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Notes on - Doctor Who: The Giggle

 

The Giggle notes

Soho, 1925

There’s that clip of the toy shop from the trailer

NPH – clearly enjoying hamming it up

*** The rules.  They are very, very importantent, these rules. Don’t you think?

Stooky Bill.  I’d never heard of him

Stooky Sue and the Stooky Babies.  Creepy

The Toymaker is properly sinister

Ah, he just did the arpeggio laugh

Nice little moment of casual racism

Why is the toymaker letting his accent slip?

John Logie Baird.  Also never heard of him.

There’s the laugh arpeggio again

Stooky means stupid and slow in Scottish idiom?

Stooky Bill on fire is creepy as hell

There’s the giggle again.  They’re sneaking it in a lot before we know to look for it.

Bernard Cribbons is tactfully gone/just out of shot/ not showing his face.  That’s sad.  Obviously he wasn’t really there anymore.

Man, you can see the increased budget

The Toymaker dancing uin the background

Should this guy be this able to ellucidate what’s happening while affected?  I suppose it had to happen to get the situation explained

Pointing to Wilf out of shot

That must be an audio clip ‘you go with the Doctor’ from a previous episode.

Sound cue of the Arpeggio again

Heluicopter carries the TARDIS to Avengers tower

Shirley Anne Bingham again

Really thought Kate was going to punch him

The Doctor’s not wrong.  UNIT has seriously given up being secret

Hey there Mel!

Donna:  I wasn’t the first Redhead?

Mel: No.  That was me.

Actually it was Liz.  Just for the record.

Love that Shirley has limited mobility.  Suck it, disability gatekeepers

Two days ago, an increase in violence worldwide

Everybody thinks they’re right and won’t be told otherwise

This is a not so subtle dig at the Tories

Yeah, what’s with the arm bands

The Vlinx

The Zeedex

So we’re just not going to get any backstory on the Vlinx

‘The Spike’.  Not ominous at all.

The spikes in neural activity matching a musical scale is neat, conceptually, but I don’t know if it logically tracks.  Why would it affect the brainwaves visually like that

Kate:  As for her, in that chair, I’ve seen you walk!  I’ve seen you walking!

So the spike turns people into alt right internet trolls.

Mel does ‘sad look’ very well.

Mel:  I’ve been fine.  Well… no more opinionated than usual

Donna: Nor me.

So former companions are immune

Zeedex – thinly veiled vaccine metaphor.   Of course there are anti-Zeedexers

KOSAT-5 satellite – Everyone is online on the planet now.  Really?

Donna: I spent six months teaching my daughter to play the recorder ‘til she said ‘this is not who I am, and that was the start of a whole other conversation, believe you me.

Mel singing the arpeggio makes everyone go weird

Donna’s placement of the points on the musical scale is totally arbitrary.  There’s no reason for it to be middle C.  It’s just conceptually cool, so maybe don’t think about the logistics too much

Arpeggios are basic

Shirley is good at research.  She found the puppet laugh right away

The Doctor:  The giggle in everyone’s head.

The whole ‘hiding inside the signal thing has been done before

So Stooky Bill and his laugh have been imbedded in  every image on every screen.  That doesn’t really track logistically, but it does track poetically.

So once the entire world was connected Stooky Bill burned himself into everyone’s brains.  How, exactly?

Looking for the puppeteer

The Doctor:  All the anger out there on the street.  The lies.  The righteousness. That’s human.  That’s you.  That’s who you are.

Playing with you like toys.  He’s dancing around the realization 

She was waiting for the Doctor’s permission. They’ve learned since Harriet Jones

Mel is a pretty good computer person

Aww, Doctor and Mel moment.

Sabalom Glitz!  Aww, Tony Selby

Zingo

So Mel was already an orphan when the Doctor met her

Donna:  How much per year?

Kate: Sixty thousand.

Donna:  One hundred twenty plus five weeks holiday.

Kate: Done.

Of course the Doctor pops back to 1925 to see the actual transmission

They’re rehashing the same school reunion argument.  Russell is keeping the trauma plotline simmering in the background

The old face came back because he’s wearing himself out?  Lame.

That’s kind of a leap assuming Stooky Bill came from the toy shop

He’s playing a game!

Toymaker:  Und now, everybody loves the balls.

The Doctor is recognizing the Toymaker

Super effective

Michael Gough flashback

And he goes from german to English and back

Establishing now that the Toymaker doesn’t employ logic

Back in the Toymaker’s domain.  Neat.

So is David Tennant talking about the 1st Doctor episode or the implied visit before that

Casting the salt at the edge of the universe counted a s a game and let the Toymaker in.  That’s kind of lame

I hope there will be clowns in the domain again

Donna’s right about statistics.  Dice don’t know what the dice did last time.

No!  Do not go through doors separately!

Of course they’re separated now.

It’s the guy that bought Stooky Bill

He’s wrapped up exactkly like Bill was.

He went back to the shop ater the cold open and lost a game to the Toymaker and now he’s a marionette.

This is grotesque.  In a good way

This is where the Toymaker works.  The innocent games twisted into scary mockeries

Stooky Sue!

Speaking in rhyme is creepy

Donna:  Hello Stooky, my name’s Donna.  Now I think that you’re a goner.

Donna is hard core murdering that doll

Who would the Toymaker let them find one another that easily

Is this the same design as the new DVD

Puppet show exposition!!

Toymaker:  Well that’s all right then!

The marionettes of the companions are great

He’s taken aback by being offered what he really wants.  To play a game

NPH can really do these card tricks, can’t he

He made a jigsaw out of the Doctor’s history.  So, there you go.  All inconsistencies are covered

Why bother bringing up the master in the tooth

The one who waits.

The Toymaker claims he saw them hiding and ran.  Was he really afraid?  This is clearly setup for a big bad season plot

The Toymaker made everybody’s opinion supreme

Toymaker:  That’s the game of the 21st century.  They shout, and they type, and they cancel.

That plotline doesn’t really amount to much

The Toymaker is indignant at the thought that he might cheat.

They made cutting cards a tense moment

Best of three is an inviolable rule

The Doctor:  Donna!

Donna: I’m already running!

The folding up effect is pretty neat

Galvanic beam.   It works that they have to wait for the satellite to get to be over them which Mel tricked it into doing

The Doctor is scanning for something?  Is this just technobabble to make it seem like the Doctor has a plan?

OK, he’s scanning for the way the Toymaker entered our universe back in 1925 in the hope that he can shove him out of it again.

Spice Girls dance number!

I bet NPH had a ball doing this

That hit of Kate on the wall was brutal.  That should have given her a traumatic brain injury

Turning the soldiers into balls is cute, and then the screaming face in one ball show how sick and painful it really is

This is all Tex Avery Aesthetics

That’s a lot of broken glass flying around

The Toymaker doesn’t like being called small

The Doctor is inviting the Toymaker to be a companion.  That’s bonkers

The Doctor:  We can be… Celestial.

Didn’t the Toymaker already know humanity?  He’d picked people from here before

The Toymaker makes a strong case for why he would love humanity

Dang!  I did not see that coming!  David Tennant is dying earlier than expected!

Donna and Mel insist on being by his side

Mel:  You’re going to be someone else.  It doesn’t matter who.  Because every single one of you is fantastic.

Allons-Y should have been his final words last time

Pull??

I love that half the clothes go with Ncuti and half stay with David

The Doctor’s in his underwear

Bi-Generation

The range of colorrs line is cringey

He shrank the guardians into voodoo dolls?

Doc 15 getting carried away and almost eliminating 14 is funny’

The flattening and folding effect is cool

So did all of this just now never happen?  Did no one die?

No, Kate seems to be indicating that they did still die.

And now the Doctor is agreeing that people still did really die.

The 15th Doctor:  Come here.  I’ve got you.  Yeah.  I’m here.

The red fingernailed hand picking up the master/tooth.  No.  Just no.  Just don’t

That is the big question.  How does this work now?

Fun rundown of the major hits of both series.

The 15th Doctor:  Sarah Jane is gone.  Can you believe that for a second?

So Ncuti is fine now because David is going to ix himself in his personal future.  So they are still kind of linear, but folded back and overlapping

So his face is back because it was supposed to tell him to go home with Donna?  Weak.

He just happens to have a huge Tex Avery Mallet on  hand.  Of course he does

It does work that the ‘cartoon rules’ are still lingering.  Feels a lot like the ‘regeneration energy is lingering from Christmas invasion though

I like the accessibility ramp

Still no chairs, but now there is a juke box

This does really feel like a fresh new start for the show.

This is a proper sendoff for the new Doctor and the rest is wrapup of Davod Tennant and family

Aqww, Sylvia says Mel is family.  Love that

I love that Doc 14 and Mel are travelling

Wilf is shooting moles

Lovely last moment with Ncuti

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