Mark

At this point, the "people who are angry about bisexuals being angry about Constantine" demographic seems a lot louder than the actual "bisexuals being angry about Constantine" one.

Just sayin'.

I prefer to think of him as eccentric.

Right! I've seen all of Buffy and not one time did I see that

Well, there's the monster made out of bugs in 'What's My Line'. Close enough.

Still a silly comparison to make, though, not least because (a) the original Hellblazer story predates Buffy by quite a few years, (b) the demon-made-of-bugs concept wasn't original to HB either, and (c ) very little of what made 'A Feast of Friends' work was especially reliant on that specific element anyway.

Sign me up for Team "Some of the best SF in decades". Even if the ending is straight out of one of those stories off of that there Doctor Who. Possibly even especially because the ending is straight out of one of those stories off of that there Doctor Who.

I'm really looking forward to seeing it later this week. I've been informed in the strongest possible terms, by people on both sides whose opinions on films tend to correlate with mine, that it's either some of the best science fiction in decades, or that it's among the worst 'big movies' in recent memory. I'll be interested to make my own mind up.

You do notice the date on that article, yes?

It's still not been officially confirmed, although I'll be astonished if it isn't true.

Yeah, last week was an improvement on a middling pilot and a fairly desultory first episode, but this week's was the first episode that felt like a show I'd be interested in sticking with even if I weren't already invested in the character. More like that, please.

I had my reservations about the changed ending, but I can see what they were aiming for, and thought it largely succeeded. As others have pointed out, by making Gaz more sympathetic they actually made John's sacrificing him feel like more of a betrayal. Zed was largely superfluous, but having her there at the end to give John some well-deserved shit in lieu of his Greek chorus of dead mates (and hopefully we'll be seeing those before the end of the season) was probably a useful way of spelling it out for the hard of thinking.

Not a masterpiece, but an extremely solid bit of telly. Hopefully this is more of an indication of where the show will be going from here, and hopefully it's not too late to save it after a fairly unimpressive opening few weeks.

Blimey. That was actually good. No "considering that it's set in the DCU", no "considering it's not the real John", no qualifiers. Just a really solid John Constantine story. About time too.

Hate to break this to you, but Jenna Coleman is confirmed for the Christmas special.

1) Ade Heathen

2) Pooka

3) Mark

Wolvy - I assume you could tell me where your parents live with marginally more precision than "America". Why should this be any different?

Pooks - you appear to be unfamiliar with the concept of "interpreters"... :wink:

Out here in the real world there are entire charitable agencies devoted to reuniting refugees with their families. Of all the things in this episode whose plausibility could be questioned, this one strikes me as an odd choice to single out.

what the hell is Clara supposed to do? She has no idea who the kids parents are or where they live, or even if they are a live. It's not like she could ask Danny because he doesn't know either, and The Doctor already left by the time.

She could probably ask the kid himself, though. That might work

Heh - I was counting on nobody coming into this thread while I made a few quick edits to my post just after posting it. You got in there first, though

Well, that was a hell of a thing.

Bloody grim, mind. They've been pushing the envelope of what you can get away with in a Saturday evening family show all season, and this took that about as far as I think they're ever going to be able to take it. It's also the first Cyberman story since the '60s to effectively engage with the nightmarish body horror that actually makes them conceptually interesting as more than just A.N.Other generic army of stompy robots. The Cybermen shouldn't be Terminators, they should be vampires, and this one sold us on that. Gaiman's 'Nightmare in Silver' last year was touted as the episode to "make the Cybermen scary again", but this one did a far, far better job of it.

Death of Osgood was heartbreaking, as was just about everything with Danny - his line about all the Doctor's pretty speeches melting away in the face of a tactical advantage was chilling, not least because it was completely true. Good enough to redeem some of the unfortunately heavy-handed stuff earlier in the season about the nature of soldiers, and the Doctor's role as an officer.

The fact that Kate survived felt earned in a way that very few of Moffat's non-deaths have done before, precisely because death was treated with an appropriate degree of gravity elsewhere in the episode. The fact that the Master will inevitably be back, hopefully still played by Gomez, in no way undermines the effectiveness of that final scene in the graveyard - Clara's line about "if you've ever let that creature live, all of this is on you" is arguably a cliche, but a valid one deployed well. And while it's still something of a cop-out, of course the Brigadier should be the one to "save the Doctor's soul" by killing the Master for him. A lovely, heartfelt tribute to a beloved character.

Moffat's best season finale. Possibly the best season finale since the show came back. The best season since the show came back, in fact. And the best Doctor. Ever*.

And definitely the best Master. Also ever. "I just want my friend back" is up there with the "I Can't Decide" musical number in 'Last of the Time Lords' when it comes to note-perfect defining moments for the character.

Brilliant.

*He is right now, anyway. As the current incarnation always should be.

http://www.themarysue.com/capaldi-doctor-video-grief-autistic-boy/

 

:'(

What? No, it's just a bit dusty in here...

It's pretty much 'nice guy syndrome' writ large; all these guys feel like they've been doing everything right, and since they haven't been rewarded with the hot, hot sex such behaviour should rightfully lead to, they're upset at being misled.

 

i actually read that quite a lot on the interwebs lately and in my experience the 'nice guy syndrome' is bullshit. i actually do not even have a clue where this is coming from. do guys with such a self image and expectations really exist, or is it just made up?

Oh, they exist. They really, really exist. They're fucking *everywhere*.

most of the time it was really about a guy that wanted a relationship (and narrowing down relationships to sex is really sad). people deserve loving relationships, simply because they are human beings and loneliness is one bitchass feeling that after a while really takes it tolls on your soul, no one deserves that.

But that's the thing...they don't. It's awful that so many people are lonely and miserable. But 'deserve' has nothing to do with it - a relationship isn't just an abstract concept, it needs a commitment from another person. And the idea that a relationship is something that everyone deserves, regardless of the fact that they may not be making the necessary efforts to be the sort of person that another person can find attractive...that's absolutely reducing relationships/sex/women to the status of a reward, something that people (and it really is usually men, for a whole host of complex social reasons) are just entitled to.

No one is automatically entitled to the love or affection of another human being. However nice they are, however lonely they are, they just aren't. Loneliness and unfulfilled desires are horrible, miserable things, but by its nature a relationship requires mutual consent from more than one person, and sadly that means some people aren't going to get their romantic or sexual desires fulfilled. Because it isn't up to them. Reducing a relationship to an abstract concept that can be 'deserved' means ignoring the fact that another person has to consent to it as well, which is exactly the problem.

(Pssst...they're called bay leaves in English)

I made these last night, because I'm always on the lookout for good quick'n'easy recipes for week nights. They were absolutely delicious, particularly considering that they took no more than ten minutes to prepare.

Going back to 'Dark Water' for a moment (although that trailer is...intriguing), I just wanted to mention the scene where Danny is confronted by the child he killed is one of the most shockingly, truly, adult moments we've ever seen on Doctor Who. That it managed to be that while remaining well within the boundaries of appropriateness for what remains, after all, a children's show (family show. Whatever) is quite an achievement. Once again, I find myself deeply impressed by the complete shift in tone, content, pacing and just about everything else this season. I was well and truly ready for Moffat to leave before this run began, 'cos it was really feeling like he'd run out of ideas some time earlier. I've rarely been happier to be proven completely wrong, and on the strength of this year I'm pleased to know that he's going to be around for at least one more season. That's not something I'd ever have expected to find myself thinking.

She did do a 7th Doctor audio back in '07. Valhallia, I believe it was

Oh, so she did. I recall rather enjoying' Valhalla'. Nothing special, but a perfectly solid story with a better-than-average performance from McCoy (he's tended to be pretty good in the handful of companion-free audios he's done). I wouldn't urge anyone who hasn't dipped into the audios to seek out this one in particular - there are at least a couple of dozen better ones that would be worth checking out first - but I think l may dig out my copy to give it another listen. Thanks for the reminder!

Green Wing is a huge amount of fun, but you should definitely check out The Book Group, which is one of the most tragically underrated and overlooked TV shows of the past 15 years. Gomez is very good in it.

Unrelated: I'm delighted to note that, outside of the predictable hysterical bleating from a few of the more irrelevant corners of online fandom, there seems to have been very little substantial backlash against the gender switch. Which is tremendously encouraging, not least because it makes the eventual casting of a female Doctor even more inevitable than it already was, but it does mean I'm a bit embarrassed about the way my initial response was partly a defensive kneejerk against said (barely extant) backlash.

It's too early to draw any firm conclusions about her take on the character, but thus far Gomez appears to be playing a more traditional, recognizably Delgado-esque version of the character than John Simm did. There are hints of unhingedness buried just below the surface (her delivery of "Doctor Chang!" was splendidly bonkers), but on the whole she seems a lot more arch, and a lot less manic, than her predecessor. I'll be interested to see what she's going to do next week, when she finally gets the chance to go all in and really show us what she can do with the part.

Well, she's definitely been to Gallifrey - last time we saw him/her was when s/he (OK, this is going to get confusing fairly quickly) was being sent back into the Time War along with President James Bond and the rest of the High Council. I'm torn between wanting to know how s/he got out of that and quite liking the idea of it being left unresolved.

We last saw 'mood patches', including one that induced sleep, in Gridlock. I haven't gone back to check but I remember them looking similar enough to these that it's probably a deliberate, albeit subtle, callback. Can't recall anything similar since then.

Off the top of my head I can't actually think of a single compelling reason why anyone could reasonably object to the very idea of a female Master, but I'm open to the possibility that such a reason could plausibly exist. There certainly isn't anything pre-2005 that in any way rules it out, though. .

I have encountered at least one rational reason to prefer a male Doctor that doesn't boil down to a distaste for change and/or cooties - that the character is one of very, very few masculine role models NOT to be defined by violence or physical prowess, and that it's worth keeping him that way. I'm not 100% convinced by it, but it's a perfectly reasonable argument to make. It doesn't apply to the Master(/Mistress) anyway, though.

I'd like to roll back ever so slightly on the snideness in the final paragraph of my previous post - there are probably a few good reasons for objecting to the Master being played by an actor of the female persuasion that aren't in any way (a) massively nostalgia-blinkered or (b) sexist. I just don't see any of those reasons being cited very often, particularly compared to the remarkable frequency with which I see arguments that go out of their way to demonstrate how neatly they can be filed under either (a) or (b).

I was, indeed, referring to the episode.

It could all very well fall apart in the second part, but thus far I'm very pleased. A surprisingly (almost entirely, in fact) talky episode, very heavy on setup and light on plot, but that's not a terrible thing if the setup is intriguing, and it is here. I'll be disappointed, although very unsurprised, if the development at the start of this episode is reversed in part 2. Having something so major happen in such a mundane, almost off-hand way was a bold choice, and I'm not sure it entirely worked - I suspect that's more down to a lack of chemistry between Coleman and Anderson in previous episodes than to anything intrinsically wrong with the way it was handled in this episode, though.

Clara is, of course, the worst. But we all knew that already.

Michelle Gomez is splendid as <exactly who everyone thought she was> - if I recall correctly both TimC and myself argued in favour of her as a potential Doctor in this very thread a few years ago, and this is probably the next best thing. Unless you're particularly committed to thinking otherwise, in which case her casting is presumably the worst thing that could possibly have happened and doubtless means that Doctor Who will be cancelled, Moffat fired and/or the Proper Order Of Things restored any day now. See also: "Gallifrey was destroyed"; "the Doctor wears a leather jacket now"; "a companion fancies the Doctor"; "there are no round bits on the walls of the TARDIS any more"; and worst of all, "girls enjoy watching the show now, and some of them have the nerve to find the actor playing the Doctor attractive". And presumably, way back when, "some guy called Patrick Troughton is replacing William Hartnell".