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]

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

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]

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

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

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]

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]

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]

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]

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

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

But functionally, she is a bit like the Eric Balfour character, Jesse, in the first episode of Buffy (Whedon wanted him in the main credits, but the network wouldn’t let him). It is a signal that nobody is safe. It is also floats the question (which is is nice to see acknowledged in this thread) of why we ca…

[Read more]

Speaking for me, Thane, I loved it. Immediately upon watching the first 12 mins, I said, “Oh, Lord, she’s DONE it!”

I can see why others might not.

From a 16 1/2 point of view, it was very funny AND there were the jump scares.

I really liked how Doctor said, in response to “what if it kills us?” “it could have already.”

I took that…[Read more]

I bow….

Followed by falling over.

Indeed Gold has made it clear, “it was a pastiche, basically. It was bloody hard. It was mainly samples.”

For the whole 1st season!  Later, Foster did quite a bit of the incidental music. I’d say that Akinola is at the stage Gold was at in 2002-03. We ought to give him time to develop. As for arcs,…[Read more]

I surprisingly loved Ecclestone’s series despite the 2005-like graphics. The end…[Read more]

On Locke; dualism; and on memory as identity I think that’s why Thomas Reid calls in his (The) Brave Officer Paradox- which considering Lethbridge Stewart, works well 🙂

Thane16

Within Moffat’s Whonivese, ‘soul’ appears to be separate from ‘recorded memories’ – the classic case being Auton Rory. Then there’s the Gangers, where the entire episode is about beings with duplicate memories and duplicate brains – and whether those duplicates are ‘us’.

Moffat’s answer comes from philosophy, not biology’s current…[Read more]

Regarding the cue cards, I was okay with them, though I can see where some thought this overplayed Twelve’s…[Read more]

Many thanks for the extra information and the correction!

@tardigrade @ichabod  @ichabod “These are my memories so this is me”: I might be making a mess of this, but the Countess Scarloni has explained to me (by talking very slowly) that this…[Read more]

@tardigrade However, I have to register my discomfort with the First Doctor being portrayed with 1960’s (or earlier) attitudes to gender roles, even with that being played for comedy. I have difficulty in reconciling that with the Doctor’s character as I know it- I’d have preferred that those dated elements were treated just as a by-product of ma…

[Read more]

Not actually canon!

I colourised your image in 5.9 seconds. Find out how: https://t.co/Pz5ZKkzRGh pic.twitter.com/ZaEPlwbqnr

— Colorise Bot (@colorisebot) November 10, 2017

I think @missy and I feel similarly about the Twelfth Doctor – and I also don’t feel the need to have everything wrapped up neatly with a bow on top,…[Read more]

Perhaps he might have some unconscious control- there was a suggestion that his current form was unconsciously chosen. However, at present, he’s struggling with the prospect of repeated change to who he is, and him deliberately choosing to depart even further from his current identity doesn’t seem to sit that well with that. Per…[Read more]

I’d prefer to see Jodie play a Doctor who is female (rather than a female Doctor). Whilst I don’t think the gender element should be down played, I do think the essentials of the doctor’s character and behaviour should remain essentially the same. I think the point of having a gender change character should be to show…[Read more]

So far wedged in, I can still feel the welt.  lol  I don’t really want it to happen, I can see too many negative drawbacks that would be counterproductive to the message it would send, but it’s fun thinking up ways to mess with people.  Of course, that being said, I don’t lump all dissenters into the same category.  I’ve already sai…[Read more]

I’m basically saying  more gender ambiguous.

Not too distinctly feminine.   Jodie is a pretty girl and I don’t want to see

her made into a  Doctor Barbie doll.

They didn’t ‘fem’ up Missy and I  think that was very smart  but  they still made a

point to refer to her as a Time lady.  Romana too and maybe that was a…[Read more]

The extra regenerations have been mentioned a few times with no number given, in fact I think in both Kill the Moon and Hell Bent it was said that the number wasn’t known.

@rorysmith

Sorry, personal opinion but I think she…

[Read more]

I’m sorry, for what was obviously poorly wording, but you have read much more into that phrase than I ever intended. I agree with you, regarding looking at morality outside any religion context. I’m not so sure that faith in some reward in an afterlife necessarily makes much difference.

I certainly didn’t mean to infer or imply this…[Read more]

Great point — A Simm Master Confession Dial would have nothing but snarks and boasts, and I don’t think Missy…[Read more]

Indeed!  All that “things end because they have to” is…[Read more]

I think it’s the fact that the Doctor has been through a set of full regenerations that means we won’t see the Valeyard. Capaldi’s Doc strictly speaking is Doctor 1.1 rather than Doctor 13 (why does the War Doctor not still count as a proper Doctor? Surely he was redeemed and earns the right to be the Doctor again?)

I actually…[Read more]

… has the man become lost, becoming nothing but an ever-changing role, always changing, always dying, always a story rather than a real person.

I agree, although, as the Doctor himself once said ‘We are all stories in the end’

As @tardigrade noted, the Doctor’s unwillingness to change was foreshadowed in Bill’s insistence that…[Read more]

I’m hoping that…[Read more]

I’ve got a vague recollection that there was a paper presented a couple of years back which considered the possibility of thermodynamic time reversal in black holes. In the popular press it got translated into ‘time going into reverse’, which might well have caught the eye of one S. Moffat.

What would happen in…[Read more]

@mudlark @thane15 @nick @ichabod   As I understand it…[Read more]