Yes, the bushfires were fairly close – about 50km / a half hour drive away. We saw nothing until last Saturday when the sky filled with a light smoke, turning the sky orange-brown and the sun a vivid red. Something that would have signaled the end of days to those unscientific folk in times gone past.…[Read more]

Much (though far from all) my knowledge of Classical comes via the prism of Prog. Mind you first time I heard Tapiola by Sibelius it was a ‘building a library’ program… basically a Head of David like 1/2 hour wall of sound interspersed with two terribly educated gents asking each other… ‘which one do yo…[Read more]

I hope the next year is all that you hope for.

stay sunny

Thank you!

You know, I have managed it in the past. You get an update you can’t call t’internet yer own!

Anyway, how was that ever only a b side?

@whisht OMG She was the Moment for a Moment and now is actually the Doctor for a season!!

Oh, I like that!

I watched Unleashed too, and I felt for the crew! Midges are really the worst, evil wee critturs.

Are there any songs about them?

Of course there are!! A bit on the cheesy side but here you go:

Scottish legend Kenneth McKellar (“the midges, the midges, I’m no gonny kidyes, with teeth like piranhas, they’ll drive ye…[Read more]

Interesting. Are there any songs about midges? Midges in my experience are a million times more pestiferous than mosquitos, because mosquitos at least do you the courtesy of injecting anaesthetic when they bite even if the bites itch later, and  they don’t generally tend to attack in battalions. I have very unpleasant memories of working…[Read more]

Great choices as always. And the last one even has the colour scheme!! (Blue/yellow/splashes of dark red)

And very fitting for 1950s Wish World.

Now I may have to go and suck some lemons to counterbalance all that sugary sweetness. LOL. 😛

And to @geoffers for clarifying my muddled thinking. Of course the Rani timetravelled from 1865 to 2025. Similarly, we (and the world’s…[Read more]

“Poppy is real”

I still have this lingering feeling that Poppy might be a Timelord, crazy as that sounds. How else to explain her appearance in “Space Babies” and, briefly, in Lagos?

@Mudlark I love the catch about the Rani turning the 7th son of a 7th son of a 7th son’s Mum into flowers and his Dad into an owl, a la Blodeuwedd. That’s another duality (like the bigeneration) as Blodeuwedd has the dual form of owls/ flowers. Hers is also a very…[Read more]

@Mudlark – LOVE your Lesley Gore pick for Robot Revolution – just perfect (tho I admit to bias as it’s one of my all time faves). Thank you.

Thanks also to @Whisht – always spot…[Read more]

Speaking of which… what…[Read more]

And apologies for my absence on here, been working away from home and only just managed a proper binge catch up of the last 3 episodes. Twice!! And a catch up of the thoughts and theories here. I especially liked the Story And the Engine which has hung about my head a lot, and…[Read more]

The chief problem I have with your proposed scenario for the finale is that it’s an awful lot of material to cram into two episodes, and this is a series in which, as several people have observed, there have already been episodes which might have been better developed over more than 50 minutes. I agree also with @whisht and @blenkinsoptheb…[Read more]

I really hope Belinda is not ‘special’.

As do I. If you recall, the Doctor scanned her DNA, so unless he was lying through his teeth, we can hope that she is regular Belinda.

p.s. Mrs Blenkinsop and I watched the very first Who story “An Unearthly Child” last night. It was brilliant. It brought back memories for me of watching it as a n…[Read more]

See above

Apologies to anyone I’ve missed off the list.

As to what’s goi…[Read more]

He wasn’t prepared to accept  the loss of control and subordinate status, but in defying the gods and planning revenge he lost his own power as a storyteller

Yes, this was my take also. It would have been nice to understand how and why it occurred but I assume the story runtime meant it had to be implied rather than shown (t…[Read more]

 If he’s the storyteller of the gods then why did he need to hold people hostage and force them to tell stories?

My reading, which of course may be well off the mark, is that he began, as he said, as a mortal – a griot telling stories. To connect the stories  he gathered from all over the world he constructed a web, the Nexus,…[Read more]

In fact the Barber hasn’t been telling stories – he’s been stealing them.

I wondered about this. If he’s the storyteller of the gods then why did he need to hold people hostage and force them to tell stories? Presumably he wasn’t able to tell stories anymore, but I didn’t see the reason why that was the case explained in the episode.

Thanks. I did wonder afterwards whether I should have gone with the Dusty Springfield cover, which is a better quality recording … and it’s Dusty Springfield!  But perhaps it was best to stick with the original.

stay strong

By the way that guy in the picture freaked me out as a child.

stay strong

The still of Balok, from Star Trek’s The Corbomite Manoeuvre, is on the nose. A puppet as it turned out. The protagonist was in fact a hyper intelligent baby.

The potential use of puppets is worrying for anyone who saw the Bandrill ‘video link’ from 1985’s Time Lash. However, the Bandrills look nothing like Anita Dobson, unlike the Balok puppet.

If it is another old Who callback, and one of the Guardians, I’d be a bit surprised. But…

1. I’ve been wrong before, pretty much everytime actually.

2. I’d reckon she would be the Black Guardian, given her previous statement about “bringing terror”.

What is interesting is that she’s been the neighbour of both of Doc…[Read more]

@bunface @Blenkinsopthebrave @thane16

I wonder if Gatwa Doctor’s frequent tears are because, on some deep level, he recognises that there is a Red Doctor/ Sutekh-possessed Red TARDIS out there in the crossed…[Read more]

The beginning and end of the choir vid reminds you these are regular fun-loving children making this amazing sound. Incredible really. x

Yes, The Carol of the Bells, which we heard in the introduction when baby Ruby is left at the church and again at the other end of the time loop when the Doctor returns her to the church porch – presumably the church choir singing. I wonder whether the choice here was deliberate, given that it is a Ukrainian song in origin – although I…[Read more]

cauliflower cheese. It’s a marvellous dish!

Can’t argue with that, it made me the Mudlark I am; likewise the Macra(ni) Cheese, regarding which the only terrors were my best friend and me when it appeared on the school dinner menu 😜

Looking forward, maybe the Toymaker’s phantasmagorical legions to come will include that well known Gr…[Read more]

@whisht

As I was watching, I wondered if the cut cards would yield anything meaningful. When the 8 Clubs came up, I was a bit stumped, but knew someone here would have an in-depth view.

For my part, it seemed to be a bit of foreshadowing, and with “Eight” sounding like “Ate” and a Club looking a bit like a Brassica, my suspicions were…[Read more]

… there’s an entire comment of yours on this thread I should link to as I want to hug it.

Awww shucks 🙂  I’ve been enjoying having you and @ScaryB back in the DJing box, and actually some of the lyrics to that Tom Waits song you posted, Who Are You, combined with @Phaseshift ‘s musing on the “Celestial” element of the Celestial T…[Read more]

GOOD Whisht!!! Yes, yes and YES! Exactly that! 😉

@ps1l0v3y0u

the stage in the Chibnall cycle when my brains started leaking from my ears.

😀 😀 😀

I’d missed the detail that it was the TARDIS that clocked Clone-Donna’s long arm at the last – clever old thing.  And yes, definitely a play on AI and its current weirdnesses with the human body. AI is terrifying frankly, so a very modern form of body horror.

I had forgotten ARSE – I’m…[Read more]

Haha, what else? 😉

Now what about this week…? How about this for an episode about doubles and detecting life signs:

(And also interesting thumbnail which seems to be AI image gone a bit wrong 😉 )

It is indeed lovely to catch up here again 🙂

Hope he can keep the accent.

Cheers

Janette

But another Scot!!???!!!???
Where’s the diversity BBC????

Ha!! Brilliant!

You have been gone too long, my friend.

@thane16 – Eleanor Rigby – great choice 🙂

RL has been having a massive impact on my online DW life; ironically for life in a pandemic with lockdown etc I got really busy, and mostly been having to watch on catch up (sometimes several at a time). Also, with less scope for bonkers theorising in the last 2 seasons maybe some of the…[Read more]

Stay safe.

I might try to do a FatBoy Slim style remix for a laugh. But a friend of mine just said to do top tracks from 1971. And there are…[Read more]

The Doctor. I know I have said this before, but Jodie Whittaker’s version still lacks authority. @mudlark made the same point above. I felt this has been her (or Chibnall’s) problem all along. And I point the finger at Chibnall because I have felt it was a conscious decision on his part to…[Read more]

So I thought I would offer up this, both for the music, and the staging, and because it reminds me of good…[Read more]

Crikey, you did! It’s either middle age short-term memory loss or lockdown disassociation.

So…did you manage to watch the two Borg episodes of NG and then Picard?

It has been a while since you have been around. Have not seen Devs yet. Clearly, I should.

Must ask you a question, but it means heading over to another page. So…

How many times i have said to someone, “I can imagine how you must feel.”
I hadn’t a clue, you have to experience something, then you don’t need to imagine, you simply know.
Your brother was right, grief comes in waves.<
There has been the  odd occasion when I’ve thought,  ‘I must tell D about that,’ then realised that I can’t.
Thank y…[Read more]

Have been in and out over the past few weeks, busy  as always, though the lockdown has at least meant no meetings. It has almost felt like a holiday but have been trying to catch up on other work which I had been neglecting.

Good to hear all are well and keeping safe. Right now I am very glad to be living where I do. Despite our idiot…[Read more]