@jimthefish <waves at old fishy comrade> I also loved the BBC’s Dicken’s adaptation. I thought it was beautifully shot – amazing use of light and shadow. Guy Pearce was excellent and it was great to see Vinette Robinson again (who played Rosa Parks in Rosa last season of Doctor Who).  Bringing some of the darker Victorian issues (around abuse) to…[Read more]

@phaseshift

Humble request from a new member.

Could we have a discussion sometime about the BBC series “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Service”?

The first season was so very good and then they had to rush the end because the BBC decided to yank the only other show they had that matched up with Doctor Who in any way.

It’s so short, we can…[Read more]

@phaseshift I think that would be very enjoyable, and good to have something to watch and discuss during the Who-less months. (Or what am I supposed to do with my time? Write my essays? besides, my whole course is about adaptions and dialogues between texts, so I’m sure it will count as study.)

It appears to be, as well as Sky box sets, on Amazon…[Read more]

On the question of the mindwipe, I tend to agree with @phaseshift and @jimthefish (now there’s a name we haven’t seen on the board for a while!). It does not seem right either in terms of consent, or in terms of the ways it has been used in the past (eg. Donna) or, more to the point, the countless times it hasn’t been used in the past. And as @jimt…[Read more]

@juniperfish and @phaseshift

Well, well, this is quite like old times, isn’t it? Hello to you both (and everyone else). Hope you’ve been well and had a good festive season.

Big yes to Dracula. The first couple of episodes are among the best that Moffatt and Gattiss have done. The third ep was a bit weaker but I appreciate why they made the move…[Read more]

@phaseshift that’s an excellent point about Dracula, I hadn’t even thought of it like that. But of course, Dracula wasn’t written as a period piece. While many of the older Gothic novels were theoretically set in medieval times (Radcliffe was terrible for anachronisms) Dracula was very much about the relocating of the medieval into the modern. And…[Read more]

@Phaseshift Sounds like a good book 🙂

I haven’t seen Moffat’s Jekyll and now feel compelled to get hold of it, as there’s obviously quite a trilogy going on there – Jekyll, Dracula and Sherlock. 

Did you see Penny Dreadful (UK TV series for Showtime a few years ago)?  That was a really interesting mash-up of a number of Victorian gothic n…[Read more]

@Mudlark I think Lucy was depicted as both self-absorbed, as you say, and depressed. She was obsessed with being “pretty” but she also recognised that people reacted to her superficially because of her looks, so her sense of self-worth was actually quite disturbed, which, sadly, led her to be attracted to death, as an escape.

Really the poor…[Read more]

@miapatrick  I felt as though the 7% not human DNA was a big part of Barton’s coldness here.

Yes, true. But there was a bit of an odd discrepancy there, as Barton seemed fully intellectually functioning with his 7% alien DNA (if not morally) but others “infected” with the alien DNA became simply “shells” and “memory sticks”, like his poor old M…[Read more]

@phaseshift

it was the recycling in this episode that really stopped me getting into it and grading it higher.

Agreed that there was a lot of recycling, most of which seemed to be the Master recycling previous ‘greatest hits’. It’s whether it’s, y’know, recycling created by the BBC saying ‘we don’t like the direction of the last series,…[Read more]

@PhaseShift

Good to see you back again, and commiserations over the dysfunctional kidneys – quite enough to make life miserable, I know, and to explain your absence from the Forum. I hope that your reappearance means that they are now working as they should or are at least under control, and that you are feeling better.

Yes, Dracula is…[Read more]

@phaseshift

Sorry to hear that. Disobedient kidneys can be a Bad Thing, so I hope it’s now under control. Lovely to see you back

So far I’m up to two-thirds of episode 1 of Dracula and it seems very good. However, I also had a gift of Season One of Star Trek: Discovery, so after months of no telly at all, I’m suddenly in the position of trying…[Read more]

@phaseshift

I’m not loving the new you, actually. Not at all. I thought, you know “friendly place.”

What the heck’s happened?

@blenkinsopthebrave

I think there was some genuine confusion about the Wicked West of the West-type of thing. From what I read?

@ragnarok I mean @idiotsavon of Savon Manor AND  @ScaryB  😀

Happy new year’s to you both.  x0 x

I remember, yonks, or timey-whimeys agos, we had a Ragnarok theme during the end of the Smith era?

I’ve not watched the new ep yet. In fact, I haven’t hooked into the ABC much at all except for the occasional special from The Midwives or Foyles Wa…[Read more]

@craig

I know we are at the end of a series, when contributions slow down, but it does seem that the activity on the site has slowed down considerably in comparison to what it used to be like.

I am not entirely sure why this should be so, but this site has been running for a number of years, and we have had so many regular contributors who,…[Read more]

@swankycriminal

I think you might also like @phaseshift‘s Time and The Doctor.
My blog on timeywimeyness in the Smith Doctor’s tenure is: The Day of The Doctor – a time structure analysis. My more general one on time in the Whoniverse is Wibbley Wobbly, Timey Wimey.

The SIDRAT section of the blogs are well worth looking at if you like the…[Read more]

@pedant and @anduril Have I been summoned by costume bonkerising!?

(@anduril – my icon is an old reference to the red/blue bow-ties of SmithDoc and the elaborate, some might say obsessive, theorising thereof, in our former home on Dan Martin’s recaps at The Guardian, before @Craig created the Better Place).

In face I’ve been chewing my tail…[Read more]

@juniperfish … as a child who was definitely wired differently, I really wanted a hero to evoke that quality of “it’s OK to be your own wild self”. Sadly, it was the 50s and 60s, across the pond in the US and mostly we had westerns and cop shows. Well, then there was Star Trek… and Star Wars and Lord of the Rings and other science fiction and…[Read more]

Hi @scaryB Good to hear from you and @blenkinsopthebrave over in icy cold Canada. Mid thirties here and the upstairs air-con isn’t working so the boys are sweltering at the mo. @Thane16 I hope you Mum is better soon. Not fun being ill over Christmas. Please pass on my regards to her and I hope you all get to watch the special…[Read more]

@Phaseshift – thanks so much for sharing – I hope it lived up to expectations. Time travelling with the Doctor is always special, I’ve found. (The Christmas episode just took me back to being an excited 7 year old, watching weekly, with my mum (and that is special indeed))

@XAD4 – thanks for sharing, I love the Doctor Puppet stuff… that was…[Read more]