The saga started, as you know, with the disappearance of my fabulous tweezers.

Then my tweezers returned.

And I thought then that the gecko insurrection movement might have gone underground, or that, perchance, they were abandoning their revolutionary plans.

But, no.

Because I’ve just been in the bathroom.

And my fabulous tweezers are still there, but one of the other two pairs has disappeared now.

So perhaps the return of the fabulous tweezers was a sympathetic gesture, a kindness from the small lizards to the humans they are planning to overthrow.

But, clearly, they still need tweezers to carry out their plans—whatever those plans might be.

(This, incidentally, is the one-year anniversary of Circulating Library: I wrote my inaugural post on the 13th of February last year. So the fact that this, my 513th post, is about my revolutionary geckoes, is a nice encapsulation of the way the blog has expanded its boundaries in the last twelve months.)

Exhibit A:

This is a slightly wonky photograph of a late nineties edition of 1932’s Devil’s Cub, itself a sequel to 1926’s These Old Shades. (Well, not a direct sequel: it deals with the original protagonist’s son.)

Judging from the creases, I seem to have fallen asleep on this book at some point, which isn’t uncommon.

It’s not a bad read, provided that you like your heroes on the aggressive side, which I don’t, really. It’s fun, if not quite as funny as some of the others.

But take a closer look at the cover, in Exhibit B:

Yep, that’s William Lamb, painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence.

He’s perhaps best known as the somewhat unfortunate husband of Lady Caroline Lamb, said to be slightly embarrassed by her affectionate portrait of him in her first novel, Glenarvon (1816) and even more so by her rather warm (to use the contemporary euphemism) description of their married life.

But he steadfastly refused to divorce his wife, although the novel itself would probably have given him grounds even if her affair with Lord Byron hadn’t been quite so public. He seems, too, to have given his wife advice towards her later novels, despite any embarrassment he might have felt about Glenarvon.

And he was Queen Victoria’s prime minister, after his wife’s early death and his own accession to the title of Lord Melbourne.

Okay, he was named by Caroline Norton’s husband as the subject of a criminal conversation trial that nearly destroyed the government. But there was no proof and he resisted Norton’s attempts at blackmail. And though this was a horrible situation for Caroline Norton, whose husband prevented from seeing her three sons and refused to grant her the divorce that might have allowed her to remarry, she did put the experience to good use: it was primarily due to her agitation that Parliament passed the Custody of Infants Act (1839) and the Matrimonial Causes Act (1857)—the latter allowed women to retain control over their own property after marriage and to take court action on their own behalf (which would in turn contribute to women being able to seek divorces themselves, instead of having to wait to be divorced).

(See also Caroline Norton’s Defense: English Laws for Women in the 19th Century, edited by Joan Huddleston, for more information on Norton. It’s out of print, unfortunately, but fascinating.)

Okay, so William Lamb didn’t actively take part in those campaigns.

But I still think that depicting him right above the red-inked slogan “Devil’s Cub” is going a little fair.

Note: This is an odd live-blogging experience. About two hours ago, the server that hosts Circulating Library went down for emergency repairs. It went down without warning, which suggests that there’s some problem in the underlying hardware. This is exceptionally annoying.

I asked Nick what the options were, and he suggested that I simply couldn’t blog it tonight. But I’m quite fond of this episode, and I don’t really want to miss one episode out of the season if I can avoid it.

So I’ve reached a compromise that suits me: I’m live-blogging this in Microsoft Word—which is a whole ‘nother story. I’m blogging it as I would if I could access my actual blog, but it’ll be posted later—as soon as the site is up and running again. So consider this a live-blogging under unusual live-blogging circumstances.

It’s also given me the opportunity to discover that Microsoft Word doesn’t recognise the word “blog.” Microsoft Word is so far behind the times.

That was fifteen minutes ago, and the blog’s still not up.

Here, though, we have a Scottish vista—most beautiful country on earth, bar none—and a carriage crossing the heath.

And monks! Vicious monks, threatening crofters. Damn! Ninja monks. They don’t believe in the hand of God: they have the fist of man—and some excellent bullet time. Was this episode directed by Yun-Woo Ping?

NICK: These chaps are a little underexplained, I have to say.

I don’t think they need explanation, since these guys have quarter staffs, and a giant scary box, which even the head ninja monk seems a little frightened of. We don’t get to see what’s in the box, though the terrified inhabitants of the stately home (or Scottish equivalent thereof) that they’ve attacked do.

The Doctor claims they’re heading for the late 1970s, for which he thinks Rose is over-dressed in her cut-off overalls and dusty pink T-shirt. Of course, it’s unlikely to end that way—they seem to be listening to Ian Durie, by the way. And the Doctor loves the Muppet movie, but hates Margaret Thatcher.

Instead, they’ve landed in Scotland in 1879—and there’s David Tennant’s real accent (and the Robbie Burns quote). Rose, on the other hand, is firmly instructed not to attempt a Scottish accent.

The Doctor trained under Doctor Bell? Ha! (That would be the model for Sherlock Holmes, for those of you who don’t read Golden Age detective fiction.) On the other hand, that’s Queen Victoria. Nick and I are secretly quite fascinated by the fact that Doctor Who keeps coming back the Victorian era. But I don’t really have time for that angle right now.

Instead, they’re heading to the house of a Sir Robert McTeesh (and I’m sure I haven’t got that right) [it’s “MacLeish,” as it turns out. I checked later. So I was close. In a manner of speaking], thanks to a tree across the train lines (which the queen is suspicious about), which has prevented them getting to Balmoral.

Sir Robert, of course, is the man whose house has just been overtaken by ninja monks.

Meanwhile, Rose bets the Doctor ten quid she can make the queen say “We are not amused.” (She tried for five quid, but the Doctor said at that price it would be against his responsibilities as a time traveller.)

Wait, Sir Robert’s estate is called Torchwood? Now, I bet that’s not a coincidence.

There’s a running joke about Rose’s relative nakedness, but I’ve not had a chance to reproduce any of that. Funny, but mostly because of the delivery.

Sir Robert’s wife is super pretty, but she’s not happy with the guy in the mysterious crate, who we see shushing the terrified group. (Apparently, David Tennant went to acting school with the chap in the crate, who was a bit weird even then.)

Meanwhile, the Doctor’s being shown a gorgeous steampunk telescope—Rose is still trying to get the queen to say, “We are not amused.” This is starting to annoy me, actually. The Doctor thinks the telescope is rubbish as a telescope, but beautiful. It is truly beautiful.

There’s a local myth about a wolf that fascinated Prince Albert, but before Sir Robert can explain the story, the head ninja monk, now masquerading as a butler, cuts him off. There’s something mysterious being done in the kitchen by numerous semi-identical monks, involving herbs, which they then feed to the queen’s soldiers.

Who promptly collapse.

Well, they’re not getting their Christmas bonuses.

Rose, meanwhile, is hearing about the problems in the house, the over-running by the ninja monks, from a terrified housemaid called Flora. She convinces Flora to tell the Doctor, but they come across the drugged soldiers in the interim, and are snatched by ninja monks.

The Doctor is told that Rose has been delayed by the complexities of nineteenth-century clothing, which the Doctor finds convincing.

Hang on, my server’s back up! I’ll cut and paste.

Ah, now this is proper live-blogging. Hurray!

(The fact that Nick didn’t tell me the server was back up is another story.)

(I’ve missed the queen talking about missing Albert.)

Rose is now with the other prisoners—and we see the terrifying eyes of the creature in the crate—while Sir Robert tells the story of the local legend of the wolf. Rose, showing the bravery we see in other episodes, approaches the crate, recognising the content as not human. Well, the boy in the crate is human, but something else has taken a local boy, a “heartsick boy,” and taken over his body.

And the Doctor mentions the word “werewolf” for the first time.

Rose offers to take the werewolf—the essential wolf—back to its home planet, but it wants to take over the queen, and begin “the Empire of the Wolf.”

The wolf, meanwhile, recognises something of a kindred spirit in Rose, presumably a hangover from the Bad Wolf events of last season.

Sir Robert is trying to warn the Doctor of the nature of the ninja monks—that they turned from God and worship the wolf.

Meanwhile, the moon has risen, and the creature in the crate is changing. Rose is trying to motivate the prisoners to pull simultaneously on the chain holding them, though they are, not surprisingly, distracted by the man turning into a werewolf in front of them.

The ninja-monk-butler openly admits to wanting the throne, and kills the queen’s last bodyguard—just as Rose and the prisoners release themselves, as the Doctor leaps into the room and, seeing the werewolf, proclaims, “That’s beautiful!”

(It is, in a way. The transition looked intensely painful: I can’t blame the prisoners for being distracted.)

The queen has her own pistol, though I doubt it would work against a werewolf. We don’t get to see how it works against a ninja-monk-butler, whom she shoots.

The werewolf, meanwhile, is roaming the house, entirely comfortable in its plan to kill everyone. The house is ringed with ninja-monks, by the way. The Doctor tries to convince the man I called the crofter earlier—who is, of course, the steward of Torchwood, though whether the house steward or the land steward is another story. I’m betting house steward—that the werewolf is not that easy to kill, but the steward goes ahead and is grotesquely eaten.

The werewolf enters the kitchen where Sir Robert’s wife is hiding with the maids, but disappears without eating them, which is odd and suggestive.

Oh, apparently ninja-monk-butlers are susceptible to bullet wounds.

Much frenetic running through the house ensues.

Hang on, there’s a soldier still alive and conscious. Where’d he come from? Anyway, he plans to hold the corridor, despite knowing that bullets can’t stop the beast, to give the queen time to get away. He’s eaten horribly, as well—after talking to the queen about the mysterious content of the chest she brought with her in the carriage.

The werewolf is stopped by the door to the library, for some reason. The Doctor is uncertain why, though they all look quite relieved not to be eaten. The Doctor, of course, is overtaken with intellectual curiosity about why the werewolf can’t enter the room.

(Oh, and there’s some indiscriminate hugging, going on. And Rose tries to make the queen say she’s not amused, but now is really not the time.)

The queen seems to have lost faith in the Doctor, partly because of his gobbledegook but mostly because he’s dropped out of the Scottish accent at some point.

The Doctor and Sir Robert’s wife both realise that the wolf won’t touch or pass mistletoe—the wife sees the monks garlanded in mistletoe, while the Doctor has to lick a door. I know which one I’d rather be.

(The Doctor suggests that the wolf only thinks it’s allergic to mistletoe, a belief instilled by the monks as a means of controlling it.)

The Doctor’s also quite rude to Sir Robert, although it seems a little unnecessary. Even if he’s not as bright as his father, that’s hardly his fault. He, Rose, and Sir Robert flip frantically through the books in the library, looking for information they can use.

The queen, meanwhile, whips the Koh-i-noor out of her pocket. The Doctor wonders why she’s carrying it with her, and the queen acknowledges that Prince Albert never liked it. The Doctor knows that Prince Albert had the stone cut down by 40%, which seems a shame.

This sets the Doctor off. He knows the wolf is trying to trap the queen in the house, but the Doctor thinks that Sir Robert’s father and Prince Albert may have planned a counter trap for the wolf, which conveniently falls through a skylight at that point, but is doused with mistletoe-infused water by Isabel (finally, we get a name for Sir Robert’s wife).

The party head towards the conservatory, followed closely by the recovered wolf.

Sir Robert stays outside, hoping to buy them some time and, perhaps, to absolve himself of his sense that he has committed treason. Luckily, he has some swords stored on the wall outside the observatory, but that doesn’t seem to have helped him last long against the wolf. He dies off-screen, but I’m not too worried about that in this context.

(Remember, he’s one of the people the Doctor flashes back to in the final episode of season four.)

Meanwhile, the Doctor has put the diamond in the telescope, magnifying the light in some way I don’t understand and using it against the wolf right as it grabs the queen. (The question of why the queen was standing right in front of the door instead of at the far end of the room, when they knew she was the target, goes unanswered.) The telescope immobilises the beast, who transforms to human shape, begs for the light to be made brighter, and disappears with a howl.

The queen has been bitten, but she won’t acknowledge it.

The queen knight the Doctor and makes Rose a dame, but simultaneously banishes the Doctor from her empire, never to return. She claims that they consort with stars and magic and think it fun, but their world is steeped in terror, and blasphemy, and death. She won’t allow it. (She’s also not amused, so Rose wins her bet.)

I’d like to see some pay-off to the Doctor being banished, myself.

The Doctor, meanwhile, indulges in some entirely scurrilous rumours about Queen Victoria’s haemophilia. I’m no expert, but my understanding is that you don’t actually have to inherit haemophilia: it can be caused by a mutation in a single individual, who then becomes a carrier of the disease, passing it on to their descendants.

But I’m not getting into a debate about Queen Victoria’s haemophilia.

The queen, finally, founds Torchwood in remembrance of Sir Robert and to guard against the Doctor’s return. I wonder if there’ll be any pay-off for that?

And next week, Sarah Jane comes back! Hurray! I hope the server doesn’t go down next week, as well.

A Farce, in Three Acts.

Well, no: it’s not really. The word “bedfellows” is used pretty loosely, too: I haven’t actually found a lizard in my bed since, well, the last time I found a lizard in my bed.

But I have noticed that the living-room geckoes are much less chary about wandering around during the day time in this hot sticky weather. (For the record, BoM tells me that it’s currently 32 degrees with 56% humidity. I would have put it as more humid than that, considering it was 86% humidity at midnight last night. But it is true that I don’t feel as close to suffocating right now as I did as midnight, when it was like drowning.)

Anyway, the geckoes don’t get much attention on the blog, because they’re usually fairly nocturnal, and difficult to photograph in low light, being much smaller than the water dragons.

But here he is, clinging to what now looks as though it’s a slightly grubby cornice.

And I think that means all our lizards have now had a look-in on the blog, assuming this guy also stands in for the other two geckoes who live in our living room.

I’m going to do him the courtesy of assuming that he’s realised the camera is benign. Because now he doesn’t seem to care how close I get; he doesn’t even get restless during the closer shots.

It certainly saves me time on cropping and editing photographs,

He’s also developing his range of facial expressions.

See?

Pugnacious:

Bored:

Superbly disdainful:

I have found my fabulous tweezers. On the kitchen windowsill.

Now, that’s just odd. I use the kitchen windowsill to store all sorts of things, not least my cigarettes. And I’m sure the tweezers weren’t there when I grabbed a packet of cigarettes yesterday.

There’s only one plausible solution.

The geckoes have clearly worked out how to lift the lid of my laptop and, since the computer is not password protected, have been reading the blog, and have discovered that their plans for an insurrection have been rumbled.

(Or, I suppose, the possums could be telepathic as well as telekinetic.)

Now it’s only a matter of figuring out whether they’ve returned the tweezers out of a sense of “Fly, all is discovered!” or whether they’re trying to lull me into a false sense of security.

Well, that and wondering why they haven’t returned my cheese slicer, as well.

ME: Honey, don’t store things on the windowsill. (It’s not just nagging: that windowsill also gets full sunlight most of the day.)
NICK: What?
ME: The Ajax.
NICK: Oh. That’s a temporary measure.
ME: They’re all temporary measures.
NICK: It’s the war.
ME: What war?
NICK: The war.
ME: Which war?
NICK: I can’t tell you. It’s a secret war.
ME: A secret war.
NICK: Marvel Secret Wars.
ME: Marvel Secret Wars are the reason why you left the Ajax on the kitchen windowsill?
NICK: Yes.

Disclaimer: None of the dialogue here is taken verbatim from the books, but I think it’s fairly accurate.

Agatha Christie 1
HERCULE POIROT: Ah, Hastings! Always you are helpful to me. Always you think of exactly the wrong thing.
ME: Wait, you say you’re addressing Hastings, but that was aimed at me, right?

Agatha Christie 2
AGATHA CHRISTIE: Don’t look at what I’m doing with my left hand. Look at the elaborate twirling movements of my right hand, instead.
ME: Wait, is the doctor left-handed? Did you mention that? Where? Is it relevant? Have I guessed who the murderer is? That counts as a guess, right? Even though you reveal his name in the next paragraph?

Rex Stout
NERO WOLFE: Well, if you can’t tell who the murderer is after all I’ve just told you, I’m certainly not going to give you any further assistance.
ME: Wolfe, you smug, smug man. I love you!

Kathy Reichs
TEMPE BRENNAN: I was sure I was right about [blank], though I could barely believe it myself.
ME: Wait, did you mention [blank] earlier? Did I skip a paragraph? Well, don’t mention it if you’re not going to tell me!

Randall Garrett
LORD DARCY: Clearly, this murder was committed by magic.
ME: Well, obviously. I like your Irish sorcerer, by the way.

Arthur Conan Doyle
SHERLOCK HOLMES: Well, surely, Watson, if you’d paid attention to the number of steps up to the second floor and the fingers on the murdered man’s right hand . . .
ME: You know, another murder would really liven this plot up.

P. D. James
ADAM DALGLIESH: I’m sure you must know what happened by now.
WHICHEVER SUBORDINATE OFFICER HE’S WORKING WITH IN THIS NOVEL: I think I see it, sir, but there’s one thing I don’t understand.
P.D. JAMES: He explained his theory carefully and Dalgliesh agreed with him.
ME: But you can’t do it like that! You can’t reveal the way in which the murder occurred in between paragraphs—that’s cheating! Agatha Christie would never have done that!
AGATHA CHRISTIE: Don’t look at what my left hand’s doing.

Poor Nick: he never does get used to the fact that I like to talk about nonsense while he’s trying to go to sleep.

ME: I saw this Facebook group called “I wish a little elf would write my thesis for me.”
NICK: Hmmm?
ME: Yeah, I would have joined that once.
NICK: (Grunt)
ME: But then I saw it had a disclaimer saying it’s not plagiarism if the elf references properly.
NICK: It’s still plagiarism.
ME: I know that! I would have bought it if they’d said that, maybe, it wasn’t plagiarism because supernatural creatures are not subject to mundane laws.
NICK: (Grunt)
ME: But even then I think you’d find it a bit tricky from your perspective.
NICK: (Grunt)
ME: Legally, I mean.
NICK: (Grunt)
ME: It’s like when someone, probably Matt Damon, got Robin Williams to write his thesis in that movie I think I just made up in my head.
NICK: (Grunt)

(Silence)

We’ve been watching the episode of The Goodies where they take over Pinewood Studios and promptly fire all of the recognised directors working for them (resulting in Tim, obviously, playing Lady Macbeth and turning up to the premiere in a fabulous black sequined dress).

But before that, Bill explains why he likes the old silent films, and actors such as Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton . . .

BILL: And Lavatory Meadows.
GRAHAM: Lavatory Meadows?
TIM: He means W. C. Fields.

And later, when they’re viewing the work of their original directors:

BILL: Whose is this one, then?
GRAHAM: Er… Russell.
TIM: Jane, Ken, or Bertrand?
BILL: Let’s hope it’s the one with the big knockers, eh?
TIM: Yeah. Bertrand.
GRAHAM: This is Ken Russell’s “Life Of Pablo Casals”.
BILL: Load of rubbish.
GRAHAM: Give it a chance.
BILL: Nope.

And that’s not even including the point at which Bill turns up at the premiere in the character of Richard Harris.

Not all the episodes have aged well, but I seriously love The Goodies when they’re on form.

You end up with covers like this:

(From the 1970 edition of Sylvester.)

Or this:

(From the 1972 edition of Charity Girl.)

Or this:

(From the 1971 edition of Faro’s Daughter. Yes, I do know why she has him tied to a chair. No, I’m not going to tell you.)

Or my personal favourite, this:

(From the 1973 edition of The Toll-Gate.)

I know Georgette Heyer is known as much for the minute historical detail with which she invests her plots as she is for the fact that the plots are, essentially, all identical.

If only her illustrators showed some of the same fascination with historical minutiae.

Or am I wrong in thinking that Regency England was not so much the era of the false eyelash?

This live-blogging extravaganza brought to you by the fact that I still don’t know how to turn my television on (and we must have owned it for nearly a year) and by the fact that I forgot to unplug my external mouse from the laptop before moving it into the living room, causing wackiness to ensue.

Oh, and by the mysterious person on my television who looks almost exactly like Marcus Grahame in a low light but who is apparently Jack Dee, British comedian.

He doesn’t seem very funny, judging from the ten minutes of the programme I’ve just seen.

In other news, I know it’s been nearly eight years, Aaron Sorkin, but I still haven’t forgiven you for killing off Mrs Landingham just to give the President a reason to run for a second term.

I’m sure the episode will begin airing soon.

. . .

Ah! Here we are! That’s a man in a pin-striped suit turning dials in the TARDIS—yes, that’s the Doctor, all right. While Rose, outside, is once again demonstrating that she really doesn’t seem to like Mickey, at all.

And yet it’s Mickey who waits and watches for the TARDIS to leave: Jackie, who knows how things are going to go, is already walking away when it dematerialises.

And, credits!

The Doctor and Rose land on a mysterious planet in the year five billion and three. Which is just silly. And there’s New Earth—complete with apple grass. And Rose is being slightly odd in this scene . . . I can’t explain why.

And she’s being watched by a strangely tattooed man, who is keeping an eye on her through a crystal ball. Well, it looks like a crystal ball.

The Doctor is explaining about the Earth-nostalgia movement and how New Earth and New New York came about: they’re very flirty in this scene, but the Doctor is easily distracted by the hospital and the message he’s received on the psychic paper. Someone in Ward 26 wants to see him.

The Doctor, on the other hand, is showing his first obsession with the little shops that you find in hospitals (and, later, libraries).

Ah, the disinfectant scene. I’m quite partial to this scene. Rose settles down into it soon enough, and she’s really having fun in this episode, Billie Piper.

Though that’s not Ward 26—and Rose isn’t stupid (though, as Nick says, she can be bloody annoying), or she wouldn’t have picked up that metal pole. Did I mention that the nurses are giant humanoid cats? Because it seems as though that would be an important thing for me to say.

The Doctor has found the patient he has come to visit: the Face of Bo, asleep in his jar, alone with the novice who is taking care of him. The Face of Bo sleeps most of his time, these days—the Doctor claims that he only met the Face of Bo once, but those of us who have seen later episodes have our own suspicions about that.

And Rose has wandered into a different place, playing endless movies of someone she rapidly identifies as Lady Cassandra—and his tattooed human, Chip, who is a “force-grown clone.”

Ew, they salvaged her eyes? That’s . . . well, that’s not quite right, is it? Or am I being human-normative?

Well, Rose isn’t human-normative, although she did seem hung up on the whole “human” thing in the last episode—just because the Doctor can regenerate, and grow new limbs, and has two hearts, you’d think that was odd in some way.

While I’ve been nattering on about that, though, the Lady Cassandra has been transferring herself into Rose’s body: she’s quite manic in this role, Billie Piper.

ROSE/CASSANDRA: Oh my god: I’m a chav!

Flipping back to the Doctor and the Face of Bo, the novice is explaining some of the legends around the Face of Bo, especially the imparting of his last message to the lonely god. (Hint: we know what that is!)

I do laugh every time Rose/Cassandra describes herself as “living inside a bouncy castle.” And her attempts at doing “old Earth cockney.” Apples and pears? Hee!

Hang on, the Duke of Manhattan got better! I thought that petrifold regression wouldn’t be curable for another thousand years? Did I mention the Duke of Manhattan before? It’s terribly difficult to keep track of all the plot points.

(Would the Doctor honestly say, “How on earth . . .?” Wouldn’t it be more likely that he’d say, “How on Gallifrey?”)

ROSE/CASSANDRA: Never trust a nun, never trust a nurse, and never trust a cat.
NICK: These are the archest cats ever!
ME: Have you ever met a cat?

I admit, though, that these cats are creepy. Or should I say these nuns are creepy? Anyway, they’re (wow! Cassandra shows much more decolletage than Rose does) performing cures well ahead of their time, and keeping people in cells in the basement, not to mention incinerating them when they show signs of sentience.

Rose, in the interim, has found the Doctor and, seeing his new face, enthusiastically snogged him, to the apparent satisfaction of both of them. Is it just me, or does David Tennant look insanely young in this episode? Maybe it’s the relatively short hair.

The Doctor, working with advice that, coming from Rose, should make him highly suspicious, has found his way to what the nurses call “intensive care,” which is full of people suffering, apparently, every single disease in the galaxy. Which seems a little improbable to me, but what do I know?

The Doctor recognises immediately that these are not patients, but lab rats.

Ah! Rose asks the same questions as I do, and the Doctor (non)answers that plague carriers are always the last to die.

Now the Doctor is shouting at a poor novice—at least, I think she’s the novice. I find it hard to tell the nun-cats apart—who probably doesn’t actually have an active role in hospital administration. Shouldn’t he be shouting at the abbess? Or matron? Or whatever she is?

Meanwhile, the Doctor decides at this point to reveal that he knows there’s something wrong with Rose—apparently not because she snogged him while Rose has been shilly-shallying around for months, but because she doesn’t care about all these sick people.

Cassandra, however, only toys with him for a very short period of time before knocking him out with her perfume. That’s not a euphemism, by the way.

Cassandra is planning on infecting the Doctor with all the diseases that the poor people in the cells in intensive care are suffering—they’re “topped up” every ten minutes, and the Doctor’s been shoved into a spare cell.

The nurses, though, aren’t susceptible to Cassandra’s attempted extortion, and she releases all the ill patients on her level—who rapidly release every single person in intensive care.

(I wish the nun-cats wouldn’t call them “the flesh.” It’s . . . it’s just creepy.)

Nick’s of the opinion that releasing “the flesh” worked better as a threat than as “Plan B,” and I have to agree with him. Especially since these zombie people can infect you with every disease under the sun with just one touch.

There’s a lot of infecting, and running, and screaming at this point, so I’m going to ask two questions (Chip looks like dying, by the way, but he jumps in a barrel of waste):

a. How do they harvest the samples from these patients, if they can’t touch them?
and
b. How can these nun-cat nurses isolate the required antibodies to treat a particular disease, if the patients are simultaneously suffering from all of these disease?

Anyway, back in the episode, Cassandra is now in the Doctor’s body, but his taunting of Rose (“So many parts! And hardly used!”) is brought to an abrupt end by the arrival of the zombie patients.

Poor Chip, meanwhile, is stuck in one of the cells formally occupied by the zombie patients. And Rose has a psychotic nun-cat hanging off her ankle—but the nun-cat is infected by one of the zombie patients, without transferring the diseases to Rose. I’m not sure how—presumably Rose is wearing socks?

After a little back and forth, Rose manages to transfer herself to a zombie patient climbing up after Rose and the Doctor, but frantically sends herself back into Rose before the patients reach the top of the ladder—Cassandra experiences something usually described as a “character moment” before she and the Doctor reach the safer, quarantined sections in the general wards.

The Doctor calls for the intravenous solutions to every single disease, and straps them around his body before ravelling down the elevator shaft. He’s a busy little bee, this Doctor. And he talks Cassandra into going with him.

(Another question: Cassandra needed complicated technology to transfer herself into Rose’s mind, but once it’s been done once, she can just flip between people’s brains without any technological intervention and with no side effects?)

The Doctor, meanwhile, is mixing up his chemicals in the lift, and inducing the zombie patients to come into the lift for the disinfectant process—where they’re cured and can then pass the cure on to others by touch.

Wait, what?

Surely intravenous drugs don’t cure when they pass through the skin, do they? If they did, why would they be called intravenous drugs?

And, then, how can intravenous drugs and cures to horrible diseases that take at least two days to cure in the wards (as the Doctor mentioned in an earlier case, though I’ve forgotten its name already. Not the petrifold regression: another one) occur immediately?

Oh, I’m sure it’s not important.

But it is another instance of the Doctor becoming complicated with the idea of a medical Doctor, which Nick finds fascinating.

Meanwhile, the Face of Bo is feeling better, and tells the Doctor that they will meet again, for the third and final time, when he will impart his message, and then teleports off.

DOCTOR: Now that is enigmatic. That is . . . that is textbook enigmatic.

Cassandra, meanwhile, transfers into Chip’s body, but it’s all too much for him. He only has a half life, apparently, and presumably the excitement of hosting his “mistress,” who he loves, is too much for him.

So the Doctor bundles him into the TARDIS and takes him back to the party for the Thracian ambassador, the video of which Cassandra was watching earlier in the episode. She said, then, that it was the last night that someone told her she looked beautiful—and Chip/Cassandra wanders up to his/her older self, and tells her that she looks beautiful, and then collapses.

It’s rather sweet—but also strangely narcissistic. Although, since the original Cassandra doesn’t know that she’s speaking to herself, does that count as narcissism?

Either way, the Doctor and Rose wander silently into the TARDIS and off to their next adventure—which is “Tooth and Claw,” starring David Tennant’s actual Scottish accent! Hurray!

Seriously.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Now, I may have come to this a little late. (As usual.) But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to read it.

I imagine there’ll be a little flurry of dissatisfaction online that someone would take such a dearly beloved book and add a zombie apocalypse.

But I’m not too fussed about that.

It seems I’ve reached either an age, or a degree of maturity, or a state of stubbornness—I’m not sure which, but feel free to take your pick—in which I don’t much care what happens to certain books.

Well, no: it’s not that I don’t care, it’s that it doesn’t seem to bother me the way it used to.

Take C. S. Lewis, for example. I only got around to watching the films of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe and Prince Caspian last weekend. And I thoroughly enjoyed the first: particularly the way in which it paid delicate homage to Pauline Baynes’s position as the illustrator of Narnia—much as Peter Jackson drew from Alan Lee and John Howe in creating Middle Earth on screen—so that for viewers like me, to whom Baynes is as important as Lewis, the whole movie felt and looked right.

But Prince Caspian—well, I warn you that the next paragraph is ranty and also contains spoilers if you haven’t seen the film.

That attack on Miraz’s castle was ridiculous. Peter was a warrior king: he not only won his kingdom, he and Edmund both, in battle, but he then spent the twenty-odd years of his rule fighting giants and taking part in tournaments in the Lone Islands and the like. Furthermore, Lewis insists that the Pevensie children, after a sort time in Narnia, become more like the kings and queens they were than the English schoolchildren they are. He states this explicitly before Edmund’s duel with Trumpkin, and shows it, too, in Edmund’s stance as he delivers Peter’s challenge to Miraz and in the duel itself. And the movie pays some degree of homage to that in Peter and Miraz’s duel, which only makes the attack on the castle more absurd. No warrior would ever attack a heavily defended castle with such a small body of warriors. And if the intention was to show the horror of the Old Narnians being cut down at the gate, well, that could have been shown elsewhere—Caspian and his troops had seen some hard fighting before Peter and the others showed up, little if any of which is shown in the film.

Anyway.

My point is that even though I found it ridiculous, there’s no way it could ever hurt my love for the books or the way in which I read them. I’ve loved them too long and read them too many times to be hurt by a silly adaptation.

And I’m thinking that Jane Austen with zombies will work the same way.

Plus—well, it’s just cool, you know?

(Don’t forget: live-blogging of “New Earth” tonight at 8:30pm, Brisbane time.)

An apology for not managing a proper update.

I did issue a warning, way back when, that the new camera would mean many more photographs on the blog.

I am a woman of my word.

I am also a woman whose less than five hours sleep has turned into a dull headache at the base of her skull, so this is about as scintillating and intelligent as I get this afternoon: a many weeks old photograph of a sunset and a vague, gnawing worry that I’ve made at least two egregious errors in punctuation in this post.

Still, it’s pretty, yes?