Ringthane

Well, the chameleon circuit is supposed to disguise itself as the most innocuous thing in its surroundings. And there are diners in the middle of nowhere in the US. Still, it makes me wonder why the one in the Master's TARDIS didn't seem to work right after Delgado's Master either. His TARDIS became such things as a computer in a lab, which makes sense. But in "The Deadly Assassin" and "The Keeper of Traken", it's a grandfather clock for some strange reason. And then in "Logopolis", it's a bush and a Roman column (in the middle of a rocky planet). In "Castrovalva", it's a fireplace, which did fit in. I don't remember what it was after that. Another question, while we're on the subject of stolen TARDISes: how was it possible for the Master to have all those spare TARDISes? Where was he getting them? It's not like he could just pop back to Gallifrey and nab four or five of them. And yet, every time we saw him, he had an extra, stashed away somewhere convenient. Which also makes me wonder - if the Time Lords could track down and bring the Doctor back to Gallifrey or that space station to stand trial not once, but twice, why couldn't they just do the same to the Master? Or the Rani? Or the Meddling Monk? I realize the first time they only found the Doctor because he asked them for help with the War Games, but they didn't have any trouble finding him in "Trial of a Timelord". And if he's that easy to find, why did they never track down any of the villainous Time Lords in the same way? They even sent the Doctor on missions to clean up after the Master, but they never went after him themselves (and they apparently had no trouble finding him in "The Five Doctors"). There are times when even Classic Who makes about as much sense as a Moffat story.

The paint scheme on the Daleks in "Death to the Daleks" is my favorite of all of them - silver and black.

I think somebody else brought this up, but as of this episode, Gallifrey is back. Never mind how they managed it, but look at it this way: since the beginning of the return of the show in 2005, one thing has been guiding the Doctor above all else - Gallifrey. First it was the loss of it, and having to blow it up. And then, once he figured out how to save it, the objective became finding it. And now it's back, and he knows where it is, and I have to ask... Why? Why did he want it back so badly? Every time he goes there, he ends up being disgusted with the place, and tries to leave as soon as possible. He has nothing but contempt for the Time Lords. And he usually ends up almost being executed for something. Be upset that it's gone, OK. Be as guilty as you want because you had to burn it, fine. But why expend getting all that energy over it when it turns out you never liked it in the first place. What a case of sour grapes. Remember, this has been the Doctor's albatross for ten years now. And instead of getting something awesome when it came back, we get this.

You know, for some reason I can totally see Ashildir doing just that.

But they have a stun setting. Maxil shot Five in "Arc of Infinity", but it was just on stun. Surely Twelve could have just stunned the guy instead of killing him.

I remember reading somewhere that the reason that Two and Three defer to Hartnell is because he was the original, and the only one who wasn't a regeneration. I don't remember where I read it, or why that mattered. As far as my celebrity encouters go, I've gone to conventions with Tom and Colin Baker, gotten autographs from Sylvester McCoy, and had two near misses - like somebody else, Jon Pertwee walked by me dressed in character at one of my first conventions. And at another one, I was in the dealers' room, and at the next table was Sally Knyvette from Blakes 7 (I'm a fan of that show too). I was too shy at the time to talk to her, though.

I have to wonder what Jenna Coleman thinks of that. She just spent the last two or three years playing the worst thing to happen to the Doctor in 51 years of stories. She must just be thrilled.

What's worse is that we say a poor rural village being raided by Vikings in 9th century (or something very like it) in "The Girl Who Died", and they came off better than Gallifrey did here. And they didn't have millenia of knowledge and technology backing them up either. Just the Doctor. The only good thing about the episode was the stuff with the Doctor at the beginning in the barn, and then with the white TARDIS. I didn't realize how much I missed that look until this episode. I know dark and flashy is the style nowadays, but man, did that old console room look good. I could see Capaldi totally rocking that look. Although I'm not sure if the default console design should be the one Hartnell had. Unless that was another Type 40. Or was that just the set from "An Adventure in Time and Space"? I'm not sure if they kept it. And as someone else said, the original console was pale green, because pale green looks more white in old black and white TV than actual white.

Way back in 2008, we watched as another incarnation of the Doctor did and said the following: (from: http://www.tv.com/shows/doctor-who-2005/the-doctors-daughter-1198118/ ) And that was when a man killed what was technically his daughter. Not his special snowflake, not the Impossible Bore (sorry, Girl), not the most special person in the Universe. His daughter. Mr. Moffat, please spend a day watching the show you claim to love. It's on DVD, it's on Blu-Ray, it's even on Netflix streaming. Spend a day watching this little show called Doctor Who, and then do one more piece of writing. Write up your resignation letter, send it to your bosses, and then go back to working on the show you obviously want to work on - Sherlock. Let someone else play in the wonderful, glorious sandbox that is Doctor Who. Because you've used up all the love and admiration you built up from the admittedly wonderful Coupling. You've taken all the goodwill you built up with the 50th anniversary story and flushed it down the nearest toilet. The Doctor that was so happy when "Everybody lives", and the Doctors that figured out how to save Gallifrey instead of burn it, are the same Doctor as the one that shot a Time Lord and forced him to regenerate? I don't think so. There's 51 years of characterization built up about the Doctor, Mr. Moffat. If you can't get it right after 51 years, please step aside and let someone else try.

You have to wonder how much different or better it would have been if Hartnell had been well enough to take a larger part in the story. IIRC, he was supposed to be with Two and Three when they confronted Omega.

Oh, yeah, forgot about that - is this the first use of the word "ass" in DW? That Moffat - he's so edgy. Still thinks he's making Coupling, I guess.

A quote from the article: Anyone have RTD's number? Sounds like it's time for Moffat to read another one of those scripts...

See, I said Capaldi works better without a companion... Maybe we're taking the whole episode too literally? As in, maybe the whole thing wasn't a physical thing, where the Doctor spent centuries physically breaking down the wall to Gallifrey. Maybe it was just his thoughts as he was being sent to wherever the thing sent him, and that's how he perceived what had to happen to break down the wall between our universe and wherever Gallifrey is. And the "hybrid is me" line could also mean, "they thought it was a hybrid, but it turns out it's actually me", not that he is the hybrid. Again, I'm just hypothesizing here, and I have no actual facts to back this up. But he does say they got the prophecy wrong, so it's not a stretch to think that maybe he's saying "what they thought was a hybrid is actually the rogue Time Lord who's been fighting against them all along".

They usually have to negotiate that, don't they? I know actors can be very specific where their names are in the credits. Although, how are the end credits for that episode? If Capaldi's still first, than the title credit order may not matter too much. I'm not sure how that stuff works in England. But there is precedent - Colin Baker was credited before Peter Davison in episode 4 of "Caves of Androzani", and his face replaced Davison's in the end credits, even though it was Davison's last episode.

I did like the Doctor's line about "The Universe seems a lot smaller if I'm angry at you". Mayor McMe certainly understood what he meant, just like back in "The Woman who Lived", when he told her if she killed someone, she'd make an enemy of him. And it was interesting that this Doctor seems to have more Warrior than Doctor in him, just like John Hurt's incarnation. Wonder if that's leading up to anything.

For me it was always Sunday night, at 11PM. Saturday night was Blakes 7 night. Actually, Sunday night was an awesome night for TV on PBS in Chicago, as they had Monty Python at 10, Dave Allen at Large at 10:30, and Doctor Who at 11. Then The Two Ronnies was on after Doctor Who (and I believe Image Union after that). Plus Masterpiece Theatre with Alastair Cooke at 9. So pretty much from 9 to whenever PBS went off the air (shows how old I am that I was around for TV channels signing off for the night), that was what our upstairs TV was tuned to. Another thing I remember from those days is when I got my first Target novelisations. The first ones I got were "Horns of Nimon", "Leisure Hive", and "Full Circle". About a month later, my grandmother got me "Dalek Invasion of Earth". At that time I didn't know about renegeration, or that Tom Baker was the fourth Doctor. So I had no idea who the old guy with white hair they were calling the Doctor was. Or who the companions were. I thought they'd made some kind of mistake, or maybe the Doctor was like James Bond, and different people used the title. Somewhere in my basement I still have every Target novelisation, plus pretty much all of the special books, like Peter Hainings books, the Companions book, all kinds of things... Between that and my pretty much complete collection of Star Trek novels, I'm probably sitting on a real goldmine.

They probably could have just clubbed the monsters with those huge guns and they would have disintegrated. They're made of sand, after all. Yeah, they might reassemble, if they're that good at being sand monsters, but it would give you a chance to get away while they're doing it. The level of stupid this season has reached unheard-of levels for this show. There are McCoy stories that make more sense than a lot of these.

I do like Pertwee's run. For some odd reason, "The Mutants" through "The Three Doctors" are some of my favorite stories. Of course, my first exposure to Doctor Who was... "Horns of Nimon". So that may have something to do with it. (I'm not kidding. The first time I ever saw DW was when I was around 11, and my parents let me stay up to watch it. It was on WTTW, the Chicago PBS station, and the first story I saw was "Horns of Nimon". I got to see that one through "Full Circle" before I had to go back to school and couldn't stay up so late on Sunday nights. That was back before we even had a VCR. The first story I was able to videotape and watch the next day? "Inferno". I suppose it could have been worse - my first story could have been "Time and the Rani".)

The Myrka? That was the one in Davison's story ("Warriors of the Deep"). That's the one where somebody does the world's most eccentric karate chop against the thing. I want some of whatever the production team was on when they made that story.

The way the soldiers kept saying "May the gods look favorably upon you" or whatever reminded me of Lexx and the people on the Cluster that were always saying "May his merciful Shadow shine down on you" or whatever. Other than that... Ummm... Once again, we have about half an episode of story. And I thought the dust was the Vashta Nerada. Now it's these guys as well? Plus it can capture and transmit HD audio/video? This episode wanted to be a whole bunch of other Doctor Who stories. The 474 character really wanted to be the robot that wasn't a robot from "Journey to the Center of the TARDIS". The monsters that couldn't see really wanted to be the other monsters that couldn't see (I swear we just had blind monsters a few weeks ago). The story really wanted to be the story from the underwater base episodes. The Rasmussen doctor guy really wanted to be Burke from "Aliens" (all right, so that's not a DW story, but you get my drift). Beyond that, though... Another goofy story from Moffat. He's beginning to rival JNT for odd ideas. Time for some new blood in the production office.

Yeah, I found a screencap from "Curse of Fenric". The duffle coat looks like the one Sylvester McCoy wore in that story.

That's another time that the Doctor's messing with Earth just made things worse. The whole Saxon thing could have been avoided if he'd followed the example set by his third incarnation when the Brigadier blew up the Silurians (ie, he let him know just what a tool he was, but went on from there. He didn't sabotage anyone's career, or allow a madman to hold one of the highest posts on Earth, or get a bunch of people killed through his self-righteousness. And I think we can agree that Three could be just as self-righteous as Ten any day.). And I believe that Bonnie Osgood's duffle coat may have been a nod to Sylvester McCoy's duffle coat in "Curse of Fenric". If so, it's quite an esoteric choice, as he only ever wore it in that story. Anyone else notice that Twelve stopped calling Bonnie "Zygella" in the middle of his speech? When things got really down to the wire, he stopped screwing around. It's little subtle things like that that really show there's potential in the stories. It's just too bad that the rest of it is as lousy as it is.

Something that just occurred to me about this episode, and I'm not sure if anyone brought this up: Twelve's "sit down and talk" speech was awesome and all, except for one thing... Getting the humans and Zygons to sit down and talk is exactly what started this whole mess. Again, if any of the three Doctors in "Day of the Doctor" had just said to the Zygons "Let us find you a new world and leave the Earth in peace", instead of wiping their minds of whether they were human or Zygon, locking them in a room, and not letting them leave until they worked out a treaty, none of this would have to have happened. Earth (and the Doctor) are stuck cleaning up the mess he made. I'm sure it seemed like a good idea at the time, but... It isn't the first time something like this has happened - see the Hartnell story "The Ark" for a similar example. Also, there's "The Face of Evil", where Four has to clean up the mess he made in an earlier visit to Leela's planet.

Speaking of Harry Sullivan, does anyone else remember that Companions book series they tried to do back in the 80's? There were (I believe) two of them - one for Turlough, and one for Harry. I have both of them, and one of these days I'll have to get Harry's book out and see what happened in it. The Companions books were supposed to be about what happened to the companions after they left the Doctor. Here's a link to the series: http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/The_Companions_of_Doctor_Who And a link to the actual Harry Sullivan book: http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Harry_Sullivan's_War_%28novel%29 From what I remember of them, Harry's book was a lot more James Bond-ish than he ever was in the series. According to the link, he was working on antidotes to nerve toxins, not toxins as in this story, but I don't know how canon these books actually were.

I believe it's on Youtube. Yeah, here it is: https://youtu.be/fBv_lwQWxoM?list=PLvMGq_h9khwW25HNCI7atc4wlbig0p9q6