Heads up! Dr Who starts Saturday....

[BrianI]

This Saturday at 7:10PM

YAY!   

[Adam]

I was struck by the fact that the Doctor Who episode to be shown on Saturday is "Let's kill Hitler", and the Torchwood episode tonight had Jack's speech about the parasite thing changing the course of history so that the Third Reich carries on.  Linked stories?

[mcshroom]

Maybe they're following a TV equivalent of Godwin's law 

[woollypigs]

Five minutes warning !!! Please BBC don't do a Touchwood on the the Doctor.

[rower40]

Five minutes warning !!! Please BBC don't do a Touchwood on the the Doctor.

And breathe.  They didn't.

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Hitler's still in the cupboard though.

Shame we won't see more of Mels though.  She was ~17% more fit than River Song.

[TimO]

That was certainly interesting.

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It seems like a bit of a shame that in effect they've stopped River from regenerating again in future, so she can only hang around as long as Alex Kingston wants to play the part.

A good episode though, a little silly in places, but I enjoyed it.  I was worried that the whole Hitler thing would be a bit of a drag, but ultimately it was really a bit cursory, which seemed to work.

[woollypigs]

That was good, right old Doctor Who

Next week looks like a real watch from behind the pillows episode ....

[peliroja]

That was brilliant. Fast, clever, and more plot than you can shake a stick at. Such a contrast to Torchwood.

[border-rider]

oh, that was fantastic

Proper funny & exciting Dr Who

The "kill Hitler" thing was a pretty knowing nod at the genre, I thought, and it was good to have people queuing up to do it 

Such a contrast to Torchwood.

just what we thought

[woollypigs]

Hmm just hit me? Do you get jet lagged if you time travel?

[Eccentrica Gallumbits]

Oh, I liked that.

[her_welshness]

Yes, a right rollicking episode. More please  It is hopefully going scary next week.

[MattH]

That was certainly interesting.

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It seems like a bit of a shame that in effect they've stopped River from regenerating again in future, so she can only hang around as long as Alex Kingston wants to play the part.

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Unless something is pulled out of a hat that allows the Tardis energy to pull extra regenerations from a parallel universe, or some other deus ex machina, as appears to be the current fashion in Dr Who.

[border-rider]

Lots of nominative recursion

Watching Confidential on BBC3 now; Steven Moffat refers to "the River" at one point.  I suppose it's about the flow of her life through the Doctor's, but in the other direction. It's a clever idea.

[TimO]

Confidential is always good for a few "Oh, so they did!" and "What, I hadn't noticed that!" moments.

Today's, for me, was that Karen Gillan had previously appeared before in Dr Who, in the episode The Fires of Pompeii, as a soothsayer!

[David Martin]

Loved the Numbskulls...

[BrianI]

A very good episode.  Mels would have made a good Doctor's Assistant,  Ace style!   

[rower40]

Confidential is always good for a few "Oh, so they did!" and "What, I hadn't noticed that!" moments.

Today's, for me, was that Karen Gillan had previously appeared before in Dr Who, in the episode The Fires of Pompeii, as a soothsayer!

And that they've used that building many times before.  I recognised it from the welsh mining experiment episode - the Silurian conference room.

[andyoxon]

I don't know... IMO, it was too self absorbed, too convoluted even for Dr Who, in danger of losing it's 'target' audience - while also appealing to adults,  didn't like the writing, not convinced by the series or this episode.  Matt Smith is no David Tennant, and bring back episodes like the Empty Child, Sally Sparrow, and the Girl in the fireplace...

Not saying it wasn't worth watching though...   

and... the Rory character was on-balance probably a mistake, as it IMO adds an unwanted plot dynamic detracting from the Doctor - companion relationship, a feature over the years.

[mrcharly-YHT]

I'm glad they've re-balanced the character of Rory.

He had more grit in the first few episodes, then was supposed to have lived for 2000years guarding the stone thing - then suddenly turns into an ineffectual wimp. Wrong.

He's back as a more balanced character.

[Woofage]

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Hitler's still in the cupboard though.

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Rather funny I thought. I said to the peeps at the end of the episode that history has now changed because AH can't invade Poland and start WW2

[Kathy]

That was certainly interesting.

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It seems like a bit of a shame that in effect they've stopped River from regenerating again in future, so she can only hang around as long as Alex Kingston wants to play the part.

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Unless something is pulled out of a hat that allows the Tardis energy to pull extra regenerations from a parallel universe, or some other deus ex machina, as appears to be the current fashion in Dr Who.

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Well we already know River Song can't regenerate - she "dies" when she's introduced in Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead.

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...and gets put in that computer program for the rest of eternity

A moderately enjoyable episode, but I couldn't help but be annoyed at the whole "here is my bestest friend for the whole of my life so far who's somehow never been mentioned before" retconning.

Which is similarly complained about here.

Also,

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I assume this is the last we see of Alex Kingston, since she lives backwards in time compared to the Doctor, so her introduction to him is his farewell.

...unless they change the rules again.

[mrcharly-YHT]

Also,

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I assume this is the last we see of Alex Kingston, since she lives backwards in time compared to the Doctor, so her introduction to him is his farewell.

...unless they change the rules again.

Well, she could appear with Rory/Amy, but never in a scene with the Doctor.

[Woofage]

Also,

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I assume this is the last we see of Alex Kingston, since she lives backwards in time compared to the Doctor, so her introduction to him is his farewell.

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I'm sure she appears in the series trailer with one of those strange metal eye patches (like the evil baby-snatcher). Therefore, I think we'll be seeing her again.

[TimO]

That was certainly interesting.

(click to show/hide)

It seems like a bit of a shame that in effect they've stopped River from regenerating again in future, so she can only hang around as long as Alex Kingston wants to play the part.

(click to show/hide)

Unless something is pulled out of a hat that allows the Tardis energy to pull extra regenerations from a parallel universe, or some other deus ex machina, as appears to be the current fashion in Dr Who.

(click to show/hide)

Well we already know River Song can't regenerate - she "dies" when she's introduced in Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead.

(click to show/hide)

...and gets put in that computer program for the rest of eternity

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Well, we know that Time lords can be killed, we had a load killed only a few episodes back, they're not immortal.  Given something sufficiently unpleasent then regeneration isn't a perfect cure, presumably what happened in the Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead could come under that categroy.

But yes, we knew she had to stay as Alex Kingston once she was Alex Kingston, since she would be unlikely to regenerate as herself (and the implication is that Timelords have relatively little control on who they regenerate as).

If there was a sufficiently advanced technology, they could pull her consciousness out of the computer, and put it back into another (new) body.  That sort of thing happens in other science-fiction (eg Iain M Banks Culture novels for example).

A moderately enjoyable episode, but I couldn't help but be annoyed at the whole "here is my bestest friend for the whole of my life so far who's somehow never been mentioned before" retconning.

Which is similarly complained about here.

Also,

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I assume this is the last we see of Alex Kingston, since she lives backwards in time compared to the Doctor, so her introduction to him is his farewell.

...unless they change the rules again.

There's always an element of pulling a hare out of the hat about many episodes, and with science fiction you often have to be careful about making sure that some of these hares have sufficient limitations that they can't be used to solve every puzzle, hence often the Tardis won't work for various reasons, or can't be used, or something to stop them popping back to just before whatever bad stuff happened, and stop that happening.  Time travel is often considered too dangerous an item to use in plots, because it's very powerful and can leave you with too many "Well why didn't they just ..." moments.

So long as they don't make a habit out of it, or do it too often, you can sort of get away with it, especially if it leaves you with a good episode, if you ignore that particular hole in the plot.  The big question is whether they're making too much of a habit of doing this, and I don't think they have yet, but it could be argued that they're getting close.

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I'm not sure that the argument that River is travelling backwards exactly in opposition to the Dr is required, since he doesn't exactly travel linearly in time himself.  I think the implication is that broadly he first meets her a long time after he met her for the last time (both from her perspective), and a lot of other meetings are roughly oriented like this, but given the way she refers to the diary ("Spoilers...") to work out where they are in relation to each other, implies that the relationship between their respective timelines isn't trivial.