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    Who?

    Or "I once had to clean her pipes".

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      Who?

      "I once had my hand right up her S-bend"?

      No, best to stop now.

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        Who?

        Yeah, y'see it was precisely to try and forestall that sort of sniggering and smutmongering that I related it in such a deadpan fashion. In fact I actually had to give her boiler a proper going-over, but announcing that (a) just invites crude raillery and (b) leaves me with a paralysing sense of yearning for what might have been. Nobody wins.

        Replied, Phoebs.

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          Who?

          Cheers.

          And you make that sound like crude raillery is wrong.

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            Who?

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              Who?

              Anyway, there were things I didn't like about it but I thought it was much better than last year's.

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                Who?

                I thought the Davros(rocking the Oedipus look rather well)/Doctor conversation was a great primer for kids in ethical subjectivism.

                *lights touchpaper and leaves*

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                  Who?

                  I have to agree, Yoss, that I'm still at a loss to work out what the Osterhagen key plot device was actually for, other than to give Martha somewhere to go for a bit. And did she really need to go home first?

                  I was really disappointed when first Martha and then the Hiding In The Tumble Dryer crew with their equally underwhelming Warp Star plot non-device were summoned effortlessly to Dalek HQ. Couldn't Jack just have said something bold about how the Daleks should be surprised to see him and that he and his mates were clearly therefore more than a match for them? Why pointlessly wave around a prop from Men in Black?

                  Seriously, though. That whole Osterhagen key. It was superfluous last week and what did having it around achieve this week? Why does Martha have to have her own, personal lengthily set-up then momentarily dismissed non-threat? Sarah Jane and Jack at least got their's sorted out from start to finish in about ninety seconds.

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                    Who?

                    See I don't mind those sorts of false leads, at least there was a purpose to what she was doing, and if it came to naught then hey, life's like that sometimes. You're right though, the story didn't need Martha there at all. Much like the whole of series three.

                    I don't normally make a habit of cross-posting between different boards, but I'm making an exception here as we're having similar discussions on both:

                    In terms of the story itself and the drama therein, I thought it was much better than last year's. Bleach as Davros was a million times better and more interesting than Simm as Master, and there was nothing like as crap as everyone-chanting-the-doctor's-name-at-once.

                    In respect of the incidentals, there was much that wasn't right though. Firstly, playing fast and loose with the whole regenerative thing I wasn't comfortable with, and the second doctor / doctor-Donna stuff. It sort of worked in terms of the dramatic flow of the story (though why, incidentally, did the daleks remove the tardis from its lock when they knew there was someone still inside? They weren't to know Donna didn't know how to fly it) but it all seemed "a bit dr who" as BusStop on 40percent puts it. Though as bat more diplomatically notes, Davies tinkers a bit too much with the cogency and internal consistency that sci-fi needs. Moffat's scripts have been tighter in that respect, which is why I remain hopeful for future series, though he hasn't yet hat to write a ratings-busting season finale.

                    So yeah, then those last twenty minutes, was that supposed to be all sad and heart-string tugging? Just it was just a bit naff, really. The Donna story, yeah whatever - again it sort of worked but it was just a shoulder-shrugging end. (And was that mind-wiping supposed to be the death of which Caan spoke? It was the opposite of Forest of the Dead, where they made all that fuss about River Song living even though she plainly didn't, this time they had a whole series-worth of hullaballoo about Donna's sticky end only for her to live. Fair enough, I suppose.)

                    But the Rose thing was worse. First you've got this now useless spare doctor who shouldn't be, and you've got Rose back but Billie obviously doesn't want to do it full time again, so Davies puts in this little solution that sorts his problems but makes no sense. Firstly, there's no reason Rose needs to go back to the other reality anyway, she only slipped into it by mistake last time the two were open, what possible harm can it do for her to slip back through this time? But then, she's more or less press-ganged into cohabitation with the Tennant she obviously doesn't want, and there's no way of making it seem right, but instead of thinking oh how sad or oh that's nice you just thinkg Ewwww, you're snogging the wrong bloke you little tart.

                    Still in future years when the real Tennant-doctor has long since regenerated and moved onto better things, he'll still be able to come back with a guest appearance, they'll be both Rose and a half-time-lord Tennant can pop up again to join the a doctor next time the walls of reality are falling apart.

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                      Who?

                      Ooh, I think far too many people are being far too harsh about tonight. I was in pieces when Rose was back on the beach at Bad Wolf Bay, with her "human" Doctor, who could lean across and say "I love you", which the real Doctor knew he could never do. Very Highlander.

                      I haven't the time nor the inclination to go through all the posts with a fine toothed comb, but I thought last night's episode it was all good, cracking fun. The trick is not to approach all that stuff as if it was Shakespeare and accept it as it was intended: lively, knockabout, all-over-the-shop gubbins that probably didn't make much sense if you looked too closely at it with the stern, clinical attitude of a headmaster.

                      It had its flaws, god, yes (Freema Agyeman, bless her, has all the dramatic force and subtlety of a Tesco checkout girl), but then my enjoyment of it was purely determined by looking at it at as a singular 60 minutes of entertainment. I'm not much of a Doctor Who aficionado and perhaps that's why I've enjoyed it all (with reservations, obviously) without the slightly proprietal feelings that true Who fanatics on here have done. The more affection you have for a television series (and its history), the more hurt and pissed off you get when the standards you expect aren't reached or that some episodes just don't measure up to the era of Baker, Davison or Hartnell, or that some plots have holes big enough to drive a milk float through.

                      That baggage I don't deal with because I don't really care about it or feel it has enough relevance to get all hot and bothered about. It's entertainment, pure and simple, and whatever Russell T. Davies's own flaws are towards writing and plot structure are, well, to be honest, they're secondary to the fact that he's resurrected an staple of Saturday Night viewing with a huge amount of aplomb and no little sense of fun. It ain't Harold Pinter and wasn't meant to be.

                      It's got miserable gits like me watching Saturday evening telly again, and even had me looking forward to it. That's a good job done.

                      Back to crappy, wanky audition-based shit shows with Andrew Lloyd-Webber's smug, punchable features smirking at me, I suppose.

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                        Who?

                        Good post, agree with all that. (Despite my apparent carping.)

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                          Who?

                          Armies of straw men there, Ian. Nobody wants it to be Pinter.

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                            Who?

                            Suppose I was being flippant a bit there, but, as I said, I enjoyed it immensely. I suppose it's the breathless brio that makes Who and deflects whatever criticisms I may have. If it was in the hands of less enthusiastic bods and came over with the turgid slog of a soap opera then perhaps I might be open to grumble a bit more.

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                              Who?

                              Well, yesterday was my first episode of the new series. The season finale is not a great place to start. I hadn't got a fucking clue what was going on.

                              I was drawn in as I'd caught the end of last week's episode and thought I'd find out whether he regenerated or not. Fairly sure that he wouldn't but I thought it'd be interesting to see how they dealt with it. Crappest denoument to a cliffhanger moment ever. Oh look, he's regenerating. Oh look, he's not anymore.

                              Other random observations - careful with that botox Barrowman, your acting range was never that diverse before.

                              And, Martha is no great actor but I'd take any performance of hers over pramface Piper any day of the week. I honestly don't get why she gets all the acting plaudits she does. And thus, those endless romantic scenes with her and the Doctor just leave me cold.

                              I think they're doing the right thing resting the series for a year or so. Anyone know how the audience figures have held up for this series?

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                                Who?

                                They've held up brilliantly and the series has been in the national top ten most watched programmes 4 or 5 times. It only once got beaten in its own timeslot and that was by Britain's Got Talent.

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                                  Who?

                                  Impressive! I thought they might have dropped due to the storylines possibly getting more convuluted due to three series worth of back story that can be referred to, thus putting casual viewers off. But maybe I was given the wrong impression by watching last night's episode. Like I said before, watching the end-of-season finale is not the best way to start off, is it?

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                                    Who?

                                    Oh, I don't know, it means that every other epsiode you watch will be an improvement.

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                                      Who?

                                      They've held up brilliantly and the series has been in the national top ten most watched programmes 4 or 5 times. It only once got beaten in its own timeslot and that was by Britain's Got Talent
                                      The Final thereof.

                                      It gets better:

                                      "Unofficial figures show that the final episode of Series Four, Journey's End, was watched by 9.4 million viewers, giving it a 45.9% share of the total television audience.

                                      Not only was the programme the highest rated on Saturday, beating the second placed Casualty by nearly 4 million viewers, it is currently the highest rated programme of the week. If no Sunday programme manages to beat it then this will be the first time in the series' long history that it has ever been the top rated programme of the week"

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                                        Who?

                                        Season two's figures dropped alarmingly as it ran into a very hot summer, prompting some newspapers to speculate that the show was already a spent force.

                                        Ah, we like to knock 'em down, don't we.

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                                          Who?

                                          Again, I disliked the finale less than many of y'all. "Good in parts", I thought it was. Tennant plays the Emotionally Wounded Doctor very well; far better than he plays the manic end of the character's bipolarity. Donna's story really was desperately sad, and in an interesting way. And Other Doctor whispered "I love you" to Rose, which pushed all those buttons in me that make me a fan of things like Dolly Parton and Puccini.

                                          On the other hand, it was very, very flawed, even at the "emotional" level that RTD fondly imagines he's made his own. You just can't have Real Doctor saying to Other Doctor "What have you done?" because Other Doctor's just committed Dalex genocide, tapping into an ethical theme that's been there, and part of who the Doctor is, since Genesis of the Daleks, only for him to be perfectly cheerful in the next scene. That's leaving aside the more basic, but more superficial, "Why did you have to do that?" moments like the way, when your planet's being towed through spacetime by the Tardis, your crockery might fall off the mantlepiece but that's just about it.

                                          Candidate for bad science spot of the week: the way you can see the whole surface of the Earth when it's in deep space, only for the nighttime side of it suddenly to go dark when it's back in orbit around the Sun. Never RTD's strong suit, the science--and fair enough, except that this was once something the show used to have a fair crack at.

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                                            Who?

                                            On the genocide thing, I sympathised with Rose and reformed-Doctor in the first couple of seasons of New Who, but frankly, I'm starting to struggle to see what's wrong with it in this instance. The Daleks (or RTD, anyway) have made perfectly clear that a) they intend to wipe out every other living thing, and b) they have the means to do so, no matter how defeated and contained they seem. Furthermore, with the exception of the human-corrupted ones, the only emotion they experience is hatred. Given those facts, what exactly is the moral argument against wiping them out? By not doing so, you're basically inviting the genocide of the entire universe when the Doctor's not looking.

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                                              Who?

                                              Reluctantly accepting the moral argument for something and being the one to carry it out isn't quite the same thing, but yeah, you'd expect a time lord with such superintelligence to be a little bit above the squeamishness that us lesser mortals might feel for such a necessary act.

                                              Lawrence Miles latest blog is up, same link as before - http://beasthouse-lm2.blogspot.com/ - haven't read it myself yet, but he does point out a glaring continuity error with season 1 episode 5 in his graphic in the top right corner.

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                                                Who?

                                                Wait till I submit my script "Doctor Who and the Categorical Imperative".

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                                                  Who?

                                                  Ha, that's really funny in all sorts of ways, but words can't express how much I can't be bothered to list them.

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                                                    Who?

                                                    Back to crappy, wanky audition-based shit shows with Andrew Lloyd-Webber's smug, punchable features smirking at me, I suppose.
                                                    How sadly true. Because no matter how bad Dr Who is (this was confusing and a bit deus ex machina even for RTD), it's still a billion times better than Britain's Got Desperate Twats Wanting Fame In Musicals Academy.

                                                    So, looks like we may have our two new Torchwood recruits as well.

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