Personally @purofilion, I think @thommck is quite right on this one. It can be really easy to pick isolated scenes as evidence to back up a glib assertion (such as Amy and Clara are “indistinguishable”, when @thommck has focused on the characters over the period.

I think Amy is peculiar one, and the scene you’ve selected from Beast Below is…[Read more]

@PhaseShift

Ahh, I knew that I would miss something like that, thanks for bringing it up, if it’s so, then from which doctor (all over in time and space) are we watching?

@thommck

I don’t know what happen to the series, but I think they found some invention called Slow-Motion and starts abusing it over and over again 😀 I mean the timing…[Read more]

@Devilishrobby, @FatManInABox, @Brewski, @Oh, everybody, really…

It might be strange, given my predilection for bonkers theories, to say this, but:

I think we might be reading too much into this episode. Clearly, Clara’s angry confrontation with the Doctor is crucial, but how are we to read that scene? I would argue that the Doctor is not…[Read more]

@thommck Thanks for the link to the Trolley problem, a great head-scratcher. Although, it doesn’t seem to include an altruistic suicide option?

The way that the problem is framed is designed to exclude a self-sacrificial option, as that would test a different psychological phenomenon – the willingness to self sacrifice.

The fatman thought ex…[Read more]

Going back to what someone said (sry can’t remember who) and has been echoed lots, about it being funny how some things bug people more than others in what they like to be ‘accurate’. I was just thinking that for me, last week, the space robots imaging sensors annoyed me a huge amount, but this week I am totally fine for the moon to be  a giant…[Read more]

@PhileasF

Well done in tracking down the dialogues from the BG episodes. Definitely not a new thing that companions threaten to leave and forcefully call the Doctor out on things. I seem to remember it wasn’t unusual for Ian or Barbara to do it either. I see lots of echoes of Hartnell in particular in Twelve.

@pedant – Stop doing that!!…[Read more]

@Thommck

 it could lay an extremely dense egg which then inflated to moon size.

 

Who’s to say the “Dragon” didn’t lay a small egg to which it instantly expanded due to the space vacuum environment

Two minds …. (well, more or less) 🙂

@Bluesqueakpip   Well, that’s a possibility if we assume that the egg itself consisted originally…[Read more]

@Thommck

(LOL at the thought from @pedant of waiting to see the creature that comes to fertilise it!).

Thats not a meteor shower, it’s Moon Sperm!

@thommck yes, I sure should!  Sorry. And thanks! 😮

OK, in light of the second viewing, I would single out the final confrontation between Clara and the Doctor as the whole point of the episode. The actual story itself (the threat that is revealed to be a life that deserves compassion and protection) has been done elsewhere by Moffat (the star whale, the teller), but what is different here is…[Read more]

@handles

Now I need a memory worm to get this out of my head.

Ha ha, sorry for the negative imagery. Hope you have got it out of your head already! 🙂 To clarify: I think that “fun, larks and adventures” define Dr Who. (NOT confrontation and/or crying. They’re optional extras, to be used judiciously.)

I guess that the proper definition of…[Read more]

The above should be @thommck (my forum manners are all over the place today!)

@handles

I’ve watched the first Gotham, and enjoyed it enough to want to continue. Its noirish look and feel is a treat. It’s funny – Chris Nolans first Batman film took some familiar aspects from Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One for Bruce Wayne, and this looks to be doing the same as some of the scenes of the young Gordon learning his way around…[Read more]

@BadWulf – I always take the latest understanding in cosmology with a grain of salt, as it’s prone to change as new discoveries are made. Given the massive unknowns (dark matter, dark energy) that seem to make up much of what’s going on in the universe, and all the unknown unknowns that we don’t even know we don’t know about yet, I think the fate…[Read more]

@thommck I finally managed to watch the episode last night. It felt very much like an episode of the Sarah Jane Adventures

Exactly! I knew there was something about the episode that I couldn’t put my finger on. The Skovox Blitzer now reminds me of the robots from the SJA episodes The Empty Planet.

Re: the Skovox Blitzer being attracted by artron…[Read more]

Our middle son lost interest for a while, partly I suspect because none of his friends were fans and it wasn’t cool. Now that one of his best friends is a fan it is cool enough to have Who pictures on school books and the application of Jammy Dodgers during viewing helps. He is probably less enthusiastic than the rest of the family but there is a…[Read more]

@Thommck – given that I teach kids quite a lot, I’ll join with @FatManInABox by saying it’s a normal phase in growing up.

Teenagers do this ‘it’s childish/a bit geeky to like Doctor Who’ thing. Doctor Who was something they loved when they were little kids, they’re trying very hard to establish that they’re not quite a kid any more, so they d…[Read more]

@thommck

Yes, of course. There must have been a memory worm with me in the cellar.

Mind you, when the Doctor mentions the woman in the shop and says: “we still don’t know who that was”, it was a perfect opportunity for Clara to look at him and say: “well, actually…” but she didn’t.

Hmm. Now I am questioning my previous reflection. Obviously…[Read more]

@thommck  Susan has definitely been dangled in front of us.  I was almost sold on the idea that Clara’s mother was Susan and that Clara’s been chameleon-locked since birth for her own protection or something but, as much as that sounds nifty, I also struggle to make it fit.  Does that mean her mother didn’t die but regenerated?  Did Susan just…[Read more]

@thommck – spot on!

I’m perfectly ok with closed loops (or acausal loops as @PhileasF so eloquently puts it) because I assume the Doctor has a more nuanced view of time and paradoxes than I do, and if creating one’s own time loop doesn’t bother him, it won’t bother me either.

When I feel close to head-asplode time, I just think back to this…[Read more]