SpaceScotsman

The blitz setting was very well done. Sci-fi spaceships aside, this story feels like the kind of ghost story people might have told each other during that era.

Watching this episode for the first time really creeped me out as a kid, and has given me a lifelong thing about gas masks. They did a great job on the writing and direction in this episode, my only note there was at times the background music was a bit too much. It might have been scarier if it was a bit quieter. The CGI on the transformation at the very end still looks pretty good - Creepy as hell.

The story of the homeless kids that have run away is really touching - especially how Nancy tries to raise them politely despite everything going on. The kid who ran away says "there was a man" and I never clocked this when I was watching this as a kid, but re-watching as an adult, it says everything without going into unnecessary graphic detail.

I remembered this being Jack's introduction, I don't remember him being as insufferable. The first time we see him, he's introduced as basically the classic caricature of a perv with binoculars. In this episode he comes across as very unlikeable.

The fact that rose is so smitten with him makes no sense to me, especially given how negatively she reacted to Adam behaving in a similar "sidling up with you just to scam you" way recently. Rose spends much of the episode complaining that the doctor is not "spock" enough, doesn't have gadgets, but he has all the same gadgets as Jack, right down to the space binoculars, just is more selective with when to use them. I don't understand what that plot point is about - Rose just wanting more excitement and that not meshing with Doctor's more peopley approach? This is one of those times where I think they could have cut much of the B-story and not really missed anything.

Various notes:

• Episode starts with a great Red Dwarf callout (Mauve alert / brown alert).
• Towards the start of the episode the camera zooms in on the Masked child a few times, and it's painfully obvious how low the camera quality is here
• The gag with the phone not being a real phone is great - I can't remember if it was ever explained how the child controls the electronics around him
• At one point doctor says "Nobody here but us chickens" - I had to look this one up, and it might be referencing a 1946 song, if so he's off by about 5 years too early.

This is a great site. Trying to break it is fun. It's possible to make a long neck giraffe ship with a giant cowcatcher on the front.

Aside: This is the first time I've ever seen a site ask for cookie consent via a submission box. Annoying. At least in EU if the cookies are purely functional, as seems to be the case here, you don't need to ask permission and you can just notify when the user is about to save to local storage.

This is something I've been thinking about a lot while I've been rewatching DS9 while listening to The Delta Flyers.

They do have the odd one-off "fun" episode in DS9 - this past week was "Our Man Bashir" which is also a fun holdeck episode, and shares a lot with this episode. But the one off fun shows aren't really needed for DS9 to be funny. What makes DS9 work so well is that they have more episodes to develop character relationships. Once you have that built up, DS9 is able to pack in a lot more humour without even needing one-off comedy episodes, just from the characters riffing off each other.

When you have a limited episode count, like in SNW, that's much harder to do. There is a bit of genial poking at spock's vulcan nature, and some character based humour between the engineering staff, but that's about the extent of it at the moment.

And so as nice as these fun episodes are, it does feel like there's missing opportunities. There is a random line about giving Ortegas the bridge when we know there was character development from the last episode that still needs to be dealt with. And one of the main characters in this episode wasn't even really there, so that's a whole lot more time unspent, and whatever development Spock and La'ans relationship has may end up happening offscreen.

I wasn't expecting another "fun" episode. I enjoyed it. The campy awfulness of the old TV set design and costumes was spot on.

Spock-La'an works well, I want to see more of it. It's difficult to find a lot of plot progress in comedy eps, but pushing their relationship forward a bit is nice. I really hope it goes somewhere meaningful, but this being a prequel, I guess just how far it could go is limited, unless they're willing to diverge off canon.

Hollywood AR walls don't hold anything against a holodeck, but we're getting there. It's cases like this that make me think I wouldn't enjoy one for real though, I'd just spend all my time getting paranoid. And did La'an get permission from everyone to use their patterns?

This earlier holodeck is lacking in any kind of true failsafe and is relying on the simulation program alone to not hurt people. Later on the enterprise, they never really figured that out. Scotty should have wrote his notes on safety much bigger than footnotes.

The writing staff must have been using this episode to vent their frustrations of the TV industry. When they were writing it, I wonder if they knew yet they had a confirmed 5 seasons, or if this was written during a hiatus.

I guess the takeaway message from this episode is "you can always rely on those around you". Except when they're holographic murder simulations, then all bets are off.

I just finished Hail Mary Project which I started last week - really enjoyed it. It scratched a perfect itch for some optimistic sci-fi.

The music is disappointing in this one because until now Gold has done a pretty good job. The bit you point out with the chords stood out to me. It did sound like there was an error in processing. Had it been at one peak moment, say a pivotal realisation, it might have been a good way to highlight things are going wrong. But it just seems to happen randomly. The rest of the score is kind of bland this episode.

This is a really nice episode. Not the best but definitely above average. It's a very human one - these are the ones where usually RTD excels, so it's interesting to see it was written by someone else.

The premise is a very natural one to imagine when you've got a time machine. Of course it leads to classic time travel shenanigans - the doctor ends up very upset at what rose has done, which is understandable, but I think he is being a bit unfair. This is rose, and much of the modern audience's, first real experience with a paradox. The doctor could have done a better job of explaining the stakes instead of leaving an emotionally struggling person to witness their own parent's death. Throughout this episode he keeps his very frank and pointed style of talking, but he starts being the emotional support for much of the human cast present, which is a great way of showing his heart starting to grow after he has been so pessimistic since we met him. The moment when he is standing up in front, like a priest preaching to his flock, is an especially nice image.

Rose's dad seems to really have struggled in life. Pete is really smart - he figures out the reality of whats happening fairly quickly, but he seems to struggle socially. He obviously has his own problems with confidence and relationships, and jackie really isn't helping. She goes on a few tirades here, but its never clear if what she is saying is accurate or whether that's just her viewpoint. The whole trip seems to break rose's interpretation of her dad, and that's possibly the bigger message to take away from this episode than the paradox: If you time travel, you might find out things that break your idealised version of the world.

The tardis losing its inside is a really great way to demonstrate what is happening, and how the tardis itself works. It reminds me of an old tom baker explanation which I really like: https://youtu.be/JJ01T3_E6YQ?t=48. The episode also serves as an example of a fixed point in time - Rose's dad has to die, so she can be raised in a certain way with her mum, so she can meet the doctor and do everything else she needs to.

The reaper designs are really nice. The flying monster motif makes a reapparance in the next season, and gargoyles get a brief mention in Blink. The gothic image is one that doesn't appear so often in popular sci-fi so it's nice to see used here, especially against the backdrop of the church. The monster designs looks pretty good even if the texturing and animation is a little janky. As far as beings in charge of timeline discrepancies go, they are more interesting than the weird bonemonsters from the most recent series finale.

Extras:

• I forgot about the mickey joke - that was fun
• The doctor mentions the isle of wight in 1987, I had to look this reference up. There was a massive storm back then that hit the south of england really badly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_storm_of_1987
• The adults all scream when the aliens are attacking. In the playground none of the kids scream when the same happens. I wonder if that was an intentional choice or if someone at BBC standards had an issue with a bunch of children screaming as they died

I think I am starting to lean towards ebooks for the convenience when reading novels and prosey nonfiction.

However for reference books a physical thing is easier to flip through, and for anything with illustrations, physical still has better quality.

The article is saying the petition is targeting steam, but the actual linked petition is addressing credit card companies. The text of the petition doesn't mention steam or valve. I don't know what the author of the article thinks is happening here, and they've explained it very badly.

What happens when anti-porn organisations like Collective Shout go after the currency exchanges?

Much of the episode is devoted to zombies, and zombies are boring. Moving on. I thought the directing and/or editing was pretty lifeless (heh) in this one, too - not a lot of tension throughout.

This could have been a bottle episode and might have been better for it. The plant was a macguffin that could have been anything. A molecule on some random asteroid could have served the same purpose and allowed the plot to continue mostly unchanged.

Maybe without the zombies that would have given more time for focusing on discussion around what the characters are feeling - More of ortega's struggle; something better than spock's mind meld which seems to serve as nothing more than foreshadowing for something that's going to be said out loud a few minutes later anyway.

If the writers were going to use zombies in a story, then they should actually use them as part of the plot.