@geekknocker123 it has been said many times, but: Doctor Who has always engaged with political issues. Including, in the past, the dangers of all this plastic.

I actually had a conversation on another site where someone was saying how much better this issue was handled in the 70’s, which I found slightly amusing. Because here we are.

@Tardigrade…[Read more]

Just to add to what I said above, while it was a good historical, one of the reasons why I think “Rosa”, for example, will linger for longer as a memorable episode is that, instead of rather disposable alien monsters, in “Rosa” the monsters were us.

@Tardigrade raised the idea that perhaps “the lie” that seems to underpin the projected…[Read more]

@tardigrade

Tim Shaw found a new level of ineffectiveness, protected by feeble “sniper” bots and personally able to be bested by one untrained old guy with a gun. His only significant power was by proxy, through his influence on the Ux.

Absolutely! He was “pretty crap” as a villain. Graham and “the gang” had been to a variety of places nipping hom…[Read more]

Just back from holiday and caught up with episode 9, and what a corker it was. I loved this. Taking the fairy tale right back to its grizzly folkloric roots. (I really enjoyed your post detailing the fairy tale elements @bluesqueakpip.)

I can’t believe how quickly my reservations about this series have melted.

Hanne: from the Hebrew Channah,…[Read more]

@Bluesqueakpip @tardigrade

True. That’s a good point. But I liked the frog -I think it’s very ‘Daniel’ from Rectify. It wouldn’t be that would it @cathannabel? Except there was no actual frog – just mentioned by Daniel and Tawnee. I’ll ‘ogle it 🙂

I was concerned it would be a real ominous talking person, all ‘received pronunication’ and filled…[Read more]

@Tardigrade

If I’d been directing, I suspect I would have been shooting an additional scene with Grace as the Solitract’s embodiment, in case the frog didn’t work out. I think the idea of the frog is OK, but it didn’t quite work for me in practise.

In a world where Doctor Who has enough time and enough money, I’m sure they would have done th…[Read more]

@tardigrade

the run of not-really-all-that-scary monsters continued, with the creature of the week being moths. They’d need to be a whole lot bigger to present much of a realistic-appearing threat, at least to me.

True: they seemed ‘OK’ if you stayed still but the Scary Hungry Baddie was eaten almost as fast as if he’d been attacked by a swarm o…[Read more]

@tardigrade see this is why I actually like the use of frog form. I think the Doctor found it slightly endearing, and found it easier to feel warmer towards the Solitract when it wasn’t using the form of one of her friends (albeit a short friendship) the form that was being used to trap another of her friends, a form that completely screwed up by…[Read more]

@Tardigrade

The psychic paper works on me too. When I look at it, I see the words “Plot Device” printed in bold lettering. I find it a bit clunky.

That’s because it IS a plot device. It’s just as much a plot device as the Star Trek transporter, which was created to save the writers having to take the Away Team down to each new planet by shu…[Read more]

@miapatrick: good points. And valid as it explains why the villagers wouldn’t have questioned the ‘dress code’ – what with them all summoned to the lake for a prompt ducking. Also, dress code: not a priority considering the dead horses, 35 people ducked and dead, etc

@kevinwho I think that the prisoners had been particularly bad -the fact they’d…[Read more]

@tardigrade

The Doctor could apparently easily keep them in contact by jazzing up their phones, but for some reason has chosen not to.

That’s because mobile phones are a plot killer. From the days of Star Trek onwards, when practically the first thing every writer would do was have Kirk’s communicator damaged or stolen. Killer of Plots – you…[Read more]

@tardigrade – I also didn’t see why the Doctor needed to dispatch the dispatch bots at the end, since she seems to have the means to get them to teleport somewhere safe.

my take on that was that she knew she only had a very few seconds to act (the system was counting down the teleport), and that keeping the threat contained was first priority. on…[Read more]

@tardigrade I’m absolutely certain Graham will break our hearts. I don’t know though, I don’t think he’ll die of cancer, but this is the second time he’s spoken in defence of someone keeping something quite important from their family. I think at the very least he sees the time he has right now as a bonus, he sees the time he had with his wife as…[Read more]

@tardigrade what’s depressing is the predictable volume of comments on this being a ‘PC version’ of what happened in India, propaganda etc, despite the light touch of how it was dealt with here. What’s been really hardening is the amount of comment’s I’ve seen across the internet from people saying they didn’t know about partition and now they’re…[Read more]

@mudlark  Yaz . I thought I knew my Nan … But if this is true, if this is her life, then she lied to me.

Graham. … that girl in there, she ain’t your nan, yet. It’s only later that she’ll decide how to tell it. And I honestly don’t know whether any of us know the real truth about our own lives’.

This was the first hint of serious depth in this…[Read more]

@tardigrade

you can see why the Doctor might come across as lesbian- relatively short hair, androgynous clothing

Big tick there.   Mum now has short hair;  wears dad’s T-shirts and his 3/4 long trackie-dacks.  In America or the UK you might not know those. In Australia it’s tracksuits in stretch fabric.

I apologise for such a long post. I was tr…[Read more]

So much going on in this episode I have to watch it again (I’m watching on Amazon, the only way I can get it).

Malorie Blackman, well done. More please.

Relevant to what’s going on now, and scary that it might rear its ugly head in the future.

Weird that it starts in the year of my birth, 1955, I was four months old at the time of Rosa’s moment…[Read more]

@tardigrade

The time displacement device appears to have been capable of sending people forward to the 85th century, from memory. If its ability to send people backwards is similar, then Krasko could have ended up around 6000 BCE.

That detail hadn’t fully registered yesterday evening but, despite my flippant comment above*, I was assuming that he…[Read more]

@mudlark  the dialogue did not have quite the wit and depth of Moffat at his best

Yes; no snap, little sparkle, but those are some of Moffat’s gifts — but not, as I thought watching B’Church, Chibnal’s.  It’s going to be workmanlike at best, which kind of suits the steam-punkish look of things so far.  I’d be missing Moffat’s brilliant fl…[Read more]

@tardigrade I would put money on Graham’s time in the Tardis being his time in remission and him sacrificing himself in some way, with a speech along the lines of ‘I got (x amount) more years, I got Grace, I got to go on all these wonderful/absolutely appalling adventures’.