May has no chance of lasting until 2020. Her entire schtick is “if you ignore it, it will go away”.
It won’t, especially now she has tied herself to terrorists and neutered the only effective weapon they had against Corbyn. Her weakness is emphasised by the fact that her reshuffle left all of the big jobs in place including Hammond, who she wanted rid of. And Labour now knows that galvanising the youth vote works.
One by-election in a urban marginal and she is stuffed.
So watch out for another hubristic snap election when the Universities are on break.
Oh, and she can’t sort out brexit. It is a clusterfuck wrapped in a nightmare.
The campaign in England was the same – The Theresa May Party. But is was all but impossible (as you say) for the SNP to do anything other than regress to the mean. Curiously the Tories got put to the sword in all the target seats she visited.
GO OUT AND BUY THEA GILMORE’S NEW ALBUM NOW! I posted The War, the teaser track, a while back but the standout tracks are Slow Fade To Black and Rise (which is just sublime) – but rather annoyingly neither have been youtubed yet. So have two of the best covers I have ever heard.
TP writes:
“Your story last week about Pearl Mackie being a diva was bollocks. At BBC Roath Lock I never saw her be anything less than entirely lovely, not in a polite reserved way, but actually talking to everyone like she was part of the crew and not the talent.”
Random thought: @sirclockface reported Who film in Kettering ages ago, in a scene apparently set in WWII and reports of Jenna Coleman being seen (but not witnessed by him). A scene which has yet to see the light of day.
Now that really would send the ARSE brigade over the edge….
Exactly what @blenkinsopthebrave said. New Doctor + Amy Pond. The Eleventh Hour.
I’m sure I recall RTD saying he asked Moff where he needed the show “to be” – and it was Moff’s idea to keep Jenny alive, even though that didn’t pan out. I would imagine Moffat will no more wish to write Chibnall into a corner than Chibnall would want to be written into a corner.
(I wasn’t going to post this, because it is a bit depressing, but it provides some counter view to the “insider” source. Popbitch is scurrilous but does tend to have good contacts and a keen understanding of defamation law…)
>> Who’s next? <<
Cast list getting shorter
Pearl Mackie has been hugely popular with fans as the Doctor’s new sidekick on Doctor Who, but behind the scenes? Not so much.
Perhaps she’s too focused on delivering a good performance on screen, but Pearl just seems to forget her manners on set. Her behaviour was described by various members of the cast and crew as ranging from “grossly rude” to “eye-wateringly rude” – and she also spent a fair bit of time giving unrequested lectures on acting to the Doctor himself, Peter Capaldi.
Of course, Capaldi won’t have to deal with it any longer as he’s not coming back next series. But if the rumours going around are correct, neither will she.
I would absolutely love it if it turned out that Gomez has been bullshitting and Missy is the new Doctor (which could actually be shoe-horned into @brewski‘s bonkerising).
In fact I would listen to an entire Smiths album and only stab myself once.
Just to say, if you were in any way capable of holding it together while Ariana Grande completely lost it while singing Over The Rainbow then I don’t think I can ever trust you.
you have to live with the consequences of the setting you’ve chosen
Why? It’s not what the story is about, it is not a documentary and it’s not a Peter F Hamilton 300-page-story-squeezed-into-1200-pages doorstop. It is also something that Doctor Who has zero track record in doing.
Also, you don’t get to decide what SF is, any more than I do or anyone else here. By all means don’t like the episode (I thought is was OK, with a few very good bits and a crappy pyramid launch from Cheapside and Gresham Street), but at least try to explain without stubborn insistence that it must fit in to your hideously narrow straitjacket conception of what SF is.
“In amongst seven billion, there’s someone like you.”
That is what the story was about, not the logistics of post-War reconstruction.
As a writer/production team if you aren’t willing to show the way the earth and human society is altered by a multiple large scale alien invasion (over 10 year period in the case of AG Who), with many deaths and damage to infrastructure then why bother writing that story line ?
Because sometimes that isn’t what the story is about.
Yes – that is spoilerly, despite claims to the contrary (SFX mag used to do “spoiler-free previews” which were excellent, until the person doing them start to injecting opinion into them).
A “spoiler-free review” is a chimera. It cannot be.
No. You would be amazed the shit people put on there for lolz. My personal favourite was Bamber Gascoine being Paul Gascoine’s dad. Low traffic pages don’t always get modded quickly.
Yes, she’s been of a few times and is always charming and articulate. I like her because she is not afraid to show the limits of her understanding. Also, when I disagree with her it is for interesting reasons.
I quite like the idea of Liam Brady as the new Doctor. At the end of his career, with West Ham, he scored one of the best goals ever seen at Upton Park. Right up there with Di Volleyio.
Way back in the day, a mate of mine who really understood football said: “The biggest problem with English football is that Frank Stapleton is Irish”.
So I didn’t bother watching the election interrogations last night (tbh, I’m a bit beyond caring), but the Twitter reaction seems to be that Theresa Mayhew was less than impressive.
Than, Laurie Penny – a left wing writer of rare wit and intelligence, and also a great big nerd – posted this:
You seem to be trying to analysis Bill’s choices as rational, when the explicit aim of the Monks was to punish reason (the UN dudes fear was quite reasonable, given how outclassed the B52s and subs were, and the generals were trying to strategise, an act of reason).
Bill suddenly found herself promoted to President-by-proxy, while the mentor who has plucked her from the kitchen and given her all her dreams, then shown her wonders beyond compare – by far the most powerful person she had ever met, and who had chosen her to knock around with – was in mortal danger. I very much doubt the Monks were being honest when they say she acted out of love. What mattered was that her decision was entirely emotional.
Moffat doesn’t waste time with wordy explanation. We have seen that Bill and Doc have been knocking around – at the very least – for several months. Everything needed to understand this episode was there, it’s just that Moffat writes in sentences, not paragraphs.
Useful lesson there.
Also, why the hell are you so obsessed with what other sites think? Who cares? Christ, the Graun has people who think “Well, that was no Robots of Sherwood” is still funny.
Another post gone walkabout – some time after @wolfweeds #58228, and I’m sure it initially posted (did you get a notification, wolfweed?) Nothing consequential in the post, but strays are worth noting.
No dog in the fight (more of an East London persuasion), but never get tired of seeing Money Launderers FC lose.
I got the impression the specs could help with the digital stuff, but the not the tumblers. Odd things that can see the outline of a pyramid but not a person. Actually, the specs display looks a bit like Battlezone, if you remember that arcade classic…
Farm cats might – and within a few generations they would be indistinguishable from the African Wildcats they are descended from. Bengals might because they are only 2 generatiosn removed from the Asian Leopard Cats they were bred from.
But your average domestic moggie and fancy breeds? They would be very quickly ‘selected out’. The population would plummet; most would go; some would make the cut (just as the odd strand of modern wheat might survive as the creeping red fescue reasserts itself).
But at the microbial level, one hypothesis for the end of the Black Death (and the – comparatively – lesser impact of later plagues) is that the strand of plague mutated into one that *does not wipe out its host*. ‘Cos, in terms of natural selection, leaving yourself with no hosts will select you for extinction. That wouldn’t do us a whole bunch of good (hence the multiple “sort ofs” above)…
36:00 – Broken glasses scientist informs the Doctor that even though she activated the safety protocol that seals the lab and stops deadly toxins escaping into the atmosphere, an air pump will activate in thirty minutes that will… um… let the deadly toxins escape into the atmosphere. Oh and it can’t be turned off.
I was thinking about this and it sort of makes sense. Sort of. Almost nothing genetically modified – whether via gene editing or selective breeding – would last very long in the wild. They are not selected to. No dog, no cat, no wheat, no cow, no maize, no apples, no bananas, no spuds – nothing that we see in our shops – would survive long. So it is – sort of – feasible that something that is lethal in a closed environment might be less so in the fresh Yorkshire air. After all, it’s Yorkshire and Yorkies are always telling us how brilliant Yorkshire is (sorry….mind wandered….). Unless stupid scientist misplaces a decimal. Sort of.
A dream exists solely in the mind of a dreamer. When you wake it is gone. A sim is souped-up AI video game that, when we wake up, is still very much there. And being AI it is smarted enough to send a warning. This was spelled out by the Doctor encouraging Bill to go after Penny.
The closest you can get to it being a dream is in the sense of a prophetic dream (or dream vision, if you prefer). And if you have a problem with prophetic dreams, then kiss goodbye to close to 100% of fantasy.
Along with Bobby Ewing walking out of the shower at the end.
Oh for heaven’s sake. Bobby Ewing coming out of the shower meant everything that happened in however many seasons Patrick Diuffy was absent for NEVER happen.
These weren’t dreams, they were sims, exactly has the Culture ships in Iain M Banks SF ran sims for every battle and every contact situation. (God, imagine the fun Banks (RIP) would have had if he’d thought to do a story from the POV of a simmed character. It would have been Banks meets Pratchet’s (RIP) Only You Can Save Mankind (opening scene – boy playing Space Invaders-like video game when suddenly the “invaders” surrender).) And the Doctor used the knowledge to encourage Bill, while himself apparently retreating to the Tardis to think.
Why a pyramid
Why a 5,000 year old pyramid where none had been before? To get the attention of the powers that be. One of whom cowered, the others attempting strategy. Bill, on the other hand, just did what she thought was the right thing.
Also, pyramids are cool.
As @thane15 says, much more that a few weeks has passed. At least several months. Bill has literally just discovered – in a high pressure situation – that the Doctor paid a huge toll for saving her (and she does not know about regeneration, since the Doctor swiftly changes the subject when he casually mentioned it in Smile (I think)).
The point of this story wasn’t “who is real”. That story has been done. It was the central Capaldi-Doctor dilemma – how do you choose when all the choices are bad?
I was with them all the way up to “the songs still sound marvellous”. The emperor never had any clothes, he just hid his self-pity behind Johnny Marrs’s fig leaf.
Ugh. I feel the need for something silly and over the top. Paging Miss Lee, paging Miss Lee…
The preening narcissist Morrissey can fuck right off. This is what Manchester is about:
Goosebumps! The amazing moment Manchester crowd joins in with woman singing Oasis – Don't Look Back in Anger after minutes silence pic.twitter.com/Cw4mOq8yde
The Poke, bless its little cotton socks, did a fine job of rounding up the #BritishThreatLevels hashtag. Even Louise Mensch managed to be quite funny. Go figure. (One not on that list which I just spotted “We only have UHT milk”)
Maybe it is because my old neighbours are a Bangladeshi family who, on formal and celebration days wear the most spectacular and brilliantly vibrant colours that led my first impression to be that the monks were very much Asian-inspired.
My first thought on seeing the monk, walking towards the Doctor bak-lit by the portal was “Buddhist” and they have monks too. Or maybe the Hare Krishna devotees, those who go down the street singing and chanting.
And I can easily Moffat thinking in terms of other lives lived that Karma might just come into play…
I think any groups (Catholic or otherwise) who take offence are indulging in 100 degree proof spirit special pleading.
We only know of the “test” from the Veritas, but it seems probably to me that there was other information that persuaded both Church and Science that suicide might be an effective way to chuck a spanner in the invader’s works. Moffat is not given to over-explaining!
I’ve never been too bothered with Moffat’s (and his writers’) leg pulls. I have no more problem with a bit of hand-wavy oblique reference to Pope Joan (anachronistic art style or not) than with the tendency to chuck the word “quantum” about with gay abandon (or, for that matter, straight abandon and gender-non-binary abandon).
Timescape is an absolute cracker and, as you say, the pathos of the hero-scientist’s situation was very well played out. It was also, you may recall, bleakly contrasted with what happened after You-Know-Who dodged the bullet.
Apparently the theory he was playing with has now been pretty well abandoned, but so what? Totally not the point.
