I’m watching “Silence in the Library” tonight. This has always been one of my favourite Moffat scripts and I haven’t seen it for a while, so I’m really looking forward to settling down and just letting it wash over me. Clever, atmospheric, creepy, funny and touching.
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I believe a certain River Song fan around these parts may have just purchased this recently released tome from Obverse Books:
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I did indeed! Now just need to find some time to read it!
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I love the Black Archive books. Not read this one yet. 
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I finished Planet of the Spiders today. I enjoyed it a lot.
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I’ve just seen Space Babies and The Devil’s Chord.
Space Babies is just a bit of light-hearted fun for the most part, so that’s always enjoyable 
The Devil’s Chord on the other hand is just not for me - the scene where Ncuti and Millie are talking about Susan is great, as is our two leads’ costumes and the way sound is turned off with the sonic is great - the rest? isn’t.
I think I’ll pop on the first part of Image of the Fendahl to get “There’s always a twist at the end” out of my head 
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See, I really love “The Devil’s Chord”. It’s bonkers, yes, but it just sweeps me along. The pre credits sequence is great. The entire mid section is some of the best TV (from the rooftop until they get back to Abbey Road for the final showdown). It’s also surprisingly dark beneath the camp and colour.
Music is order, music is life. The opposite of entropy. Maestro is, thus, a greedy nexus of entropy… driving the universe towards chaos and nothingness… no order, no music, no life. But Maestro doesn’t achieve this by simply cancelling out music (as the Doctor tries to cancel sound, in what has to be one of the very best uses of the sonic screwdriver in the past 61 years)…
Maestro is sadistic, cruel and playful, taking music as they please, watching things unravel slowly, over decades, but inevitably heading towards apocalypse and then… nothing save the aeolian tones of desolation… until even those stop and there truly is… nothing. At all. Ever again.
Yes. I’ll even forgive the “Twist at the End” which is just a great big crazy onrushing of music returning. It’s an indulgence, sure, but what the heck.
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So I watched “Silence in the Library” last night. It’s an episode that still rewards on a rewatch. The setting is interesting (I’ve had a love of libraries since I was a small boy and used to peruse the shelves in my local library for Doctor Who Target books - oh those lovely hardcovers!), the premise is fascinating, the juxtaposition between CALs world and the Library is done beautifully. And then there’s the Vashta Nerada. Utterly brilliant concept! All that AND River Song gets an amazing debut (her last story in her chronology, but our first with her). It’s a corker!
Looking forward to “Forest of the Dead” tonight.
“Hey! Who turned out the lights?”
Poor Proper Dave.
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I sort of see what you are getting at, and I do believe that that is what the story is telling us.
But the story is all spectacle that revolves around the performance of Jinkx Monsoon. And I do not enjoy it in the slightest. Camp, over the top and scenery chewing from an actor I can enjoy to no end. What was onscreen was a whole other level of just bad acting, I genuinely think that that is the worst acting in the entire Whoniverse (K9 show, Hippias and Cotton included).
And what was the point of having the Beatles in this story when the thing that makes them the Beatles, their music, isn’t included in any way? Any number of musicians could have been the centre of the narrative so I don’t get why it had to be the Beatles.
Plus does it really take a musical genius to eventually hit a tritone and release Maestro?
And when the deliberately bad song about a dog is actually better than the song meant to celebrate the return of music, then I just feel like the story has been let down massively.
And I don’t like feeling like that about a story, I want to love all of Who
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I know what you mean. I feel that about a couple of stories (I have major issues with “The Girl Who Died” for exanple) and it’s curiously disquieting. I don’t like feeling that way but, with 61 years of DW, there are always going to be occasional stories that don’t gel with us, no matter how frustrating that may be for us.
“The Devil’s Chord” works for me, but I do kind of agree about The Beatles. It doesn’t bother me because… well (sacrilege coming) I’m just not that fussed by The Beatles anyway.
But, yeah, I guess we all have our DW dislikes (thankfully rare). I didn’t really expect to change your opinion - merely to express my own enjoyment.
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Of course not. Nor am I looking to take enjoyment of a story I dislike away from others 
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That’s what is really special about this community, though. I find it so frustrating when I find a story that doesn’t work for me. It’s always heartening to see others who enjoy it. And sonetimes, just sometimes, it helps me see things differently.
I’m heading towards a rewatch of Season 8 soon. That means “Claws of Axos” is awaiting me in the near future. Now there’s a story we can both agree is a blast!
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That story just has everything I love about Doctor Who in it 
It even has got the Master entering the Doctor’s disassembled TARDIS and performing much needed TARDIS maintenance
And then it has got Pigbin Josh… 
“O’ar?”
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It’s SO ambitious for its time, and throws ideas around with abandon. All enhanced by outrageously creative design and an absolute showcase for colour TV (still very much a novelty in 1971). Overambitious? Possibly, but i like my DW to push boundaries from time to time (like it or not, “The Devil’s Chord” is also a boundary pusher, just in different ways 
).
“England for the English!” Pertwee’s disdain is sheer delight, and yet people are complaining that modern DW has become too political. It’s ALWAYS gone there, always done that (and that just makes me love it all the more).
The Axons are one of the great alien menaces, far more interesting than most. With the energy crises we face today, another Axon story would be most welcome.
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The Devil’s Chord is a story I really need to rewatch. I was hugely looking forward to it because the whole concept of a song and dance number in Doctor Who filled me with joy. But I really think it suffered, for me, from being in a double bill with Space Babies. I don’t know why but I struggled a bit with so much new Doctor Who in one go.
Also, I found the song HUGELY disappointing. Gold doesn’t write good musical numbers. The dancing and staging is great but the song lets the whole sequence down.
However, I need to go back and rewatch it away from the pressure of first night nerves, away from watching it with a large group of family and friends (my eldest was hugely unimpressed with the first two episodes), and away from my expectations of a musical episode.
I agree about the inclusion of the Beatles and the tritone thing though.
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I’ve just watched the edited, updated version of Terror of the Vervoids - the one with all the court scenes removed.
It’s always been my least favourite tale from the Trial series, and this new version does nothing to disguise the fact that it’s full of half-baked ideas. The half human/half Vervoids angle was the most interesting, and the most brutally gruesome, but the poor lass (Ruth) only appears briefly.
Bonnie’s not given the best of introductions, but she soon settles into the mystery. The biggest mystery of all, though, is how is she suddenly aboard the TARDIS?
I’m sounding unnecessarily grumpy about this one. There’s a cracking cast and the monsters, for all the comments about their appearance, are effective and well directed.
Did the court scenes actually improve this? Possibly. I miss the interaction between The Doctor and The Valeyard.
Still a middling story for me, but Part One’s cliffhanger is still a cracker!
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Just watched Episode 1 of Revenge of the Cybermen.
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My family watched Oxygen without me. I hope that they enjoyed it.
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Series 4: Forest of the Dead
Really enjoyed my rewarch of Silence in the Library so I was looking forward to this anyway but… wow! Given how well I know this story, it still has the ability to blow me away. Just extraordinarily good! Catherine Tate is sublime throughout and deeply touching when she realises she’s losing the children that never were. How good is she in this? I know it’s a virtual world and that her children aren’t real… so why does it feel so real? Extraordinary!
Then there’s River. Kingston, we know, is fantastic. Again, given that I know how the story ends, it’s all the more remarkable that I still feel emotional at her sacrifice and jubilant when the Doctor realises he can “save” her.
Always has been one of my favorite Steven Moffat stories. Just sublimely good. Love it!
ME: I forgot just how much I enjoyed this story.
DOCTOR MOON: And then you remembered!
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That ending is so good - first so sad that River sacrifices herself but then the joy that she is saved.
The one thing that bugs me is that there were only 4,000 people in the Library the size of a planet. Was it a bank holiday or something?
Although it does make the sacrifice seem all the more heroic - she didn’t save billions of people, just a few thousand, but including Donna (and the Doctor technically, as he was going to do it if she didn’t).
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