#amazing scientific analysis of costuming

[fuckyeahdindjarin]

@jahsontodd EXCUSE ME TUMBLR DIDN'T NOTIFY ME OF THE TAG AND I'M SO MAD ABOUT THIS?!!! IT WAS POSTED IN JUNE??!?!! Well luckily this crossed my dash, because this is a dissertation honey!!!

Hard agree with Javi G. The colours are on point, it's so summer holiday, and the palette goes perfectly with the colours of the island as well, so warm and sandy and beachy.

Do I need to say anything about Narcos? No? Ok. I LOVE the 3 colour rule and you are so right. I'm so glad I read your post at the start of the Javier Pena Outfit Archive project, I'm definitely going to be continuing this project with fresh eyes.

I'M SORRY BUT I MUST YELL - HOW IS JACK'S WARDROBE NOT 10/10?!?!? The snowsuit is cinematic perfection, other than the rainboots, the wardrobe is 12/10!!! AND THE HATS!!! C'mon, I'm lodging a formal appeal of the score.

For Joel - 'His pants ARE suspiciously fitted. Not so utilitarian when it comes to pants are you Joel?' 😂 I'm dying because if no one is less utilitarian when it comes to tight pants than Javier.

I LOVED THIS SO MUCH. I'm so sorry I didn't see it until now! The graphics are also fantastic, I love your notes on top of them, if you ever do a second part, I'm sooo here for it!!!

✨rating pedro pascal characters based on nothing but costuming (non-exhaustive)✨

considerations:

*real housewives voice* thats my OPINION!!! also subject to change upon reflection, just going off my current feelings. 

not really discussing whether the costuming is good or bad for character, context, or source material but just how much I like them if that makes sense. 

some of these costume designers knocked it out of the park but would I be a little grumpy if I went on a date and they showed up in a walmart denim button up and ripped their $300+ jacket to shreds? Yes. Was that costume absolutely perfect for Joel? Yes again.

Mostly discussing costuming in context modern/21st century settings. The Mandalorian+GOT+ etc. in part two?

Minimal discussion on hair+cosmetics, only really when it applies to the whole look

Keep reading

[madmensideblog]

MAD MEN BOOK RECS

Happy pride/Don Draper’s fake birthday ❤️ Below the cut, I’ve listed info on my favorite Mad Men related books and a couple I haven’t read yet but I’m really looking forward to. Let me know if you check any of these out, or if you have any other recommendations! ❤️

Mad Men Carousel: The Complete Critical Companion by Matt Zoller Seitz

“Mad Men Carousel is an episode-by-episode guide to all seven seasons of AMC's Mad Men. This book collects TV and movie critic Matt Zoller Seitz’s celebrated Mad Men recaps—as featured on New York magazine's Vulture blog—for the first time, including never-before-published essays on the show’s first three seasons. Seitz’s writing digs deep into the show’s themes, performances, and filmmaking, examining complex and sometimes confounding aspects of the series. The complete series—all seven seasons and ninety-two episodes—is covered.

Each episode review also includes brief explanations of locations, events, consumer products, and scientific advancements that are important to the characters, such as P.J. Clarke’s restaurant and the old Penn Station; the inventions of the birth control pill, the Xerox machine, and the Apollo Lunar Module; the release of the Beatles’ Revolver and the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds; and all the wars, protests, assassinations, and murders that cast a bloody pall over a chaotic decade.

Mad Men Carousel is named after an iconic moment from the show’s first-season finale, “The Wheel,” wherein Don delivers an unforgettable pitch for a new slide projector that’s centered on the idea of nostalgia: “the pain from an old wound.” This book will soothe the most ardent Mad Men fan’s nostalgia for the show. New viewers, who will want to binge-watch their way through one of the most popular TV shows in recent memory, will discover a spoiler-friendly companion to one of the most multilayered and mercurial TV shows of all time.”

A classic episode-by-episode look at the series from reviewer Matt Zoller Seitz.

The Legacy of Mad Men — Cultural History, Intermediality and American Television (Edited by Karen McNally, Jane Marcellus, Teresa Forde, and Kirsty Fairclough)

“For seven seasons, viewers worldwide watched as ad man Don Draper moved from adultery to self-discovery, secretary Peggy Olson became a take-no-prisoners businesswoman, object-of-the-gaze Joan Holloway developed a feminist consciousness, executive Roger Sterling tripped on LSD, and smarmy Pete Campbell became a surprisingly nice guy. Mad Men defined a pivotal moment for television, earning an enduring place in the medium’s history.

This edited collection examines the enduringly popular television series as Mad Men still captivates audiences and scholars in its nuanced depiction of a complex decade. This is the first book to offer an analysis of Mad Men in its entirety, exploring the cyclical and episodic structure of the long form series and investigating issues of representation, power and social change. The collection establishes the show’s legacy in televisual terms, and brings it up to date through an examination of its cultural importance in the Trump era. Aimed at scholars and interested general readers, the book illustrates the ways in which Mad Men has become a cultural marker for reflecting upon contemporary television and politics.”

This is a really beautiful collection. It was published in 2019. It’s rather expensive. (I found a used copy for much cheaper.) If you can afford it, I really, really recommend buying it. There is a pdf floating around if you know where to look though. But like I said, it’s really amazing work and the women who curated it deserve high praise and compensation.

A few favorite essays of mine include “Don Draper and the Enduring Appeal of Antonioni’s La Notte” by Emily Hoffman, “Mad Men’s Mid-Century Modern Times” by Zak Roman, “Mad Men and the Staging of Literature via Ken Cosgrove and His Problems” by Aaron Shapiro, and “What Jungian Psychology Can Tell Us About Don Draper’s Unexpected Embrace of Leonard in Mad Men’s Finale” by Marisa Carroll.

Mad Men and Philosophy: Nothing Is as It Seems (Edited by William Irwin, James B. South, and Rod Carveth)

“With its swirling cigarette smoke, martini lunches, skinny ties, and tight pencil skirts, Mad Men is unquestionably one of the most stylish, sexy, and irresistible shows on television. But the series becomes even more absorbing once you dig deeper into its portrayal of the changing social and political mores of 1960s America and explore the philosophical complexities of its key characters and themes. From Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle to John Kenneth Galbraith, Milton Friedman, and Ayn Rand, Mad Men and Philosophy brings the thinking of some of history's most powerful minds to bear on the world of Don Draper and the Sterling Cooper ad agency. You'll gain insights into a host of compelling Mad Men questions and issues, including happiness, freedom, authenticity, feminism, Don Draper's identity, and more.”

This collection was published just a month before the start of season 4, so it only concerns the first three seasons of the show. As such, it includes some assumptions that are proven false and a few strange misreadings that I’m sure would’ve been cleared up had they had the rest of the show at their disposal. But there are some great philosophical insights and analysis.

I haven’t yet read the whole collection, but my favorite essay of what I’ve read so far was “Pete, Peggy, Don, and the Dialectic of Remembering and Forgetting” by John Fritz.

The Fashion File: Advice, Tips, and Inspiration from the Costume Designer of Mad Men (by costume designer Janie Bryant)

From Joanie's Marilyn Monroe-esque pencil skirts to Betty's classic Grace Kelly cupcake dresses, the clothes worn by the characters of the phenomenal Mad Men have captivated fans everywhere. Now, women are trading in their khakis for couture and their pumas for pumps. Finally, it's hip to dress well again. Emmy-Award winning costume designer Janie Bryant offers readers a peek into the dressing room of Mad Men, revealing the design process behind the various characters' looks and showing every woman how to find her own leading lady style--whether it's vintage, modern, or bohemian. Bryant's book will peek into the dressing room of Mad Men and reveal the design process behind the various characters' looks. But it will also help women learn how fashion can help convey their personality. She will help them cultivate their style, including all the details that make a big difference. Bryant offers advice to ensure that a woman's clothes convey her personality. She covers everything from where to find incredible vintage clothing and accessories to how to pair those authentic pieces with modern shoes and jeans. Readers will learn how to find their perfect bra size, use color to convey a mood, and invest in the ten essentials every woman should own. And just so the ladies don't leave their men behind, there's even a section on making them look a little more Don Draper-dashing.

I recently ordered a used copy of this book and haven’t yet received it, but I’m very much looking forward to it. Like Mad Men and Philosophy listed above, it was published between season 3 and 4, so unfortunately does not cover the whole show. It sounds like it might just cover the women’s costume design, though I’m not sure. Janie Bryant is such a meticulous, genius costume designer that I can’t wait to read it. Relatedly, you should follow her incredible costume design instagram where she posts lots of her work from Mad Men and other shows with fascinating insight into her process.

The Universe is Indifferent: Theology, Philosophy, and Mad Men (Edited by Ann W. Duncan and Jacob L. Goodson)

Centered on the lives of the employees at a Manhattan advertising firm, the television series Mad Men touches on the advertising world's unique interests in consumerist culture, materialistic desire, and the role of deception in Western capitalism. While this essay collection has a decidedly socio-historical focus, the authors use this as the starting point for philosophical, religious, and theological reflection, showing how Mad Men reveals deep truths concerning the social trends of the 1960s and deserves a significant amount of scholarly consideration. Going beyond mere reflection, the authors make deeper inquiries into what these trends say about American cultural habits, the business world within Western capitalism, and the rapid social changes that occurred during this period. From the staid and conventional early seasons to the war, assassinations, riots, and counterculture of later seasons, The Universe is Indifferent shows how social change underpins the interpersonal dramas of the characters in Mad Men.

I only just found out about this collection, but I’m very interested in finding a copy. This was published in 2016. You can see the table of contents here. EDIT: This book is available to read on Scribd. They offer a 30 day free trial.

[kirkfan2255]

I listen to Red Web at work and to say that I was ecstatic that today’s episode was on Bigfoot was.....an understatement. I LOVED this episode! It was SO funny at points, like I was dying of laughter. And as soon as I finished the ep, I wanted to listen to it again (I’m doing it right now actually). But I also am a bit of a Bigfoot nerd and I have Thoughts:tm: (under the cut for length)

So I think my biggest takeaway about supernatural/paranormal/cryptids in general was echoed by Trevor at the end of the ep: we/I want to believe, and sometimes we take facts in retrospect to make it fit. Which isn’t a bad thing! That’s how anthropology in general sometimes has to work, where you look at history, at the pieces left behind, to paint a picture of what was occurring in a specific place. But it can also mean that your confirmation bias comes out, which they discussed near the end of the Gigantopithecus theory. I personally want to believe; but I also think that there’s a lot of bias in Bigfoot research. And I think that’s down to the larger scientific community not looking into it more.

So my general thoughts are: if Bigfoot is real, we do need to discover evidence. If they are burying their dead, where are these burial sites? Can we go to where known Bigfoot sightings have occurred (as they did with the location of the Patterson-Gimlin film after it was shot) and look for clues of where the creature came from and where it was going? Would we find sites there? I think for all that we have explored all of the land and know it fairly well, there’s also still large swaths of land that still haven’t been taken with a fine-tooth comb.

Speaking from a geographer’s viewpoint, our satellite imagery and aerial photography has come a very, very long way, but you still only get to a certain resolution before it just can’t pick up all those fine details. And believe me when I say that you still don’t pick up people unless you’re VERY close. Animals can hide just as well, so who’s to say Bigfoot can’t evade it as well?

As for a few specific things:

One of the things about Bob Heironimus, who was the man purported to be in the suit during the filming of the Patterson-Gimlin film, is that he did a very, very convincing mimic of the walk in the film. But you can’t fake your knees. Heironimus was several inches shorter than the creature in the film was estimated to be (just over a foot shorter, about 14 inches), and based on where the creature’s legs are and where it bends, you can’t have a man in a suit with Heironimus’ proportions look realistic. And the PGF has never been fully debunked! There’s a TON of different filmmakers who have examined it, some debunking and some believing, but NONE of them can explain every single detail.

If you want to learn more about the PGF and all the efforts that have gone in to debunking it, I would love to direct your attention to Astonishing Legends; they did an amazing, super detailed, extremely in-depth analysis of the PGF, to the point where it is 6 parts at about 3 hours each. They’re all worth the listen, but especially parts 1, 3, and 6, which are the introduction, the talk about the hoax claims and costuming, and their conclusions and an interview with Bob Gimlin, currently the only surviving direct witness to the event.

The other thing is about the bears theory. I live in Wisconsin, and have worked with the DNR. We have bears, and I know how bears tend to function. I find it HIGHLY skeptical that everyone is seeing bears. If you’ve never seen a bear, they tend to be on four legs most of the time. They can stand up on their hind legs and even walk to a certain extent, but not to the point where you’d confuse them with an ape-like creature. You’d also have to have a very, very well-trained bear that can last on its hind legs that long *and* move as fast as Bigfoot is said to. I just really don’t believe that a bear can do that. Beyond that, their front legs are shorter, and while I could see bear skids in mud looking like Bigfoot tracks, bear prints have visible claw marks, just as you do with dogs, because they don’t have retractable claws. As far as I am aware, no Bigfoot track has ever been cast with claw prints.

Bears, especially the more prominent black bears that live in the lower United States, don’t generally tend to confront humans. This is definitely in line with reported Bigfoot behavior; when they encounter a person, they tend to leave instead of engage. Though, I should also note that grizzly bears, which stay much more in Canada and Alaska than the Pacific Northwest, are more aggressive than black bears, and are more likely to charge at you when encountered. But bears don’t throw rocks, which is a reported Bigfoot phenomena, and if they’re going to run or charge you? They’re getting down on all fours. You’re not going to watch a bear walk off on its hind legs.

Also the ‘Bigfoot is an alien’ theory is my FAVORITE Bigfoot theory (even if I don’t believe it’s true) and you can pry that from my cold dead hands.

[hellyes-tommccamus]

Norman’s Awesome Experience [film] (1988)

Sci-fi/comedy

Tom McCamus plays the main role

This has been number 2 on my list of Tom McCamus films I’ve been wanting to watch for so long. His first appearance is spectacular. From his huge 80s hair to the silver tipped winkle-pickers, plus the lab coat he never takes off. Scientists wear lab coats all the time in movies. Sadly I have only met one who does this in real life.

I find physics fascinating but I’m afraid it’s not my strongest subject, so I won’t be offering so much in the way of my usual scientific analysis. But we do get an actual tour of CERN!

This film was apparently overshadowed by the similar Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. If that wasn’t such a rad film I’d be upset that it stopped 80s Tom McCamus appearing on our television sets for all eternity. Okay maybe I’m still upset about that fact.

Tom plays the titular Norman who is seduced by model Erica (Laurie Paton) into letting her and and her photographer Umberto (Jaques Lussier) into the lab he works at in Switzerland.

Meanwhile, one of his fellow scientists (Brian Downey) is planning on increasing the energy output to win the Nobel Prize. This gives the impression that CERN is a nuclear power station. It is not. It is a nuclear research laboratory, and it actually requires a great deal of energy to run.

I’m not really sure if something goes wrong or if it’s the intended effect of the experiment, but Norman, Erica and Umberto are sent back in time to when the Roman Empire reigned.

They encounter a tribe who live in the Swiss mountains, who are going to kill the strangers until it transpires that Umberto speaks Italian so can communicate with Roman Septimus Fabius (David Hemblen). The Roman sets the time travellers free and tells them he will sell them in Rome, but for some reason leaves them with the tribe.

The tribe and their leader Serpicus (Marcus Woinsky) are not happy with the time travelers’ presence but Umberto somehow takes over as leader by threatening to burn Polaroid photos that Norman takes of tribe.

They have a party to celebrate. Umberto and Erica seem to be happy with their new life. Norman’s eye is caught by the girl with the least clothes, Felix (Gabriela Salos) who he is utterly unable to communicate with. But because of her he abandons his initial plan to go to Rome to become an inventor.  

It struck me that at the half way mark through this film nobody has seriously discussed trying to get home. I’m a bit of a fan of the “went back in time for some reason” genre, and usually the plot revolves around the protagonists trying to get home. Which sets up the difficult decision for some/all of the party whether they should stay after all. So I found it unusual that the three time travellers are more or less resigned to making the best of it in their new time. I later realised that they briefly discussed their inability to get home at the 17 minute mark (so this was allegedly the inciting incident, not the time travel).

The Romans get wind of the revolt of the Swiss tribe, and send their army in. Umberto and Erica decide to go with the Romans and Norman takes over as leader of the tribe. Thankfully he is able to “invent” some modern technology to help them.

Tom sings on a number of occasions in this film. I find their choice of 50s and 60s songs a bit odd. In Back to the Future it at least made sense. Here, I don’t know. Did someone write the screenplay and then sit on it for 20 years?

Overall I’m a bit disappointed in this film. The characters aren’t particularly likeable and the jokes are rather thin on the ground for a comedy. For me, it slips down the cracks between good and so-bad-it’s-good. I wanted to like it. I watched it twice. Only really worth watching for Tom’s amazing 80s hair. He looks like a Japanese gangster. On the up side, I have new inspiration for a costume for the next 80s night I attend!

While I love seeing Tom as a main character in films, it’s very time consuming to do the screen captures. So I played my own 80s soundtrack while I did this one, just because I can. And while I did this I either lost my mind or decided that this film was not as bad as I initially thought. It has some pretty nice shots. Maybe it’s one of those that gets better the more times you see it. Ask me again once I’ve watched it ten more times.

[bangkokjacknews]

Sunday Mysteries: The hunt is still on for BIGFOOT

Is Bigfoot Real? What made the oversized tracks found in Bluff Creek, California, and other parts of America? A giant ape or just a big jape? In 1924, a group of miners working in the Cascade Mountain Range in the state of Washington were startled to see a huge simian creature staring at them from behind a tree. Panic-stricken, one of the men fired at it and although the bullet appeared to hit the giant ape in the head, the beast ran off, apparently unharmed. Soon afterwards another of the miners, Fred Beck, spotted it again on the edge of a canyon and again fired, this time hitting the creature in the back. The group watched as it fell over the ridge. They scrambled at once down into the canyon below, but could find no trace of the creature’s body. However, that evening as it grew dark, the men heard strange scratching noises outside their log cabin and saw shadowy gorilla-like faces at the window. The terrified miners barricaded the door but soon the creatures were hammering at the roof and walls. Heavy rocks were thrown and the cabin rocked from side to side. The men began shooting through the walls in all directions but still the hammering continued, only ending as the sun rose the next morning. The miners packed up at once and left the cabin, vowing never to return. It was only after Eric Shipton famously photographed a giant footprint on the Menlung Glacier of Mount Everest in 1951, putting his pickaxe alongside to show its size, that interest in giant apes began to gather pace. During the 1953 expedition to Everest, when Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tensing were the first to successfully climb the mountain, both men reported seeing oversized footprints. Although Hillary later disputed that these were yeti tracks, there was so much interest in finding out more that the Daily Mail sponsored a ‘Snowman’ expedition in the Himalayas the following year. Keen to discover more about America’s very own yeti-style legend, John Green tracked down Fred Beck in the late 1960s and interviewed him for his book On the Track of the Sasquatch, and the Bigfoot mystery took even firmer root in America. The word ‘Sasquatch’, applied to the large, hairy hominid in its North American manifestation, was first coined much earlier – in the 1920s – by J. W. Burns. While working as a schoolteacher at the Chehalis Indian Reserve on the Harrison River, he had learned that Native American Indians used the words soos-q’tal and sokqueatl to describe the various ‘giant men’ of their legends. To simplify matters, Burns decided to invent one name to cover all such creatures, and through one of his articles – ‘Introducing British Columbia’s Hairy Giants’, published in MacLean’s Magazine in 1929 – ‘Sasquatch’ passed into wider use. As the public fascination for the giant apeman grew, the media began to report sightings on a regular basis. In 1958 road construction worker Ray Wallace was amazed when his colleague reported finding huge footprints in the dirt at Bluff Creak in northern California, the area they were working in. The local press descended and soon the story was front-page news all over America. Casts were made of the prints, which experts declared genuine. The first newspaper to carry the story, the Humboldt Times of Eureka in California, used the name ‘Bigfoot’ in their headline, and the word has since become synonymous with America’s favourite mystery creature. When more tracks were found, Sasquatch hunters flocked into the now famous Bluff Creek area to see what else they could discover. It wasn’t until Ray Wallace’s death, in December 2002, that the mystery was revealed. Members of Ray’s family requested that his obituary should announce that, with his passing, Bigfoot had also died. Ray Wallace immediately became one of the most controversial characters in Bigfoot history when it was revealed that he (along with a handful of his close friends and co-workers) had made the tracks. Investigators soon found out that all of the tracks appeared in areas Ray had worked in. In the early days that had been in Washington State, where the first footprints had been found, while over twenty years later discoveries were being made further south, in California. Bigfoot had not been on the move, Ray Wallace had. Family members produced dozens of different oversized foot moulds made out of wood or clay that Ray would have spent weeks crafting and honing. His buddies, by then rather elderly pranksters, showed in television documentaries how they had created the vast footsteps: holding on to a rope tied to the back of a logger’s truck being driven very slowly had enabled them to take the giant steps that had so fooled expert analysis. In much the same way as crop-circle makers simply enjoy confounding the experts, so did Ray and his pals. However, despite The New York Times running the news as a headline story, many Bigfoot researchers have discounted the revelation (not altogether surprising – cynics might say – when their credibility was on the line) and even tried to discredit the Wallace family, threatening them with legal action. One poor haunted soul who spent his adult life in search of Bigfoot evidence wondered why anybody would put so much time into ‘messing with people’s heads’. The answer, of course, is because it is fun. Fun, and surprisingly easy. Nonetheless, a number of scientists and leading members of the Bigfoot Field Research Centre (BFRC) are, instead, stating that the footprint moulds produced by the pranksters are themselves the fake, not the tracks. In a bizarre piece of reverse logic, some are insisting the Wallace family must prove their claims. John Green, described as one of America’s foremost Bigfoot researchers, loftily remarked of Wallace that if he had revealed the footprint mould during his lifetime he ‘would, of course, called upon to prove himself’. I am unable to see how anybody can become a ‘foremost researcher’ when they have discovered exactly the same amount of genuine evidence of Bigfoot as I have – that is, absolutely nothing. It was, after all, John Green who interviewed Albert Ostman in 1957 and fell for his tall (in more senses than one) story. Ostman said he had been looking for gold in British Columbia during the gold rush of 1927, when he had been kidnapped by an adult male Sasquatch. The beast gathered up the man in his sleeping bag and carried him several miles. He was then dumped on the ground and realized, shortly afterwards, that he was being held by a family of four who would not let him leave their camp. After six days of captivity, he concluded he was being considered as future husband material for the young female, so he fired his rifle into the air, distracting the family for long enough to make his escape. When Green asked why Albert had not told his story before, the ageing gold prospector replied that he thought nobody would have believed him. And few did, except John Green and his vast fan base of Bigfoot believers ready to leap to his defence on every issue. But Green did finally concede, in 2007, that he ‘would not believe the story if he were told it today’. Take another established piece of ‘proof’ – the footage of a female Sasquatch filmed by Roger Patterson in Bluff Creek. The story goes that in October 1967 Patterson and his friend Bob Gimlin were riding through the creek when their horses reared up and they were both thrown to the ground. Extract from Mysterious World As they picked themselves up, they noticed a ‘huge, hairy creature walking like a man’ about thirty yards ahead of them. Patterson grabbed his cine-camera and began filming the beast as she loped away, pausing only once – and looking directly into the camera lens as she did so – before disappearing from view. The film has become world famous and has been studied by zoologists, crypto-zoologists, palaeontologists, biologists, anthropologists, archaeologists, Uncle Tom Cobbley and all. And you will be unsurprised to hear that opinion is divided about whether it is genuine footage (Bigfootage?) or not. Leading scientists did, however, conclude at the time that there was ‘nothing in the film that leads them, on scientific grounds, to suspect a hoax’. Having now made my own detailed study of the film, using ultra-slow, frame-by-frame-pausing technology obligingly provided by Sony (namely, the DVD player in my front room), I can now add to the debate. To my albeit untrained eye, the creature looks suspiciously like a man in a monkey suit on his way to a fancy-dress party.

Seasoned Bigfoot researchers nevertheless regard the film as a significant piece of evidence, saying that to suggest that it was a hoax would be ‘demonstrably false’ – that old double-negative rhetoric again. But even non-researchers, including the physical anthropologist Grover Kranz, confirm the film does depict a ‘genuine unknown creature’. Another prominent primate expert, John Napier, is still not entirely convinced but once revealed: ‘I could not see the zipper then and I still can’t. Perhaps it was a man dressed up in a monkey costume; if so it was a brilliantly executed hoax and the unknown perpetrator will take his place with the great hoaxers of the world.’ So does this mean if he can’t see the zip, it can’t be a monkey suit? Or had the hoaxer compounded his/her cleverness by inventing an early form of Velcro? In 2004, Greg Long revealed in his book The Making of Bigfoot that the grainy clip was in fact an elaborate hoax. Long claims he had managed to trace the monkey suit to costume maker Philip Morris, a gorilla suit specialist from North Carolina. In the book, Morris states he sold the suit to Roger Patterson for $435, and when he saw the Bigfoot photos on the television and in the newspapers a few weeks later, he recognized the suit as the one he had made. Morris claims never to have revealed this information before because to break ‘client confidentiality’ in such a public manner would have lost him customers. It might have saved millions of research dollars, though. Greg Long revealed the man in the suit as Bob Heironimus – a friend of Patterson’s – who subsequently told the Washington Post: ‘It’s time people knew it was a hoax. It is time to let this thing go … I have been burdened with this for thirty-six years, seeing the film-clip on television numerous times. Somebody’s making lots of money out of this, except for me. But that is not the issue, the issue is that it is finally time to let people know the truth.’ John Green, of course, immediately went on the offensive, calling him a liar and declaring Greg Long had made ‘a fool of himself’. And while Heironimus was a known associate of Patterson and has passed two lie detector tests and Greg Long has found several independent, but supporting, witnesses, John Green still has yet to provide a single piece of evidence for his case that the film is of a genuine, if as yet unidentified, hairy giant. Step forward, then, Roger Patterson himself. Unfortunately, he can no longer be called upon as he died in 1972. However, the other witness to the Bigfoot sighting, Bob Gimlin, is still alive. Bob no longer speaks personally about the film as he is ‘fed up with the whole Bigfoot thing’, but his solicitor, Tom Malone, issued a statement to the Washington Post in response to their story about Heironimus’s revelation: ‘I am authorized to tell you that nobody wore a gorilla suit or monkey suit and that Mr Gimlin’s position is that it’s absolutely false and untrue.’ Which seems clear enough, but it is quite possible Gimlin didn’t know about Patterson’s hoax and was simply used to increase its credibility. Even if he was in on the act, Gimlin has always maintained the film to be genuine and so any revelation now, forty years after the event, would be somewhat embarrassing for him. In 1969, another set of tracks was reported – in Bossburg, Washington – that, on closer inspection, revealed the giant beast’s right paw was in fact club-footed. Experts argued that this indicated that the tracks were very likely to be the first genuine piece of evidence to support the existence of the Sasquatch. Professor John Napier, whose book Bigfoot was published in 1973, wrote: ‘It is difficult to conceive of a hoaxer so subtle, so knowledgeable – and so sick – who would deliberately fake a footprint of this nature. I suppose it is possible but so unlikely I am prepared to discount the idea it is a hoax.’ Straight from the school of ‘If I couldn’t think of it then nor could anybody else’, and with such imaginative minds on the trail of Bigfoot, it is hardly surprising he has managed to elude us for so long. Despite sightings of Bigfoot reported in every American state except Hawaii and Rhode Island, the creature’s natural habitat is said to be the remote woodlands and forests in the Pacific Northwest of America and Canada. The Rocky Mountains have provided many sightings, as have the Great Lakes. But if this is the case, how could he have got to Florida, California and other southern states? The Sasquatch would have had to leave the cover of his remote woodland hideaway, and it is difficult to imagine how such a creature could travel so far without leaving behind at least some credible evidence. You would certainly spot him in the Greyhound bus queue. But, unfortunately for the wonderfully named Texas Bigfoot Research Center (TBRC), it turns out that most of the evidence found, such as blood or hair samples, footprint casts or photographs, usually turn out to be fake and never, as yet, from an unknown creature. Investigators at TBRC say they receive reports of over one hundred sightings each year in Texas alone, while on the homepage of their website Janet Bord states: ‘If the skeptics are right and there is no such creature as Bigfoot, then it is a fact that thousands of Americans and Canadians are either prone to hallucinations, or are compulsive liars or unable to recognize bears, deer and vagrants.’ Quite how tramps became involved is anybody’s guess. Also on the homepage of the TBRC website is something that bears further examination. One Rick Noll is quoted, stating his reasons why no firm evidence for the existence of a big, hairy, part-man, part-simian-type monster has been found: - No one is spending enough time in the woods, - Not many people know what to do in searching, overlooking things, or vice-versa, seeing things that aren’t significant to the task, - There are not many of these animals around, - They, like most animals in the forest, know how to camouflage themselves quickly and easily, - Most encounters with humans are probably mistakes on the part of the Bigfoot, yet researchers are trying to fill in the picture with them as to being something significant. So there you have it. Those are the reasons the TBRC claim there is, to date, still no credible evidence of the existence of Bigfoot. So how is it then that, despite the use of the whole spectrum of technology – from heat-seeking cameras with night vision to thermal imaging – nobody has confirmed the existence of Bigfoot? Bigfoot enthusiasts apart, the group of people keenest to obtain as much information as possible of the apeman’s existence would be the US government. And as they have surveillance equipment that can detect a small nuclear warhead buried in the desert somewhere near Baghdad, it is fair to assume they would have picked up one of the thousands of Sasquatch that have to exist if all the Americans and Canadians who claim sightings are not lying. Such a large number of sightings does suggest that Bigfoot, or a relative of his, could well be out there; indeed I, like Janet Bord, refuse to believe that so many people can be lying. But hundreds of small, circumstantial and improvable reports do not add up to a single, solid fact. It is like pouring thirty separate measures of Jack Daniels into a large glass. Added together they do not make the drink any stronger in flavour; it still tastes exactly the same. But if you drink it all – as I have discovered through experimentation for this very investigation on your behalf – you will fall over. Scientifically speaking, weak evidence should not become any stronger just because there is lots of it, although it can affect your judgement in the end. But the Texas Bigfoot Research Center is not the only organization dedicated to finding firm evidence: there are many others throughout America. On 27 December 2003, for example, the Pennsylvania Bigfoot Society (PBS) hosted their fifth annual East Coast Bigfoot Conference (ECBC), and the keynote speaker, Stan Gordon, veteran researcher and the founder/director of the Pennsylvania Association for the Study of the Unexplained (PASU), concluded his opening speech linking Bigfoot sightings with known UFO activity in the same areas – although he stopped short of announcing: ‘Bigfoot is a spaceman.’ Which I would have done, just for the headline.  leave in ‘There is no doubt the evidence suggests there is something out there,’ he assured the audience, as they sat there hanging on his every word, then continued: ‘We just don’t know what it is.’

Another speaker at the conference, Paul Johnson, a chemistry professor at Duquense University in Pittsburgh, thought he knew: ‘Bigfoot is a quantum animal that moves freely between the real world as we know it and a quantum world outside the reach of conventional laws.’ He went on to explain how that, in quantum physics, electrons do not follow the normal rules of physics. Although he admitted his ideas were unconventional, he also noted (contradicting himself in the process) that nothing as large as Bigfoot could behave like an electron in reality, which was a relief because everybody knows that a living being is unable to dematerialize and then reappear in perfect working order in another place. Unless, of course, you are travelling on the starship Enterprise,and then you can. Another speaker at the ECBC, Janice Coy from Monroe County, Tennessee, claimed her family had developed a relationship with a family of Bigfoot (or should that be ‘Bigfeet’?) since 1947. Her grandfather, having stumbled across an injured Bigfoot, had bandaged its broken leg and allowed it to recover in a barn at the family farm. She claims to have even held a baby Bigfoot in her arms and explained that for years she had tried to obtain photographic evidence, without success. She picked up on Paul Johnson’s quantum theory and suggested that was the reason none of her photographs ever returned to her with images any clearer than a ‘shapeless fuzz’. And no one likes to see a shapeless fuzz now, do they. On one occasion the Sasquatch family, realizing the camera was present on a nearby tripod, used long sticks to retrieve food from a place out of range of the lens. On another occasion, the roll of film Janice submitted to a commercial processing lab returned to her after the film had been mysteriously overexposed, and every image lost for ever. Read the full article

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Ch. 1: “Thin Ice” Analysis Doctor Who S10.3: Ragnarök Signs, Why Bill Decides Monster’s Fate & the Vault

I’m posting this “Thin Ice” analysis a little late, sorry, since “Knock Knock” aired 2 days ago.  I went to an awesome Pat Benatar concert and didn’t have time to post this here beforehand, although I got it posted in time on AO3.

I do have new thoughts on the Vault, as of “Knock Knock,” but for this analysis, I’m posting what I originally wrote for “Thin Ice.”  I will say that I don’t believe it’s Missy in the Vault because that is not what “Pop Goes the Weasel” most likely is alluding to. It’s a lengthy explanation of whom is in the Vault and why that I’ll post in the “Knock Knock” analysis.

The Frost Fair & River Song

The setting of the 1814 Frost Fair, itself, is a reference to “A Good Man Goes To War.” A Doctor from a different point in time from the 11th Doctor’s setting in the episode took River Song to the 1814 Frost Fair for her birthday and got Stevie Wonder to sing for her under London Bridge.  (There was a scene from “Thin Ice” that was cut where the Doctor told Bill about this.) In the image below, River is coming back to Stormcage from the fair, while she’s still in her Regency clothes with her ice skates.  Was she skating on thin ice?  Rory is in the background.

The Doctor has been to the fair a few times, as he said in “Thin Ice,” including offering to take Clara in “The Caretaker,” although they didn’t go in canon.

BILL: You've been here before?

DOCTOR: Oh, yeah. A few times.

It’s a good thing the Doctor didn’t meet himself at the fair because that would have created a paradox. The 1814 fair occurred over 4 days, so presumably the TARDIS wouldn’t have chosen the times when he was there before. Otherwise, he would have been locked in his own time stream, trying to avoid himself like in “Before the Flood.”

However, the subtext suggests that he didn’t avoid meeting metaphors of himself.  That does happen a lot.  I’ll explain this in a few minutes.  (looking eye to eye)

 3 Idioms in Our First Look at the Frost Fair

It’s interesting that our first look at the Frost Fair before the opening credits involves 3 English idioms that set the stage for Ragnarök.

 The Giant Elephant in the Room… Er on the Thames

We see the ultimate elephant in the room, well on the Thames.  Part of the meaning of the elephant is given almost immediately. After the Doctor moves the TARDIS to safety on the last day of the Frost Fair before the thaw, he addresses Bill’s concerns of legalized slavery of people with more melanin.  

 However, it’s not just human slavery that the elephant pertains to, which leads, in part, to the 2nd idiom and the discovery below the ice.

 Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop

When the Doctor is going back into the TARDIS to change into Regency clothes, he nearly collides with the vegetable man.  The encounter unbalances the man’s basket, and the basket dumps over the side of the bridge.  Oddly, once the vegetables hit the ice below, the camera switches to show us the watery view. We see, shown below, a shoe dropping (red arrow) through the water and nothing else.  Why, because this doesn’t make sense on a scientific level?

 This is part of the English idiom “waiting for the other shoe to drop.”  It can mean that one defers action or decision until another matter is finished or resolved.  It can also mean that one is awaiting a seemingly inevitable event, especially one that is not desirable.  Both could pertain to the situation here. 

This has everything to do with the Vault, which we’ll get to below. 

Besides that, as Ashildr stated in “Hell Bent,” the Doctor is scared of whom he is and the prophecy of what he will do.  He’s been trying to avoid the inevitable by running for almost his entire life, but events have been set in motion.  One shoe dropping most likely is Fimbulvetr, the prelude to Ragnarök.

This accidental encounter between the vegetable man and the Doctor suggests that the Doctor is indirectly responsible for the shoe dropping.  The TARDIS brought him to the Frost Fair because he needed to be there, but he broke his promise and wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for that.

Anyway, the shoe falls through the water and hits near the eye of giant beast that seems to be sleeping. Its eye pops open.  This seems akin to “The Impossible Planet” when the Beast awakens.  The shoe (red arrow) sinks further toward the mouth of the beast, but the beast blows the shoe out. 

The elephant in the room also applies to the beast that is enslaved and in chains, like the Beast in “The Satan Pit,” the sequel to “The Impossible Planet.”

 However, the Loch-less Monster, as the Doctor calls it (I’m going to call it “Loch-less”) and another reference to Scotland, is not the same beast, both literally and metaphorically, that we saw in “The Impossible Planet” and its sequel “The Satan Pit.” Loch-less, a metaphor for a face of the Doctor, is imbued with mercy, as evidenced at the end. 

Loch-less swims away without wreaking havoc.  However, this is the calm before the storm, while waiting for the inevitable.  Hence the idiom “waiting for the other shoe to drop.” It appears that events of Ragnarök have already been set in motion.  Is Loch-less’s splash of her tail once she is free supposed to be the other shoe dropping? Loch-less’s freedom leads into the third idiom.

 Skating on Thin Ice

The episode’s title, “Thin Ice,” is part of the English idiom “skating on thin ice,” to be doing something that is dangerous or involving risks.  We see people about 8 minutes into the episode, shown below, actually skating in the area that says, “Thin Ice.” Of course, the Doctor’s world is always fraught with danger, and we see people, including a child seemingly die.  Did Loch-less really eat the child?  Or is this like “The Beast Below,” where the child gets enslaved somewhere?  Regardless, in the end, skating on thin ice comes down to the risk of letting Loch-less go.  This mirrors letting free what is in the Vault.

Bill’s concerns reflect Amy’s concerns in “The Beast Below,” and it’s why Amy, at first, voted to keep torturing the Star Whale.

DOCTOR: The creature. The loch-less monster. The not-so-little mermaid. Are we just going to leave her down there? BILL: We can't set her free. She could burst up out of the water and eat a hundred people right off of Southbank! She could eat half of London!

 Other Major Referenced Episodes

Once again, “Thin Ice” has tons of references to other episodes.  It’s amazing how many references to previous episodes have been in the 1st three stories of Season 10.  In fact, there are references to episodes from every nuWho Doctor and their companions, as well as some Classic Who Doctors and especially companion Sarah Jane Smith.  However, “Thin Ice” draws most heavily on themes from “The Beast Below,” “Planet of the Ood,” “Robot of Sherwood,” “Time Heist,” “The Empty Child,” and “The Doctor Dances.”

BTW, we even see the Vault at the end of the episode.  The subtext in the rest of the episode suggests what is happening with the Vault.  I’ll get to that in a few minutes.

I do want to mention that “Thin Ice” has some very basic elements of another 7th Doctor story called “The Greatest Show in the Galaxy” with a circus, a ringmaster, and circus performers.  Fortunately, the connection mostly stops there because IMHO this is the weakest of the 7th Doctor stories with his companion Ace. 

Is Sutcliffe dressed like a ringmaster, shown below?  The 12th Doctor told Sutcliffe, “The circus performers, the elephant, that's all you.”  Therefore, it would make sense.  I’m no expert on Regency costumes, but Sutcliffe’s outfit seems to stand out more than most of the other costumes in the episode, especially with his brighter blue contrasted with the light-colored pants.  He obviously wants to stand out, and his outfit reminds me of the ringmaster of a circus.  

 Regardless, like “Thin Ice,” “The Greatest Show in the Galaxy” hides a terrible secret, which could possibly have a bearing on Season 10.  The audience of the 7th Doctor story includes just 3 beings, a family – father, mother, and daughter.  They are the Gods of Ragnarök.  However, they are not the Norse gods that we know, like Thor, Odin, or Loki.  Instead, they look very alien, as the image from the TARDIS Wikia shows below.   They are powerful creatures that don’t think twice about destroying entertainers who fail to please them.

 Signs of the Norse Ragnarök

The Trickster’s Brigade, “Turn Left,” Ragnarök & Disappearing Pete

It’s so interesting in “Thin Ice” that the Doctor calls the pie-man a con man and a trickster, but the Doctor, himself, is playing a bit of a trickster, a con man, and a thief. None of that is new for him. After all, he stole the TARDIS, and he, for example, tricks people all the time into divulging information or into doing things.  However, we haven’t seen him going around stealing lots of things in an episode, like a hat and food.

Moreover, this isn’t the first time we’ve encountered references to a trickster.  In fact, fascinatingly the dialogue references to DW episodes all lead to a Ragnarök event.  Is the Trickster and his brigade a sign of Ragnarök?

The Trickster’s Brigade is led by the Trickster.  According to the TARDIS Wikia:

The Trickster was an immortal extra-dimensional alien, formerly part of an extra-dimensional group of beings known as the Pantheon of Discord, who were banished from the known universe. The Trickster, alone, frequently manifested on Earth, making bargains to alter history in attempts to draw power from the chaos he created and thus enter the world in his full power.

In fact, the Trickster or references to him showed up in 3 different stories in The Sarah Jane Adventures and one in Torchwood.  He also appeared in an image in “Time Heist.”  The Trickster’s Brigade, according to the Wikia, are the only villains to appear in DW, as well as the 2 spinoffs.  That’s significant.

 The Trickster’s Brigade & “Turn Left”

In “Turn Left,” we first heard of the Trickster’s Brigade after alternate Donna sacrificed herself, making main timeline Donna turn left to save the Doctor, instead of right under the beetle’s influence. Because the timeline was fixed, the beetle on Donna’s back died. 

(Later, the Doctor is prodding the dead beetle with a stick.) DONNA: I can't remember. It's slipping away. You know like when you try and think of a dream and it just sort of goes. DOCTOR: Just got lucky, this thing. It's one of the Trickster's Brigade. Changes a life in tiny little ways. Most times, the universe just compensates around it, but with you? Great big parallel world. DONNA: Hold on. You said parallel worlds are sealed off. DOCTOR: They are. But you had one created around you. Funny thing is, seems to be happening a lot to you.

Ragnarök began with the beetle, resulting in alternate Donna’s death, along with the death of the parallel world, and continuing through the finale in the next two episodes, “The Stolen Earth” and “Journey’s End.”  Not only was Donna about to die again, but in the second episode, she was reborn, so to speak, into a new being, the DoctorDonna.

Since the 12th Doctor is mirroring Donna in many ways, and Caecilius put on a gold beetle broach in “The Fires of Pompeii,” it’s not surprising that references to the Trickster would feature in 12th Doctor episodes.

 “The Pandorica Opens” & “The Big Bang”

In “The Pandorica Opens,” we see that the Pandorica was built possibly to hold a trickster, who is the Doctor:

DOCTOR: There was a goblin, or a trickster, or a warrior. A nameless, terrible thing, soaked in the blood of a billion galaxies. The most feared being in all the cosmos. And nothing could stop it, or hold it, or reason with it. One day it would just drop out of the sky and tear down your world.

This again is Ragnarök, as the universe was collapsing, which included people forgetting about events like Daleks coming to Earth.  It also included people disappearing.  Of course, in the sequel, “The Big Bang,” the Doctor reboots the universe, creating a rebirth.  Amy, however, awakes in a dream with birdsong in the background.

 The Trickster & “Time Heist”

In “Time Heist,” there is a scene where the Teller locks onto Clara’s mind when she, the Doctor, Psi, and Saibra are trying to rob the Bank of Karabraxos.  Psi projects images on the wall of…

PSI: Every thief and villain in one big cocktail. I am so guilty! Every famous burglar in history is hiding in this bank right now in one body. Come and feast! Clara? For what it's worth, and it might not be worth much, when your whole life flashes in front of you, you see people you love and people missing you. Well, I see no one.

Here’s Psi, a mirror of the Doctor, projecting an image of the Trickster on the wall.

In Chapter 10, which lead up to TRODM, we examined Psi and another subtext promise that after the rescue, like Psi, the Doctor would remember who his family was. 

What is happening to the 12th Doctor is similar to what happened in the outline arc episode “Time Heist.”  The Doctor having come to the fair several times is most likely akin to having gone to the bank multiple times, getting closer to saving other beings with each visit.

In fact, at the end of “Thin Ice,” there is another reference to “Time Heist.”  The Doctor calls Bill, “boss”…

BILL: The new Lord Sutcliffe was found starving on London's streets. The inheritance was contested, everyone got super mad, blah, blah, blah, Urchin boy deemed legitimate. Oh my God, it worked! You did it. You saved them.

DOCTOR: You did. You gave the order, boss.

…just like he did with Clara.

CLARA: See you. Don't rob any banks.

DOCTOR: Don't rob any banks what?

CLARA: Without me.

DOCTOR: Course not, boss.

Therefore, “Thin Ice” is another episode foreshadowing the rescue of the Doctor and children.  I see this as akin to rescuing CAL from her nightmarish situation in the Library, along with the people caught in dreams. The Library situation is another Ragnarök event.  The world people know in the Library is destroyed in favor of reality.  CAL is reborn, so to speak, as a child with a mother and without her fears that caused problems in the first place.

 The Norse Trickster God & Ragnarök

In Norse mythology, the trickster god is Loki, so it certainly seems quite appropriate that we would hear about a trickster if Ragnarök were really coming.  Loki and his 2 sons (Jörmungandr and Fenrir) that we examined in a previous chapter are in the final battle during Ragnarök.

 The Trickster, Sarah Jane Smith & Disappearing Pete

For a long time now, I’ve felt Sarah Jane’s presence in 12th Doctor episodes with references and such, and I’ve also felt that if the actress who played her, Elisabeth Sladen, were still alive, she would show up.  Her husband showed up in “Deep Breath,” which was a lovely reference to Elisabeth.

In fact, the Season 10 episodes support my belief because of all the references to Sarah Jane episodes, mostly with the 4th Doctor.  Not surprisingly, the 12th Doctor is channeling the 4th Doctor at various times in “Thin Ice.”  For example, the image below is part of the channeling.  You have to watch the entire movements of the Doctor in the episode where he’s talking to the foreman to see the channeling.  Bill, too, did a very Sarah Jane thing by sticking her tongue out at the Doctor.  In the previous episode, Bill mentioned Aberdeen, and one of the references to that comes back to Sarah Jane and the 4th Doctor.

 Anyway, “Thin Ice” further supports my belief that Sarah Jane is present in spirit with the Doctor. The Doctor and Bill have an interesting discussion about invisible Pete, who most likely means more than he seems:

BILL: Yeah. Travelling to the past. There's got to be rules. If I step on a butterfly, it could send ripples through time that mean I'm not even born in the first place and I could just disappear.

DOCTOR: Definitely. I mean, that's what happened to Pete. BILL: Pete? DOCTOR: Your friend, Pete. He was standing there a moment ago, but he stepped on a butterfly and now you don't even remember him. BILL: Shut up! I'm being serious! DOCTOR: Yeah, so was Pete. BILL: You know what I mean. Every choice I make in this moment, here and now, could change the whole future. DOCTOR: Exactly like every other day of your life. The only thing to do is to stop worrying about it. BILL: Hmm. Okay. If you say so. DOCTOR: Pete's stopped worrying.

It’s good to see the 12th Doctor being playful, something we rarely see, so one thing this dialogue does is to show us a different side of the Doctor.  However, the way DW works is that dialogue like this has more than one meaning.

Because the term “trickster” is being used and the Doctor, himself, is being a trickster, the Doctor may be referring to Peter Dalton, who, to prevent his death, made a contract with the Trickster in “The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith.”  After he broke the contract with Sarah Jane’s help, Peter disappeared forever. 

The idea of a contract is interesting because that ties into my hypothesis that DW is doing a version of Doctor Faustus. On top of that, I’ve seen a clip for the upcoming episode “Knock, Knock” where the creepy Landlord is talking about a contract with Bill and her friends.  I’ll talk more about this in a few minutes because this most likely ties into Bill’s decision about releasing Loch-less.

BTW, the dialogue about Pete disappearing could suggest that the universe is collapsing, just like in “The Big Bang,” which would give us another explanation for the very small size of the universe.  People not remembering Loch-less from history, like Bill discovered near the end of “Thin Ice,” is potentially another sign of a collapsing universe, just as it was for the whole of the 11th Doctor’s Season 5.

 Does the Loch-less Monster Symbolize Loki’s child?

Jörmungandr, as we saw, is Loki’s son.  (With a gender change, I’m not worrying about matching genders any longer.) However, we didn’t examine more about him.  He does have some similarities to Loch-less.

Anyway, Jörmungandr is a giant serpent that is also known as the Midgard Serpent or World Serpent.  (Midgard is another name for Earth, and one of the Nine Worlds in Norse mythology.) Jörmungandr grows so large that it could surround the Earth and grasp its own tail.  In fact, when it releases its tail, Ragnarök will begin.

The serpent is Thor’s arch-enemy, and they have 3 encounters.  (The second might have some relationship to “Thin Ice.”)  In the first, Jörmungandr disguises itself as a cat.  Thor tries to lift the colossal feline but only manages to lift one paw.  The second is a fishing trip where he catches Jörmungandr.  But the giant Hymir, who is with Thor, let’s the serpent go.  The third is the final meeting.  Jörmungandr comes out of the ocean and poisons the sky. Thor kills the serpent but walks 9 paces and dies from Jörmungandr’s venom.

While there isn’t much more known about Jörmungandr, we don’t know too much about Loch-less, either.  However, there are a few similarities between them.  First of all, I never would have assumed Loch-less would be considered a serpent, except for its similarity to Jörmungandr.  However, Bill does something surprising when she’s searching on the Internet for references to the creature in 1814.  She calls it a serpent, which gives more credibility to the idea that Loch-less is meant to be Jörmungandr.

BILL: I don't get it. London, 1814. Monster, sea creature, serpent, really, really big fish. Nothing.

Unlike Jörmungandr, Loch-less isn’t that big, but I wouldn’t expect it to be, either.  Nonetheless, Loch-less is a giant beastie about 1 mile long.  It did release its tail, too, and splashed the Doctor and Bill. This suggests to me that things are going to heat up quickly for them, as most likely the other shoe has dropped and Ragnarök has begun.

 Unlike Loch-less, Jörmungandr was never chained.  It was Jörmungandr’s brother, Fenrir, the wolf, who was chained.  It’s possible that Loch-less, then, represents a combination of Jörmungandr and Fenrir.

As far as Thor’s fishing trip goes, the symbolism of the guy on the ice fishing and “catching” the Doctor, shown below, and Bill could be a loose representation of Thor’s myth.

 Loch-less, the Star Whale Metaphor & Fimbulvetr

There are a few other things we know about Loch-less. 

DOCTOR: The creature in the river, where did it come from?

SUTCLIFFE: Who the devil are you people?

DOCTOR: Where did it come from?

SUTCLIFFE: Nowhere! It's always been there. The secret's been passed down in the family since, I don't know when. As far back as records go.

Loch-less must be at least several human generations old.  Sutcliffe is a mirror of Klineman Halpen from “The Planet of the Ood,” who is the Chief Executive of Ood Operations, a job that has been passed down from his grandfather, to his father, and eventually to himself.

DOCTOR: Then tell me, do you also keep a record of how many it's killed?

SUTCLIFFE: Please. People know the ice is dangerous, yet they will insist on their festivities. That's hardly my fault.

DOCTOR: Don't sell yourself short. This is the biggest Frost Fair in decades, and that's down to you.

BILL: It is?

DOCTOR: The man holding me has a tattoo on his left hand. And that's not all, is it? The circus performers, the elephant, that's all you.

SUTCLIFFE: I made the most of the situation. It's the first proper freeze it's caused in years.

BILL: Why? Production down, huh? Not enough people dying?

 Starship UK

BTW, we don’t know that Loch-less ate the child named Spider.   While Spider disappeared, so did the children on Starship UK.  They weren’t eaten; they were enslaved by humans.  It seems Spider was eaten, especially since Loch-less spit out Spider’s hat, but it did so along with other debris.  I’m withholding judgment on Spider’s fate for the moment.

Bill says that production is down because not enough people are dying, and that comes back to our season opener “The Pilot.”  Loch-less is a metaphor for the Star Whale and the Doctor, who spent years away from being the pilot for the metaphorical Starship UK.  Its fate was indirectly mentioned in last week’s episode, “Smile.”

Of course, Loch-less is actually the Eye of Harmony metaphor since, like the Star Whale, it’s producing energy to power spaceships.  I’m equating the Star Whale metaphor with the Eye of Harmony.

BILL: Because the creature is an alien.

DOCTOR: It certainly appears to be producing fuel suitable for interstellar travel.

 Freezing the Weather & Fimbulvetr

Interestingly, it seems Loch-less can affect the weather and make it unseasonably cold.  One of the pods we looked at from the 4th Doctor story “The Seeds of Doom” was put in a freezer, so I imagine that one of the faces of the Doctor has evolved in the cold.  I don’t know where in Scotland Amy Pond is supposed to be from, but the actress is from Inverness, which is 8 miles from Loch Ness.

Also of interest is something that the 10th Doctor says to Jack about Gallifrey in “The Sound of Drums” when he talks about Gallifrey and the Untempered Schism that has always made me question it:

JACK: But all the legends of Gallifrey made it sound so perfect.

DOCTOR: Well, perfect to look at, maybe. And it was. It was beautiful. They used to call it the Shining World of the Seven Systems. And on the Continent of Wild Endeavour, in the Mountains of Solace and Solitude, there stood the Citadel of the Time Lords, the oldest and most mighty race in the universe, looking down on the galaxies below. Sworn never to interfere, only to watch. Children of Gallifrey, taken from their families age of eight to enter the Academy. And some say that's when it all began. When he was a child. That's when the Master saw eternity. As a novice, he was taken for initiation. He stood in front of the Untempered Schism. It's a gap in the fabric of reality through which could be seen the whole of the vortex. You stand there, eight years old, staring at the raw power of time and space, just a child. Some would be inspired, some would run away, and some would go mad. Brr. I don't know.

There is no reason for the Doctor to say, “Brr,” except from his memories of coldness.  This has always made me wonder what cold place he is thinking of when he relates this.

Since Loch-less is causing the freeze somehow (I want to know how), it is bringing on Fimbulvetr and the prelude to Ragnarök.  Did Ragnarök just begin near the end of the episode with the slap of Loch-less’s tail?

 Continuing Subtext Story of the Star Whale Metaphor

Once again, “The Beast Below” figures heavily in a 10th season episode because the Star Whale metaphor is a powerful one, symbolizing so much that is relevant to the 12th Doctor.  We are seeing what has and is happening to the Doctor through the metaphor. 

Amazingly, the Star Whale metaphor has been part of the subtext story for the past 8 consecutive episodes (which is unprecedented in the subtext), and I can make an argument for including “Sleep No More” as the 9th episode, even though it’s an indirect reference.  (In a few minutes, I’ll list them all with a short blurb about the Star Whale metaphor.)

Therefore, it’s not surprising in “Thin Ice” that we come back to the continuing themes of racism and species-ism, slavery, suffering, lies, secrets, and a powerful energy source for interstellar travel. 

Also, the Star Whale metaphor comes with the reminder of a promise.  If DW is doing a version of Ragnarök, then things are going to get very dark, indeed.  However, everything is happening as part of the rescue plan.

 Racism & Slavery

With racism affecting Bill and slavery still legalized, once again these topics are hitting very close to home with the Doctor.  After all, Bill is a face of the Doctor.  Regardless of that, he cares about his student and is passionate about her honor.

DOCTOR: Always remember, Bill. Passion fights, but reason wins.

He disregards his logic and goes with his heart when he punches Sutcliffe for racist remarks. Once again, the Doctor gets physical, fighting back for someone he cares about.  By using Clara to manipulate the Doctor, Missy pushed him in this direction.

 This is yet another example of how the 12th Doctor is much more emotional than the previous Doctors, even though he tries to deny it.  He cares so much more than he wants people to know and is in denial about several things.  We’ve seen extraordinary hints of how much he cares in the past 3 episodes, except, as it seems with the child nicknamed Spider in “Thin Ice.”  (I’ll talk more about this in a few minutes because that seems out of character, and we’ll examine why.)

Anyway, the darkness does come back to the promise of the Star Whale metaphor given by Amy’s line about greater love in the poem in “The Beast Below.”

AMY [OC]: In bed above, we're deep asleep, while greater love lies further deep. This dream must end, this world must know, we all depend on the beast below.

Things are happening for a greater purpose than they appear, and the love goes a lot deeper than it appears, too.

“Thin Ice” isn’t the first time we see racism.  Martha, for example, encountered it in “Human Nature” and “The Family of Blood.”  Also, she was concerned about being enslaved during her stay in Elizabethan England in “The Shakespeare Code.”  Additionally, the topic comes up in Classic Who, especially in a couple of 7th Doctor and Ace episodes.

However, racism has also come up when talking about the elves, for example, in “Last Christmas.”  I don’t want to diminish the racism that Bill and Martha have experienced, so I’m going to call the racism against other species as species-ism.

 Species-ism, Slavery, Loch-less & the Doctor

Species-ism and slavery has come up quite a few times.  However, I’m going to reference only a few episodes that affect the Doctor.  We’ve seen an image of Caecilius with a chain around his neck in “The Fires of Pompeii,” so we know he was a happy slave.

We’ve seen Xs at times, for example, with the image of the 10th Doctor and Caecilius and the 3 Xs between them.

The chains holding Loch-less make an X, meaning a hidden, integrated soul.  If you have been reading the previous chapters of this series, I hope you expected to see an X somewhere on Loch-less since Loch-less is a metaphor for a face of the Doctor.

After Bill and the Doctor come out of the water, they talk about the mournful sounds Loch-less made:

BILL: The sound it made. I couldn't hear you, but that noise, it's like I felt it in my bones, you know? It sounded like, like DOCTOR: Despair. Loneliness. A prisoner in chains.

This is reminiscent of the scene in “Planet of the Ood” between Donna and the 10th Doctor. He can hear the mournful song that the Ood are singing, but Donna can’t:

DOCTOR: Oh, my head.

DONNA: What is it?

DOCTOR: Can't you hear it? The singing?

(Groups of Ood are sitting in cages. They turn away from the Doctor and Donna.)

DONNA: They look different to the others.

DOCTOR: That's because they're natural born Ood, unprocessed, before they're adapted to slavery. Unspoilt. That's their song.

DONNA: I can't hear it.

DOCTOR: Do you want to?

DONNA: Yeah.

DOCTOR: It's the song of captivity.

DONNA: Let me hear it.

DOCTOR: Face me.

(The Doctor makes a mind meld with Donna.)

DOCTOR: Open your mind. That's it. Hear it, Donna. Hear the music.

(The song is sad and beautiful. Donna cries.)

DONNA: Take it away.

Here’s an example of how Bill, also a face of the Doctor, is part of the Star Whale metaphor. Loch-less’s eye is reflected in Bill’s helmet glass.

Here’s another example of seeing eye to eye with themselves, which we saw with Heather in “The Pilot” and with the girl in “The Beast Below.”

Interestingly, once Loch-less is free, we see the Doctor and Bill standing on the dock watching.  Bill and the Doctor both are still prisoners, as evidenced by the chains in the image below.  However, check out what happens in the subsequent shots as Loch-less moves through the River on her way to freedom.

Less of the chain is visible for Bill.

Even less of the chain is visible for Bill in this image below.

Even less of the chain is visible for both Bill and the Doctor in this image below.  Bill’s chain is almost gone.  Loch-less just splashed them a few seconds before this.  Bill is happy, but the Doctor…

We don’t see any chains in the image below, but this doesn’t mean they are gone.  This is foreshadowing for their freedom.  Interestingly, Bill looks happy, but the Doctor doesn’t.  I imagine that might be because he knows the prophecy and what is coming.

 Doctor Disco, Duplication & Imprisonment

In “Thin Ice,” the Doctor once again uses the alias “Doctor Disco.”  He first used this in “The Zygon Invasion.”  One of the interesting things is that near the beginning of the first Zygon episode, he is on the phone in the image below, trying to call Clara. However, notice the chain next to him. He is a prisoner, which isn’t surprising.  The Doctor’s message below doesn’t make sense, just like a lot of his dialogue in this episode and its sequel, “The Zygon Inversion.”

CLARA [OC]: Hi, this is Clara Oswald. I'm probably on the Tube or in outer space. Leave a message! (beep) DOCTOR: Hello, it's Doctor Disco. I'm in the twenty first century. I don't know what month. I'm staking out some of the most dangerous creatures imaginable. (Two little girls stop and stare at him.)

Since when can’t the Doctor figure out what month it is?  He’s a prisoner, so the subtext and odd dialogue is suggesting that he’s been duplicated.  How many duplicates does he have?  It seems like there are possibly 2 in these Zygon episodes.

And since the Doctor is using the alias Doctor Disco again in “Thin Ice,” this suggests that we might be viewing a duplicate.  That wouldn’t be surprising especially since Roman Rory was a plastic duplicate.

 Why Bill Decides the Fate of Loch-less

The Doctor tells Bill she needs to decide Loch-less’s fate:

DOCTOR: The creature. The loch-less monster. The not-so-little mermaid. Are we just going to leave her down there?

BILL: We can't set her free. She could burst up out of the water and eat a hundred people right off of Southbank! She could eat half of London!

DOCTOR: She might. It's a risk. So, what do you want to do, Bill?

BILL: We already know the answers. Why are you even asking?

DOCTOR: I don't know the answers. Only idiots know the answers. But if your future is built on the suffering of that creature, what's your future worth?

BILL: Why is it up to me?

DOCTOR: Because it can't be up to me. Your people, your planet. I serve at the pleasure of the human race, and right now, that's you. Give me an order. Not long till noon. I need an order.

(Long, long pause, then -)

BILL: Save her.

DOCTOR: I'll take care of this. You get everyone off the ice.

This is very reminiscent of his exchange with Clara in “Kill the Moon.”  He’s telling the truth that he can’t see the future when it comes to both the Moon/Earth and Loch-less.  Because he can’t see the future when it involves him personally.  Both the dragon and Loch-less are metaphors for him.

What’s really interesting is his response here:

DOCTOR: Because it can't be up to me. Your people, your planet. I serve at the pleasure of the human race, and right now, that's you. Give me an order. Not long till noon. I need an order.

Coupled with Nardole’s comment about not making tea for Bill in “Smile”:

NARDOLE: Well, I'm not making any for her. She can make her own. I'm not a slave for any human, I can assure you.

The Doctor needing an order? It makes sense if the Doctor is a slave, which seems likely since Nardole is railing against being a slave to humans. Needing an order sounds a lot like the Ood in “The Impossible Planet,” where Rose asked the Ood about being ordered about:

DANNY: But the Ood offer themselves. If you don't give them orders, they just pine away and die.

ROSE: Seriously, you like being ordered about?

OOD: It is all we crave.

ROSE: Why's that, then?

OOD: We have nothing else in life.

ROSE: Yeah, well, I used to think like that, a long time ago.

The Doctor might be under a contract of slavery with humans.  It certainly sounds like he can’t decide his own fate, as far as releasing a face of himself.  If true, he sounds a lot like Dobby, the enslaved house-elf from Harry Potter. Dobby can only be released from slavery if his owner gives him an article of clothing. It seems the Doctor can only release himself if allowed by a human.

If this contract thing is true, he’ll help Bill and her friends break the contract in “Knock, Knock.” Then, he’ll most likely be able to break his own contract since Bill’s would represent or foreshadow his own.

Will we see another Star Whale reference in “Knock, Knock”?  Or does Loch-less’s release mean the end of the Star Whale reference, at least for the time being.  I still believe that the 12th Doctor will stay with Clara and River in the Library metaphor.

 Saga of the Star Whale Metaphor

What is surprising about the Star Whale metaphor is that these first 3 episodes of Season 10 tie in so closely to show us the ongoing saga, especially when the episodes are not billed as a multi-part episode.  This is not typical of episodes, even in subtext, which, like canon, usually jumps around.  However, this phenomenon goes back to the last 8 episodes.  They are telling us the story of the Eye of Harmony and the Star Whale, the pilot of Starship UK:

 “Face the Raven”

Clara dies, and the Doctor becomes the angry Sun, who is trapped and imprisoned, as he becomes the supernova on the verge of becoming a Black Hole.

 “Heaven Sent”

We see the Doctor grieving, alone and very, very scared for 4.5 billion years.  He’s tortured by it all, as he’s chased around the castle in his confession dial by a creature from his nightmares.  Through Rassilon’s engineering, the Doctor has been used to create the Eye of Harmony, the supernova on the verge of creating a Black Hole that is held in a permanent state of decay.  The Doctor dying over and over provides energy to the system that is harnessed.  He is probably being used as the Star Whale here, providing energy for space travel.

 “Hell Bent”

Having broken free of the confession dial at the end of “Heaven Sent,” he is the angry Sun who has gone mad with grief, torture, and solitary confinement.  He frees Clara from her time stream and goes hell bent through the universe, causing the solar flares and other destruction.  Afterward, he may have become the Star Whale again to become Starship UK in order to save people on Earth from destruction, or is that part of “Heaven Sent” too? Meaning he never really stopped being a Star Whale?

 “The Husbands of River Song”

The Doctor is tired of being the Star Whale with all the weight on his back without Clara’s help. He’s revolting.  Hydroflax is being powered by a Black Hole and the Eye of Harmony.

 “The Return of Doctor Mysterio”

We actually get to see the Eye of Harmony, and the Doctor has not been a Star Whale for at least 24 years.

 “The Pilot”

The Star Whale is grounded and has been for a long time.  The autopilot, like in “The Lodger,” or whatever it is, is looking for a pilot. It seizes Heather, before the Doctor is back at the helm of the Star Whale with Bill.

 “Smile”

We saw what happened to all the ships that evacuated Earth due to the angry Sun.  Except for colony ship Erehwon, all the people died, including those from Starship UK.

 DOCTOR: The colony ship isn't on the way, it's right here. The colonists are all around us, cryogenically frozen. What's in those pods, Bill, is the surviving population of Earth. And I nearly killed all of them.

TANNOY: Welcome to your new world. Be happy. (The boy goes out into the city.) BILL: They're waking up, aren't they? DOCTOR: We must have triggered the process when we came in. BILL: So what happens now? DOCTOR: Now? Now they're all going to leave this ship, and find their friends and family mulched in the garden. And if they don't smile about that, it's going to be the end of the human race.

So the people of Erehwon are the last humans, and the Doctor almost killed them.  What happened to Starship UK?  Did they arrive on a planet and then die, like many from Erehwon?

There is a turning point and redemption signaled in the subtext for the Star Whale.

 “Thin Ice”

Loch-less is

DOCTOR: The creature in the river, where did it come from?

SUTCLIFFE: Who the devil are you people?

DOCTOR: Where did it come from?

SUTCLIFFE: Nowhere! It's always been there. The secret's been passed down in the family since, I don't know when. As far back as records go.

DOCTOR: Then tell me, do you also keep a record of how many it's killed?

SUTCLIFFE: Please. People know the ice is dangerous, yet they will insist on their festivities. That's hardly my fault.

DOCTOR: Don't sell yourself short. This is the biggest Frost Fair in decades, and that's down to you.

BILL: It is?

DOCTOR: The man holding me has a tattoo on his left hand. And that's not all, is it? The circus performers, the elephant, that's all you.

SUTCLIFFE: I made the most of the situation. It's the first proper freeze it's caused in years.

BILL: Why? Production down, huh? Not enough people dying?

Having had the subtext turning point in the previous episode, the Star Whale metaphor is going free, and so are the children.

 Suffering Children

It’s not just the Star Whale that is suffering.  Of course, there are people being eaten, but there are children, too, who are ensnared in the system in both “Thin Ice” and “The Beast Below.”  In “Thin Ice,” children are trapped in poverty and homelessness.  And this mirrors the poverty and homelessness of the children and Nancy in “The Empty Child” and “The Doctor Dances.”  Therefore, these two 9th Doctor episodes are also playing a major role here.   Nancy steals food and takes care of homeless children, just as Kitty does.

 The Doctor & Robin Hood

Interestingly, the Doctor is playing Robin Hood from “The Robot of Sherwood,” stealing from people who seem more financially sound to give to the children.  In fact, one of the names in his office window is Robin Oxley. Robin Hood is Robin of Loxley.

However, the Doctor also steals a hat after he gives his to Dot, shown below.  In Regency society, it wouldn’t have been very polite for a man to go without a hat in public.  He goes hatless multiple times, which may represent him playing other Doctors.

 He takes off his hat, for example, when he is talking to Bill about moving on.  The 11th Doctor also talked about “moving on” in “The Day of the Doctor.”

Interestingly, a “palace” reference showed up in “Thin Ice” when the Doctor and Bill needed to get into the dredging area to investigate.

BILL: How are we getting in?

(Psychic paper.)

BILL: You work for the palace?

DOCTOR: Haven't had that one in a while.

I found this short piece of dialogue fascinating.  The Doctor says he hasn’t had a palace reference in a while.  Is that a reference to one of many episodes from Classic Who that have palaces, or is it a reference to something that Robin Hood said in “Robot of Sherwood”?…:

DOCTOR: I'm still having a little trouble believing yours, I'm afraid.

ROBIN: Is it so hard to credit? That a man born into wealth and privilege should find the plight of the oppressed and weak too much to bear...

DOCTOR: No.

ROBIN: Until one night he is moved to steal a Tardis? Fly among the stars, fighting the good fight. Clara told me your stories.

The Doctor was born into wealth and privilege.  In fact, in “Hell Bent” Ashildr said the Doctor was a highborn Gallifreyan.  If the Doctor’s pedigree is based on Merlin’s, then he is a prince.  And the prince notion is supported in “The Family of Blood” subtext when the Doctor turned himself human and couldn’t remember who he was.  He was referring to what he had written in his diary.

DOCTOR: But this Doctor sounds like some, some romantic lost prince. Would you rather that? Am I not enough?

Therefore, the “palace” reference could actually be alluding to the Doctor’s actual pedigree. 

Sutcliffe, BTW, is a dark mirror of the Doctor. 

DOCTOR: I preferred it when you were alien.

SUTCLIFFE: When I was?

DOCTOR: Well, that explained the lack of humanity. What makes you so sure that your life is worth more than those people out there on the ice? Is it the money? The accident of birth that puts you inside the big, fancy house?

The Doctor would no doubt also be referring to himself when he said, “The accident of birth,” which would make sense since he gave up his wealth and privilege because he found, as Robin said, “The plight of the oppressed and weak too much to bear.”

Interestingly, the Doctor’s theme music plays as Sutcliffe falls into the Thames, which makes Sutcliffe’s death seem like the Doctor has nearly come full circle with whom he started out to be – a person full of mercy who cares deeply about the plight of those less fortunate than himself.

This image of the people nearly surrounding the Doctor on Gallifrey in “Hell Bent” suggests to me the Doctor is more than a war hero to these people.  He is fighting for them and identifies with them.  This so much reminds me of Jesus and his flock.

Doctor Reading Der Struwwelpeter to the Children: The Coming Disaster

In a nice moment, we get to see the Doctor reading to the children, although he is reading a rather morbid fairytale "Die Geschichte vom Daumenlutscher" (The Story of the Thumb-Sucker) from the German children's book Der Struwwelpeter (or Shockheaded Peter).  It was written by Heinrich Hoffmann and published in 1845, so the Doctor must have a copy in the TARDIS. 

According to Wikipedia, it contains “ten illustrated and rhymed stories, mostly about children.  Each has a clear moral that demonstrates the disastrous consequences of misbehavior in an exaggerated way.”  Once again we have references to rhymes and stories with tragic consequences, this time for misbehavior.

From this story and other subtext, I get the impression that this is a story where the Doctor’s mother warns him not to use his powers, like the mother in the story warns her son not to suck his thumbs.  However, as soon as the thumb-sucker’s mother goes out of the house, he resumes his thumb sucking with terrible consequences.  A roving tailor appears and cuts off his thumbs with giant scissors.

Just like in the thumb-sucker’s case, the Doctor’s mother takes her eyes off of him, and he’s out using his powers (TARDIS).  Nardole is mirroring his mother, and the Doctor is the unruly son who was warned but didn’t listen.

This is all pointing to something disastrous coming for the Doctor. Something we haven’t seen yet because of the mirrors being set up here.  This is still before Peter Capaldi decided to leave after this season, so his regeneration most likely isn’t involved in the initial disaster.  He’s going to have to suffer tragic consequences first.  This is probably part of the Doctor’s fall or maybe the beginning of it.

Is the Doctor going to go blind?  We’ve examined how the subtext for the 12th Doctor keeps showing vision impairment (like face blindness) and other blindness.  The 2 big pieces of subtext that say the Doctor will be physically blinded are the blind Krafayis in “Vincent and the Doctor” and Newton from The Man Who Fell to Earth, who is blinded by the FBI.

The white cane with a red-tip that we saw in the subtext in TRODM could potentially be a 3rd piece of foreshadowing since these canes are only used in physical blindness situations (partial or total), rather than metaphorical blindness.  However, we’ll have to wait and see how this is really meant.  Is it just metaphorical?

The other thing to consider is that bad things just don’t usually happen in canon to the Doctor.  I’m not counting deaths of people around him, or events like “Heaven Sent” where imprisonment and torture lasted for 4.5 billion years because they are mostly contained to one or a few episodes.  Bad things happen to the people around him who are metaphors for him. 

However, because we are getting down to the truth, things are changing.  The memory block from the last encounter with Clara in “Hell Bent” is a rare example of a sort of long-lasting canon problem.  Of course, long-lasting subtext problems happen a lot, like enslavement.

 Redemption for Not Just the Doctor

“Thin Ice” has some other continuing themes.  Last week we saw the subtext turning point in the Doctor’s life, as well as his redemption (sorry, I haven’t posted my 3rd chapter for “Smile” which talks about the redemption signs.)  “Thin Ice” is also signaling redemption, but it’s not just for the Doctor.  And redemption seems like it’s going to be a huge price, considering the Doctor has already been through so much.

Anyway, in the image below there is a person carrying 4 dead rabbits on a Tau Cross (named for the Greek letter “T”).  It also has several other names, including St. Anthony's Cross.  This cross means redemption.  Therefore, there are 4 people who will be redeemed.  These, I believe, are related to the children, but they also relate to the Doctor, Rory, Amy, and River, as you can see from the images below.

 There’s a dead rabbit (red arrow) hanging near the Doctor.  BTW, the yellow arrow points to something that is called a drum in “The Satan Pit.”  The 12th Doctor’s head looks like it is on the end of the rope once again. It’s a theme with him.  He’s not wearing a hat here, though.

 In “The Vampires of Venice,” Amy and Rory are associated with dead rabbits, shown between them in the image below.

Not only is Amy associated with a dead rabbit above, but also Amy’s redemption is foreshadowed in “The Beast Below” when she goes to see what is in the tent, shown below.  Magpie Electricals (ME) is associated with an alien known as the Wire, a stealer of souls, as we saw in the 10th Doctor story, “The Idiot’s Lantern.”  ME shows up a lot.  In fact, the 12th Doctor’s amplifier in “The Magician’s Apprentice” and “Before the Flood” is branded ME, as well as various electrical products in 10th and 11th Doctor episodes.  Is it a coincidence that ME could also be Me, as in Ashildr, a mirror for the Doctor?  Or the Doctor himself as an architect?

Anyway, Amy can’t enter the tent because there is a padlock, shown below, with a Tau Cross keeping the tent locked up.  Amy picks the lock and finds tentacles from the Star Whale have grown through the superstructure of the ship.  (The whale, BTW, has morphed into something more than the diagrams showed that we examined before, which is similar to Loch-less morphing from the little anglerfish, as the Doctor mentioned.) 

Anyway, once the state police capture Amy so she can cast her vote to either let the Star Whale go or continue to torture it, she chooses to continue the torture.  This is a step, though, toward stopping the torture and redemption for Amy’s decision.

The other person responsible for the slavery and torture in “The Beast Below” is Queen Liz 10, shown below, shooting like River.  In fact, she has big hair and is a metaphor for River.  That’s not surprising since we examined how River is a Hand of Omega, a remote star manipulator, making the Doctor become a supernova and the Star Whale.

 The Child Metaphors

The 4 remaining children are shown below.  The 3 younger children match the genders of the children whom River is looking after in the Library.  In fact, 3 children come up several times in various episodes, and I can’t think of a time when they are not 2 girls and a boy.  I said I’m ignoring genders, but not here, because these characters relate to established main characters.  CAL is probably Dot since the Doctor gave Dot his hat.  There’s also Harriet on the right below, and Perry on the left. Kitty has big hair like River, and interestingly is taking care of the other children, just like River in the Library. Therefore, Kitty is a metaphor for River.

 Is Dot actually a reference to the 7th Doctor’s companion Dorothy Gale “Ace”?  Ace is meant to be like Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz.  Just as a tornado in The Wizard of Oz transported Dorothy Gale to Oz, a time storm transported Ace to Iceworld.

Shown below, Spider is stealing the Doctor’s sonic screwdriver.  

 Spider is an interesting name, especially because in Donna’s first story, “The Runaway Bride,” the Empress of the Racnoss, shown below from a TARDIS Wikia image, is a spider-like creature whose children died when the 10th Doctor flooded the building with water from the Thames.  The Doctor coldly watched as the water poured in and the Empress screamed in anguish for her children.  In fact, it was this event where Donna by turning right in “Turn Left” wasn’t there to save the Doctor.  He died in the flood, too.

 So I don’t think we’ve heard the last of Spider.  He may show up as a metaphor again or a reference to his name.  There’s also the spider-like insectoid in the big “C” room in TRODM.  Are these connected?

 The 12th Doctor & Spider

The Doctor did seem unfeeling when Spider got sucked under the ice, appearing more concerned about the sonic screwdriver.  Callousness in this situation is in direct opposition to what we know about him, especially with children. 

However, the 10th Doctor was very callous with the Racnoss’s children.  Granted, they aren’t human, but they were all just hatching and we hadn’t seen any children yet.  Could be an instance where the Doctor was up against his own species-ism? The 10th Doctor was not into giving second chances. 

Anyway, something is wrong about the 12th Doctor’s reaction to Spider’s plight.  Is it a coping mechanism?  Or did Spider get saved in another way?  Is this a retelling of “Turn Left” where the 12th Doctor is like Donna and wasn’t there to save the 10th Doctor?  In “Turn Left,” initially the 10th Doctor died (similar to Spider below) under the Thames water with his screwdriver in his hand.  This all has to mean something.

 I see the 12th Doctor as caring very deeply, more deeply than he wants to admit, and he’s the most emotional of all the Doctors.  He has to move on or more people will die.  River made that point to the 10th Doctor in the Library when he thought Donna might be dead in “Forest of the Dead.”

RIVER: Listen to me. You've lost your friend. You're angry. I understand. But you need to be less emotional, Doctor, right now. DOCTOR: Less emotional? I'm not emotional. RIVER: There are five people in this room still alive. Focus on that. Dear God, you're hard work young.

We know the 12th Doctor has to care.  Otherwise, he wouldn’t hear people screaming every time he closed his eyes.

Anyway, yesterday I saw an interview with Sarah Dollard, the writer of “Thin Ice” on The Aftershow - Doctor Who: The Fan Show.  Sarah believes, as I do, that the Doctor very much cares, but he tells himself a different story, so he can move on.  Since she knows the Doctor much better than I do, I’m taking her word for it.  She starts talking about this at 6:54, if you are interested.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJQUhzuh5oI&t=909s

 Bill is Keeping the Doctor Honest – In Some Ways

The Doctor is in denial about a lot of things:

 “Smile”

BILL: Why are you Scottish?

DOCTOR: I'm not Scottish, I'm just cross.

The Scottish answer is very different than what he said in “Deep Breath,” where he said he was Scottish and he could complain about things.

BILL: Is there a Scotland in space?

DOCTOR: They're all over the place, demanding independence from every planet that they land on. Why are you here?

BILL: Because I figured out why you keep your box as a phone box.

DOCTOR: I told you, it's stuck.

BILL: Advice and Assistance Obtainable Immediately. You like that.

DOCTOR: No, I don't.

BILL: See, this is the point. You don't call the helpline because you are the helpline.

DOCTOR: Don't sentimentalise me. I don't just fly around helping people out.

We know this is not true.

BILL: What are you doing right now?

DOCTOR: I happened to be passing by, so I'm mucking in.

BILL: You've never passed by in your life. You couldn't even leave me serving chips, so I'm not going to leave you.

Again, she’s keeping him honest.

 “Thin Ice”

Bill asked the Doctor how many people he has killed:

BILL: Don't tell me. You've moved on.

DOCTOR: You know what happens if I don't move on? More people die. There are kids living rough near here. They may well be next on the menu. Do you want to help me? Do you want to stand here stamping your foot? Because let me tell you something. I'm two thousand years old, and I have never had the time for the luxury of outrage.

I do believe his answer about moving on, at least in the moment of crisis.  I think he will see Spider in his thoughts when he closes his eyes. However, we know he’s in denial about outrage.  Bill calls him on it later after he punched Sutcliffe for racist remarks.

BILL: No time for outrage. You've never had time for anything else, right?

DOCTOR: Don't be smug. Smug belongs to me.

BILL: Are you really two thousand years old?

DOCTOR: Why?

BILL: I just wanted to know how long it takes before you can make a speech like the one you just made. It was worth the wait.

This last point about worth the 2000-year wait is what the rescue is about.  The Doctor is nearly whole again.

Bill isn’t keeping him honest when it comes to the Vault, though.

 The Vault

Once again, we see the Vault, although this time at the end of the episode.  However, its presence has been looming large in the rest of the episode through metaphors.  Just like Sutcliffe keeping Loch-less prisoner, the Doctor is holding something prisoner in the Vault.  It seemed content until this episode.  The elephant refers to it too.

At the end, Nardole is left to guard the Vault since the Doctor used the coin trick on him, allowing the Doctor to run off in the TARDIS with Bill.  The Doctor wanting to be left alone doesn’t bode well, either, for coming events.

Interestingly, there are reflections of water reflecting on the door, and currently it has 8 red lights, a sign of a djinni.  The pattern of lights looks somewhat like a demonic face.  And the cross-like structure at the top of the door might be considered an upside-down Tau cross, which certainly wouldn’t bode well.

Whatever is inside, it now it wants out.  There are 5 sets of knocks, each with 3 knocks that become more insistent until the last, which is a death toll of 4 very insistent knocks: 3, 3, 3, 3, 4.  That there are 5 sets means this is a weapon of mass destruction. 

The last time we heard 4 knocks was in “Hell Bent” when Me knocked on the TARDIS door.  Four knocks mean the Doctor’s life is coming to an end. As a Sun, it has to come to an end with an alchemical death or real death.  With the Great Work, we should see an alchemical death before the next alchemical marriage to the Mother of God consciousness.

I still contend that the Vault represents the Doctor’s mind.  It’s got to be one of the Doctor’s faces, which doesn’t mean they look like Peter Capaldi.  They could even be female.  However, I won’t be surprised if it does look like the 12th Doctor because the subtext suggests the Doctor has been duplicated.  Also, having gone through a memory block, Clara is locked away in his mind just as most likely the Master (as the War Doctor) is.  The Doctor’s family is locked away in his mind, too.  Maybe Susan will show up.

There are 44 Circles in the Squares on the giant doors, which have Gallifreyan writing on them, so that’s worth three 12th Doctors and one 8th Doctor or a djinni.

[bostonbun-blog1]

the universes we keep

Stories are amazing; written, visual, sung and spoken.  Even in-game.  Games are next level interactive movies nowadays.

They can reflect so much of someone or everyone, and when we read them we can fall into the adventure and get lost.  They can be pure heartbreak, they can give thrill and excitement, horror or mystery, they can uplift and inspire and give us hope.

I think we all create universes in our heads.  We’re all capable of it.  We can build any kind of world we want and fill it with characters upon characters who personify our greatest wants and fears; lay them to bed in a little cosy corner of our mind until it’s time to wake them up for some more development.

Photo by Yong Chuan

I have so many people and so many stories I want to fabricate and weave together.  So much pain and strength to portray, if I can’t do it yet in myself.  I guess I like to live vicariously through fictitious hope.  I think it’s become a coping mechanism for me. 

I really enjoy imagination and expression.  Creating characters out of my aspirations and the traits that I envy; my perfect person, or people, adorning all my imperfections but handling them with grit and with poise.  Creating my worst perfect enemy or enemies, encapsulating all the selfish desires or evil trickery I know better not to indulge in.  Then throwing everyone into a constructed obstacle course I call their life. 

People can say it’s not real or never will be real but I don’t think so, I think we can take elements that we place into others and create a clearer picture of ourselves, or someone we’d admire to be or fear becoming.  It’s our choice which direction we travel.

There is a picture that says:

The things that excite you are not random.  They are connected to your purpose.  Follow them.

There are countless articles calling this BS.  That it isn’t enough to follow a passion, because that seems aimless and prone to wandering astray or dropping the ball.  I agree.

The trick is rather to cultivate your passion.  That even sounds better.  It means that you build and live your passions until you become them. 

What seems to be most people’s downfall is knowledge on how to pursue such an exciting thing and turning it into your living, or your day job.  I, for one, would have no idea how to bank on my passions, at least not yet.  Not in the conventional sense where you are dependent on others. 

But you know what, there is so much entrepreneurial resources out there all you really need is to become an expert in your craft, have the boldness to try, ruthless determination to progress and money to pass any gateways.

I know it would take some mentoring, maybe some vigorous searching online and, hands-down, some taste testing and experience building.  But like a good friend has always chimed when trying to help me, “Try it!” 

That’s exactly what I need to do.  Try more things.  It’s a skill I might actually have to practice because I’ll be honest, I don’t know how!

I do know how to be unbelievably lazy, and become depressed at my wasted potential, and then have to jump start my motivation but not know how to go about achieving things, then rinse and repeat.

I most certainly know all too well how to make sure I have a boring steady income at the expense of my personal time so much so that I have no energy for my interests and things that spark my heart.

I’ve undoubtedly had preconceived ideas that were wrong for most of my life. 

I always thought bigger accomplishments came from bigger actions and attempts that insignificant things such as everyday rituals wouldnt make any kind of difference. 

What I failed to see was that little accomplishments and simple habits help to build a pretty decent foundation to success. 

This is the lesson that I finally understand now thanks to wanting to write on this little tumblr any chance I get. 

You need that want and then you just need to do. 

Things we truly desire are to be fought for, yes, but we don’t have to ride into battle as soon as we get a horse.  Time set aside, as little as 30 minutes of your whole day, dedicated daily to a passion of yours seems pretty doable, especially as it builds up over time. 

Picking up something to do every day that you totally enjoy, if only for an hour, will accumulate until one day you’ve created such a portfolio or archive of useful knowledge, techniques and ideas.  Everything always adds up over time, whether it’s inactivity or activity.

Let us not uselessly waste our time thinking about how much time we’ve lost or need to have.  Let’s use time wisely and gracefully as it comes.

Let us be brave enough to try anything that we are even remotely interested in, and not be paralysed by analysis of other’s judgement or what we have to lose instead of what we can gain.

I want to actively pursue pouring these ideas out; breaking the dam and observe what comes out. 

I find so much of my mental energy goes into constructing characters and fantasy, thinking of ways to show how to overcome adversity and struggle...that I feel I’m inclined to be doing this for a living. 

I’ve never really been a decisive person, but making this conscious choice to try and keep at something is really empowering.

I don’t know whether I’m good at it to begin with.  I have never levelled up in writing at all.  If I’m not good, I’m not afraid to be bad at it.  I know that with patience and practise that someone can always eventually get better at something. 

So I will try a little bit at a time but every day.  Consistency is a quality I always always took for granted until now. 

I have an undying fascination for special abilities, supernatural or scientific in nature.  ”Super powers”, if you will, but I hate the concept of spandex, capes and flair.  I don’t understand it and I don’t relate to it.  What I do relate to is every day individuals with personal demons to face, coming of age and learning to harness the special power within them.  

That’s why I loved the TV series Heroes a lot (until it got ridiculous) or subtle movies like Hearts in Atlantis or Matilda.  Even Carrie is awesome in all its telekinetic revenge.  Misfits, American Gods, The Craft, Sense8, Practical Magic, Stranger Things, Fringe, Supernatural, Lost to name a few...and I don’t care what anyone says, Beautiful Creatures is an enjoyable sweetheart of a movie.

No one needs bright-coloured skin tight costumes and they don’t need the body of an athletic God.  They are them and they are dealing with what they’ve been given in life and sometimes that gift can be a curse and sometimes they can’t control it so much that it can affect others greatly.

I just think that everyone feels this struggle, and I’m a major nerd for superhuman abilities....and magic and fantasy, beasts, monsters, spells, every day life mixed with a secret, stoic anti-heroes, natural born leaders who don’t want to be leaders, empowerment in strong characters, male or female, love, loss, confliction and life-changing choices or guilt and redemption and the list goes on.

I’m an idealistic day dreamer through and through. 

My mind is forever in the clouds and I quite like it up here.  I like to think this lets me be optimistic, imaginative, creative...for all my efforts and attempts at being so.  It does also mean that I’m fairly naive at times, can Iack productive focus and end up shuffling through projects without finishing a single one.  

It’s a downfall for sure, especially if pursuing something creative that needs finished projects...but I can’t help it and I accept these flaws.  We’re not human if we don’t hold both good and bad within us.  I think if you already want something, you’re halway there.

I think we’re taught to be a certain way, and push anything negative out of the way in favour of more positive ones so as to keep others at ease. Or that all bad emotions are invalid and not worth discussing so keep on keeping on and remember to ignore those nasty thoughts until they go away.  

I’ll tell you one thing, they never go away.  And they weasle through the sewer lines and alleyways of our psyche just to come back up to the surface and when they do, they’ve seen things, horrible things, and they’re here to make themselves known......at least in my experience anyway.

I’ve learnt only recently that those emotions aren’t scary.  They are perfectly normal, and they are just as deserving to see the light and be shared. 

So recognise yourself and see your flaws as adversaries that can fight alongside you instead of against you. 

Take everything that it is to be human and everything that makes up life: the good, the bad. the ugly and the beautiful, and be grateful that you can feel, even if those feelings are overwhelming, let them have their moment and lay them to rest.

Embrace them, know their origins and know that they come for a reason to teach and will happily move on through when you no longer are afraid of them.   

Channel this into gratitude for being alive and live your life to the fullest starting with the smallest of tasks. 

Happy cultivating passions!

[myinovation-blog]

Do Small business Degrees In Photography Perform?

Most photography schools offer you small business degrees in photography but a lot of photographers wonder irrespective of whether such a course is useful or not. Photography will not be just a kind of art nevertheless it is actually a science and business in the similar time. To come to be a prosperous photographer, you need to know the creative and scientific elements of photography in order that you'll be able to create amazing photographs. However, you also require good enterprise understanding to sell these photographs. If you have noticed, the majority of the masterpiece photographs were under no circumstances sold! In photography interviews and quite a few discussion forums, you can see several individuals claiming that photography can be a passion for them but this passion just isn't enough to create sales. Several photographers fail due to the fact they can't distinguish their passion for photography and the need to have to sell these photos. As an amateur photographer, you probably shoot just about each topic but for qualified photography this notion is not going to function out. You'll need to pick out your niche due to the fact the consumers come to photographers who cater a number of one of the most certain subjects. A very good photography course will help you to choose the proper niche and market place oneself in that niche. To get a excellent organization photography degree, advertising and marketing procedures would be the main a part of its curriculum. Market Research- Industry analysis is some thing which you discover inside a photography small business degree. You will study and learn the niches that happen to be at present on demand. For distinctive photography niches, distinct amount of investment and time is required. With marketplace research, you could opt for a niche that suits you the best.

Presentation- Stock photography and wedding photography are two well-known niches in professional photography. Nonetheless, the marketing and advertising and sales procedure for each is completely distinctive. It's extremely challenging for a stock photographer to succeed in wedding photography with the marketing techniques that he/she uses for stock. In wedding photography, clicking photographs are just a part of the job but all the things from your costumes for the presentation (photo albums) are extremely essential. For stock photography, your character and presentation has absolutely nothing to accomplish with promoting photographs but other components for example crucial wording and numerous licenses do. Marketing- Marketing and advertising tools in photography business have changed a lot within the last decade. A personal web site, social media profile plus a blog ensures your presence on internet. Even so, it truly is crucial to learn tips on how to market oneself by way of these new media platforms. Conventional promoting tools which include small business cards and gifts also work nicely. A good course will teach you how you can use these techniques for your good results.

There is absolutely no doubt that a professional photography company degree from any of your well-known photography schools is often the top resource for any photographer's advertising accomplishment. A thriving photographer shouldn't only understand to click masterpiece photographs but in addition ways to sell them. Together with the ideal marketing and advertising techniques, photography is one of the safest profession that a person can opt along with the inventive side of it really is fascinating. Get More Info here photography

[raymononeill45-blog]

Find out How you can Make More Money With party.

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[mexcine2]

                       “Everybody Amazed!” (Cosmic Vision Helmet ad)

“Tom Corbett, Space Cadet” was a television program aimed at a juvenile audience that ran from October 1950 through June 1955 (albeit with some gaps).  Tom and his pals were cadets at the Space Academy, sort of a futuristic Hogwarts.  The character also appeared on the radio, in a series of novels aimed at adolescent readers, in a short-lived newspaper comic strip, and in several comic book series. The “Tom Corbett” franchise was heavily merchandised, not unusual for the time period—for example, when “Hopalong Cassidy” moved to television from feature films, the character’s tie-ins increased enormously.

Today’s subject of analysis is an advertisement for the “Tom Corbett Space Cadet Cosmic Vision Helmet.”  This particular ad ran, oddly enough, in the romance comic Lovers’ Lane 37 (dated November 1953).  Actually, the advertisements in this issue are generally not aimed at the presumably majority female readership: there are several pages of ads for novelty items, a full page ad from the Jowett Institute of Physical Training (offering to make the reader an “All-American HE-MAN” ?!), and just one page for a “Tummy-Trim” girdle.  However, as we’ve noted before, ads were probably sold in blocks and rarely targeted a particular comic title’s core demographic.

One interesting aspect of this advertisement is the extremely low-key manner in which the helmet is marketed as a “Tom Corbett” tie-in. The name “Tom Corbett” appears just once in the text and can be vaguely discerned in one image of the helmet itself, but that’s it.  There are no depictions of any of the characters from the television show, nor is there any attempt to provide a space motif in the artwork (the boy shown at left does appear to be wearing a version of the Space Cadet uniform, however). [Other ads for the same product seem to have taken the same tack.  This page has photos of the actual helmet, the original box, and a different but equally Tom Corbett-less ad.]

It’s hard to understand why the ad doesn’t really link “Tom Corbett” and the product: isn’t the purpose of a merchandising tie-in to increase sales by attracting fans of the show/star/character? Since the “Tom Corbett” television show was off the air from September 1952 until August 1953, perhaps this ad was created during a time when it was felt that interest in the program was low, and thus the marketing advantage of a tie-in was not strong—or even that connecting the “Invisible Helmet” with an “old” TV series would have been a liability.

In any case, this product is, rather surprisingly, sold more as a generic kid’s toy than a character-related costume.  The point of the ad’s text is not “be like Tom Corbett” or even “be a Space Man,” but...be “invisible?”  Which is not exactly accurate.

First, the large text suggests the product is called the “Invisible Helmet,” but the official name—listed on the order form—is “Cosmic Vision Helmet.” The helmet itself is, obviously, not invisible.  And, contrary to the inference in the second panel on the left side of the ad, it doesn’t make you invisible: “Now—You See People—They Can’t See You!”  The hell they can’t.  You’re standing right there with a large plastic bucket on your head!

The fine print clarifies the matter. “You put on this helmet and nobody, but nobody can tell who you are!”  Well that’s different.  So the helmet is actually a “miracle disguise,” and “nobody can recognize you, yet you see everybody else! Boys, girls, men, and women—and you see what they are doing!”  Sounds a little stalkerish, if you ask me.  Like wearing mirrored sunglasses so women can’t tell you’re staring at their boobs.  Not that I’ve ever done that.

Why, wearing a helmet with a one-way vision visor could be your key to happiness. “Be envied by everyone. You will have fun! You will be the hero of your town!”  OK, you lost me on that last one.  Why would disguising your identity make you “the hero of your town?”  Yes, one of our previous posts was about an advertisement for a toy gun which allegedly allowed a young boy to foil a bank robbery, but I just don’t see a similar logical progression from “buying and wearing the Cosmic Vision Helmet” to “hero of your town.”

I suppose this can be chalked up to marketing hyperbole, which also urges the reader to “ORDER TODAY!” and “BE THE FIRST IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD”and “Don’t let anyone beat you. You be the first.”  To tell the truth, I can see some benefit in being the second (or third) kid in the neighborhood to have one of these helmets, because then your identity would be a real mystery: “which one of those helmet-wearing punks was peeking in my bedroom window last night?”

The copywriter for this ad also pulled out all the stops in his description of the awesomeness of the Cosmic Vision Helmet.  It’s a “Sensational, Scientific Marvel!” and “as new as the hydrogen bomb! As exciting as a ride through space. Makes you a Super Space Cadet.”  Finally, a reference to “space” and “space cadet,” although there’s still no direct allusion to the “Tom Corbett” program. 

However, the writer also contradicts his scientific claims for the Cosmic Vision Helmet by blatantly claiming “This is magic!”  Since Arthur C. Clarke didn’t propose his “third law”—“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”—until 1973, this advertisement was clearly not inspired by his work, and so we must demand an answer: is it a “scientific marvel” or is it “magic?”  For only $1.98 (about $17.98 in today’s dollars) you could find out.  And “be the hero of your town!”