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Dec. 26th, 2007 11:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackI thought the christmas doctor who was rather good. Of course, I had a wide variety of objections to the science and common sense:
* That's not how orbits work
* Even if it were, when they have eight minutes of engine power left, they could have tried to get *into* an orbit
* "And the engines will explode, killing everyone on earth." Isn't that a bit gratuitous? Was it different for children? But wouldn't crashing on London be disaster enough?
* What do they explode with, anyway, if they've run out? I suppose either the deadline is when they fail containment, or that they exhaut their fuel, but the byproducts are toxic and would contaminate the earth.
* And if they're going to obliterate all life on earth, why does it help to evacuate Buckingham Palace? Maybe the fuel was exhausted after all, or he managed to pull the dive up enough he'd knock it over but not crash?
* Every christmas, in whatever disaster, the christmas robots go beserk and attack the doctor. Has he considered mistrusting them from the beginning?
* I notice the host conveniently stop when ordered to kill, and someone says "Hold on..." That's possiblely correct programming, but they never really took advantage of it.
* I thought of another strategy for dealing with the three-question override. Just ask a *really long* question. The Doctor's fairly good at keeping talking. Alternatively, ask questions of the host individually and see if that gets you more total questions.
* The doctor can't time-travel within an episode, except for cheap jokes. It's thematically consistent -- it's always clear what he could or couldn't do. But I just wish it was justified by some consistent physics as well. It's always distracting to me when something tragic happens to someone, and I'm thinking "couldn't he look away, and then come back in time later to rescue them without interfering with any events he knows about".
* The inexplicable catwalks over unshielded nuclear annhilation are barely worth mentioning at this point. Though they looked cool.
* Astrid uses the teleport system to reach deck 31. Couldn't the doctor have done that? Or to evacuate everyone and blow up the ship in orbit.
* The EMP generator is admittedly cool -- poor Bannakaffalatta. Though I don't know why cyborgs all have them. And I was sure they'd find they'd accidently fried something important when they kept using it.
* I don't suppose it makes *much* difference, but isn't sucking a megapound out of the economy the same as stealing? I suppose it's the same as stealing a few pence from every person -- the doctor probably wouldn't balk at stealing pence from people for a good cause. On the other hand, maybe the company sold something real in return for their local credit.
* The exchange rate is 1,000,000 pounds to 50,000,056? It's defined to at least eight significant figures, even though there's no trade?
* And the cost of an interstellar cruise is about a hundred pounds? That takes twenty years to earn? And two people died over that? :(
But I enjoyed it.
* It was very funny.
* I was very pleasanly surprised, I liked Kylie playing Astrid a lot. On the other hand, people who say the doctor needs an assistant who isn't in love with him have a point. I like exploring that theme, but they've done it a lot. They should bring Jack or Ace back!
* It was sad about Astrid and the Van Hoffs and BNKFLT :(
* It was spectacular: all the dramtic and emotional imagery was, and I was proud where the doctor claimed his heritage in front of everyone.
PS. Merry Christmas all. I'm online briefly.
* That's not how orbits work
* Even if it were, when they have eight minutes of engine power left, they could have tried to get *into* an orbit
* "And the engines will explode, killing everyone on earth." Isn't that a bit gratuitous? Was it different for children? But wouldn't crashing on London be disaster enough?
* What do they explode with, anyway, if they've run out? I suppose either the deadline is when they fail containment, or that they exhaut their fuel, but the byproducts are toxic and would contaminate the earth.
* And if they're going to obliterate all life on earth, why does it help to evacuate Buckingham Palace? Maybe the fuel was exhausted after all, or he managed to pull the dive up enough he'd knock it over but not crash?
* Every christmas, in whatever disaster, the christmas robots go beserk and attack the doctor. Has he considered mistrusting them from the beginning?
* I notice the host conveniently stop when ordered to kill, and someone says "Hold on..." That's possiblely correct programming, but they never really took advantage of it.
* I thought of another strategy for dealing with the three-question override. Just ask a *really long* question. The Doctor's fairly good at keeping talking. Alternatively, ask questions of the host individually and see if that gets you more total questions.
* The doctor can't time-travel within an episode, except for cheap jokes. It's thematically consistent -- it's always clear what he could or couldn't do. But I just wish it was justified by some consistent physics as well. It's always distracting to me when something tragic happens to someone, and I'm thinking "couldn't he look away, and then come back in time later to rescue them without interfering with any events he knows about".
* The inexplicable catwalks over unshielded nuclear annhilation are barely worth mentioning at this point. Though they looked cool.
* Astrid uses the teleport system to reach deck 31. Couldn't the doctor have done that? Or to evacuate everyone and blow up the ship in orbit.
* The EMP generator is admittedly cool -- poor Bannakaffalatta. Though I don't know why cyborgs all have them. And I was sure they'd find they'd accidently fried something important when they kept using it.
* I don't suppose it makes *much* difference, but isn't sucking a megapound out of the economy the same as stealing? I suppose it's the same as stealing a few pence from every person -- the doctor probably wouldn't balk at stealing pence from people for a good cause. On the other hand, maybe the company sold something real in return for their local credit.
* The exchange rate is 1,000,000 pounds to 50,000,056? It's defined to at least eight significant figures, even though there's no trade?
* And the cost of an interstellar cruise is about a hundred pounds? That takes twenty years to earn? And two people died over that? :(
But I enjoyed it.
* It was very funny.
* I was very pleasanly surprised, I liked Kylie playing Astrid a lot. On the other hand, people who say the doctor needs an assistant who isn't in love with him have a point. I like exploring that theme, but they've done it a lot. They should bring Jack or Ace back!
* It was sad about Astrid and the Van Hoffs and BNKFLT :(
* It was spectacular: all the dramtic and emotional imagery was, and I was proud where the doctor claimed his heritage in front of everyone.
PS. Merry Christmas all. I'm online briefly.
no subject
Date: 2007-12-27 02:40 am (UTC)Well, maybe he knew that if the engines restarted it might hit the palace but not crash in to the ground. Also maybe the explosion would wipe out life on Earth over time, so some people (such as the Queen) could be saved.
I thought of another strategy for dealing with the three-question override. Just ask a *really long* question
Yes. I expected him to ask them to recite the digits in pi.
Or to evacuate everyone and blow up the ship in orbit.
Maybe that would also kill everyone on Earth.
On the other hand, maybe the company sold something real in return for their local credit.
Do you think so? I got the impression that the people of Earth had no idea about the Starship Titanic. I assumed he'd just done some credit card hax0ring. I know IRL the cards don't store any money (only a reference to an account which has money), but I thought we were supposed to think he just 'charged up' a card without thinking about how that would work in practice.
The exchange rate is 1,000,000 pounds to 50,000,056? It's defined to at least eight significant figures, even though there's no trade?
I don't think he said it was the exchange rate. I understood it to be a comparison of what stuff you could buy.
And the cost of an interstellar cruise is about a hundred pounds? That takes twenty years to earn? And two people died over that? :(
OMG! You've pointed out so many errors in the episode that I hadn't even noticed!! :/
no subject
Date: 2007-12-28 12:39 am (UTC)Yes. I expected him to ask them to recite the digits in pi.
Remember to specify the base :)
Do you think so?
Oh, I didn't mean traded openly, but maybe they have an agent who important some metaphorical glass beads, or something that would genuinely add value to the local economy (but not destabalise it into the future) and traded it anonymously for a line of credit they can use for this sort of thing.
I understood it to be a comparison of what stuff you could buy.
Right. I didn't mean an official exchange rate, I just meant the conversion rate he quotes was impossible. If there *is* trade, then you can specify it fairly precisely because there are thousands of trades each day, so you know what people are actually paying. But if not, the estimate can only be approximate, because different items have relatively different prices on the two planets, and any trade would be an unpredictable one-off negotiation. You could offer an order-of-magnitude conversion, like we do to convert modern pounds to ancient pounds, or similar, but he quotes figures that would only arise if the exchange rate were known very very precisely.
no subject
Date: 2007-12-28 12:41 am (UTC)That one was actually mum's. She commented on it, and I said I'd add it to my list of top twenty scientific inconsistencies :)
PS. I had a quick look, modern exchange rates are quoted to at least 6sf, so 8 sf isn't implausible, but it would still only make sense if there were trade.
no subject
Date: 2007-12-27 10:55 am (UTC)I'm happy for this to remain as: bad things happen if you make too fine-grained use of time travel, you need a PhD from the University of Gallifrey to really understand the details of it. Despite being awful in many ways, the Ecclestone episode "Father's day" did do a good job of pointing out that there are some things you don't mess with.
We can start to have a go at this ourselves; let's posit some time-healing force that smooths over various inconsistencies and keeps the continuum minty fresh despite time-travellers dragging their muddy footprints all over it. Let's further suppose that this isn't a perfect force and that it's failure will cause gribblies to appear. Furthermore throw in chaos theory - i.e. small causes, big effects. If the Doctor is careful to avoid getting too near to his own timeline, then the THF has plenty of slack to work with, whereas clever near-self-crossing timelines leave the THF with faw fewer variables to tweak.
For the viewer, it's simple; no time travel within an episode. Although the cheap jokes do mess that up. Grrr...
Space travel
I'm pretty happy with the notion that anything capable of practical[1] interstellar travel works on deep weird shit. In particular relativity is screwed, which means that anything that relies on gravity or frames of reference is messed up too. Yes, the orbits did make me wince, and an alternative plot where the steering gets fried and the engines send the ship towards Earth would have worked just as well, but as I say I'm prepared to cut stardrives some slack. They're not magical do-anything-on-accident Star Trek teleporters, after all.
[1] i.e. not generation ships, or long journeys spent in stasis or freezers.
no subject
Date: 2007-12-27 12:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-28 12:42 am (UTC)I'm just the sort of person who *does* want to derive a phd of time physics from first principles :)
no subject
Date: 2007-12-27 01:13 pm (UTC)* And the cost of an interstellar cruise is about a hundred pounds? That takes twenty years to earn? And two people died over that? :(
*rofl* It's the mathmo pedant's review :D
I liked the bit where he proclaimed his heritage too. Question is, why is he so keen to talk about it all of a sudden? I know he sort of came out of his shell a bit in season 3...
no subject
Date: 2007-12-28 12:50 am (UTC)I liked the bit where he proclaimed his heritage too. Question is, why is he so keen to talk about it all of a sudden? I know he sort of came out of his shell a bit in season 3...
Well, yes. As I see it, meeting the master brought him to some sort of acceptance of himself as the last of the time-lords, so he's switched from saving the world anonymously Shane-esquely and not talking about and angsting about being lonely, to making his deeds commemorate his people.
no subject
Date: 2007-12-28 12:56 pm (UTC)I wish he'd saved the big 'I'm from Gallifrey and I'm proud of it' moment for a better storyline though...
no subject
Date: 2007-12-28 05:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-27 07:34 pm (UTC)The exchange rate is PPP, innit? And if the space cruise seems cheap, do recall that the company was going bust l-)
I should say “you should see me in the morning” more often (e.g. at all), if Kylie's response to it is “OK” l-)
no subject
Date: 2007-12-28 12:47 am (UTC)Excuse my momentary confusion, what acronym is that?
And if the space cruise seems cheap,
Well, that too. But I don't think it was going *that* bust. Actually, the cost of interstellar cruises is probably incomparable, it could be anything, but it was a figure most people couldn't afford for a month's all inclusive holiday, and would take twenty years to earn.
I should say “you should see me in the morning” more often (e.g. at all), if Kylie's response to it is “OK” l-)
ROFL. Well, do. I'm sure I'll manage to give you an equally entertaining response.
It was a very good line.
But it possibly only works for David Tennant. Or only on Kylie Minogue. The infallible pickup line for penguin-ducks might be something different.
only works for...
Date: 2007-12-28 10:56 am (UTC)Re: only works for...
Date: 2007-12-28 05:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-28 12:51 am (UTC)