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1 January 2016 at 18:06 #49915
Happy new one, all.
Some thoughts on what has gone and what may be to come: List of the Lost.
1 January 2016 at 01:21 #49889From an old Hootenanny – since I worship the very ground upon which Kate Rusby walks:
31 December 2015 at 11:15 #49880I read somewhere that the ratings have been down.
Overnight ratings (people watching on the day of broadcast, before midnight) are down for all shows except those with a live element (Strictly, for instance). All shows, no exceptions. In 2005 everyone watched live because there was little real choice. The days of 28m people watching the Morecambe & Wide Xmas special are long gone.
Consolidated ratings (Overnights and those watching on eg Sky+ , BTTV etc) are consistently in the 7-8m range, with occasional peaks. Overnights for this season were quite badly battered by the Rugby World Cup (major live sports are a ratings hoover) added to the BBC actively protecting Strictly’s schedule position.
Plus, of course the viewership is now global.
I think season 9 was the most powerful since Matt Smith’s first (which will always hold a special place for me) and the acting quite outstanding.
I doubt they will re-write Susan’s relationship.
30 December 2015 at 14:54 #49870Remember, as Rory’s Dad Brian, noted: “What sort of a man doesn’t carry a trowel?”
Only modified with gender-neutral lanaguage, obv.
30 December 2015 at 12:42 #49867@puroandson
Nope. Shall investigate.
30 December 2015 at 12:39 #49866My God! She lives!
That vid was very well done. Still haven’t worked out why a library needs an auto-destruct sequence though…
30 December 2015 at 02:45 #49849Maybe it works with River (when it works) because she’s not just human — she’s at least part TL, and her love for the Doctor is a version of Missy’s description of TL “friendship”?
No, I think River’s sensibility is entirely human (and English to boot). What is it the Jesuits say? Give me the boy until he is 7 and I will give you the man. (That was always the flaw in Kovarian’s plan.) She was (albeit inadvertently) brought up by Amy who, at the first instance, was the one who told River (newly regenerated) that The Doctor was worth saving.
30 December 2015 at 01:22 #4984330 December 2015 at 00:59 #49841@juniperfish @puroandson
Are any readings of modern Doctor Who which are not Moffat’s intended meanings “bad”?
Which part of nobody is disputing that there are different readings are you having trouble understanding? Misrepresenting what is said for the third time is not going to make it true, it just looks a little tawdry.
Sophistry not being a “details man”. The logic you present is that, since hydrogen burns and oxygen supports combustion, is must be possible that water is the most lethally inflammable substance on Earth.
And seeing a half second moment does not open the door for “it was all a cunning plan” when the other 2,490 seconds and their supporting material say something different. It is just confirmation bias in action.
But since you will doubtless misrepresent again, I’m out.
30 December 2015 at 00:35 #49838@puroandson
I have an issue with Clara’s confidence -my issue. And yet I do not with River -is it an age thing? I don’t think so. Is it an actress issue? Did Clara simply underperform? No I don’t think so.
I suspect that you are skirting around the superficially fine, but in terms of underlying causation very different, distinction between obsession and addiction. While obsession can be passionate and destructive, it can also bring splendour and majesty.
Addiction almost always ends up in the same place, even if the addict does wonderful things along the way (estimated 95% recidivism rate from all therapies, including AA). Clara was careening towards destruction (and her first lie to Danny was simply the first symptom, the first sip) – and when it came it was, to all intents and purposes – accidental. She faced it bravely, but she was her own undoing. It took an intervention and risking the universe to give it meaning.
River, on the other hand, lived life vibrantly and in hot pursuit of her true love, unapologetic and full of self-awareness, and when she died it was by choice, wholly by choice. I think that is what @blenkinsopthebrave and @mersey have missed. You don’t get to have the beautiful balcony scene without the Doctor seeing that, for all her wild ways, she is a good person who loves him unconditionally, with no expectation of reward. She is wild, but true. And then he says “Hello sweetie” and she realises that the sunset is loves her back. And it is that which will allow her to face her moment of truth (which we have already seen, but she hasn’t). @ichabod – there was huge bravado. there had to be, we now know, because she did not feel she was loved back.
Ashildr had a saying about that…
I think Alex Kingston and Jenna Coleman were given fascinating characters to explore, and both knock ’em far, far over the long on boundary.
On a 1988 tour of Finland, Lemmy was asked by one journalist why he had kept going for so long.
“We’re still here,” he replied, “because we should have died a long time ago but we didn’t.” (via BBC)29 December 2015 at 19:30 #49826Has just come from talking Space Captain Smith. “Colonials” has a more specific meaning in the British Space Empire!
29 December 2015 at 17:09 #49819@puroandson @mersey
I think it has reached the stage where it would be an error to do a @jimthefish story. He works much better as a sort of Elizabeth Mainwaring-like off-screen presence (colonials will have to look up Dad’s Army to get that (not the new movie, which may well have made catastrophic blunder wrt to Mrs Mainwaring).
And also, we would be one mod down.
29 December 2015 at 17:05 #49818@puroandson *stares at The Puricle
I was doing some goggling
Has nobody told you that it’s rude to goggle! 😉
Here, all the total sh*ts are deservedly dead and the bloke who gets the diamond is someone who did the brave and decent thing of checking for survivors.
Quite. Adding to this would be like spelling out what movie is showing in Hopper’s New York Movie. All very informative, but so fucking what?
There’s then a second joke that the Doctor, to go on a date with River, had to build the flippin’ hotel first.
Well, she did die to save him…
29 December 2015 at 00:40 #49781@ichabod @puroandson
Everyman
About 20 years ago, when I worked in the City of London, a colleague was walking to work when he saw an envelope fall from a courier’s bag. He picked it up and discovered it contained £40m sterling of unmarked Certificates of Deposit. Knowing they they rightfully belonged to Union Bank if Switzerland, he walked to their office asandasked if they had lost anything. They were in a state of some panic and rewarded him with, iirc, £4000 cash on the spot.
My flatmate at the time was a money broker and said that, had he found them and had the been dollar CDs he would have been on the first flight to the Caymans.
29 December 2015 at 00:28 #49779Well, no; that’s a magic man with no need for money taking steps to get a treasure home to its current owners
Way to denigrate the person who had just been searching for survivors, as far as we can tell selflessly, something the Doctor believed was very brave. And there are no shortage of institutions with a preference for remaining discreet that will accept returned property, no questions asked. The Swiss banking system springs to mind. Nor would the rescuer have had any reason to identify the Tardis as a police box. “OK, so I thought they were looking for survivors, or maybe used an escape pod, but now I’m not so sure. But he said there was a reward for this”. It is easy to do it in a non-tendentious way, see?
And, again, there is the text. What was actually said. What actually happened.
(There are several university chairs sponsored by wealthy woo believers (one at the University of Edinburgh, for example, invested by Arthur Koestler, after Oxford. Cambridge, King’s College London and University College, London all refused.) Doesn’t stop it being evidence free, and therefore theory-free woo, and doesn’t it make it even a hypothesis. And the NHS, for all its splendours, still carries the stigma of funding homeopathy – though hopefully for not much longer. Assertions are not hypotheses, just made up stuff.)
28 December 2015 at 20:03 #49772- The Doctor went back in time and arranged for the construction of the Singing Towers of Darillium himself.
- What a delightful thought! Making good use of his Heaven Sent
I think the story we saw is much more interesting: the a courageous everyman who was rewarded for trying to find survivors in a dangerous crash site.
some reincarnation theory includes that idea
I think the term you were looking for was “made up stuff”, not “theory”.
28 December 2015 at 12:06 #49761It was simply a riff on the idea that we have yet to have River’s enigmatic remark from Name of the Doctor explained. They have a 24 year long night to do some ‘splainin’, so to speak. Make (or more likely adopt) human kiddywink. Arrange for her to be adopted on Earth (I think it was @bluesqueakpip who noted that we did not see a woman-in-labour scene is any flashback of Clara’s youth). Then nudge her into Missy’s path, knowing she would not be able to resist the bait.
I would expect none of this to take up much screen time, since Jenna is of on her new adventure.
Canon tells us that Charlotte Abigail Lux is a daughter of the foundering family of the Library, so I will be surprised if CAL is Clara. However, it is not beyond credibility that River’s highly pointed reaction to Clara during the seance may suggest that from her PoV she is already in the Library, “saved”.
27 December 2015 at 23:50 #49747Random thought, part deux, or b):
24 years. Just enough time to raise a perky young control freak, fabricate a history and plonk her in Missy’s path.
27 December 2015 at 20:57 #49744The first (the Christmas pantomime Diamond heist) had less of the feel of a Moffat story and more the feel of a RTD story.
I think you are right, but it would not at all surprise me if Moffat aimed for exactly that effect.
This is not the River Song we have travelled with since season 5. It is the River Song from immediately before we first met her in the Library. Twelve knows exactly the force of nature that is hurtling towards Ten, but also knows everything that came after and before, and I think we are seeing her very much through his eyes.
Remember, River Song is a Moffat creation and he rarely loses sight of his characters and understands the craft of storytelling as well as anyone.
27 December 2015 at 14:39 #49737Blimey. I could have programmed a better bot than that, and I don’t really programme.
26 December 2015 at 22:55 #4970426 December 2015 at 21:23 #49701Random thought: lots of references by River to expedient memory wipes. Kept the S9 themes going just enough to weave it into the continuity.
Also, rather liked the 1950s style flying saucer.
26 December 2015 at 02:18 #49675That is really rather lovely.
25 December 2015 at 23:51 #49665Yeah, spotted that. Methinks budgetary priorities came into play.
25 December 2015 at 18:51 #49657Crikey. Didn’t see that coming.
25 December 2015 at 18:51 #49656And No 1 achieved (quite comfortably in the ed, for which all credit to Beibs – the bookies stopped taking bets almost immediately after he Tweeted) – and thx to @blenkinsopthebrave! Right back at ya.
24 December 2015 at 20:57 #4963523 December 2015 at 22:15 #4962023 December 2015 at 20:43 #49613@craig Yeah saw that (and the earlier quote) just now. Hope his fans take heed (the Choir was just 660 sales behind earlier today).
(Is it just me or does the very last Doctor at the end, opening her eyes and smiling, look disconcertingly like Dervla Kirwan?)
23 December 2015 at 14:07 #49604@puroandson
Oh, Puricle. You must learn to embrace the silliness of stand-alones. They are there for those moments we all have, when we need a little something to raise our spirits and reconnect us with joy (and there are only so many times one can watch Pitch Perfect in a day).
Io Saturnalia to all.
23 December 2015 at 13:27 #49602@ichabod @puroandson
I think some people have missed a perfectly worthy gag there 😉
It’s the way I tell ’em…
22 December 2015 at 14:41 #49580@puroandson
I think it’s my inability to pronounce ‘Orgoreyn’ correctly.
How did the author intend it to be pronounced?
22 December 2015 at 03:39 #49571@jimthefish @arbutus @pedant @juniperfish
There is an old Irish joke (that is to say, a joke of Irish origin) about an Englishman lost in a rural area of Ireland, who ask a farmer for directions. The farmer thinks for a moment and says: “Well, I wouldn’t start from here if I were you.” (I am fairly sure that Dave Allen was the first I heard tell it. No clue if he or one of his writers came up with it.
That was the first thing I thought when I read:
It doesn’t matter whether you like or dislike Avatar and/ or post-modern architecture. Taste is not the issue.
and again with this:
Your declaration that one is the “true” reading (based on your psychic link to Moffat via his script) does not make it so – both exist, because we have seen posters on here cleave to each…
because, at no time, did I assert that taste was an issue, nor that there was one true reading, only that some are absurd and wholly unsupported by the text or any of its creative context. But cleaving to a view does not stop it being folly;.
When a philosophical movement has to rely on:
Equivocation;
Appeal to authority;
Appeal to popularity;
Straw men;
And that perennial favourite, flexible goal posts;
all of which are fallacies of deception (more often deceiving the user than the recipient), then it is not much of a philosophy.
It is not as hilariously incompetent as the other end of the ideological scale (enjoy an objectivist reading of A Christmas Carol. Thank me when you have recovered from the stupid), but in a way it is worse because it is fatuous. It absolves the second-rate writer of the need to come up with their own worlds and characters with which to populate them; it absolves second-rate critics of the need to understand their subjects; and it absolves the viewer of the need to think, rather than merely decide and then seek confirmation.
Not only is it fatuous, but it is profoundly insulting both to writers and their craft.
Moffat writes stories that ask profound questions in a way that is accessible to teens and pre-teens. He knows what question he is asking;
Whedon did much the same and I really wish he would get back to it, and in the Objects in Space episode of Firefly created one of the most accessible ponderings of existentialism around;
Sorkin does the same for adults (and Puricle), to such effect that many perfectly sensible Americans rather wish that Bartlett was real;
Shonda Rhimes asks potent questions about both the role of women (and black women especially) in situations of power, the way in which all peoples’ pasts can break them, and how bad people can do great things and good people terrible things because of this. And, in an episode of Grey’s Anatomy I watched this evening, in about 7 minutes of ‘flashback’ screen time one of her writers, Zoanne Clack, utterly captured the fear and paranoia in the medical profession surrounding the disease still in 1982, called GRID (Gay Related Immunity Disorder).
The reason we still talk about Chaucer 800 year later is that he took a trip to Italy and discovered an alternative to alliterative poetry, changing completely the direction of the English language. Of course, he could have been a crap story teller, or have fallen out of favour with his patrons, and seen it all go to waste.
But he wanted to tell the best stories he could and we all benefit from it. His stories can be, and have been, reinterpreted through many lenses both metaphorically and literally but it began with an act of authorship. Without it, there is nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Anyway, Puro Prime has said it more fully, and she is in hospital without her books. Fear her once she is not just working from methadone-addled memory.
21 December 2015 at 20:34 #49561You, Sir, are a star.
21 December 2015 at 15:28 #49558OK you lot. Ask a question. If you had the choice of which to be Chrstmas No 1 would you rather it be
1. Justin Beiber;
2. Whatever faceless entity is the latest output of Simon Cowell’s PR machine
or
3. The Lewisham & Greenwich NHS Choir’s mashing of Bridge Over Trouble Waters and I Will Fix You?
But it on iTunes and Googleplay and stream in on Spotify – that last be is crucial ‘cos you are up agains the weight of whatever Beib’s fans are called. 10 streams (or at least 30 secs) = one sale.
• ITunes – http://tinyurl.com/z4v98cj
• Amazon – http://tinyurl.com/jup2bb3
• Google Play – http://tinyurl.com/h2yu3xg
• 7 Digital – http://tinyurl.com/hg5swkfThis is the official video, but buy the song and STREAM, and get everybody you have ever met to do so too! (@Craig – any chance of something on the front page?)
20 December 2015 at 03:06 #49538I think people sometimes mix up his publicity strategies, which do use deliberate misdirection, with his writing and dramatic strategies, which are exercises in skill for the purposes you cite.
Yes. Good point.
and I’m recalling 11, I believe it was, declaring that he remembers (by a deliberate effort of will?) everything,
But we know, from the text, that at the very least a regeneration crisis messed with his memory (see Deep Breath). It has never been stated how persistent this messing is, or can be (for perfectly sound story telling reasons related to Chekov’s Ducks).
20 December 2015 at 03:01 #49537My offhand comment on labels was simply to say that if you were in a species where there are no males/females, then labels like Mr/Miss would be pretty meaningless.
Ursula Le Guin posed the question in a more interesting way in Left Hand of Darkness (have you read that yet, @Puroandson (both Prime and Puricle))? Gender in language has little to do with the concrete fact of a twin-gendered species (setting aside transgender for convenience here, not to diminish it). Icelandic, for example, has three genders which can generate six cases and if my memory serves(1), some of the languages that eventually led to early modern English and German had many more genders.
And even today it is fluid. In English the nominally plural “their” is increasingly used and accepted as a gender-neutral singular pronoun, and even in France young people habitually use “on” where traditionally “il” or “elle” (or even personal pronouns) or their plurals might be expected (presumably this is much to the dismay of the Academie Francais).
(One of the reasons I don’t especially like “cis”, while having some sympathy with the case for it, it is exactly the sort of alienating neologism that po-mo fosters)
And as Missy pointed out, our notions of love and gender and the whole general mish-mash looks positively primitive to people whose brains are the size of a planet. That’s why all SciFi shippers should be taken out and shot as a service to the gene pool.
(1) By which I mean it is ages since I read it, not that I was there!
19 December 2015 at 19:12 #49525Pah! Slacker! 😉
19 December 2015 at 17:44 #49523@juniperfish @puroandson @tardigrade
Gosh, it’s hard to know where to start (which is pretty much the point of po-mo), so let’s start with @arbutus who nails it in two sentences.
The problem with having presented the Doctor in the past as the “man with the plan”, as in “I knew it all along and was ready for you”, the Doctor lies, etc., is that people are then tempted to apply that kind of thinking even when the creators didn’t intend it. So people choose to dismiss things that were said and done because the Doctor was lying, acting, or in some way tricking someone.
The “Doctor was acting” thesis only holds up if you dismiss Moffat as the writer (lets have fewer bullshit weasel terms like “de-centre”). Not only is there nothing whatsoever in the text to support it, but we know that Moffat is a fair writer – he plays his tricks to entertain and tease, not deceive. If the Doctor has lied we know about it because we were told explicitly in text. If the Doctor can remember we will know when Moffat (or a future showrunner) tells us.
Now, to men of straw.
Take James Cameron’s Avatar, for instance.
Well, I’d rather not since it is a rancid pile of old dreck, buoyed for about two minutes by Michelle Rodrigues in war paint, but since you insist: nobody is disputing that there are different readings – there is nothing po-mo, or indeed post- anything, or for that matter insightful, about that. And the last one is a critical reading that places the author very much at the centre by highlighting his cultural blindness.
(a)ask him what his intention and (b) decide that his interpretation and meaning was more significant and meaning was more significant than any of the others, as you suggest above.
Setting aside that (b) does not follow (a), we would then be in a position to judge how effectively he met his own objectives. That would be quite interesting if the film wasn’t such utter bollocks in the first place, but there you go. James Blish deployed the same trope (The One Tree) in A Case of Conscience much more effectively. He even makes the authorial choice to leave the ending ambiguous (he phrases it as “agnostic” for reasons that I won’t spoil).
And I am sure people of the Philippines and Gaza are delighted that you are ethically allowing them a point of view (I know you didn’t mean to be that patronising, JF, but seriously…)
Po-mo solves a problem that didn’t exist. To use an example from my realm, modernism created terrific dwelling spaces (almost any survey shows a high degree of satisfaction (unless poor build quality broke it) in modernist buildings’ individual apartments). But modernism utterly, completely and inexcusably failed to understand the relations between spaces that permit and support communities (true for commercial spaces as well – Centre Point and the NatWest Tower looked kinda cool from a distance, but were hostile and alienating up close). Po-mo does nothing to address this miserable failure but instead has decided that square corners are the problem. There’s a building on City Road in London that – quite literally – makes me feel queasy looking at it, because it is so fucking playful it was designed to look out of focus.
Po-mo has nothing to say on relations, which is where the crass simplicities of structuralism failed, where genuinely interesting and important questions needed addressing, but instead it mainlined handwaveium. “I think, therefore it is”.
– Characters die in Doctor Who – the shows central conceit gives some wriggle room, but even in this thread there are countless examples of dead characters.
– The Doctor doesn’t always have a plan – no shortage of characters have sacrificed themselves for him, thanks to that, most recently Clara. Always analysing is not the same as always having a plan and when he has one we are told, in text.
– And even though his brain is not as limited as Ashildr’s, there is plenty of evidence that he forgets, even without the help of a neural blocker.
All of these are choices made by the writer (and for anyone thinks anything gets on screen without Moffat’s approval, the laudanum is on the sideboard). RTD was less subtle, but he approach was fundamentally the same.
By all means have any interpretation you like (here is an interpretation of Santa Claus is Coming to Town as a fascist anthem). But don’t pretend it is a “valid reading” (whatever that means) if it is not rooted in a firm grasp of the creative process and its many, overlapping, contexts.
16 December 2015 at 23:12 #49463This is implausibly amusing : Morphtastic
16 December 2015 at 02:20 #49455True, but we have just been talking about perception filters (I take as read that anywhere in a Gallifrey city is pretty much a managed-time environment)
16 December 2015 at 01:16 #49453@soundworld @thebrainofmoffat @bluesqueakpip @puroandson
It occurs to me that it is not at all clear that Clara can leave the Diner!Tardis with get the “dum” bit of her last “ba dum” (and one could reasonably infer, from The Doctor making her stay inside at the end of the universe, that she can’t).
That could cramp her style a little.
14 December 2015 at 15:04 #49422I should be working for my clients!
Bloody clients. Always getting in the way of the fun stuff!
14 December 2015 at 14:02 #49419This image has gone spectacularly viral from my FB feed. Earth, viewed from Mars. Perspective, or what? Right up there with Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot.
14 December 2015 at 13:50 #49418@juniperfish @bluesqueakpip @puroandson @lisa
The problem with post-Modernism (and its Cleetus-The-Slack-Jawed-Yokel-like cousin, deconstructionism) is that it takes a perfectly sensible critique of structuralism (especially its obsession with the dual) and degrades it into a sub-6th-form (or to use the more useful American style, sub-Sophomore) debating club.
It is so patently self-invovled, so auto-anally-inserted, that it isn’t even much fun to take the piss out of it because real comedy is shouldn’t be that easy.
It, for example, allows such self-serving nonsense as this:
“convincingly argues is likely a multi-authored text, transitioning over time. So, to pin its “ultimate” truths onto Malory’s personal life or authorial intent (both common forms of humanist literary criticism) would be patently reductionist.”
It would help to known what reductionism means with far greater clarity than deployed here, because then the straw man hidden in it could be avoided. And more to the point it would save the trouble of wasting words on something that everyone else worked out years before. To use the old book review trope, it is both good and original, but the bits that are good are not original and the bits that are original are not good.
It is a deliberate obfuscation between method and stance: what is actually being accused is essentialism (and yes, @Juniprfish, I am blaming the original author, not you. It is his nonsense).
All artistic work is multiply authored – indeed even modern copyright law explicitly recognises this with the distinction between “publishing” rights (the original text) and the “mechanical” rights (the version, or interpretation).
‘Cos the thing is, nobody is arguing that the original author is the sole authority [hmm, consider the roots of those two words].
Indeed, the changes protested by Dead Authorists happen at a much earlier stage as well: at the transition from author’s mind to page: the simple act of transposition changes the idea. Does that make the page the author?
Also, of course, the author may change their mind – Arthur C Clarke went back to the basic idea that became Songs of Distant Earth many times before finding a version he was happy with. He was happy with. But then there will be his editors (only poor writers dismiss the need for a good editor – good being defined as one who helps the author find their own voice). And all the other changes that happen twixt thought and expression (the details differ but the basic pattern is the same for all media).
So at what point does the author cease to own it? The answer, of course, is that it happens at which ever arbitrary point is need to support whatever evidence-free interpretation they wish to cling to. But that is pure sophistry.
There is nothing wrong with reader imagination (well, duh) just don’t pretend the text supports it (I am happy to agree with Richard Schiff that, in the West Wing, Toby committed the betryal he did to protect someone else (CJ, probably). It is an idea that gives me comfort, given that Toby is perhaps my all-time favourite human character. But there is nothing in-text to support it, and I would never claim there is).
Of course, any interpretation is best left until the story is complete (as @bluesqueakpip discovered 😉 ), and I suspect there is still a little of Clara’s story to come. River Song may not be the most subtle character ever, but Alex Kingston is an actor of quite astounding subtlety and I am fairly sure that, at the meeting/ seance with Vastra, Strax and Jenny, River knew immediately and exactly who Clara was).
13 December 2015 at 01:32 #49357@juniperfish @bluesqueakpip @mudlark @puroandson (both Puro Prime and the Puricle)
The thing with authorial intent is that it is the thing that distinguishes human writing from my cats paw prints on the kitchen floor. Even if I can deduce some events (chasing spider? obsessed with sunbeam?), she was not trying to impart anything to me. She just doesn’t wipe her feet before coming in, and she certainly isn’t trying to tell me the Epic of Tharg Slayer Of Mice, Tormentor of Sparrows. Little beyond ‘Thanks for feeding me, Have this dead mouse that I <s>found</s> killed’ in fact.
In the case of Who, one person is producer and writer of key episodes and is known to take a close hand in editing and “take” selection (as did RTD: see the three versions of Tennant’s “I don’t want to go” for the best known Who example). That is a very strong authorial voice (and even the most casual comparison of any Moff seasons with any RTD season would highlight this, since RTD has an equally strong authorial voice). It is not a democracy. What Moff says goes, and he has made it clear he will intervene in scripts when he has to.
What I saw on screen – and what the script supported – was the exquisite agony of ignorance on the Doctor’s face and the divine torture of knowledge on Clara’s. If there is ambiguity it is when the Doctor sees Rigsy’s tribute: and that ambiguity exists in the gap spotted by @ichabod between script and realisation.
And Missy didn’t have a plan other than to cause chaos and hope the Doctor would be seduced by it. Ashildr worked that out.
(A curiosity: the wife of a friend refuses to believe that Derren Brown has no physcic powers, despite him explaining often and at length that he has none. I thought this odd (endearing, but odd) until I read how Harry Houdini would also show people how his tricks were done and yet have them still refuse to believe it was magic, rather than sleight of hand (or foot or torso)).
I, too, look forward to a female Doctor. I also suspect it might come sooner than most of us are supposing. Don’t ask me to pin down why, though.
@Spawn of Puro – watch any classic Star Trek, since that is where the term redshirt originates. If you are a crew member with a red shirt are asked to beam down to a hostile planet with Kirk, Spock and McCoy DON’T GO!!! YOU WILL DIE!!
(Oh, and @mudlark – about the only benefit of a) popping out to the shops and getting back to find my dad had died while I was out, b) then a couple of years later sitting by my mum for three days waiting for her to die, and c) then spending a significant chunk of the past year to two wondering whether it was worth buying season tickets to Shrewsbury Crematorium is that I don’t need to take pompous lectures on grief from anyone).
12 December 2015 at 20:08 #49340And Whedon did it at the end of Buffy with Anya and Amanda – he was adamant there had to be a toll (the D&D game was specifically placed to build empathy for an already-liked character).
But the kicking cannot come too often nor be too hard and it must never stop.
All those moronic comments about Moffat being lazy, when redshirts really are the gold standard of lazy writing.
12 December 2015 at 19:26 #4933812 December 2015 at 19:23 #49337(this is a response to a Graun post, since it’s locked and I found your posts on life and death in the Whoniverse terrific)
I’ve no doubt Moff will kill someone “stone dead” (no timey afterlife in view) before his tenure is over.
Danny Pink. Not just very nearly dead, but very really dead.
But also, one thing Moffat seems to be kicking hard again is the idea of a redshirt. Generally, he tries to let us get to know and give a toss about even the transient characters (often leaving us wishing they had jumped aboard the Tardis). The nature of the story means you cannot eliminate them completely (think the UNIT personnel in Magician’s Apprentice – and even he had a backstory filled out in just a few lines of dialogue), but he seem to go to more lengths than most to limit their use.
By the way – and I can’t claim credit, because I saw it elsewhere on the interwebs – The American Retro Diner in Space has the acronym – TARDIS – pretty cool huh – that made me smile – what a nice Easter egg.
Brilliant!
12 December 2015 at 11:44 #49322But what will she call herself?
The Teacher?
The Governess?
Simply Clara?Definitely! The Governess is too stern, surely? And Professor is what Ace call Seven, iirc.
The Lecturer would be quite amusingly meta 🙂
- The Doctor went back in time and arranged for the construction of the Singing Towers of Darillium himself.
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