truther

Several people have tried to thoughtfully explain why the "text" wasn't as clear as you would make it out to be. How's about we simply acknowledge the differing viewpoints rather than try to tell people what to think?

Yep, that's exactly how I saw it, too. The only time Twelve has taken a kindly view of anything any human has done is when he thought Clara was dating a well-dressed white guy instead of the black guy she's actually going out with. All this speculation here about race simply highlights what an awful job the show has done in explaining the Doctor's motivations.

I feel like an idiot for asking this now and not back when the subject first came up, but is there a famous person I can reference who speaks with this vocal fry you guys all talk about? Because I'll admit I don't always catch it on these episodes. There'll be some woman who speaks with what to me is simply a midwestern accent or something, and then the next day people are all "vocal fry!" and I'm not sure I know why. It's like everyone else laughing at a joke you don't get.

Speaking from personal experience, there are obviously problems with 4th/5th-storey walkups (eg broken legs, crabby movers), but the benefits vastly outweigh the negatives. You get used to it real fast and the free exercise is amazing. It really is good for you, and that's something that you get everyday versus the slight possibility of something like being housebound with a severe fracture. To me, not living in a walkup for fear of maybe breaking your leg is like choosing where in a jet plane to sit in the event it crashes. Just don't worry about it. You also often get really good views and, in our case, great rooftop space. Plus, a little-known plus is that these places are amazingly safe. Nobody walks up 4 flights of stairs to see if a door is open so they can get in and steal a TV. I'm fairly confident that I could have removed the lock from my front door entirely and nothing ever would have happened.

Howdy! We've currently got HHI on in the background and it's a single guy moving to Helsingborg, Sweden. He wants to experience Europe and travel all around and be a sophisticated cosmopolitan guy but he 1) has a fake quasi English accent and 2) refuses to take buses or ride a bicycle and 3) is one of the most annoying, high-maintenance people I've ever seen on this show. It would have been much better if they'd simply run snarky comments about him from his nurse, I mean friend.

Certainly we can conceive of some magical space creature that can create an entire replacement Moon out of nothing. But if so then the episode was badly written, because it used terms like "egg," "shell" and "hatch." And also, when the Doctor first arrived on the Moon he immediately went to work trying to figure out why the "gravity is wrong." So the laws of physics applied to this situation, and the hatchling inside the Moon fed off the matter around it just like any egg is supposed to operate. That makes it impossible for the new space creature to be born and then to lay a new Moon egg that exactly replicates the old Moon it had just destroyed. A baby can't lay an egg that's larger and heavier than itself. It's a physical impossibility. I also wondered how the new Moon could possibly look exactly like the old one. How do you recreate ancient lava flows, impact craters and seismic fractures? How do you know where to put the newer craters on top of the older ones? Does the new Moon have the left-behind Apollo landing craft on it? That can all be hand-waved away, I suppose, but it's simply another reason why the whole Moon-is-an-egg idea (for me, at least) didn't make any sense. At all.

Yeah those spinner things are actually pretty handy. I don't remember the precise words but I'm pretty sure Lewis also threw in a pun about "hanging you out to dry" while Hathaway was putting his spin-dried trunks away. I thought it was a good episode. Loved Innocent telling Hathaway not to be such a diva. Though I agree with whoever said upthread that the new partner should speak slightly slower.

My thoughts exactly. BBC America broadcasts Doctor Who at 9pm Saturday nights in the Eastern Time Zone. That's a very loud, very clear acknowledgment that the show isn't particularly kid-friendly, especially given that BBC will run promos during the show for other very adult-oriented programs like Orphan Black or Intruders. Whatever it's meant to be in the UK, it's marketed in the US as a show for grownups or, at the very least, kids who are allowed to watch a lot of violence. That's not to say the show can't appeal to kids. Heck, I grew up watching Star Trek and it's a great example of a program that can appeal to every generation. Any good show should have something in it for everyone. But NuWho in particular has stuff that I wouldn't want kids watching -- people screaming in agony as they're being devoured by spiderlike bacteria on the Moon, for example -- and I've never seen anything in the way the BBC markets the show to suggest it's aiming for adolescent viewers.

Yep. I'm coming around to that viewpoint as well. As I was thinking about the ep this morning I finally realized just how breathtakingly arrogant Clara was. You've got planet Earth in 2049, suffering under some extraordinary catastrophe and reaching consensus on how best to deal with it. Then along comes Clara, utterly ignorant and alien to that world, taking it on herself to veto their decision even though nobody asked her and she literally doesn't know what's going on. Even giving them a vote was itself amazingly egotistical. Imagine if you were about to have major surgery and somebody you didn't know waltzed into your hospital room and said they were morally opposed to what you were doing but would let you go ahead with your decision if your whole family voted in favor of it. And then they ignored you anyway!

But that's not what should have happened. It's not simply that the Earth didn't know a replacement Moon was coming. It's that there can't be a replacement Moon. It's impossible. I totally appreciate how you're paraphrasing Star Trek but this episode seems to teach precisely the opposite lesson from Star Trek. Namely, that there's a magical solution to everything that makes everything alright for everyone no matter what you do (well, except for the Mexican miners and those other two astronauts on the shuttle). Star Trek argued that to boldly go where none had gone before was worthwhile despite the risks. This ep, for me anyway, seems to say that there are no risks at all. That there's always a happy ending, no matter how fanciful or implausible, so just do whatever you want and hope for the best. It's like teaching your kids financial responsibility by giving them credit cards, letting them max them out, and then secretly paying them off.

I really enjoyed the first 45 minutes. Capaldi was great, the story was familiar but good, the show moved along well. So that's a good thing and hopefully they can build on that success the rest of the season. The last 15 minutes, for me, were just one WTF moment after another. I didn't buy the Moon as egg idea. It seems impossible not to have been noticed already if it is. Heck, it's just impossible. It made me think of that movie The Core from a few years back. The new egg to replace the blowed-up Moon was just a little too magic wand-y for me. How can a space creature that hatched from the Moon then lay an egg the size of the Moon? And Clara's fury at the Doctor at the end didn't make sense for me at all. I'm honestly not sure what she's so mad about and I certainly didn't sympathize. It just felt like another one of these forced relationship milestones that just happen because the show wants them to, without making any coherent sense.

You know, BearCat49, that third AZ home had "professional athlete" written all over it. To me, anyway. Something about the weird color schemes, the big backyard pool/bar/slide, the funky stairwell lights, etc.

I just watched NYC-to-Phoenix, where the husband insisted on evaluating the places according to their price per square foot. The lower the price/sf, in his mind, the better. Unless I'm missing something this is just an absolutely pointless thing to do. Price/sf makes sense when you're looking at otherwise comparable properties, like "Class A downtown office space." Single-family homes are definitely not interchangeable. The better ones are more expensive -- a 1,000 sf house right on the beach, for example, will cost a heck of a lot more than a 1,000 sf house two blocks inland. And a house with serious structural problems will have a much lower price/sf than the same-sized house that doesn't. If you buy whichever house has the lowest price/sf you're almost certainly buying the crummiest. Perhaps that explains why the homes they looked at all seemed surprisingly dumpy for the price.

Agreed. A textbook example of how to do this show properly. I remember when that episode first aired -- I learned about a market I knew little about, and saw a very interesting home, and saw a very interesting house hunter, and saw her put the property to extremely good use. Everything made sense given her particular needs. The contrast between her house search, and the more common episodes featuring some whining jackass who doesn't know what "updated" and "contemporary" mean, was astronomical.

Apples and oranges. I want the show to spend as much, or as little, time as necessary to make Danny and Clara a believable couple. Right now the show devotes an inordinate amount of time to Clara's personal life but has never once shown me any reason to believe that she and Danny even like each other, let alone should be romantically involved. So it's not about trying to have it both ways. It's about asking that the show put a little effort into character development. If that means one 5-minute scene for the whole season then fine by me. But we still need that scene. Right now they have zero chemistry.

If it's a kids' show, what's it doing on at 9pm on Saturday nights? That's like putting on Friday evenings after sundown a show for Jews who keep the Sabbath.

While I have my problems with Clara, this is definitely not one of them. :)

I had the same reactions. Once the homeowners mentioned that they'd found mold in the kitchen insulation, I decided that the whole scene was a set-up. The kitchen demo looked like it had been very professionally done -- everything removed down to the studs, but all the wiring and plumbing kept intact. That would have taken the husband and wife at least a few days to do and would have left a huge amount of rubbish to dispose of. You mean to tell me they did all that without the contractor or the decorator noticing? Or that they didn't bother telling anyone about the mold when they found it? And yeah, I felt sorry for the extensive wildlife living in the pool that had reverted to a wetland. Let's assume they had a happy ending. And it was odd to spend $1,000 to fill the pool with water after the end of pool season.

No, I don't think anybody actually thinks the Doctor was being racist. What I (and, I think, some others) are saying is that the Doctor's behavior on that issue is utterly incoherent and out of character. There's no reason why he should so angrily refuse to acknowledge that a former soldier can teach mathematics. Certainly no reason that the show has ever given us. It's insane. So the viewer's mind starts grasping at straws, trying to find something that at least explains why the characters are doing what they're doing. It's a staple of American society that black men are assumed to hold lower rungs on the ladder vis a vis whites. It's the inherent racism that's been there since slavery days. The Doctor sees Clara hanging out with a black man and wonders why she's wasting her time with a PE instructor. Then he sees her with a white man and instantly approves of what is to him a perfect match of equals. I know that's not what the show is trying to say (or at least I hope to god not). That's why I said my wife, who only sits in the room while the show is on and doesn't really pay close attention, drew that conclusion. So what the showrunners should have been doing is giving Twelve's hatred of soldiers a more plausible foundation. Then we wouldn't be thinking about racism which, again, is at least a plausible explanation for the Doctor's behavior rather than whatever soldier hatred he now has that hasn't been explained to us. Make sense?

That was exactly my wife's reaction. She doesn't really watch the show but we sit there together and I'll be watching while she does something else. When the Doctor scoffed at the idea of Pink being a maths teacher she immediately looked up and said "why? Because he's black? Since when is the Doctor racist?" I agree that wasn't the intent, but it's further evidence that they didn't really think through the (ridiculous) plotline.

Especially this ongoing "P.E." thing. Matt Smith would have made it amusing. Picture him saying that he keeps hearing that Pink is a maths teacher "but that it's just not registering" and it would be funny. When Capaldi says it he just sounds meanspirited. It's like watching a drill sergeant pick on the outcast in a group of basic training recruits. The whole episode was like that. What might have been enjoyable in other eras was just gloomy here. The music was dreary. The lighting and sets were dreary. It reminded me of when a show tries to do an alternate reality or alternate universe by having everyone dress darkly and act more depressed or something. And the comment upthread about the Clara/Pink relationship progressing entirely off-screen is dead on. I saw absolutely nothing in this episode to even suggest that their relationship should be improving, let alone getting to the "I love you" stage. Seriously -- why do they like each other?

Did anyone catch the Evanston episode last night? House #3 was being renovated when the homeowners looked at it. The husband -- who we were told is terrible at visualizing things -- walked into this empty home and immediately knew precisely where his TVs would go and how the renovations would look when finished. Of course he knew this because it was their house. Maybe I'm overthinking this but it's not really worth watching if they're going to mail it in to quite the degree they've recently been mailing it in on this show.

That would explain why my reaction to the Bali episode was Zzzzzzzz. It was like watching bad actors stumble through a badly-written movie. Like a porno without the porn, or so I might imagine based on what other people have told me about porn.

Oh, whoops, I didn't notice that the thread title had previously talking about PhD's. BTW, Martha is awesome. Smoking hot and super cool. What I wouldn't give to have her traveling around with Capaldi right now instead of the Impossible Girl.

To me a medical doctor is a "real" doctor. A Ph.D. is a "professor." If they don't work in academia, and hence aren't actually a professor, then they're a Ph.D. Yes that of course entitles them to be called doctor, and I'm merely talking semantics and not passing judgment on anyone, but if I'm told that somebody's a "doctor" then I'm assuming they're an MD unless I'm told otherwise.