubt he missed a few individually.  Including Missy!

I think he’s only lonely for the companions that he…[Read more]

@nerys I agree with you on this too.  (Sniff)

@blenkinsopthebrave and @nerys I remember the first time I saw that Trek episode, too.  I would probably have been about 13.  However, even then I was pretty weird. And while I was also very disturbed by the cold ease with which the woman was killed, I also distinctly remember thinking: “She was turned into that hard foam stuff they put in the v…[Read more]

@nerys
That Star Trek episode was from series 2. It was called “By any other Name”. I would have been 15 when I saw it, and that act, of the young woman being reduced to a cube of chalk and then crushed in his hand, had a huge impact on me. I was devastated. I watched it again only recently, and, 50 years later, I was still devastated. Even now, I…[Read more]

@nerys @ichabod I agree that there was only so far this episode could go and still be family-friendly.  Many critics and viewers wanted the Doctor to have either truly sided with the Monks or have been brainwashed, from my understanding, and have the episode just deal with that.

If he’d been sincere he no longer could be seen as a hero at all,…[Read more]

@missrori  I think what Moffat and co. meant about Bill not being “special” was that she does not enter the story as having some great mystery surrounding her, as Amy Pond did with the crack in her bedroom, or Clara Oswald did with her multiple lives.

Yes, you’re right — and thanks for that post, it’s really right on the mark (especially that…[Read more]