truther

Fair play to you for responding.

Candice has really, really come on strong. I don't pay any attention to the criticism about her looks (which, in all honesty, don't exactly bother me let's just say). After all we're only seeing what the editors choose to show us, and anyone can get an edit that may or may not reflect their true self, even on a lovely program like this one. I honestly don't see why anyone would have a problem with Candice. And her results have been spectacular. When you compare them to some of the people who are clearly falling behind, like Tom, the difference is even more pronounced. Some of these contestants are still struggling to do basic things like bake the food properly, and she's doing highly sophisticated ingredients and presentations and pulling them off nicely. She and a few of the others, like Benjamina, are starting to pull away from the pack. That all being said, I was a little surprised at the ending. After Mel and Sue announced star baker and who was being sent home, the show spent virtually all the remaining time commiserating about Val. Everybody hugging her, talking about how wonderful she was, wishing her the best. Then at the end they threw a few second Candice's way, and it was just her and nobody. The show seems to present her as more of a loner than the others.

That also explains the comic relief about the burglar mask he was wearing when he was taking Bill to the lifts, and how the others in the operation room saw through his "disguise."

Agree with the sentiments some others have expressed. It's a pleasant enough show, and certainly better this season with Bill as the companion, but it's missing something. This episode was okay, with flaws, and I don't need to ever watch it again. Personally I just want Missy to go away.

And don't forget the red shirt! Granted, they were all wearing red shirts, but he was, too.

Surely we can all agree that there is a Valles Marineris-sized canyon of difference between running commercials during a TV program and killing your employees when they become too expensive to maintain. It's not hypocrisy to teach lessons through fables, anecdotes and hyperbole.

Loved the premise and most of the episode -- the witty banter, especially, was terrific. The Doctor, Nardole and Bill were a good trio. Likewise loved the idea of a coldly calculating mining station (@JohnPotts) whose bottom-line owners simply offed their employees once they became too costly. The ending left me shaking my head, though. Tons of questions, like why send a ship with replacement workers if you're killing off the too-expensive-to-maintain ones already there? Why did Bill not die, exactly? (I heard something about the Doctor zapping the suit so the charge wasn't strong enough or something.) How come nobody else got to come back to life? It seems like this show often starts out great and then, when it looks at its watch and sees it's time to end things, just sort of has the Doctor talk quickly about a lot of mumbo jumbo and presto, happy ending. The breath counter was a great idea but with one huge problem -- why not turn off the artificial gravity? Then they could float and push themselves around the station and use vastly less O2.

You're not missing anything. It's basically been the same scene every week -- Nardole checks the box door and mutters about the Doctor's oath, and it's insinuated that somebody is on the other side. Last week there were three knocks. This week there was some piano playing and then the Doctor brought in dinner. Others may have a different reaction, but to me these little end scenes almost feel like afterthoughts tacked on for some Special Edition re-release issued 5 years later. They're irrelevant to the rest of the episode and don't actually contribute to the story. If they were cut out entirely I wouldn't miss them.

This is exactly why "Kill the Moon" was so bad (IMO). If the premise is that destroying the Moon will wreak havoc on Earth, because of mass and gravity and physics and all that jazz, then you cannot, by definition, have the ending you have in that episode because it violates all those laws. You can have whatever ending you want to imagine but it must make sense within the construct of the show. That goes to my problem with this episode (which I really liked, btw). I agree that it repeats Moffatt's basic problem of a consequence-free storyline. Cool setup, great tension, but silly ending. Lots of people have remarked on Bill's strange reactions and I agree that they illustrate the Moffatt-era problem of everything being forgotten as soon as it happens. Your friends are being eaten alive by a house? Hey, whatever! Fireworks! This Doctor guy thinks you're in trouble? The same Doctor who saved you from your crush after she'd been turned into a water zombie, and from homicidal nano-technology, and from a giant underwater monster in the River Thames? Hey, he's just old! This is me time! Bill's behavior in this ep doesn't really make sense in the larger context of what we've seen because it's not meant to. The scene about the dead orphan last week was there because we apparently needed A Confrontation. But then it's over and forgotten and we move on like nothing's happened. And Bill's in a creepy, dangerous situation she doesn't understand and it's like that's never happened before, either. Because it essentially hasn't. And the episode is wrapped up in a tidy little bow because we like it that way and let's go the pub! That's S.O.P. for this show.

Actually, once the ending became obvious I was hoping they were going to bring everyone back to life. It would have been cool to have a final scene, Close Encounters-style, with six people from 1957, 1977, and 1997 suddenly re-appearing in the present.

Add me to the list of people having issues with the dialogue. There's nothing foreign about the accents to me, yet every episode there's at least three or four instances where I simply have no idea what somebody's just said.

My thoughts exactly -- it's making the whole concept of travel through time and space fun, which is what it should be. You're supposed to be blown away when you realize you're standing on another planet or in a different time. There should be a million questions cramming your totally overwhelmed brain. You should be struggling to make sense of it all and doing everything you can to capture the moment, comprehend it, and enjoy it while it lasts. Clara, on the other hand, too often rolled her eyes like a spoiled teen.

I wonder whether I would have liked it more had been from one of the early NuWho seasons. As it was, it seemed very recycled. Still, it was pretty good. Nice banter, no Clara, pretty scenery . . . good stuff. But I agree with the other complaints. The ending felt forced and silly, as if they'd come up with a great concept but never quite gotten around to figuring out what to do with it. And yeah, "Vardy" or whatever name they used was just too similar. And I kept expecting one of the emojibots to hold out its black hand and explain that it was offering a kindness.

That's the kind of trivia that fascinates me so I looked it up. Sadly, it isn't (any more?) true. College Station is slightly bigger within Texas, and Fresno CA is five times as big. (Also in California, Santa Rosa has almost twice the population.)

I liked it. I'm not sure I want the whole season to be like that, especially the pacing, but generally I agree with the other comments. Bill's cool and, fundamentally, not Clara. Capaldi seemed comfortable and the professor idea was good. I also thought Nardole was excellent - very funny and effective in limited doses. My one big pet peeve, and it's probably just me, but I'm always bothered when shows have random background people getting killed just for scenery. Just something about the way this episode focused so much on the important peoples' lives -- going to the end of the universe to try to save one person -- while at the same time shrugging off the Dalek victims without a second thought.

Yeah, I probably wouldn't even have posted my comment except BBCAmerica showed "Midnight" yesterday, which is precisely the type of episode I wish they did more often.

My problem with having that character return -- and I like both the actor and the character -- is that it implies some Epic Spectacular Confrontation Across Time And Space Where The Fate Of The Universe Hangs In The Balance. My personal issue with this show is that it's become too big. Everything's too . . . much.

I've always heard people refer to their "growing families," though. Since a lot of the house hunters on these shows seem ignorant of even basic words and phrases, it wouldn't shock me if the same people who think a split-level prefab is a "craftsman-style home" also use terms like "growing our family."

I agree. The Truther Family all agrees that the family interactions between Jo and the kids are painful to watch.

The interiors of those Rio places were awful. I'm normally a pretty easygoing person, and I've lived in lots of different places of wildly varying levels of luxury, but those Rio places were uniformly depressing. Even the first apartment.

Not just you. I saw the original "Superior Donuts" play at Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. We had season tickets back then and it was just another one of the plays. Caught it tonight and decided to watch to see what they'd done with it, and was pleasantly surprised. I agree with you completely about the way the show "draws a picture of how we could all get along." I loved the good cop/bad cop ending with the Girl Scout mom and Lou's eviction from the bathroom.

Melbourne last night was in my family's neighborhood -- Beaumaris. It's a great suburb but very far from the center of the city, so I wonder where he was going to work. It was also a shame they didn't talk about what school the kids were going to, or spend more time on the local shopping street, or any other practical stuff. Instead it was all with the wife and her silly demand to be within walking distance of the beach "so they could live the Australian lifestyle." Melbourne is a sprawling city and very few people make "walking distance to the beach" a priority in their house search, in part because Port Philip Bay isn't really the "beach" you might go to. It's sort of like insisting on a view of the Eiffel Tower from your living room so you can live like a true Parisian.

Maine couple were great. I got the impression they both clearly knew the screened in cat porch was just a producer thing. They were having good fun with it. I also liked the kitchen shot early on, when she made, what, green bean tacos? And he joked about how everybody watching would think they were crazy. Good times.

Do people even care about this show anymore? I mean yeah, obviously a lot of us literally do. But in a larger sense it seems that this show has completely lost the plot. I fear the producers are going to learn all the wrong lessons. They brought in Capaldi and gave him absolutely crappy material to work with, and have likely concluded that an older Doctor won't work. Then they take a long hiatus, causing casual viewers to forget about the show, and the producers seem to think they need to kickstart interest by bringing in some young, flashy person to take the show in a new direction. So I can picture them making the next Doctor a sass-talking woman, perhaps, and alienating a lot of the long-term viewers in the process. Which means the producers will learn another incorrect lesson -- that Doctor Who fans are misogynists or something -- and decide the show isn't worth it anymore, and it'll disappear for even longer.

I thought I was watching the pilot episode for a Fixer Upper spinoff about gun-toting Baylor frat boys starting out their new lives as grownups.