When he smiled at being able to call himself The Doctor, even if only for a minute, it broke me up. In that moment, he really did seem younger than the other two. Lovely bit of acting from John Hurt.

Some characters just don't need origin stories. To be blunt, I have no more interest in the Doctor's life on Gallifrey (or life on Gallifrey in general beyond the occasional glimpse) than I would in a series about Sherlock Holmes getting picked on in school for being a boffin.

I really like that, on a narrative level, the episode combined a bunch of Doctor Who storytelling tropes - the pseudo-historical bit dovetailed into the earthbound U.N.I.T./alien invasion stuff which also had shades of the old "base under siege" chestnut, then that folded back into a pretty textbook NuWho Big Epic…

How is he not still a tragic figure? He still remembers committing double genocide, and he'll have to wait nearly half a millennium for any sense of absolution.

Yeah, I can't get on board with anyone complaining that she didn't really play Rose. Thank fuck we didn't have to deal with her and Ten simpering at each other.

Nine definitely tells Rose at one point that he was responsible for the deaths of the Daleks and the Time Lords. The retcon in The End of Time was that he hand't actually destroyed Gallifrey (and Skaro?) but sealed it/them in a time lock.

Oh, you mean the guy who played Mr. Olivander in the Harry Potter series? Come on dude, it's ludicrous to have gone into Doctor Who expecting it to measure up to a David Lynch classic, or have anything like its tone. You're trollin'.

Marc Ribot's work with Tom Waits pushes pretty much all my guitar-y buttons. He's like aural crack to me.

Fuck yeah to Marquee Moon especially. Like I said with Cortez the Killer below, all the lead work on that song is insanely good.

Pretty much all the lead work on Cortez the Killer is my favourite guitar solo.

Was series six simpler than series five though? I wouldn't have said so - to me that was where Moffatt started to confuse 'complex' for 'convoluted'.

Even the eighties and early nineties were a lot more diverse. This is anecdotal, obviously, but I remember watching Cosby, A Different World, Family Matters and so on (in Australia, even) and it going completely unremarked upon that the casts were predominately black. Things really do seem to have actually gone…

It was some bonding shit. Cadging a couple of freebies off the nightclub wouldn't have been the same, gesture-wise.

I feel it would be bad form to reveal Treacher's identity, but since he writes for the Daily Caller it's pretty easy to find out.

Man, union membership isn't as common in Australia as it used to be, but I was shocked to discover that it's permissible for employers to bully their employees out of unionising in the States. I think it was an episode of The Office where Jan straight-up threatened to sack the entire warehouse if they organised, and I…