What do the following terms have in common?

Darwinism ("Darwinianism")
Evolution
Microevolution / Macroevolution
Natural selection
Theory
Transitional form
Vestigial organ

Answer: They are all bandied about routinely and flippantly by Creationists, who never get the definitions right. An attempt to correct these bad definitions follows…

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"Darwinism" (or even more inaccurately, "Darwinianism") is usually used by Creationsists to describe the entire school of Evolutionary thought, when in fact it only describes one small area i.e. the notion that species evolve by natural selection, as stipulated by Charles Darwin. Creationists, as a rule, tend to think both that Evolutionary thought began with Charles Darwin (it didn’t, at the very latest it started with the Ancient Greek Anaximander, meaning the idea pre-dates Socrates), and also that it has barely moved since his time either. Slightly better-informed Creationists (but there aren’t many of them) might acknowledge the work of Stephen J. Gould, but assume he is the only Evolutionary scientist since Darwin’s time to have done any new research.

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"Evolution" is usually defined by Creationists as meaning an animal, "suddenly transforming into a different animal". This is meant to imply some kind of magical metamorphosis into a different shape, a little like Optimus Prime transforming into an articulated lorry. Less sorcerous, but hardly less silly, it is sometimes put forward to mean the life-form giving birth to a creature from a completely separate species. In fact, evolution means life-forms (not just animals) changing their dominant form over lengthy periods of time in response to their environment, with the transition being extremely gradual and barely perceptible, usually occurring in tiny increments over many generations. Creationists further assume that the "different animal" the life-form transforms into will be a contemporary of the original form e.g. a crocodile gives birth to a duck. But where evolution occurs, the new life-forms that very gradually emerge over long generations will be a new species that did not exist at the time of the original.

Creationists also have a strange tendency to enlarge their interpretation of The Theory of Evolution to encompass numerous  lines of scientific enquiry, most of which are not only not directly linked to the ongoing development of life on Earth, but are in fact the focus of completely separate scientific fields. For instance, most Creationists seem absolutely convinced that The Theory of Evolution discusses the Origins of the Universe. This is a subject studied by fields such as cosmology and astrophysics of course, and it is from these fields that The ‘Big Bang Theory’ discusses how the Universe might have begun. The Theory of Evolution does not touch on this at all, as the Big Bang and the start of life on Earth were events some ten billion years apart. And on mention of that, by the same measure Evolutionary science does not really analyse the origin of life on Earth either. That field of study is referred to as biopoesis, or abiogenesis.

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"Microevolution" and "Macroevolution" are usually defined by Creationists, when grudgingly forced to concede ground on the issue of whether there is evidence to support evolutionary theory, as meaning very slight changes to a creature’s DNA as opposed to fundamental changes. This is actually close to being a good definition, but once again the tempo is completely misjudged. Microevolutionary changes usually take place over a few years, whereas macroevolution can, and usually does, take place over thousands of years. The common position taken by many Creationists today is that microevolution is real, whereas macroevolution is not, for where microevolution occurs it is within the boundaries of a species, whereas macroevolution would carry a life-form beyond those boundaries, an event that has never been witnessed. The fallacy is two-fold. Firstly, these ‘boundaries’ are never really defined, nor is any evidence cited to support the notion that they exist. Secondly, macroevolution does not occur during the lifespan of a single organism. It happens over many succeeding generations and across whole populations.

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"Natural selection" is usually defined by Creationists as the assertion that, "Life just happened by chance." This mal-definition is perhaps the grossest of the lot, as natural selection, if anything, means the reverse. Certainly chance plays a role in the process of evolution, but natural selection is not that part, and the very use of the word ‘selection’ should make clear that developments are not just happening at random. Natural selection actually means, from different specimens of the same life-form, those with the individual traits best-suited to their environment are most likely to survive, and so pass their traits onto descendants. For instance, in an environment where there is very little food at ground level, but a lot of fruit in the branches of high trees, a taller or longer-necked specimen of a quadruped is likelier to survive than a smaller counterpart, as it will be easier for the taller one to reach food. And as the taller one is likelier to survive, it is also likelier to mate and to have offspring. These offspring will inherit much of its genetic information, including the extra height/neck-length, and so future generations are likelier to be taller/longer-necked than the present average.

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"Theory" is usually defined by Creationists – and in fairness by much of wider society – as just an idea or an elaborate guess. This immediately casts an illusion of uncertainty over whether evolution is a reality or just a possibility. Hence the exhausted phrase, "Evolution is just a theory." But in science, such a vagary would not be given the title of a theory, but instead it would be categorised as a hypothesis. A better alternative name for a theory is ‘explanation’. A theory in scientific terms means an explanation for a phenomenon that is not only allowed for, but also fully supported, by all the available evidence, and which has stood up to all of the most rigorous testing and analysis by qualified peers. Quite simply, in the realm of science there is no greater badge of confidence that can be bestowed upon a hypothesis than the name ‘Theory’. If Creationists don’t think that’s true, perhaps they could suggest other, more authoritative titles that are used by science instead? So far, this hasn’t happened.

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"Transitional form" is usually defined by Creationists as meaning, "Half one animal, half another." This usually conjures up mental images of mythical creatures like the Minotaur or the Hippogrith, which would essentially appear to be bits of one animal fastened to bits of another. Probably the most notorious phrase that this idea has given rise to is the Creationist mantra, "There’s no such thing as a crocoduck!" often accompanied by a picture of an imaginary creature with the head of a crocodile and the round, feathered body of a flightless bird. This shows a fundamental misunderstanding, not only of what evolution means as a whole (see the section on "Evolution" above), but also a flawed preconception of the animal kingdom as a collective, and a very rigid and limited notion of what a transitional form would be. To address the first point, Creationists go in with an assumption that the Earth has, so to speak, a ‘quota’ of animals. Every species on Earth has always been there, and always will be, barring extinctions. These life-forms are seen in the Creationist mind to be ‘completed’ i.e. they are the definitive form for their species. Any variation away from one species, Creationists assume, could only mean it carries them into the shape of another one that is already there. There may be a generation or two of transition, where there is a life-form that is part one, part the other, but the transition is assumed to be immediate. Hence, if a crocodile ceases to be a crocodile, it will evolve into one of its contemporaries, perhaps in a couple of stages, e.g. a duck. Ergo, the ‘crocoduck’. The possibility that the end-form might be a new species altogether never seems to enter the Creationist’s thoughts. There is no ‘set quota’ of life-forms in nature, no guaranteed catalogue or line-up. There never has been. And a transitional form, in truth, is not on a clearly marked dividing line. All life-forms that have ever existed on Earth since the earliest protozoa have been a transitional form. Even the form of modern humans is no more an ultimate destination than the so-called ‘Missing Link’ was. The transition is a gradual process, and homo sapiens can be classed as the transitional form between homo erectus and whatever is to follow. But equally, what is to follow will be a transition form between homo sapiens and whatever is to follow again, and on and on, indefinitely, and all the while with countless sub-categorisations in between. A transitional form is not a freak mutant or one of the Wuzzles (remember them from the 80′s? Google it to refresh your memories). It is, quite simply, a single step on a ladder of infinite steps.

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"Vestigial organ" is usually defined by Creationists as meaning, "useless remnant of a body part inherited from a remote ancestor". This definition is almost correct, except for the epiphet, ‘useless’. Creationists always insist on the epiphet being included though, as a method of discrediting the whole concept. A vestigial limb is indeed a remnant from ancestral forms, and one that natural selection is gradually ‘phasing out’ (for want of a better term) due to general disuse over long generations. But, while it is fair to argue that such a body part goes largely unused and so is unnecessary to the species’ survival – that’s the whole reason that it is phased out, to reduce the burden of ‘dead weight’ – that does not mean it is useless. And this distinction is important, because vestigial parts can still play a minor function. For instance, the human appendix is unnecessary, but can play a useful role in supporting the body’s immune system. By forcing the word ‘useless’ into the definition, Creationists hope to discredit the whole notion of vestigial organs, because they can then point to the uses vestigials still have and say, "See? They still play a role, so they are obviously not vestigial." This is itself a very obvious fallacy of definition, confusing the meaning of ‘unused’ with the meaning of ‘useless’, and so mangling the definition of ‘vestigial’. The usefulness of a body part is not central to whether or not it is vestigial (it might be the reason why it is happening, but there are other possibilities). The only requirement for a body part to be vestigial is for it to be in the process of being phased out by natural selection.

Let me just mention before I start that I do enjoy Guy Fawkes Night. At a dark time of year we get a bit of colour and spectacle for everyone to share, and I think that’s grand, so by all means let’s keep it going. But I do sometimes question how many people understand what they’re celebrating, because the prevailing attitude to the occasion always seems so contradictory.

On the one hand, we have many people (not just kids) putting together their own effigy of Fawkes, taking it out into the streets and calling “Penny for the Guy!”, before burning the effigy on a bonfire on the big night. But on the other, there always seems to be a great sympathy for the Gunpowder Conspirators among the exact same people, an affectionate shout-for-the-underdog. This always strikes me as mildly ridiculous. Burning-in-effigy is supposed to be a gesture of hatred, not affection, a half-conscious belief in sympathetic magic. The more you study these attitudes, the more you begin to realise that the people who hold them know almost nothing about the Conspiracy beyond the rough order-of-events, and never even think about them in any detail.

The whole business of burning-in-effigy is harmless, if rather tasteless, and doubly so when the man being symbolically slaughtered has been dead for centuries. I mean, talk about kicking them when they’re down and are definitely staying down! But I doubt that many people recognise the implication of it.

So I thought I’d offer a gentle de-bunking of a few of the myths I’ve heard surrounding this business. (Some of these myths have perhaps been brought to life by the recent movie of V For Vendetta, but whatever caused them, let’s get the story right.)

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1. “Guy Fawkes was a leading freedom-fighter and a visionary.”

Well freedom-fighter is probably a fair description, perhaps (perhaps) fairer than accusations that he was a terrorist. The freedom he wanted was the freedom to practise his religion in his own way, nothing more, but that’s still freedom of a kind.

But leading? Visionary? Firstly, Fawkes was not the leader of the Gunpowder Conspiracy, he wasn’t even a deputy of any description. The leader and figurehead was Sir Robert Catesby, a minor Catholic nobleman who was lionised as the finest swordsman in England at the start of the seventeenth century. Fawkes was an important member of the Conspiracy in that he was the only one who had real military experience (from fighting on the continent for the Spanish as a mercenary), allowing them to put their plans into practise. But being crucial to the Plot didn’t make him its leader.

Second, could Fawkes be described as a visionary? In the movie V For Vendetta, Fawkes is hailed by V as some kind of Early-Modern-Era Vladimir Lenin. A hearty freedom-lover with a daring and intricate plan to end Government oppression and to build a new society, freer and with power vested in people rather than Royalty. Was this Fawke’s real vision? Far from it – his ‘vision’, such as it was, was largely the work of Robert Catesby, and it was entirely backward-looking; a wish to see England restored to the authority of the Pope. Politically, that was pretty much it. There was nothing new in his ideas at all, and there was no noticeable increase in freedom by being subject to the Bishop Of Rome instead of an Absolute Monarch.

2. “Guy Fawkes was burned at the stake for his crimes.”

Not quite. This appears to be a false impression that people get from the way Fawkes’ effigy is burned on the bonfire every November 5th. Burning alive was certainly a horrible death, especially in Britain, where the damp climate really slowed down the process of dying and so prolonged the agony, sometimes for as much as eight hours.

However, the execution of the Conspirators was arguably even more hideous. They were hanged by the throat until not quite dead, then tied to running horses and drawn along the ground, had their entrails cut out of their bodies and burned in front of their still-living eyes, and then their bodies were cut into quarters.

People really knew how to make others suffer before killing them back then.

3. “The Gunpowder Conspirators were high-ranking political masterminds.”

The Gunpowder Conspirators were, in fact, a bunch of unimportant, half-mad imbeciles; tragicomic young gentrymen with dreams that hadn’t a hope of coming true, shunned even by their fellow Catholics who regarded them as embarrassing cranks. That Catesby was the leader and brains of the outfit says a lot about the general mental state of the likes of Thomas Wintour, Francis Tresham, Ambrose Rookwood et al. Most of the Conspirators were emotionally unstable, few of them were in a sound financial position, hardly any of them had expertise in the murky fields of ‘assassincraft’ or statecraft, and only a couple of them (Catesby and Thomas Percy) had any kind of status in the nation’s hierarchy at all.

Their plan was so naive that if it were invented for a novel, critics would pan the book as laughable. The Conspiracy’s hope was to blow up Parliament, taking King James I and the political establishment with it, then to swoop down on the Palace and capture the King’s daughter Elizabeth, putting her on the throne as their new puppet Monarch, forcing her to declare for the Pope, before stirring up an uprising by English Catholics to secure the rest of the country.

In practise, the chances of successfully blowing up Parliament were actually fairly good, but the rest of the idea was insane. What chance was there of getting into the Palace to capture the Princess when it was heavily-guarded night-and-day? What chance was there of them stirring up an uprising amongst English Catholics when none of the Conspirators were part of the Catholic ‘mainstream’? Even if they could, the Protestant majority in the country outnumbered them by at least ten to one, probably far more. How could the Catholics hope to beat odds like that?

Such was the incompetence of the Plotters that when news reached them that the plan had failed, instead of running for the nearest port and getting out of the country, they decided to “hide” at Holbeche House, a mansion belonging to one of the Conspirators. (Yeah, that’s the last place the authorities were going to look…) With battle inevitable, the Conspirators found their stash of gunpowder had become damp, and decided to try and dry it out, by leaving it to stand in front of an open fire. The inevitable flash-flame that followed nearly killed half of them.

Masterminds? The Gunpowder Conspirators, masterminds? They were idiots!

4. “Contemporary English Catholics supported the Plot, and were distraught to learn it had failed.”

No. No no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no. There isn’t a sufficiently powerful negative in the English language to cover this idea.

Hardly any English Catholics knew anything about the Plot until after it had been foiled. And most of them were appalled, not that it had failed, but that anyone had attempted it at all. The reason they were distraught was they knew full well that the Conspiracy was going to trigger a fresh wave of anti-Catholic suspicion around the country, a wave that they were likely to experience the full force of themselves.

Also, most of them were in fact loyal to James I. It’s true that they felt let down by him when, having initially relaxed the anti-Catholic Laws of Elizabeth I (the so-called ‘Recusancy Laws’), after about a year he started to enforce them again more strictly than ever. But even so he was still their King, and the thought of a bunch of insignificant young tearaways daring to attack his person offended their whole understanding of the relationship between the Crown and its subjects.

5. “Guy Fawkes fought with the Royal guards when they found him with the gunpowder.”

This is purely a Hollywood invention from V For Vendetta. It makes the moment of Fawkes’ arrest look very vivid and dramatic, but it is nevertheless completely inaccurate. In reality, Fawkes did not make a single move to resist capture when he was found (not by Royal guards, but by Lord Monteagle and Lord Southwark). Instead, he gave the pseudonym of ‘John Johnson’, claiming to be a servant of Thomas Percy (the Conspirator who had rented the undercroft that the powder was stored up in), and he was then marched away without a fight to be interrogated by the King himself.

6. “The whole Plot was a setup by the Earl Of Salisbury!!!”

(Rather than not knowing about the Treason, this myth is usually a sign of people thinking about it so much that they get carried away.)

The Gunpowder Treason, down the centuries, has in many ways been the precursor of 9/11. One of those ways is the conspiracy theories that surround the Conspiracy. Many people believe the US Government was ‘in on’ the attacks on Washington and New York. By similar reasoning, the popular myth about the Gunpowder Treason goes (and has done for over four hundred years) that it was all just a massive set-up by King James’ Secretary of State, Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury. The notion is that Salisbury was looking to curb the King’s would-be Catholic sympathies, and that he ‘provocateured’ Robert Catesby and his men into attempting the attack on Parliament in order to trap them and to smear Catholicism.

The theorists point to suspicious details; –

a) How did the Conspirators manage to obtain so much gunpowder and march it into the cellars of Parliament without being noticed?

b) How did they manage to secure a cellar directly beneath the House of Lords?

c) The tip-off the Government received (the Monteagle letter) seems highly doubtful, given that no one has ever been able to establish who wrote it.

d) Why, on receiving the letter, did Salisbury choose to wait five days to bring it to the King’s attention?

e) Isn’t it a bit lucky for the King that the gunpowder the Conspirators were planning to use ‘just happened’ to have spoiled?

Unfortunately, as is so often the case with these kinds of theories, application of common sense soon knocks it into the ground.

For a start, if you look at the nature of the plot itself, it’s clearly the product of an unstable mind. Purely as a straight-on terrorist attack, the act of blowing up Parliament and wiping out the entire ruling class would be madness. To set it up merely to frame someone is overkill on a ludicrous scale. Catesby was, if not mad, then clearly unstable enough to dream up such an attack, and he didn’t need anyone else to put the idea in his head.

By contrast, whatever else Salisbury was, he was never mad, and if he wanted to stir up anti-Catholic feelings, all he had to do was provoke them into assassinating a few officials inside the Government (maybe one or two of his rivals, thus killing two birds with one stone). Instead, the conspiracy theory requires him to rig a plot on this wild a scale, taking well over a year to progress from start to finish, and with no way of controlling the outcome. He was far too intelligent a man to take such a brainless risk.

Also, if the idea for the plot was given to them by an outsider, why is it the Conspirators never mentioned it during the weeks of interrogation, or at their show-trial? If they’d been set up, surely it must have occurred to at least one of them. So why did they not announce it to the gathered crowds as they were led to their executions?

As for the doubts raised above, all can be answered; -

a) This is a question that is asked from a modern perspective, a perspective that sees today’s attitudes to, and methods of, security. To understand where the powder was obtained, and why it was so easy to get it into the Houses Of Parliament, it’s important to keep the circumstances of the era in mind.

The Anglo-Spanish War had been raging from 1585 until shortly after the succession of the Scots King James VI to the English throne in 1603. During the war, gunpowder was being regularly manufactured in large quantities. With the end of the conflict, demand for gunpowder went through the floor – the army and the navy no longer needed anywhere near as much. So there was a sudden glut of powder on the market in London, and vendors had to cut their prices drastically to sell off their stocks and break even. There were absolutely no vetting procedures back then. So long as he could afford it, any customer could buy as much powder as he wanted, no questions asked. So it was easy and inexpensive to obtain the powder in the amounts the plotters needed.

As for getting the powder into the cellars of Parliament undetected, there is nothing suspicious about that. Yes it would be difficult to do that today (partly as a consequence of the Plot), but back then merchants were regularly renting rooms below Parliament for storing up their wares, and every day it was perfectly commonplace to see hundreds of civilians coming and going, hauling barrels on their shoulders.

b) (It was actually an undercroft, not a cellar.) As I said above, not difficult at all. There were numerous cellars and undercrofts below Parliament, and these were being rented out all the time. Given that the plot took over thirteen months to reach fruition, a suitable cellar was bound to become available at some point.

c) Actually no it isn’t doubtful, at least not in the sense that it must therefore have been a Government forgery. There’s no doubt that Lord Monteagle passed the letter to Salisbury, and there’s also little doubt that this is the first solid lead that the Government had found to the plot. (It’s possible that Salisbury had heard something on the grapevine about the Conspiracy quite early on, which is what he always claimed subsequently, but there’s no evidence that he did.)

The only doubt about the letter is over how Monteagle obtained it in the first place. His claim was that his servant was given it during the night by a dark stranger. The likelier explanation is that Monteagle wrote it himself. There is strong reason to suspect that Monteagle (being a prominent Catholic and a close friend of Catesby’s and several of the other plotters) learned of the Conspiracy, was against it, and decided to warn the Government, but in such a way that there could be no way of becoming implicated in it himself. Whatever the case, it is very doubtful that the letter was the first Monteagle knew of the Conspiracy, but that is the very clear implication of what he had to say.

d) At first, this certainly looks remarkably casual on Salisbury’s part, taking risks with the King’s life, and of scores of other peers including his own, by not moving with any urgency to inform the King. That can suggest he wasn’t worried because he himself engineered the situation.

But in fact, the exact opposite explanation is every bit as probable; Salisbury kept the letter under his hat, not because he was confident, but because he was terrified. Imagine if he had taken the letter to James and declared, “Your Majesty, I have just learned about this conspiracy that aims to murder you, your family, and all the lords of the English aristocracy. It has been developing for over a year, but this is the first I have heard of it, and the only information I have is in this cryptically-worded letter.” Given James’ notorious obsession with his own safety, Salisbury would likely have been dismissed on the spot, and possibly imprisoned. Therefore Salisbury’s best bet was to keep the letter quiet until he had gained more solid information to present to the King.

On the other hand, it is true that Salisbury always claimed in subsequent years that he had gotten wind of the plot at an early stage, but allowed it to ripen so that he could amass enough evidence to capture all the Conspirators and be sure of convicting them. This is possible, but beyond his say-so there is no indication that he really did know anything about it until as late as October 26th 1605, and he might just as easily have made the claim to enhance his own profile. It made it look to the King like he was always in control of the situation, and exceptionally good at his job as ‘Chief Intelligencer’, in the best traditions of his father, Lord Burghley.

e) Not particularly. The powder was studied shortly after the Conspiracy was thwarted, and sure enough, the conclusion was that it had spoiled (“deteriorated”) i.e. become damp, and some of the ingredients had separated. However, it’s not certain that the powder had spoiled before it was sold to the conspirators. If it had as part of some kind of set-up, it leads to several important problems;-

Firstly, the sheer amount of gunpowder, thirty-six barrels, was enough to blow up Parliament at least five times over. Just because it had spoiled, it doesn’t necessarily follow that it wouldn’t explode. ‘Spoiled powder’ simply means gunpowder that forms into large, damp chunks that can’t be easily inserted into a gun-barrel or cannon. It can still burn and explode very violently under the right conditions of containment. While spoiling might have reduced the effectiveness somewhat, when you have enough of it to blow up your target five times over, you can afford some give.

There’s also the problem that the Conspirators were going to have possession of the gunpowder for months on end. Selling them dud powder as a safeguard would be another foolish risk, because there would be every danger of them noticing it had spoiled when they had that long to look at it, whereupon they could just buy fresh stocks. Once again, Salisbury was far too bright not to have thought of that.

In short, a lot like 9/11 conspiracy theories, 5/11 conspiracy theories just don’t stand up to scrutiny, or a simple application of common sense.

7. “Fireworks were invented for Bonfire Night to symbolise what would have happened to Parliament if the Plot had succeeded.”

I imagine a large number of people in China would raise the metaphorical brow at this idea, seeing fireworks were invented in their country roughly a thousand years before the Conspiracy. “Oriental prescience,” and whatnot? Hmm, if you say so.

In fact, fireworks were seldom used at Guy Fawkes Night celebrations for over a century after the Plot, the practise only really becoming popular from the early eighteenth century onwards. Up until then, the main practise to mark the occasion was simply to light a bonfire.

Given fireworks use gunpowder, there may feasibly be a tribute-link between their use and the details of the Plot, although I’ve never seen any evidence for it, and once again, it does sound a bit paradoxical; the event celebrates the failure of the gunpowder to explode. Why mark such a celebration with exploding gunpowder?

8. “If Fawkes had succeeded in blowing up Parliament, England would be a Catholic country today.”

Fat chance. As I pointed out in my answer to 3, had he succeeded, there would have been a civil war between Protestants and Catholics. The Catholics would have been hopelessly outnumbered, and the Protestants would still have had control of all the financial, military and legal advantages.

What would most likely have happened would have been the nationwide massacre of English Catholics.

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Where am I going with all this? Well, addressing the bizarre enthusiasm for Guy Fawkes that’s developed over the last few years (especially internationally), it makes me uneasy when it’s coupled with so little understanding of why it’s there. What I would like is for the rather distasteful side of it to be recognised, its intrinsic anti-Catholic bigotry, and above all, the cold-blooded nastiness at its core. Celebrating someone being barbarically executed by burning them in effigy is utterly medieval, every bit as vulgar as the American celebrations when Osama bin Laden was assassinated in May. The difference is, in the case of November 5th, many people don’t seem completely to understand what it is they are celebrating when they cheer the sight of the effigy catching fire. If they did understand it, maybe they’d stop.

Guy Fawkes Night, as I say, should be retained, and it should be celebrated, but not for the reasons it normally is, nor for the reasons it was originally created. What it currently celebrates is the revenge, the blood-soaked ‘justice’ wrought upon the Conspirators. There’s no worthy reason for celebrating that at all. What should be celebrated instead is simply that the Gunpowder Plot failed.

Had it succeeded, the conflict (and likely extermination) that would have followed would have been one of the darkest periods in British history. When an actual Civil War broke out for unrelated reasons four decades later, the country saw the kinds of horror and misery that such a conflict could bring. That such a war was avoided, at least for a time, is undoubtedly a far happier reason to send up some fireworks and eat toffee apples, than some misplaced sense of satisfaction over Catholics having their entrails cut out.

“1. Do you believe energy has always existed?

7. If you had to show me one empirically, 100%, factual, non-opinionated, proof for evolution, show it with absolute solid, unarguable, infallible proof now. Video and text responses are accepted.“

And so now, here are my answers. Before I begin, I need to warn you that you might feel my reponses have a certain withering, unimpressed tone to them. But to that accusation I would say, “Yes.” Here goes;-

1. I don’t know. We haven’t found out yet, but not being religious, I’m not too proud to admit that Man doesn’t know something yet.

1A-A. No.

1A-B. You want me to give evidence of something that doesn’t happen?

2. No.

2A. No.

2A-A. See 1A-B.

3. No.

3A. No.

3A-A. No. But then The Big Bang hypothesis doesn’t say any such thing. The Big Bang isn’t even postulated as an explosion as such. The hypothesis states that there was an *expansion* of energy (not matter) out of a singularity in an otherwise empty void. Some of the energy froze into particles of matter as it was exposed to the cold of the void. No one knows for sure if this is what really happened, and no one knows what preceded this event, how the singularity formed, or why. Not being a cosmologist, I’ve never claimed to know, and unlike you, I’m not filling in the gaps with guesswork. Guesses are fine for formulating hypotheses for testing. Just believing them as a matter of faith without testing them first is quite another matter.

3A-B. No, because this “occurrence” did not occur in the way you describe it, and in any event, no one would be alive that far back.

3A-C. We haven’t tested it.

3B. Not deliberately.

3B-A. See 1A-B and 2A-A.

3B-B. Yes.

3B-C. No-one’s attempting to repeat it.

4. Yes.

4A. Depends on the movie. And you can’t even 10% prove there’s an intelligent designer.

5. Aren’t you making an assumption there? See my previous answers.

6. No it isn’t the same as saying, “God did it”. From radiometric signals, there *is* empirical evidence of some kind of catastrophic expansion of energy occuring around fourteen billion years ago. We’re not certain how to interpret it, or even if it truly was ‘Event One’, because evidence about it is scant. But the idea is based on more than just a book written by fishermen in the Bronze Age. And no, as my previous answers show, I’m not making assumptions. I’m perfectly prepared to admit, as I said at the outset, that we don’t know the origin of the Universe. The Big Bang hypothesis is a possibility. My suspicion from some of your questions is that you don’t even know what the hypothesis says.

6A. Not reliably.

6A-A. See 6A.

6A-B. See 6A. And if you believe all that, noddies for you. So what?

7. Sure. The capacity of bacteria groups to mutate into new forms in response to human-made vaccines, sometimes within months (hence tuberculosis recently became dangerous again), or to alter into forms in response to their environment e.g. the bacterium recently discovered that mutated into a form that could feed off nylon, having only a few months earlier not been able to feed off it. The dominant form of a bacterium dies out, and mutated forms that have resistance to what is killing off the dominant forms become the new dominant form.

See? Sorted.

Oh, and on a side-note, The Big Bang hypothesis has nothing whatever to do with the Theory of Evolution. They’re not even parts of the same fields of science (The Big Bang is chiefly physics and cosmology, Evolution is biology, paleontology and zoology, among others), and it amazes me how often Christians keep trying to present them as the same theory.

So there you go, all seven questions answered, and they didn’t really make me think much, because it’s not like any of them haven’t been asked – and answered – a thousand times before. I long for the day when I encounter a Creationist who realises he’s dragging conversations back across old, old ground that the rest of the world has long since moved on from.

@havstormer
You know we have beliefs and you know that they’re not inherited so where did they come from and when? Are you familiar with Alvin Plantiga?

@shizzleman8
Could you please spare me the non-sequiturs? You’ve already turned Potholer54′s forum into a loony flamewar with your irrelevant raving, don’t do it on every channel, please.
If you mean Alvin PLANTINGA, only very slightly. Like I say, I don’t see how cherry-picking the name of one academic who happens to believe in God will in any way relate to my question about emulating ancestors for the sake of it.

@havstormer OMG Did I make a typo?! I guarandamntee you it’s never happened before Ma’am.
Don’t give me so much credit and him so little for seeing that the crocoduck is disrespectful and disingenuous. He at least went in the right direction toward making peace. Your logical fallacy was comparing inherited traits to religious freedom. My ancestors came from England, John and Priscilla Alden, I can “emulate” them without having to go to England and sail here as a separatist. How old are U?
shizzleman8
NOTE: Shizzleman was responding to a flippant remark I was making to another Christian about Vlad The Impaler. The logic the other guy seemed to be using was that Christian ways should be sustained because America’s Founding Fathers were Christians. I replied that if he were to learn that he was descended from Vlad The Impaler, would that mean he would have to go round thrusting people on spikes?

@shizzleman8
What do you mean, “inherited traits”? You appear to be saying that a tendency to thrust people on spikes is an inherited trait. So every single descendant of Vlad the Impaler is a serial impaler, is that what you believe? What I very clearly said (and once again you resort to cowardly straw man arguments to make it easier to dispute) was that just because your ancestors used to do something frequently, that’s no reason in itself to copy it.
And I’m over 21.
And I didn’t even mention the Golden Crocoducks, so why you think I was referring to that is quite beyond me. I don’t care if they’re disrespectful, because the people being highlighted in them are frauds and so don’t deserve respect. And if you want to call them disingenuous, well you can, but only in the same sense that all jokes are disingenuous i.e. they’re not literally happening. The points they make about persistent lying by creationists (including Ray Comfort) is very accurate.
havstormer

@havstormer Let’s just say you live in the U.K. and know as much about being an American as the fellow who wrote “don’t forget that OUR founding fathers were Christians” (actually religious separatists) and I know about what it’s like being from the U.k.
“Just because your ancestors used to do something frequently, that’s no reason in itself to copy it.” < Your argument here stands alone I have no interest in addressing it. 8¬ D
You're not a Christian, you're in favor of abortion, right? K
Maybe you’re just on a side, and see it from that view? I've had atheist friends on YouTube, still one that I stay in contact with. He’s way past the "Christians" in warmth and love @TheNatureRealm
One of the hardest things in the world to do is love your enemies or even put yourself in another's shoes, even if it's just for a moment. When a person apologizes to me (there's been a few) I'll usually say, "I'd have said/done the exact same thing if I were you, no problem". GRACE
shizzleman8
@havstormer They've (Creationists who have been lampooned by Potholer54) been convicted of fraud? I'm leaning towards suing Pothoer54 and Thunderf00t for using their positions as scientists/educators and using their position in society to evangelize thier religion through disguise and impersonation. I think they're the ones commiting fraud. "I think God did it" coming from a Senator is campaigning as where "scientific conclusions prove there is no God" coming from an educator is a lie.

@shizzleman8
Heh, good luck with that. You see, they’ll both shrug off any attempt you make to sue them, because they back up their arguments with facts.
Also, neither of them are educators or scientists, nor have they ever claimed to be. They’re both very open and honest about being members of the public. Potholer states in many of his videos that he's a journalist and not a scientist. So yet again, you've lied about what your opponents say.
And you again lie by putting the words, "scientific conclusions prove there is no God" into the mouths of atheists. Hardly anyone says that, because the term is an absurdity. You can't prove something does not exist (except an entity whose properties are contradictory), because the act of proving is done with evidence. Evidence is an observation of a physical fact, and something that doesn't exist, by definition, won't have any physical facts about it.
Didn't know that? How old are *you*? (I wanted to put it as "Did you really not know that?" etc, but not enough space.)

@shizzleman8
"Let's just say you live in the U.K. and know as much about being an American as… I know about what it's like being from the U.k."
Um… no let's not. Once again, you seem to think you know an awful lot about me without me telling you anything. It's these ridiculous assumptions you make that make you so prone to completely missing what people say to you. It makes you think you don't have to pay attention.
havstormer (I've never been to the USA, but my grandmother was American, and a former girlfriend of mine is American too. I may not know everything there is to know about being American, but as we shall soon see, it's a great deal more than he knows about the UK.)

@havstormer You're telling me everything about yourself while simultaneously not addressing any authoritative references. You proudly follow Thunderf00t & Potholer54 and simultaneously admit that they're not scientists or have any degrees in theology yet think their works are unassailable.
You have a motive for telling me that I don't know anything about you when you're spilling your guts. You don't want God to exist or be a part of human's lives. God is not in your life? Target. Cause > effect. Steven Hawking’s latest attempt at explaining how the universe came into existence is to say: There is no unique source to the universe. It’s his THEORY that violates all the laws of physics. 1 in 3 people provide testimony (direct evidence) of God/Supernature. You just can’t find any of God for all the same reasons that a thief can’t find a Bobby.
shizzleman8

@shizzleman8
Um, I don’t recall asking you about Steven Hawking. I was asking you for examples of you highlighting falsehoods in Potholer’s videos, and examples of the evidence you cited to back up your refutations. How strange that you respond by talking about someone else entirely, and with a noticeable absence of sources for your argument.
havstormer

@havstormer Your position is that yours is the only position it’s EVIDENT in your writing. You’re talking to @myheartsahome1 as IF they DON’T have a say unless they “pay attention” to your special pleading (one sided prejudicial positon).
A presentation of information becomes a special pleading with the introduction of a double standard or prejudice. You’re right and there’s no wiggle room then you’re PREJUDICED! You lose the moment you try to bring up your position. Rule 403 Federal Evid.

@shizzleman8
No, because I’m not saying that MHAH has no right to say anything unless he pays attention to me. I’m saying, he has no business taking issue with what I say, if he chooses to go around flagrantly misquoting me. He’s entirely free to say what he likes, but if he chooses to misrepresent what others say, he can expect them to answer back, and if they choose not to be polite about it, well he should be more careful in future. As indeed should you, because you keep doing the same thing.
havstormer

You wrote that I would have no chance against pothole or tinkerbell because THEY back up their statements with sources and references. Does everyone who backs up their statements this way all agree? Is it their exclusive proprietary method to refer to a source? Isn’t that just the same as me saying, God has been proven see dfpolis #15 video Scientific Proof of God; Evidence. < There that proves God, I said it and I backed it up with a DR! Do all people of sound minds agree? Yes?
What's the difference between quoting someone and taking what a peson says out of context?
shizzleman8

@shizzleman8
There isn't always a difference. Quoting someone can be done out of context, but it can also be done in context. The question is irrelevant anyway, because my beef with MHAH is that he keeps MISquoting me.
And if, in the highly unlilkely event that dfpolis' video proves unanswerable, you would still fail to sue Potholer and Thunderfoot in court, because it's only by highlighting this video subsequently that the supposed failings in their own claims came to light. Suing cannot be done on such a retroactive basis.
To show good sportsmanship, I'll watch the video as soon as I can find it.
havstormer

@havstormer Prior restraint has roundly been rejected by the Supreme Court of the USA. I'm just trying to help you understand the difference between a person who SAYS they're providing reliable sources and one who actually does in court frequently.
I've highlighted [Potholer54]'s erroneous and spurious form of presenting all of his information. He got the message.
shizzleman8 1 hour ago

@shizzleman8
WHERE did you highlight this to him? And where did he confirm that he "got the message"?
I'm well aware of the difference between providing reliable sources and merely saying they are. But if you want to sue Potholer, then in court you will have to prove beyond reasonable doubt that he knew in advance that his sources were bogus. How exactly do you propose to prove such a thing?

@havstormer After dfpolis #15 (you can link up with his channel from mine) try reading the page on wiki Contextomy (quote mining). It's the same with special pleading/double standard/one sided presentations and Potholer54/Thunderf00t. It becomes contextomy with the introduction of prejudice.
That's your only enemy friend. Prejudice/bias (a priori assumptions – in your case you're a naturalist, a belief system the same as atheism. It is the exact same thing.)
shizzleman8

@shizzleman8
Quote mining is not a new concept to me, thank you anyway. Nor is it, I fancy, to about ninety per cent of the world.
No I'm not a naturalist. Once again, you *think* you know so much about me, when I've told you so little.
And you *still* haven't offered any specific instances of Potholer or Thunderfoot deliberately lying, or evidence to demonstrate why your accusation should be upheld.
havstormer

@havstormer I don't know how it works there in the U.K. friend, not precisely anyway, but here in the U.S. we are The Litigious Society (book). We don't even have to feel right in our cause to file a lawsuit. In the U.S. state of Nebraska, State Senator Ernie Chambers filed a suit in 2008 against God, seeking a permanent injunction against God's harmful activities, as an effort to publicize the issue of public access to the court system. I'm just for putting an end to the hate.
shizzleman8

@shizzleman8
"I don't know how it works there in the U.K."
That is VERY obvious.

@havstomer Do you know why Lady Justice is blindfolded? So she can't see WHO deposits the most amount of evidence in her scales and tips the balance in their favor. Potholer54 and Thunderf00t are wielding Lady Justice's sword without ever being examined, they believe it's their right to hate and execute vengeance.
It's not right to hate is it? That's all the law is about is deciding who is hating who. I can accept that you don't or won't accept God, cool by me. I got no hate videos. See?
My family is banking/finance that's what put me into the law, and crime (my own). Law is basically the same all over the world. It boils down to a morality based on hate/love. If I can't afford the payments on my new car and skip town with it to do the best for my family, the law says that what I did to the finance company was wrong. I wasn't "loving" them I was
All of my comments prove the nature of reality. You and they are hating. All you wrote is that some times it is contextomy and sometimes it isn't, and now for about the 7th or 8th time, no it's been a lot more than that, I'll explain it to you again. Prejudice. Even if what you are saying or providing is technically correct if you're producing the evidence (trying to) in a prejudical manner or with hate you'll be the one who gets punished. Contextomy is "twisting" a person's words.
shizzleman8

@shizzleman8
Still patiently waiting for examples… Still resolutely refusing to be sidetracked by evasive attempts to talk round the question in flowery language…
havstormer

@havstormer
You have to be objective to win. I can't help someone by becoming emotionally involved in their drama. They both use emotive language, a logical fallacy. You don't win in law because of how sweet you speak (potholer/thuderfoot) but by the objective presentation of material, relevant and competent evidence.
They're only speaking sweetly to cover up the fact that they're wrong about all their science.
shizzleman8

@shizzleman8
For which you still haven't offered any *EXAMPLES*.
havstormer

@shizzleman8
Anyway, I've watched dfpolis #15, and if you really think that will give you a cat-in-hell's chance of suing anybody, your delusions are amazing. He holds up a pebble and proclaims it evidence of God, because the laws of physics and nature require a further law to sustain them, and so… well… God's the only thing he can think of off the top of his head that would meet the task. (Never mind that his argument that laws require more laws is unsupported.)
So the 'evidence' is badly flimsy. It's his hopeful guess, one that has an inherent contradiction. He insists that the laws of physics and nature require a further law to sustain them, because if they sustain themselves they're on a path of infinite regression. But the external law he cites would be the same. What would sustain this 'law-governing-laws'? Why, only another law governing the 'law-governing-laws' of course. But what would sustain that law? Why another… oh you get the idea.
dfpolis isn't saying anything new, or anything that wasn't debunked decades ago. Since time immemorial theists have answered the question, "What evidence is there that a God created the world?" with, "Well the world is there, isn't it?" Which of course is just base circular reasoning.
A priori assumptions are more a problem for you than me. You clearly watched that vid first time willing yourself to believe what it said. The slightest skepticism at all would lead you to see its logic flaws.
In summary, if that is your source, then your lawsuit becomes an empty case of one-man's-word-against-another­. Irrespective of which man is actually right about God, (and believe me, Potholer's sources are far, far stronger) you would not win that case, because your allegation that he has deliberately falsified his videos will have nothing to support it.
havstormer

@havstormer You don't think anything they do or say is even a violation of a YouTube community guideline regarding respect, there's no amount of technical evidence I can provide to you that will sway you.
Potholer54 took down his crocoduck award that's "his" material fact. Maybe it had nothing to do with anything I wrote, but for whatever his reasons I applauded him. In fact it was several days ago now and I haven't posted anything since. Intentional infliction of emotional distress. Happy?
shizzleman8

@shizzleman8
"There's no amount of technical evidence I can provide to you that will sway you."
You haven't tried even one piece so far.
Potholer decided to suspend the GCs because there were racial arguments breaking out on his forum. It had absolutely nothing to do with you, nor anything to do with him being made to feel like a bully. Now who's being way out of context?

@shizzleman8
Oh I agree Thunderfoot hates religion, no two ways about that, and I agree he oversteps the mark. Potholer seems more respectful and tolerant of it. He just doesn't tolerate religious propaganda that blatantly misrepresents the discoveries of science, and he mocks that sort of thing when it leads theists to say really idiotic things e.g. "dinosaurs died out because their nostrils caught fire." If you want to call that 'hatred', it says more about you than it does about him.
havstormer

@havstormer
I don't want to talk to you about God. I'm just really tired of the hate and the superiority complex of people who can't feel good about themselves unless they put down people they disagree with. If you were right then why all the inflamatory insulting rhetoric and videos. Atheists don't behave like any educator I've had. I guess I've had the best education money can buy, but when I was young I went to public school and none of the teachers put anyone down for not knowing something. Bye
shizzleman8

@shizzleman8
But *you* have been putting down people you disagree with. You just try to dismiss everything Potholer54 and Thunderfoot say by labelling it 'hatred' and 'bullying', without really highlighting anything in particular that they've done wrong. That makes it an unsupported accusation, potentially a smear.
So you can add hypocrisy to your long list of logical errors and unsubstantiated claims. If your religion is right, you truly are going to Hell, for all the false witness you bear.
By the way, if you don't want to talk to me about a God, why did you ask me to watch a video that supposedly provides evidence of the existence of… well… God?
Such volatile moods you must have…
havstormer

@havstormer You're twisting by accusing me of being volatile. I'm not the least bit emotional right now. I got a huge Pyrenean Mastiff, Cinnamon, asleep at my legs up on my bed. I'm about to head out for the best food money can buy. Do you think a person whose Dad was an admiral, owned 27 finance companies and I walk 2 huge dogs at the same time for PAY ever has a probelm in the world?. I just got a dividend check from the State of California. I'm flush with money and assets. I know how to win.
shizzleman8

@shizzleman8
"You're twisting by accusing me of bein volatile."
It was a joke, shizzleman. Stop taking yourself so damn seriously.
"Do you think a person whose Dad was an admiral, owned 27 finance companies and I walk 2 huge dogs at the same time for PAY ever has a probelm in the world?. I just got a dividend check from the State of California. I'm flush with money and assets. I know how to win. "
Yeah well, the super-rich and spoiled tend to be shorn from reality.
(Just another joke! Chill!)
havstormer

@shizzleman8
"They label what they're doing as prejudice."
That statement doesn't make any sense.
"If you want to teach science get a degree"
Not sure, but I think Potholer already has one. Dunno about Thunderfoot, but then he doesn't try to teach science that often anyway.
"Don't you have the same exact knolwedge you did before?"
No.
"you feel better about yourself when putting down people you hate!"
Like you? Not really. I'm contemptuous because of the stupid things you've said. Hate? No.

@havstormer I was making a point about authoritative references, and how they only provide one sided arguments. I don't want you or them on my side, I just don't like all the vicious emotional attacks in the name of science and advancing knowledge. I'm sure you have 10,000 more ways to justify your hating people you disagree with, I would rather sue for peace.
shizzleman8

@shizzleman8
"I was making a point about authoritative references, and how they only provide one sided arguments."
And laymen's arguments never do that?
I think this is the most hypocritical remark you've made yet by the way. Earlier you told me you had to be right about the putative lawsuit because you've worked in law for so many years, making you an authority, and yet when anyone else is an authority who is inconvenient to your viewpoint, he must offer a one-sided argument. Double-standard.
havstormer

@havstormer
I can prove everything I write and all my personal claims as well. Ergonmover made me provide a dozen different resources for all my information and finally called my attorneys Reid & Hellyer then went right back to calling me a liar or damnable or some such bullshit. Why do you think I'm the only one who has the time, will and patience to talk to atheists you preach only hate? I can take it! I gave out my address so many times until no one showed up to challenge me.
shizzleman8

@shizzleman8
"I can prove everything I write and all my personal claims as well."
And yet you don't! Despite my repeated requests for you to do so. The only source you've cited at all was a video I was able to dismantle and debunk in five minutes, and I don't even see myself as any kind of science expert. You haven't proven anything, and yet you boast that you can prove *everything* you say.
So many implausible claims, shizzleman8. Almost all of them sound like self-deluding bluffs.
havstormer

@havstormer
Dawkins and atheists claim you represent 34% of the USA (atheists) but can't rally any number of the hundred and fifty THOUSAND of you who live in my town to bring whatever it is you got for me online at me in person.
I'd tell you what I really think of you, but I'm a nice guy. I've been to war, and I know how valuable my life is, but if I lived my life as cowardly as atheists live theirs I'd kill myself.
shizzleman8

@shizzleman8
"if I lived my life as cowardly as atheists live theirs I'd kill myself."
And you expect anyone to believe, after a wildly-generalised and abusive slur like that, that your chief motivation for this argument isn't hatred?
In any event, I don't really give a damn about headcounts. No matter how enormous the number of people are swayed into believing something, it won't make it true. And given most people in the USA are born to a Christian upbringing and so start out as Christians by default before they've had a chance to think about it, it's not really a fair measure anyway, is it?
Maybe the atheists in your town don't bother arguing with you because they just don't think you matter enough.
havstormer

Let’s start at the beginning shall we? They could hardly have made Matt Smith’s double more obvious, during the moment when the ‘Ganger Doctor is grabbing the original Doctor by the lapels, without dying his hair bright ginger. The back of the double’s head is almost completely different from Smith’s. For heaven’s sake, BBC Wales, try a bit harder will you?

To the episode itself, hmm hmm. I was extremely impressed with it on first viewing, and indeed on subsequent sittings it still has points going for it. But I have to say that the flaws in it become a lot more noticeable too. In particular, The Almost People displays an occasional tendency to throw in a sudden plot-twist, as if to say, “Hah! Bet you weren’t expecting that, were you?” No, we certainly weren’t, chiefly because one or two of the twists stop the story making any sense.

The main one is the revelation that the Doctor and his duplicate swapped places. It shames Amy for her prejudices in a delicious manner, but it also suddenly makes the prior behaviour of the other ‘Gangers very difficult to fathom. They invite what they think is the Doctor’s ‘Ganger to join them. They weren’t there when the Doctor’s duplicate first showed up, so the only way they could realise he might have been a ‘Ganger is if they could in some way ‘sense’ something about him, almost on a genetic level. But if it then turns out that he isn’t the ‘Ganger after all, but the original, well where did they get the idea from? And how do they manage to make exactly the same mistake Amy was making all along? And how can the original Doctor sense the torment of the Flesh more keenly than the ‘Ganger can?

I know he’s never going to challenge the leader-board on Mastermind, but this episode really does Rory no favours at all. It’s nice to see him getting a pro-active role for the first time in a long while, but in the event, the activities he gets make him look like a love-sick cretin. How much of a fool does he have to be to go along with everything Jennifer’s ‘Ganger tells him? Providing muscle to help turn the wheel is one thing, but does it really never cross his mind to ask why she needs him to place his hand on the palm-reader? Not realising how easy it would be for the Flesh to emulate a burn is also pretty thick. I’m sorry, like I say, Rory’s no intellectual heavyweight, but he’s not that stupid.

Some of the guest-acting is, again, terrible. Sarah Smart in particular, who was dodgy enough in the first episode, is just awful when playing Jennifer’s ‘Ganger. The face she pulls before she attacks Buzzer looks so over-the-top it’s embarrassing, while the moment when she snaps her fingers, points, and tells the Doctor to “Join the Revolution” is so corny and stagey I winced. Her whole ‘descent-into-revenge-driven-psycho’ arc is not at all believable. Raquel Cassidy is again wooden as both incarnations of Cleaves, although her performance is mitigated somewhat by how inconsistently her role is characterised in the script. She was a cold-blooded murderer at the end of the previous episode, ruthlessly gunning down one of the ‘Gangers for no reason at all bar her own paranoia. This detail seems to be totally overlooked and forgotten in episode 2, as she and her ‘Ganger almost take on the role of reluctant warriors trying to keep the conflict from getting any further out of hand. But then the original still instructs Buzzer to attack (what she thinks is) the Doctor’s ‘Ganger, and the duplicate still invites the Doctor to change sides with talk of “you’re one of us”. Indeed, the script can never make up its mind whether Cleaves is supposed to be sympathetic or cynical. The male guests are also uninspired – Marshall Lancaster is a complete plank as Buzzer – except again Mark Bonnar is quite impressive when he has fatherly moments to act out.

The regulars on the other hand produce perhaps their best work of the year to date. Matt Smith is tremendous in a dual role that calls on him to portray many characteristics. The torment of the Doctor’s ‘Ganger as it struggles with past-regenerations interfering with his present form is superb. Look closely at his eyes while he’s at the throat of the original, and the anguish and terror will make you flinch, right up there with the very best eye-work that Karen Gillan has done. Smith does the quirky, wittering eccentricity of the Doctor with his usual aplomb, and it makes appearing alongside himself very engaging where it might easily have been irritating. He also shows great hurt and resentment at Amy’s apparent rejection of the ‘Ganger, and desperation and anger in the scene when he nearly attacks her; a moment disturbingly reminiscent of the Sixth Doctor trying to throttle Peri. At the end, when ordering Rory to stand away from Amy, his authority is both fierce and sinister. Time and again, Karen Gillan once more shows her great talent for portraying fear, but reveals equal skill for playing a stubborn bigot. Arthur Darvill maintains his usual fine standard, especially in the scene when he confronts Jennifer’s ‘Ganger about tricking him, though by now he may be forgiven if he feels his efforts are wasted on scripts that give him so little reward.

This episode really is swimming in superfluous backward references. “Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow,” from Jon Pertwee. “Would you like a jelly baby?” from Tom Baker (that scene is very reminiscent of Peter Davison’s debut in Castrovalva, when the Fifth Doctor went around impersonating his earlier selves). “No let it go, we’ve-we’ve moved on!!!” he screams in a noticeable parody of David Tennant. “Where’s my Daddy?” asks Adam, loudly echoing, “Are you my mummy?” The Doctor is “John Smith”. The TARDIS is “reliable” and “sexy” once more. Yes, I share the continuity thrill other long-time viewers get, but I still don’t think it’s a good idea for the series to play that card so strongly. The more continuity-dependent the series becomes, the more danger there is of it alienating people who have never seen older stories. (Should just mention that at a lot of moments in this episode, Matt Smith really does look like Peter Davison at his dazed best. Keep an eye out for them.)

The ending is not too clever. Cleaves again has a fundamental personality change and turns into a hardcore pacifist again to scupper Jennifer-‘Ganger’s plans. Exactly how Jennifer-‘Ganger turns into the giant animal isn’t very clear; if she’s able to do that, why didn’t she just do so hours earlier? The TARDIS’ energy ‘just happens’ to be exactly what is needed to make the ‘Gangers become real people, and the Doctor ‘just happens’ to have a cure for blood-clots on the brain tucked away in the TARDIS console? Handy. (Not that the blood clot really has any significant role to play in the story.)

Re-set button city. Give me a break…

But the story is not a write-off by any means. It has many good and valid things to say about the twin follies of prejudice and paranoia, as well as their causes and how inseparable they are. And the startling ending has more than a tinge of clever irony to it, given that Amy, who has spent most of the episode giving one of the Doctors the cold shoulder for supposedly being a ‘Ganger, turns out herself to be a ‘Ganger. When exactly did Amy become duplicated? Where is the original and when did she become cut off from Rory and the Doctor? Might it even have been before she met the Doctor? (It must have been before meeting the Silence as that was when she first saw the Eye-patch lady.) The ominous, bleak tones of the season are again sustained and enhanced by the gloomy, cold visuals, and the chilling atmosphere of danger and unsure perceptions started in The Doctor’s Wife has been carried over. The setting of a castle for a factory is very neat for adding to the ‘haunted house’ scenario, and there is a consistent undercurrent of foreboding. In short, even if it’s not all that intelligent, it remains genuinely dark and scary, and it always resists the option to be wilfully silly. Its most powerful redeeming feature is that it tries to be a drama, and largely succeeds in doing so. A flawed drama, perhaps, but exciting and never a farce.

The episode also gets fresh points for demonstrating this season’s willingness to break formula. In previous seasons of NuWho, the story arc, such as it is, has usually been made up of a long string of repeated references thrown into most episodes, none of which have ever actually developed or explored the idea at its heart in any detail. Furthermore, the string has only ever culminated at the end of the season. In this case, the string of hints has culminated at the midway point of the season instead, which is another breath of fresh air.

In the end unfortunately, a little like The Doctor’s Wife, the episode is far too deeply flawed for me to rate it higher than a 6 out of 10, even though I can’t deny that I would have liked to. The two-parter averages out at a respectable 7.

The only one that really jarred was the Doctor’s bloody awful pretence of doing a northern accent. It was ill-timed, served no purpose other than to slow down the storyline at a critical moment, and stands at stark odds with the Tenth Doctor’s equally tiresome “Don’t-do-that-no-seriously-don’t-do-that!” stance when his companions tried to mimic other accents. This is a shame, as it completely ruined a well-developed moment of friction and confrontation between the humans and their doppelgangers.

The scenario is not madly interesting in itself. Duplicate people wanting their freedom, and even to replace the originals, has been a staple of sci-fi and horror for so long it amounts to a cliché. Even the considerable effort that the script goes to to make the ‘Gangers sympathetic victims rather than insidious monsters is hardly new. But it all happens in such a well-cooked atmosphere of unease and mutual suspicion that it seems not to matter very much.

Jennifer introduces an angle that had genuinely not occurred to me until this point, which is that a threat to Amy and Rory’s marriage might come from the opposite direction to the ones that have emerged to this point. Up until now, Rory has been the one feeling threatened, inadequate, fighting a torrid but successful battle to keep the heart of the girl of his dreams, whose head had been turned more than once. Now Rory is the one who finds a new object of affection in the shape of a vulnerable girl who takes an immediate shine to him. Although Amy makes commendable efforts not to become jealous when she sees him comforting Jennifer, she is still visibly shaken and hurt by the sight. That Rory quickly becomes very protective toward the replicate-Jennifer, and even taking enormous risks to help her, suggests that his head has now been turned as well.

None of this is to say that Jennifer is an interesting character. On the contrary, she is the kind of dreary, helpless-female-Dr-Who-character that Jo Grant and Peri Brown used to epitomise in different ways; confused by everything around her, sporadically inassertive, all wrapped up in whiny self-pity, and always in need of help and comfort from the big male. Given her greater drive and authority, I’d argue the duplicate Jennifer is more interesting and worthy of greater respect.

The duplicates might show evidence of sharing the memories of the originals, but it’s noticeable that they don’t necessarily share all the same personality traits. As  I say, Jennifer’s duplicate is more assertive and aggressive, more authoritative. Cleaves’ duplicate appears more peaceable and less bigoted or arrogant than the original. Buzzer’s duplicate seems less clumsy but more emotionally vulnerable. With this in mind, while the ‘Gangers can fairly claim they have a right to life, their claim to being the people they are duplicated from is not true. Biologically and genetically they may make such a claim, but philosophically they are different people.

This episode reverses the trend of The Doctor’s Wife, in that the performances from the regulars are largely excellent, whereas the guest actors are a bit too soap-ish and folksy. Sarah Smart, who seems to have a resemblance to Janet Ellis, starts poorly, but improves without ever rising to real heights. Raquel Cassidy is a bit too self-consciously stony-hearted as Cleaves, perhaps underlining that the character isn’t anything very meaty (the stereotype of the arrogant, reckless, “no-one-may-question-me” corporate-scientist-leader), and Marshall Lancaster seems unsure about how to play Buzzer, as his sneezing fits appear to be the only characteristic to get hold of. Mark Bonnar is predictably good as Jimmy, but then he also has a stronger role to play i.e. his characters are the ones who find a bond of common ground.

Matt Smith is much better here than in his misfortunate detour into emo-ham in The Doctor’s Wife. His acting as the ‘Ganger Doctor seemed exceptionally sinister without being in any way different from the Doctor’s usual behaviour, which is a neat trick if you can do it. Karen Gillan does what she does best (facial acting to die for), and Arthur Darvill once again shows his real versatility, varying between the clumsy, inassertive follower and a protective, confident near-rebel, without any impression of inconsistency.

It’s an interesting rather than thrilling cliffhanger, but it’s certainly engaging enough to demand the audience keep watching. But at the same time, I do get the worrying impression that most of the plot-life has already been used up, and so there’s a real danger that part two will be yet another let-down. I hope not of course, but I fear there’ll be a lot of treading-of-water in part 2.

Promising, if not madly deep or original, and full of dark atmosphere and refreshingly little silliness.  I’ll give it an 8 out of 10, though not by much.

Before I begin properly, I’m going to admit with unashamed cheeriness that I’m a lifelong Liverpool supporter, and so my motivation for writing this essay is hardly impartial. But after a week of the predictable, insecure, insufferable, jeering gloats from across Greater Manchester, I feel a polite retort is overdue.

To those of you who don’t understand what I’m talking about, it’s that game played on grass, with a round ball roughly the size of a human head. And you can’t use your hands to control it. You with me, yeah? Good. More specifically, on May 14th 2011, the game of Professional Association Football in England supposedly reached a major turning point in its history. From 1973 to 1992, Liverpool Football Club had a period of unprecedented domination of the English game. During that spell they were the Champions eleven times (bringing their grand total of Championships in its then-one hundred year history to, putatively, eighteen), the FA Cup four times (bringing their total at the time to five), the League Cup four times, the UEFA Cup twice, and the greatest prize of all, the European Champions’ Cup, four times. This era established Liverpool as by far the most successful club in English football, at the time.

But heading into the mid-1990’s, Liverpool’s team went into a steep decline, and success became much more sporadic, at exactly the time that one of its most hated rivals, Manchester United Football Club (less than forty miles away) rose to pre-eminence. From 1993 to 2011, Manchester United won the Championship twelve times, bringing the club’s grand total of Championships in its even longer history to nineteen. It has also won the FA Cup eleven times (Liverpool’s modern total is seven), the League Cup three times, (again, Liverpool’s present total has reached seven), the European Champions’ Cup three times (Liverpool have won it five times in all), one European Cup Winners’ Cup (Liverpool never won that, but they have won the UEFA Cup three times, which United have never won at all), and one World Club Championship (again, Liverpool have never won that, although it’s highly debatable whether it’s really an important trophy).

All-in-all, the gap between the two clubs’ success rates has narrowed away completely over the last twenty years, and with United now holding more Championships of England, they have claim to be the most successful club in League football.

Having given them a week to get the utterly predictable insufferable taunts out of their insecure little central nervous systems, I now have some bad news for United fans. Their heroes have not surpassed Liverpool’s total number of League titles yet. I strongly suspect they will do so next year, as the current standard of competition against them is pretty low, but nonetheless they haven’t done it yet. They have merely drawn level. This is because the Championship Liverpool won in 1990 was not the club’s eighteenth, as is generally believed. It was in fact, the club’s nineteenth Championship.

To explain; -

Most football fans in England are aware of how the history of Liverpool Football Club began. In 1878, Merseyside’s oldest surviving professional football club was founded as St. Domingo’s FC, named after its local parish in the Liverpool district of Everton. A year later, sure enough, the club was renamed Everton Football Club. After playing its home games at Priory Road for the first five years of its existence, Everton eventually re-settled at a large ground on Anfield Road, on the south-east corner of Stanley Park, in 1884. The ground was let to the club by a landowner called John Orrell.

The President of the board at Everton Football Club was a local merchant by the name of John Houlding. (He was sometimes nicknamed locally as ‘King John Of Everton’, which seems an amazing irony in hindsight.) Houlding eventually purchased Anfield from Orrell for £6,000, and, somewhat perversely, in effect started renting the ground out to himself on behalf of the club. This meant that Everton was now renting the ground from its own chairman, and so a disproportionate share of the club’s gate receipts was being allocated to Houlding rather than to the club as a whole. Worse, Houlding kept increasing the rent at the start of each season. By 1889, the club was paying double what it had been paying when it first moved to Anfield just five years earlier. The rest of the board, unsurprisingly, were very unhappy about this. They were also getting concerned about Houlding’s insistence on selling and promoting ales from his own brewery at the ground; many on the board were Methodists and objected to what they called ‘intemperance’.

Over the next several years, the rift behind the scenes at Everton became more entrenched and bitter. In 1892, matters came to a head when most of the staff at the club, including all the players and most of the board-members, broke away. They moved across Stanley Park to a new ground called Goodison Park, and set up shop there, and it has been Everton’s home ever since. This left Houlding and his handful of remaining colleagues with an empty stadium. Houlding’s response was simply to build a new team to play at Anfield. This team played under the new banner of Liverpool Football Club.

That, at least, is the official story, and it’s accurate as far as it goes. But what it leads people to assume is that Everton is the original club established in 1878 (as is even proclaimed on Everton’s own club badge), and that Liverpool is the newer club established in 1892. It makes sense. The team playing at Anfield before the split was called Everton, the team playing at Goodison after the split was called Everton, and was composed of almost exactly the same players and staff.

The truth however is not nearly as straightforward as that. What’s not entirely clear is exactly which club did set up shop at Goodison Park in 1892, and which one resumed activities at Anfield. Which one was the new club, and which was the original? As I say, at first glance it appears very obvious, but look closely at the details of what happened, and suddenly the picture changes.

What needs to be kept in mind was that John Houlding was the President of the club before the split. And the split occurred in protest against him, so, as stands to reason, he was one of the few who didn’t leave. The breakaway group, despite being far greater in number and having the players on its side, did not ever have control of the club, Houlding himself had that. Realising that the split was imminent and that there was little he could to prevent it, Houlding even went as far, in March 1892, as to make his ownership of Everton official in law, registering the name Everton Football Club & Athletic Grounds Ltd with the Board Of Trade. At that point, he had assumed the breakaway group would be forced to get a new name, and possibly even have to join the Lancashire League for their first season, while Houlding’s own faction would, as the de facto club, retain membership of the Football League.

When the ‘rebel Evertonians’ did move to Goodison Park a few weeks later, in order to sell tickets legally to the public for their games, they had to set up a formal new company, with a new board and officials, and register with the Board Of Trade. Yes, they expected to retain the name of the club they had just left, but so did Houlding’s faction back at Anfield. For some weeks, it was very uncertain which club was Everton, and which was going to have to find a new name.

The Football Association eventually intervened. Correctly judging that the status of Everton Football Club was achieved on the field of play, they ruled that the club that had the players on its side should retain the name, and also should retain the position they had earned in the Football League. Therefore, although it was the newer company, the breakaway faction took up the heritage and name of Everton Football Club, and also were allowed to continue playing in the Football League. But just because they held the old name and privileges, it didn’t mean the Goodison Park organisation was the same club. Even retaining the same players wasn’t enough for that.

Houlding was understandably disappointed to lose that part of the argument, but decided to press ahead with creating his new team. In the summer that year, he applied to the Board Of Trade, not to establish a new club, but to change the licensed name of the club he already had. The new name he gave it was Liverpool Football Club & Athletic Grounds Ltd. In law therefore, Liverpool FC was not born in 1892, it was simply rebranded, and the old brand it had possessed since 1879 was passed to a new club that had just started trading on the other side of Stanley Park. Liverpool was accepted into the Lancashire League that year, as it began the job of working its way towards re-entering the Football League. Meanwhile, the newly-established Everton Football Club, now in residence at Goodison Park, took up football at a national level.

The added complication in all this is that Merseyside saw its first Football League Championship in 1891, when Everton won the title. This was fully a year before the split at the club became permanent. The position of the Football League and the Football Association ever since has always been that the Everton Football Club who now play their home games at Goodison Park is the club that won that Championship. But that club didn’t exist back then; they weren’t registered as a company until a year later. The Everton team that won the Championship were playing at Anfield Road, and more importantly, they won it while playing under the administration of John Houlding. He never relinquished control of the club established at Anfield. There was never a time during his ownership of Anfield that there wasn’t a football club there. Most of the board might have left, and the team might have moved with them, but the club remained where it was, and it retained the license that Houlding had registered beforehand. The breakaway faction, within the law, had recognisably set up a new club instead. Houlding’s faction was the club that the Everton team had been playing for when they won the Championship (and had ‘King John’ had his way, his club would even have retained its identity as Everton – unthinkable though that may seem today).

So the question this raises is, which of the modern clubs, Everton or Liverpool, holds that original title for 1891? The team was undoubtedly Everton. But the club was what became Liverpool. And so, although it’s never done so, even in Houlding’s own time, Liverpool Football Club has a very strong claim over the 1891 title. And the thing is, that title is not usually counted when assessing Liverpool’s record of success. When counting it as well, Liverpool Football Club’s revised total of Championships is not eighteen, but nineteen. And so that means that last week, Manchester United merely caught up with Liverpool, they did not overtake them.

But I’m not being vindictive when I say that (well, not very). That United have taken less than twenty years to wipe out the enormous gulf there had been in Liverpool’s favour is some achievement, and, even with the advantage it has always had in resources, even during Liverpool’s heyday, Manchester United deserves enormous congratulation for that. And I say again, I have little doubt that United will move ahead for real very soon, as the only teams in the Premier League who can challenge them are Chelsea (too old and tired), Arsenal (too soft), and Manchester City (too raw). But it is worth setting the record straight.

Oh, and don’t forget the small matter of eight European trophies…

Well. Given how twee the title sounds, this episode was incredibly dark at times. The premise was completely bananas of course, in fact one of the more fairy-tale-like episodes in feel and tone since the production changeover, and it still had its share of too-pleased-with-itself dialogue. But in any case, it was dark, dark, dark! We should expect no different from Neil Gaiman, the man who gave us the Sandman comic series. But, given his impressive CV, should we have expected something better? Despite enjoying the episode, I’d have to say the answer to that is yes.

It’s by no means a terrible episode. It’s frequently chilling, imaginative and thought-provoking. But it’s also drearily sentimental, continuity-dependent (albeit in a subtle manner), pseudo-scientific in a very “there’s-no-difference-between-technobabble-and-real-science” kind of way, clumsily-articulated, and sporadically silly. In other words, it’s custom-built NuWho. And just like last year’s misfire by RIchard Curtis, it seems an odd description to apply to it, given that we’re talking about a script by a world-class guest-writer. Shouldn’t formula be the first thing that gets abandoned in those circumstances?

The story idea is a good one, but the execution is wobbly. For a start, the idea of the TARDIS actually possessing an immortal soul of some kind is an unwanted revisit to the messianic/sorcery buggerations of the RT Davies era. For another thing, the technobabble, used as a substitute for an explanation of how the TARDIS was transferred into Idris, is some of the most appalling, meaningless waffle that the series has ever been guilty of, worse even than the Doctor’s pseudo-mathematical gibberish to Adric when trying to repair the chameleon circuit in Logopolis. (And on that occasion, at least the babble wasn’t something that the plot was dependent on.)

The continuity references are not exactly hammered over our heads, and crucially the audience probably doesn’t need to recognise them to understand the story. But even so there are quite a few in there. Mentions of different control rooms aboard the TARDIS (firmly established by the Fourth Doctor during his times with Sarah Jane and Leela), and actual portrayals of older control rooms (the walls of a 70’s-style TARDIS surrounding the Doctor’s makeshift console, as well as a brief return to the control room of the Ninth and Tenth Doctors) might have been confusing to younger viewers, while a not-altogether-necessary appearance by an Ood, and witterings about getting rid of the swimming pool (another link back to the Fourth Doctor’s time, as well as Matt Smith’s debut) seem a little forced as well. Also referencing Smith’s debut is another mention of fish fingers.

Performances are notably better from the guests than the regulars. Suranne Jones is absolutely excellent, her performance as Idris suspiciously reminiscent of (the almost-identically-named) Sidriss from Knightmare. She also has very similar eyes. But original or not, the confused, alarming eccentricities of the character are portrayed with exactly the kind of nervous energy needed. Michael Sheen as the House, sounding and acting much like the Justice Computer in the Red Dwarf episode Justice, manages to be both sinister and threatening, yet uncertain of himself and feckless, a difficult trick. Auntie and Uncle are half-amusing bit-parts, competently performed. By contrast, this is one of Matt Smith’s worst performances so far. Very stagey, over-excited, much too loud over and over, and shedding gratuitous tears aplenty at the end. With his repeated compulsion early on to declare that, “That’s impossible!!!!” it really does feel like the episode was written for David Tennant, and Smith appears to give in to that. Arthur Darvill and Karen Gillan do rather better, largely because Rory and Amy aren’t given much opportunity to be silly, seeing all the really scary stuff in the story happens to them, but even so, they do get a bit stagey and ‘lay-it-on-with-a-trowel’ sentimental in the later stages as well.

Rory really is being reduced to the Arthur Dent of the series. His main role seems to have become standing around and letting bad things happen to him, so that Amy has something to burst into tears about. The proactive, assertive version who had been emerging recently didn’t last. Although he did well with his, “Killing us quickly wouldn’t be any fun” line. Pity about the follow-up PE teacher reference. Silly and ill-timed.

Indeed, ill-timed silliness gets in the way quite a bit, which is another same-old-story. “Look at that! What could possibly go wrong?” *A PIECE OF THE MACHINE FALLS OFF WITH A PATHETIC CLUUNKING NOISE* is an ancient joke that could’ve been written in HG Wells’ time. It’s also silly. “Actually… I feel fine…” *DROPS DEAD* is a joke from the Palaeolithic era of comedy, painfully similar to Sir Talbot Buxomley’s death in Blackadder The Third. Even if it wasn’t familiar, it’s silly. “I think you call me… sexy,” irritates. Because it’s silly. The Doctor and Idris bickering like a married couple as they try to build a new TARDIS could have been lifted from a number of the Doctor’s conversations with River Song, or even from Mr & Mrs Smith. And again, it’s just silly. Standing around applauding the worthy opponent is silly. “I’ve got mail!!!” Silly, silly, SILLY!

STOP I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-IIIIITTTTTTTTT!!!!!

When is the modern series going to learn to stop ruining the drama of a story with badly-timed set-piece gags or self-conscious quips? Some stories do not need, or benefit from, being zany or whacky, and this was one of them.

And so much sorcery-babble is needed to carry the plot; the makeshift console powered by a kiss from Idris, and able to keep her and the Doctor breathing in space, despite the mini-TARDIS lacking a couple of walls. Telepathic security systems. The soul of the TARDIS just ‘phases’ back into the console, and the House is invisibly ‘dispersed’. Magic re-set button time again.

The plot resolution is not well-written at all in fact. At a crucial stage of the story, we have a familiar moment of the villain stopping to talk to the Doctor when he’s perfectly placed just to kill him. “Why should it matter to me where you die?” Why should you stop to ask that question at all? Why not just kill him and speculate about the options some other time? No? You want to carry on talking to him. To learn… what? Um, not much it seems. “Enough!” thunders the House. “That is enough!” Oh, so you don’t want to talk to the Doctor after all? Well why don’t you silence him by killing him then? Nope, you’re going to carry on talking to him anyway. O-… kaaaay… But I thought you just said that was enough?

This is followed by one of those verbose, unnatural info-dump speeches by the Doctor for the benefit of the audience. Very clumsy.

But it’s by no means all bad news. The darker, scarier edge introduced this season is maintained, in fact enhanced, with the sequences when Amy and Rory are trapped by time anomalies in the TARDIS corridors being unusually brutal and chilling for 6:30 on a Saturday night – all the more so, given all they’re doing for the most part is the timeless exercise of “running down corridors that all look the same”. (By the way, aren’t the hexagonal corridors of the TARDIS very reminiscent of the interior of the Liberator in Blake’s 7?) The mind-warping tricks the House plays on them are very surreal and unsettling, The Game Of Rassilon from The Five Doctors, only done right. The ‘Kill Amy’ graffiti on the walls is startling, and the sequences are filmed with real skill and flair. In style and impact, the story has strong tones of the no-holds-barred approach to horror that the series had back when Bob Holmes was script editor.

The plot may be disjointed and poorly-connected, but as a scenario, it is one of the more sophisticated ideas we’ve seen in some time, at least psychologically. Entertainment for the House only ever takes the form of ‘it’s-nothing-personal’ cruelty, hence the fear and torment Amy and Rory experience being little different to the agonies of Auntie and Uncle. The notion of people being assembled from the body parts of dismembered Time-Lords is enough to make the audience’s skin crawl – yes, that’s definitely an endorsement. And the TARDIS being given an outlet for its persona has considerable charm. It might have been more interesting if the story had kept us guessing a little longer before revealing to us who Idris really is.

The actual personality of Idris makes for easily one of the most interesting and sympathetic guests the series has had in years; quirky, jumpy, almost multiple personalities constantly catching each other by surprise with jumbled, confused words of wisdom. “Biting’s… like kissing, only there’s a winner” is a nice line, quirky and slightly macabre rather than whacky. “Are all people like this… so much bigger on the inside?” is one of the best self-referencing ironies Doctor Who has managed in a long while.

The Doctor’s decision to send Amy and Rory back to the TARDIS on a wild goose chase says a lot about his superiority complex. He clearly feels as keenly as ever that humans are beneath the business of Time-Lords. How arrogant he remains.

Some of the sets and effects are outstanding. The griminess, the broken landscape, the wreckage, and the overpowering, dark gloominess of the environment all really contribute to the sinister, doom-laden atmosphere. Also, fairness to Murray Gold, his music score was generally less over-cooked than usual, but I still think he would have been better-advised to keep the music quieter and more sombre for longer.

The Doctor’s Wife is therefore one of those episodes where, when it’s good, it’s very good, but when it’s not, it’s very much not. It is perhaps the most original and imaginative episode of the current season, and as chilling as any of them. The potential in it is there for all to see. However, the suffocating sentimentality of the ending does it no favours, the clumsy methods of conveying information are jarring, the occasional silliness undermines the main strengths on offer i.e. the dark atmosphere and an intriguing guest character, and the plot is incoherent and advanced mainly by contrivance. These are all weaknesses that it is very difficult to see past, and that is why ultimately the episode promises more than it delivers. Given who wrote it, it has to be seen as a disappointment, albeit a worthy one.

Bottom line, 6 out of 10. I wouldn’t say yet that we’re in another slump as we head into mid-season, but the standard is gradually and recognisably declining.

Okay, fair’s fair. Given I feared this would be a shabby retread of Pirates Of The Caribbean, this wasn’t too similar at all. It was still not quite up to the standard of last week’s fare, but the series has at least managed to keep itself in the same kind of street, in sharp contrast with the same stage a year ago (the childish nonsense of Victory Of The Daleks).

Having said that, there still was a substantial amount that was lifted from Walt Disney. Amy was shamelessly dressed up as Elizabeth-Swann-as-Pirate-King, and the opening shot of the pirates in the jollyboat was an exact clone of a shot in The Curse Of The Black Pearl, just before the pirates’ closing battle with the Royal Navy. Also, the son who idolises his mariner-father and then finds great trouble accepting the reality of him being a pirate, is almost a carbon-copy lift from Will Turner’s early story.

There are other details that feel a bit too familiar for comfort, but borrowed from elsewhere. The siren is an exotic, beautiful apparition that sings hollering, echoey songs across the sky, which gives it a more-than-passing resemblance to Abigail – Kathryn Jenkins – in A Christmas Carol. The Medic-as-hologram is a very similar idea to the bald, griping character from Star Trek. (No I don’t mean Picard.) And even the idea of the siren gathering up injured people because of its simple-minded AI innocence does have a faint echo of the androids trying to repair their ship in The Girl In The Fireplace.

One or two details perhaps could do with clearing up too. In particular, how exactly do reflective surfaces constitute a gateway between dimensions? How is the siren able to sense injuries suffered by people in another dimension? Why does a black spot appear on people’s hands when they suffer a wound? Especially if it doesn’t appear on them when they get ill, but the siren still collects them?

So it’s an episode with stolen ideas and plot-holes, but even so, it’s good stuff. Avoiding the cliché of making a pirate story all about hunting for buried treasure was a good move (although treasure did still play a small but key role in the plot), and the discovery that the siren was benign all along was a nice twist, even though I did have my suspicions quite early on that everyone had been wrongly prejudging it.

Apart from the aforementioned resemblance Toby had to Orlando Bloom’s naive William, the characterisation turned out not to be derived from Pirates Of The Caribbean much at all, with Henry Avery quite an interesting, if under-explored, personality. He appeared exhausted with his life as a pirate, and torn by, on the one hand, the demands of his own avarice, and on the other, concerns for his estranged family. The story really could, and perhaps should, have given him more to do than just blunder around following the Doctor most of the time. The nasty moment when he learned that his insistence on retaining the crown may have cost him his son was quite affecting, but this only underlines the point.

The dilemma of taking Rory off the life-support and then racing to resuscitate him was also good stuff. I don’t think any of us were in the slightest doubt really that we were going to hear the sound of him coughing water out of his lungs soon enough, but the director did a clever job of keeping us on tenterhooks a good five seconds after it seemed possible for him to wake up, so it did get scary for just the briefest of brief instances. Really wish Murray Gold hadn’t insisted on punctuating the moment Rory woke up with that ridiculous, over-the-top chord of music though. When will he learn to stop beating us over the head with “destruction-of-the-Death-Star” tunes during moments that would be better served by a soft, sigh-of-relief sound?

The episode also looked superb. Given the first half hour was set almost exclusively on a deck of an early-modern galleon, the visuals avoided feeling samey or monotonous, and some of the effects for the siren were a cut above the usual standard, especially when it turned bright red. The sets were very authentic, even if the sickbay aboard the spacecraft was a bit bereft.

Didn’t really need the crude reference to “alien bogeys”, that really did belong alongside the repetitive and puerile flatulent aliens gags from Aliens Of London.

Performances were fine. Karen Gillan seems largely to have dropped the cocky strutting routine from last season, to her eternal credit, Arthur Darvill was a bit of a fifth wheel at times, but what he had to do he did well, and Matt Smith was at his impressive best again. I don’t wish to repeat myself, but his careful, restrained, softly-spoken delivery of most of his lines is such a breath of fresh air after five years of David Tennant’s forced yelling and weeping. The guest cast were generally okay. Hugh Bonneville’s performance veered between worthy gravitas and wooden boredom. Can’t really blame him there. When he had something to do other than chase after the Doctor he was very good, at all other times he didn’t really get much opportunity. Lily Cole did about the best she could with a voiceless part, but it’s hard to say she was really acting. Oscar Lloyd impressed for his age as Toby, while the rest of the pirates were just bit-parts, again not much the actors could do with what they were given.

COMPLICATED THEORY TIME: The quandary about Amy’s possible pregnancy is, I suspect, another lift from The Hitch Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. Early in the second season of Hitch Hiker on radio, Arthur and Ford are stranded on Prehistoric Earth and encounter a rescue ship from the far future that keeps vanishing and reappearing in front of their eyes. They soon realise they are in a time paradox in which they have to send an SOS into the future to summon the ship. Until they do so, the ship will keep vanishing. In the same way, my suspicion here is that Amy is potentially pregnant, but only if certain events in the TARDIS crew’s future come to pass, and due to time-travel, those events will affect Amy’s recent past. If she becomes pregnant for real, things will carry on as we generally see them, but if the course of events alters, Amy will enter an alternative reality. This is where the lady with the eye-patch enters the equation; I think she is an intern at an asylum, and in this alternative reality, Amy is a patient there. Amy will have memories of events aboard the TARDIS that suddenly haven’t happened, and her ravings about it lead to a diagnosis of madness and she is committed.

Yes, that’s an awful lot of information to work out from so few hints, but speculation-for-its-own-sake is fun.

Bottom line. It’s flawed, not got much originality, and lacks depth, but at the same time it’s fun, beautifully-shot, and has a nice plot that thankfully doesn’t involve an army of aliens trying to take over the world. It’s nice to get a simple mystery story that doesn’t require a bloody/inexplicable/contrived resolution every once in a while. I also appreciate that, while not taking itself too seriously, it again resists the temptation to be silly.

Not great, but far from bad. 7/10. Generally an impressively strong start to the new season, and signs are it’s holding up better than last year too. Here’s hoping that’s not an illusion.

So here we are then, ladies and gentlemen, we are living in a post-Osama bin Laden world. I can’t say I’m impressed with how this new world seems so far, but nonetheless, he was shot on May the 2nd 2011, and so of course, the world is put to rights.

Sometimes, just sometimes, assassination can be acceptable. In times of war, it can be justified or at least mitigated in certain conditions. And let it be remembered that bin Laden declared war on the USA in the 1990′s, so his supporters (what few there are) can hardly protest against his death on the basis of it being an act-of-war. (Not that I see much sign of them doing so.) But does that all mean that this particular assassination is acceptable?

When an assassination is attempted, it must, not just can, must, be mitigated by the conditions. And when I say that, I mean it can’t be done simply "because it’s a war". That’s just a sweeping, one-size-fits-all standard of measurement. The exact circumstances it’s done in are all-important, and in the case of bin Laden, I’m sorry but the circumstances just do not cut it.

For one thing, in strategic terms it really wasn’t necessary to kill him. He was just a sick old man, one who had long ceased to be of any practical importance. This is not being said in the hope of winning sympathy for him, but merely to point out what an empty achievement it was on the part of the USA in managing to take him down. Finding him took some doing, especially given the suspicious inactivity of the Pakistani security forces, granted. But once the Americans found him, killing him was no great task, and it will make no positive difference in the war (such as it is).

But another question is the actual morality and intention of the raid in which he died. The official story put forward by the White House surrounding the attack has changed almost beyond recognition in the days since, and the more subsequent corrections that come through, the more suspicious it starts to sound. Yes, ‘fog-of-war’ confusion can lead to many discrepancies, but not some of the ones we are getting here, particularly the glaring variances with what bin Laden’s daughter recalls. These corrections are, in their own right, making the death of bin Laden sound a far less reasonable outcome. In particular, the admission that he was not armed when the Americans cornered him.

The inevitable question this provokes is, “Were they always planning to kill him summarily?” Or to put it another way, was the whole operation meant from the outset to be an assassination? If the Americans did deliberately kill bin Laden without even trying to capture him, it puts the morals of the operation in a far less courageous light than the likes of Barack Obama and David Cameron have so far tried to paint it.

The inconsistencies seem more conscious than ‘fog-of-war’ denials would seem to suggest, especially in light of the attempts made at the outset to justify the outcome. The statements made on Monday went to some lengths to insist that bin Laden "resisted" capture, leading many to assume that he forced the soldiers to gun him down. But it turns out that he wasn’t armed, in which case, what form did this resistance take? (In fact, that’s a question that would have needed a full and definitive answer even if he had been armed.) What exactly was bin Laden doing to resist? Thumbing his nose and sticking his tongue out? Making insulting hip movements in the direction of the soldiers? Turning and running in the other direction? Just shaking his head when he was told to put his hands up? Resisting arrest can mean just about anything upwards of these actions, and they would hardly call for a bullet through the brain-case in response. In spite of all the revisions to their account, this detail still goes unexplained.

Furthermore, if an assassination is truly justified in the minds of the Allies, why have they so far not used the word to describe what happened? Why do they insist on calling it ‘a raid’? Why have they bothered trying to dress up bin Laden’s final moments like those of the proverbial wounded tiger? It looks to me worryingly like Obama knew that what he had ordered was all pretty unnecessary, and it leads to uncomfortable questions; for instance, whether the precise timing of the attack might have been a stunt to get Donald Trump and the Birther movement off his back for a few days. Maybe not, as I don’t suppose it needed bin Laden’s death to achieve that. But it still bears asking.

Whatever the motive, if it was premeditated, the slaying of bin Laden is not vindicated by the circumstances. Assassination can only be defended when the consequences of not doing it are clearly going to be worse than the act itself, and unless the Americans had some solid information about bin Laden being up to something truly horrific (which they would surely have revealed by now with considerable staged indignation if they had), that is simply not the case here. Therefore, the only justification for his death is if it were not the original aim, but he would have taken the lives of the soldiers who had him cornered if they had not killed him. This doesn’t appear to apply either if he wasn’t armed (even allowing for three of his colleagues being armed).

This therefore appears very much like a familiar, ugly story of arbitrary/summary justice, justice of a type the USA has long since become far too comfortable with meting out. It is a nation that behaves in other countries where it has no authority with considerably less respect for the law and due process than it ever would in its own backyard, even though in its own backyard it actually does have authority. The Americans have made clear that they acted without the involvement of the Pakistani security forces. They have understandable reasons for that, but it was still a unilateral action inside someone else’s territory. Summary execution committed inside someone else’s jurisdiction, followed by what appears to be a flimsy attempt to cover up the real background of what happened.

This business, in short, stinks.

I do often get irritated when I hear would-be intellectuals trying to prove their point by quoting George Orwell, as though the only qualification required for an idea to be true is that a man with an out-of-control tea fetish, who died over sixty years ago, agreed with it – or at least that a quote of his can be dressed up to make it look as though he agreed with it. Orwell was, by all means, a remarkable and thought-provoking writer, but he would be the first to insist that he was neither omniscient, nor infallible, nor the final word on every subject. Ironically, that’s one statement he might have made that I would not hesitate to quote.

But today one of the most disturbing and notorious quotes from perhaps his most famous work seems irresistible. Osama bin Laden, the most excessively famous terrorist the world has ever known, was pronounced dead today by the US President, at around 4:30am UK time. The reaction to it in parts of his nation was entirely predictable, but that has made it no less nauseating. Wild celebrations, cries of triumph, dancing in Times Square, songs of self-congratulation  by crowds gathered on Capitol Hill, joy unconfined, a parade of laughing two-fingered salutes, speeches shamelessly confusing revenge with justice, assassination and arbitrary punishment with courage and civilisation.   

There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy.

Is this really what the USA has allowed itself to be reduced to? In the name of democracy and freedom, its people sing, dance and drink to the death of a single man in advanced middle-age with a renal disorder. Whatever blood coats his hands, that is all the US forces have achieved, and yet we have scenes sickly reminiscent of the Palestinian celebrations on the 11th of September 2001, when the Twin Towers fell. You can draw distinctions, but the bottom line is it is still a laugh of triumph over death.

It is hard to say what is most horrifying; the almost barbaric triumphalism, or the naivety. There is a general acceptance that the war against Islamic Militancy is far from over, but the notion that today’s developments are even particularly significant is quite foolish. Symbolically it has some meaning, but only in a negative way; bin Laden now has the status of a martyr, a status that is only enhanced by American rejoicing. And strategically, it is nothing. Bin Laden’s time of prominence ended in 2001 with the destruction of his base at Tora Borah. Since that time, he has been a yesterday’s-man, his threat absolutely minimal. His death makes no positive difference at all, and serves no purpose beyond satisfying the USA’s seemingly endless appetite for revenge, its unquenchable thirst for showing its capacity for stamping its will on the rest of the world. Even that might be just barely tolerable, except 9/11 was not even bin Laden’s doing. It was the work of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, even if bin Laden endorsed it and provided money for it.

But even if there were a practical use for this ‘victory’, it makes the US reaction no less crude or barbaric. Triumphing over an enemy, no matter how much he deserved his fate (which he probably did), and celebrating like their favourite team has just scored a ninety-nine yard touchdown demonstrates the very same tribal, jingoistic hatred that the USA claims to be struggling against. The same medieval outlook, the militant ideal that war-war is better than jaw-jaw, as though Times Square has been occupied by a thousand rebirths of Henry V. Is this really what it was all about, is this really what the USA has come to? "We beat you! We win, we’re better than you!" That it takes a war to make the USA feel so good about itself speaks volumes for a deep sickness in its culture.

I would say it is fair to feel satisfaction that bin Laden has been brought to some semblance of justice – a very violent, arbitrarily-enforced justice for sure but at last he has been taken to task after some fashion – but triumph? Joy? Elation? This was not an FA Cup Final. This was not the Super Bowl, or the Ryder Cup, or the Centre Court at Wimbledon. Punching the air and singing, "It’s all gone quiet over there…" should be reserved for occasions like that, not as a way to greet the news of bloody death.

Sometimes war is necessary, but it is always abhorrent, and it should only be celebrated when it is definitely over. And it should never be celebrated for its only certain bounty – death.

It’s not often that someone as difficult to please as me will say this, so enjoy it while it lasts…

This was terrific. No I mean it, it was fabulous stuff, best I’ve seen in years.

All the good qualities about the The Impossible Astronaut are retained, while its handful of flaws was mercifully absent. I’m quite serious when I say it’s one of the best Dr. Who stories since the revival. It was a packed plot, full of mystery, real terror, interesting character development, exciting moments, poignancy that was moving but wasn’t laid on with a trowel, a remarkable resolution, and an enthralling, dark edge that the modern series rarely manages to pull off successfully. It’s the best story, in my mind, since Blink at the very least, and possibly even going back to Dalek in the Eccleston season.

The dark edge made it feel like it could have been written by Bob Holmes at the peak of his powers in the mid-1970’s. Canton, as established in the first part, is a ruthless, harsh character, and yet one who has a very courageous sense of right and wrong. Those with such a strong idealism tend to be all the more ruthless. Therefore, his apparent slaughter of Amy, Rory and River at the beginning seemed scarily convincing. And that was just the prologue! Three central characters supposedly dead two minutes before we’ve even reached the titles, and the story gets darker and scarier from there.

I still think the Silence are somewhat derivative – the way the creature growls, “Silence, Doctor!” mid-way through the story could have been lifted from any of a dozen Tom Baker stories – but at the same time they are one of the best variations on the idea so far, and another example of Steven Moffat’s amazing capacity for making the audience paranoid. We could have encountered these creatures a thousand times in our lives and we’d never know. You could have been confronted by one just seconds ago, and as soon as you turned back to face the screen once more, you wouldn’t be aware any more. Indeed, they might be standing behind you right now…

Hell, maybe they are from the Baker era, in a sense. I mean, the Doctor might have encountered them a thousand times before, and he wouldn’t know. What planets might they be in control of? They might be what gave Davros the idea for the Daleks, they might have given Omega and the Time-Lords the secrets of travelling through time. And no one would ever know. The more you think of it, the more possibilities there are. This really has the potential to reimagine and rewrite the series history in a completely legitimate way. Their relationship with humans and their ability to control human minds is very reminiscent of the Kromaggs from Sliders, which again makes them seem derivative, but they’re far more effective. The notion that they’ve been secretly running the world for thousands of years, like some kind of extra-terrestrial Illuminati, makes them far more frightening, even if I still don’t find their appearance particularly scary. One sticking point is that this does seem rather to contradict City Of Death, where it was suggested that the Jagaroth was the alien entity that was guiding the advancement of human science and technology. (I suppose it’s entirely possible that the Jagaroth was made forcibly unaware of the Silence when it encountered them as well…)

Either way, the scenes where Amy is captured are as chilling as the ones when she was nearly killed by an Angel in The Time Of Angels. The way the tallies on her skin keep increasing in number shows that the scenes last a lot longer than we see, potentially days. This is underlined by the intern’s belief that the year is 1967, and not 1969. So much of his memory is being cut away from him that he has fallen two years behind everyone else.

Rory’s insecurities about Amy and the Doctor are still there, although his insistence that Amy knows that he is always coming for her shows that he is becoming a good deal more assertive. It is somewhat forced possibly, and it has very little to do with the story itself, but Arthur Darvill once again plays the vulnerable side of the character so well that you almost fail to notice how crowbarred-in the lines are. And River’s despair at realising that her days with the Doctor, just under way from his point of view, are nearing their end for her, was really saddening. Alex Kingston’s broken expression as the Doctor departs in the TARDIS is some of the best facial acting she’s ever done in the role – for just a moment I really believed it. That she and the Doctor are living their relationship in reverse is something of a side-scraping retcon – it was previously established that they were encountering each other in a jumbled-up order, not in reverse – but it does in fact make it easier to ‘anchor’ their relationship in our thoughts better, and it seems that Kingston’s own performances are benefiting from that as well; she now has a clear idea of what stage of River’s life she is meant to be portraying. Matt Smith also again demonstrates why he’s so much better at the part of the Doctor than David Tennant – if DT was still there, can you imagine the bellowing, eye-watering roar of self-righteous outrage with which he’d have delivered the line, “And it still wont be enough…” The gentle, soft whisper with which Smith delivers it instead is so much more subtle, although it might have been even more effective if he’d delivered it in a slightly gruffer pitch. But not loud, that’s what matters. Sinister menace is not directly proportional to number of decibels. Also, another honourable mention for Stuart Milligan who again portrays the insecure, ingratiating quality of Richard Nixon really well. He gets the toothy grin of Nixon absolutely spot-on.

The writing is as sharp as Moffat can get, and this means the tone of the episode is refreshingly non-zany. There are still some funny lines in there, but for the most part they’re gritty, which is how they should be, rather than smug or screwball, which too often is how they turn out in other stories. Especially punchy examples of one-liners-to-relish are in Canton’s more ruthless moments, such as, “It’ll look better if I shot you while you’re running… then again, looks aren’t everything!” and *BANG!* “Welcome to America.” (Appropriate dig at the National Rifle Association.) Other gems in the script include, “These [body-bags] could really do with air-holes!” – “Never had a complaint before”, “Rome fell.” – “I know, I was there.” – “So was I.”, “I think quite possibly the word you’re looking for right now is, ‘Oops.’”, and  “Love a tomb!” (which would explain why River seems to enjoy increasing the number of potential occupants rather too much).  “Is this really important flirting, because I think I should be higher on the list right now?” was perhaps a little too close to the self-conscious sarcasm the modern series is prone to, but it was still amusing instead of smug. The Doctor’s non-reassuring attempt to reassure Nixon at the end was truly hilarious. Hasn’t quite mastered how this ‘bedside manner’ thing is meant to work, has he?

The resolution is absolutely brilliant. It’s another huge-scale, the-whole-population-of-the-Earth-does-the-same-thing-at-the-same-time idea, but it works because it’s not something they do consciously. It’s a fabulous idea of using the rise of television, the enormity of the moon-landing in the history of the human race, and also the hypnotic powers of the Silence against themselves, to give the humans the power to eliminate masters they aren’t even conscious of. There are a couple of flaws in the idea though; surely when the humans gun down the Silence, the dead bodies would still be there afterwards. And yet there’s never any sign of them. Do people forget the creatures are there even when they’re dead? Also, didn’t the creature Canton shot down survive? So can we be sure that human weapons are actually capable of killing the Silence? Still a great idea though.

Only downsides to the story are that the implants in the hand are a bit deus ex (forgivably so though, as their abilities aren’t exactly overblown), and River gunning the creatures down by just turning round and round on the spot while pulling the trigger was a bit Flash Gordon. It certainly makes the Silence look a bit rubbish if they can get blown away so easily, especially as they appear unable to hit a barn-door with their own powers.

There are several mysteries that the episode doesn’t explain, but we’ll probably get there later in the season. Why did the Silence need a spacesuit? Who was the woman with the eye-patch whom Amy briefly saw through the door? How come Amy appears to be both pregnant and not pregnant at the same time? Who is the girl in the spacesuit, and how does she have the power to regenerate? If the girl is a Time Lord, can she be the off-spring of the Doctor’s and Amy’s future selves? In which case what will happen to Amy’s marriage to Rory? And to River’s romance with the Doctor? Getting quite soap opera-ish again in fact, but at least it’s in an interesting way rather than in the soppy gushing way it did when Rose Tyler was around.

Anyway, let’s have more of Canton! He’d make a great addition to the TARDIS crew.

All-in-all, an absolute feast of class, showing that the modern series has the potential to be the best thing on TV, if it can just reach this standard more consistently. It’s certainly a terrific confirmation that both darkening the tone, and altering the running order by allowing the season to open with a two-parter, was the ideal way to freshen things up a bit. It’s also one of those rarities in that part two really improved on part one – no sign of the old ‘Episode 3 syndrome’ here. This episode on its own gets a 9 out of 10. And in fact so does the two-parter as a whole, as it rises above the sum of its parts.

So the mighty Moffat is back on form with a triumphant flourish, and the new season has made an even more promising start than the previous one. Now, here’s hoping it doesn’t fall away like last year. For instance, I’d be quite grateful if next week’s offering isn’t just a lazy attempt to cash in on the hype of the latest Pirates Of The Caribbean movie…

Has anyone else noticed how many of the NO2AV arguments could just as easily be arguments for the return of the Absolute Monarchy?

“Proportional systems mean more arguments!!!” they cry. Well maybe, but then that’s a case against bothering with elected representatives at all. If you have a dictator, he or she will simply make all the decisions, and nobody is allowed to argue with them, period. There’s a reason why we put policy ideas up for discussion and dispute; some policies are stupid and/or immoral. We need people to argue with them, especially as sometimes the policymaker may not have noticed the flaws in the first place. A Government that is unchallengeable is usually assumed to be a strong one. But a strong Government is also one that has a broad perspective, and an effective Opposition can force a Government to consider other sides of a story that may not have occurred to it previously.

“Proportional systems are more complicated!!!” they cry. Again, that could just as easily sum up the case against bothering with elected Parliaments at all. Under an Absolute system, the King/Dictator/Emperor/Benevolent-President-For-Life makes a decision, and the deal’s done. Under a representative system, a policy is put up for debate, potentially hundreds of different MPs will have points to make, sometimes painting the policy in a very complicated light. Outside pressure groups may also get involved, adding to the weight of material to be considered. The policy then gets voted on, and it may be rejected. Even if it goes through, under most systems it will also have to be assessed by an Upper House of some kind as well. During this time, it will be subject to constant redrafts, amendments, additions, edits, clarifications. This is why it can take months on end for a Bill passing through Parliament or Congress. In the pre-Magna Carta days, the King let his subjects know his will, and it just became so. Inclusive Government, by its very nature, makes things more complicated. But that’s ultimately for the best, because political issues are seldom straightforward either, and many of the complications involved can only be drawn to a Government’s attention by someone with an outside perspective.

“Proportional systems are more expensive!!!” they cry. In some cases, that may well be true. But then, how much money do six hundred-plus MP’s cost the country every year, irrespective of the system? Again, you might just as well argue for abandoning Parliament, selling off the Palace of Westminster to a developer, and then putting everything in the hands of the Queen, and just paying her and her alone a salary. Except of course that in a country of over sixty million people, there are going to be far too many issues for one person to address.

The worst aspect in all this is that the arguments aren’t even relevant. This is because the Alternative Vote isn’t a proportional system at all, it’s another majoritive system. In terms of the proportion of results, it really isn’t that far removed from First-Past-The-Post. It might result in more Hung Parliaments (although for reasons I’ve already given above, I don’t necessarily see that as a bad thing), and it might result in more power for some of the smaller parties (again I don’t see that as a problem per se). But neither of these mean it is a proportional system. By that kind of logic, given that there is a Hung Parliament at the moment and the Lib-Dems have a place of influence in a coalition, you could just as easily argue that FPTP has been shown to be proportional.

Yes, the AV system is rather more complicated at the point-of-ballot, but in the end, all it really boils down to is having the ability to offer an order-of-preference. People do that all the time with all sorts of things – I see similar activities every other day on Facebook, for heaven’s sake. If you really find that too difficult, you probably aren’t ready to make sound judgements at all, in which case it’s questionable whether you’re ready to vote under any system.

But I have faith in you that you can. Yes, AV may seem a bit awkward at the first attempt, but you’ll get used to it! Just like when you first started learning basic arithmetic; it took some getting used to, but you could still count to ten by your fifth birthday. If you can count, you can cope, easily.

In the end, most of the valid arguments against reform – and yes I acknowledge there are some, even though I don’t agree with them – are, when carried to their fullest length, arguments against having democratic systems at all.

It rarely matters how blood-curdling, childish, useless or offensive the opinions that a fellow human being (or thereabouts) wishes to express, I will always defend their right to say it. I might draw the line at aggravated exhortations to violence – there is such a thing as solicitation after all and it does cause a fair bit of needless trouble – but for the most part, if you have something to say, you should damn well say it, and no one should be allowed to stop you. And if they try and stop you, the standard response of, “I’m entitled to my opinion” is completely reasonable, fair and, as best I can tell, true.

But one thing I notice occasionally, with the ‘easy-access-to-debate’ that the Internet has given us, is that this response is being used a lot, not as a response to attempts at suppression, but as a response to response. Purely as a hypothetical, imagine someone on some discussion forum about, say, the history of warfare, makes the following assertion; -

USERNAME 1: I believe that no one died as a result of World War II. In fact, the war brought loads of people to life. The population of the world today is far bigger than it was in the mid-30’s, so that proves it!

This doubtless causes a few of the other users of the forum to raise their eyebrows, and so someone answers; -

USERNAME 2: That’s ridiculous. We’re not sure how many died in WWII, but we know it must have been scores of millions – the Japanese alone killed something like twenty million people. Hell, my own great-Grandfather died in the Blitz in 1940! So did his best mate! The population started growing again after the war ended, and growth continued to accelerate. That’s why the population is so much bigger today.

To which USERNAME 1, clearly affronted, replies; -

USERNAME 1: Don’t be offensive! Don’t call me ridiculous just because I don’t agree with you, I’m entitled to my opinion! Go away!

And of course he is entitled to his opinion. But I do sometimes wonder what people really mean when they say that.

Now I must reiterate that the above is purely a hypothetical, but at the same time, I have seen (generally rather less glaring) examples of this sort of exchange. What I mean is, someone makes an unsupported and disputable declaration on a forum on the internet, maybe one that has clearly not been researched, maybe one that depends on a very doubtful rule-of-logic, maybe just an outright lie. And when someone else takes issue with what they are saying, the original poster will simply retort, “I’m entitled to my opinion!” and will probably say little else, as though that’s the end of the discussion. It’s as though they are saying, “You think one thing, I think another, let’s just agree to differ”, before the discussion has even got under way.

Part of my problem with this is that it defeats the object of having a discussion forum in the first place. Such a forum is not there purely for certain people to make arch-declarations that must never be commented on, except with sycophantic words of praise and agreement. But there are also more insidious implications.

One of them is the unspoken contention that USERNAME 2 is in some way suggesting that USERNAME 1 is not entitled to his opinion. As though simply by disagreeing with it, USERNAME 2 is somehow arguing that USERNAME 1 shouldn’t have been allowed to say it. Such an idea was never implied. USERNAME 2 merely said, for very obvious reasons, that the idea was ridiculous as it flew in the face of so many glaring facts. (Note that USERNAME 1 accuses USERNAME 2 of calling him ridiculous, which again he did not, another increasingly frequent term of denial.)

The implication there is that someone, by disputing his words, is in some way disputing his right to articulate them. Someone is oppressing him by neither agreeing with him, nor keeping quiet about what he has said.

When used in the context it frequently is these days, the phrase, “I’m entitled to my opinion!” has become almost the new trigger of Godwin’s Law. That Law used to state that the longer a discussion continues on the internet, the greater the chances of someone mentioning the Nazis, usually as an insulting comparison to the person they are arguing with. Now it seems the chances of someone saying they are entitled to their opinion are what will rise. But the meaning is fundamentally the same here, because of the implication of oppression; trying to deprive someone of their right to express an opinion is, itself, reminiscent of Nazi Germany. In other words, “I’m entitled to my opinion” has mutated into a subtle ad hominem retort.

Another insidious implication is the idea that facts are no more immutable than opinions. Quite the reverse in fact. Yes, many ideas that we consider to be facts are often subject to revision as our understanding evolves. But when that happens, it means we didn’t have the facts to begin with. But there are many facts we do have that are absolutely beyond dispute. Gravity pulls other objects towards the centre of the object that is projecting it. Water freezes into ice as it gets colder. It evaporates into steam as it gets hot. In an atmosphere, two objects striking each other will generate a sound. And so on. That people died in World War II, and as a direct result of that conflict, is such a fact. It is immutable.

Not to USERNAME 1. As far as he’s concerned, that fact is subject to revision, and furthermore, when anyone tries to argue with him, he makes clear that it is his opinion that cannot be subject to change. He is entitled to it, and anyone who tries to present him with better information is oppressing that right. So it seems that merely having better information is an act of oppression, and that having the facts on your side is not good enough. USERNAME 1 has opinion on his side, and that is what will never change.

The irony in all this is that when people misuse the phrase in this way, they are actually denying themselves that right, because they are not particularly au fait with what an opinion means, at least not an honest one. An opinion is not a decision as such, although choice certainly plays a part, but it is a conclusion drawn by assessing all the facts available to the beholder, and making a judgement of them to the best of his or her ability. Whether it is right or wrong is dependent partly on what proportion of the facts the beholder has access to. But what is quite clear in the case of USERNAME 1 is that this is not what he is doing. He has been presented with facts that better explain the growth in the world’s population than his own argument, and that also point to examples of people who definitely died in the war. And yet USERNAME 1 just deflects these facts, blatantly discounts them, simply answering back that he is entitled to his opinion. But he is not forming an opinion at all, because he is refusing to accommodate some of the information available to him. He is therefore not assessing all the facts available to the best of his ability. So what he arrives at is not his opinion, but merely what he wishes to be true. Deep down he knows it is not.

He is depriving himself of his right to an opinion, and what he should really be saying is, “I’m entitled to my prejudices, and if you keep introducing all these confounded facts into my thinking, you’re going to shatter them, so shut up!” Prejudice and opinion are not really the same thing, and as I have demonstrated here, in a sense they are mutually exclusive.

My reasons for discussing this is that I was recently studying a thread on a football forum that was discussing the Hillsborough Disaster of 1989 in Sheffield (the twenty-second anniversary of which was just a couple of weeks ago, at the time of writing), and a contention by a radio host in the USA that the Disaster was caused by six-to-eight thousand Liverpool fans showing up for the game without tickets. The radio host, an expatriate Londoner called Steven Cohen, has never cited any supporting evidence for this allegation, but still maintains it is true.

Given the ticket allocation the Liverpool fans had that day for the Leppings Lane terrace at Hillsborough – where the Disaster happened – was ten thousand one hundred (and yes, the tickets had sold out), and given that a subsequent study by the Health & Safety Executive concluded that by far the most likely number of fans in the terrace at the time of the Disaster was nine thousand seven hundred and thirty-four, not only is Cohen’s allegation unsupported, it is nigh-on impossible. There is just no way that thousands of fans were there without tickets, barring thousands of fans who did have tickets mysteriously deciding not to go to the game after all – a scenario that is deeply implausible, and does not really tally with records of turnstile-use on the day from the stadium’s admissions system.

Many people commenting on that forum thread however, firmly agreed with Cohen’s claims, and when others argued otherwise and pointed to what the established facts tell us, see if you can guess what a number of Cohen’s apologists chose to say in response. You guessed it. “He’s entitled to his opinion.”

Well yes of course he is. But when he makes claims like that, which are not only based on zero evidence but are in complete contradiction of the established facts, (facts that had been brought to his attention many times before) he is not expressing an opinion. He is simply lying. For it to be his opinion, it has to be something he genuinely believes, it cannot be knowingly untrue. For someone to hold an opinion they don’t believe in is a contradiction in terms. For him to cling to ideas in the face of facts that preclude their possibility, he is not concerned with expressing his opinion, but only with supporting his prejudices.

If he wants to say such things, let him do so, but when he harks on about freedom-of-speech, he needs to remember it’s a two-way street. Everybody else has freedom-of-speech too, meaning they are allowed to disagree with him, and just as loudly. And when people can so easily expose how his statements simply do not fit the facts (and expose how he has long been aware of the true facts), if that means he is shown to be either a liar or an imbecile, well that’s one of the prices of freedom-of-speech. Any freedom has a responsibility attached to it.

And yes, that point can be made to Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and a thousand others.

When you have something to say, say it. But if it’s not something genuine, there will always be a chance that someone else will expose it as such. If that happens to you, the responsibility is solely your own, and no empty aphorisms about being entitled to your opinion will save you from that.

Seconds out, round two….

The second blessedly non-RTD-led series is up and running with a fairly interesting starter. First thing I should say is congratulations to Steven Moffat for finally giving the series the courage to shake up its own running format, and dare to open a season with a two-parter. One of the tiresome, formulaic qualities of NuWho so far has been that it always seems to follow the same order every year i.e. three single-episode stories to get started, a two-parter for episodes four and five, another run of single episodes for the mid-to-late stages etc. Breaking this needless and highly restrictive format is a simple act that could do a lot to keep the series fresh.

Moffat does seem to be developing some more unfortunate traits in his writing though. One of them is by-the-numbers hackery. The aliens in this are an example. The Silence look quite similar to the Ood, so they get no points for originality on the visual front, and also their powers have a very familiar echo to them. If we consider the Weeping Angels, they’re creatures that only move when our heroes’ backs are turned. These new aliens are creatures that no one remembers… as soon as our heroes’ backs are turned. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a bad idea, it’s just it does sound a bit too similar to ground the series has already been over in the recent past, and it does lead me to question whether Moffat has any really new ideas left in the locker.

This question is reinforced by his insistence on once again having a story about events happening out of sequence (the Doctor of the future sending a message to the Doctor of the ‘present’ – such as there is one), more talk about ‘spoilers’ (a joke that was quite engaging on River Song’s first couple of appearances, but nowadays I can imagine most of the audience singing along to a slow hand-clap, so predictable has it become), the Doctor hanging out with black-and-white-era movie stars (Marilyn Monroe in A Christmas Carol, now Laurel & Hardy), Amy again being pregnant (please don’t let us have another round of her wandering about with a balloon stuffed up her shirt, a la Amy’s Choice), a guest appearance by a prominent world leader, admittedly superbly played on this occasion (see Victory Of The Daleks), and yet another mysterious child figure making lots of arcane remarks, sometimes through electrical apparatus (remember the gas-masked kid in The Doctor Dances, and the computer in Silence In The Library, among others). Even the title sounds almost identical to The Impossible Planet.

The episode doesn’t start too well. In fact, the scenes with the Doctor showing off by deliberately leaving a trail through recorded Earth history are silly and self-indulgent. Some of the dialogue in those first few minutes is also typical of the rebooted series in being smug and far too quip-heavy.

But once it stops trying too hard to be clever and punchy, it settles down a bit and actually starts being clever, and packs a really solid punch. The moment the ‘old’ Doctor is assassinated is quite a shock, and suddenly all the silly, forced light-heartedness is thankfully swept away. We have a story in progress at last. How about that?

It’s quite easy to figure out, of course, that we would see the Doctor again very quickly. His declaration that he was two hundred years older than he was last time we saw him, coupled with experience of Moffat’s constant ‘timey-wimey’ ideas, leaves us plenty of chance to predict the impending arrival of a younger incarnation. (The Doctor’s slightly bitchy remark about Amy looking a bit heavier these days immediately makes her condition very clear too.) This scene is quite a bold risk on the part of the Mighty Moffat though, as it appears to discount the possibility of future regenerations. So if Matt Smith does choose to leave the series in the near future…

Get out of that one, Doctor Who. (Could’ve done without those uses of the series title in the dialogue, by the way, it’s needlessly demonstrative when the show does that.)

The friction aboard the TARDIS is fascinating, especially the Doctor making plain how little he trusts River. After all, what reason does he have to trust her really? The difficulty the other three have over whether to tell the Doctor about seeing his future self die leads to some real antagonism. At its core, I suspect, is the Doctor, usually the one who knows everything, suddenly being the only one aboard the TARDIS who isn’t in on the secret. Usually the others all have to trust him, now he is being asked to trust them, and it’s clear that his intellectual pride is bruised by the experience.

The character of Delaware is what really makes the episode for me. He’s potentially an excellent foil for the Doctor, in that he shares the same boundless, open-minded sense of curiosity for the unknown (the wonder in his eyes when he enters the TARDIS is startlingly innocent given how cynical he is about individuals), but he also has a very grisly air of ruthlessness to him, that is clearly just below the surface. This paradoxical mix of cynicism and boyish enthusiasm somehow works, making him unpredictable, and therefore intriguing. He is also terrifically played by Mark Sheppard.

That the story is turning out not to be a Western after all is perhaps a shame, as the ground it is instead covering is, as I’ve already stated, somewhat derivative. It does allow it to have Richard Nixon in it though, which is kind of amusing, especially hearing all the hints at his arrogant paranoia littering his speech. Really, some of the people who’ve been elected to the Oval Office down the years. They’ll be voting for some right-wing, alcoholic, draft-dodging, Texan born-again next.

No wait…

Never mind.

Somehow there’s something just not scary enough about aliens in a dinner suit. Maybe they just remind me of how silly the Jagaroth looked in City Of Death, but so far, the Silence ain’t doing it for me, just as the Human Dalek failed to affect my bladder-control in Daleks In Manhattan. It was very lurid the way the creature annihilated that woman in the lavatory though, and oddly chilling how even that sight just vanished from Amy’s memory as soon as she was out of the door. The ending, with Amy apparently shooting a little girl in a spacesuit (possibly the future self of her unborn child? Perhaps) was rather shocking as well. I guess this episode certainly delivers in terms of startle-value, so we can’t complain it’s ever dull. Does it count as a cliffhanger though, seeing none of the regulars are definitively in danger? Yeah I’d say so. A moral cliffhanger is as valid as a physical one.

Possible bloopers; this incarnation of River appears, from what she says to Rory, to be younger than the one at the end of the last season, and yet she also seems to remember the business with the Pandorica. Also, she discusses the business of the Doctor’s regeneration being interrupted. Amy and Rory seem to know what she’s talking about, but they’ve never seen the Doctor regenerate before. Not necessarily a contradiction, but it does rather go against the grain; in the past, the Doctor has never really talked to companions about his power to regenerate unless they’ve seen it happening.

To sum up; not brilliant, but very, very absorbing, and as I say, it earns a bonus point for finally plucking up the courage to break series formula. In its own right, 7 out of 10. In this context, it just barely scrapes an 8.