Eggwatch, part 9

If, like me, you’re still wondering whether the alleged early release of the box set was actually a colossal publicity stunt designed to revive interest in a series that’s been almost universally crap, you may be in need of a little distraction this week. Certainly there has been a lot of talk about it, but no actual substance, leading me to wonder whether the people who claim to have seen the last episode (“But, you know, I can’t give you any details”) are actually having a bit of a joke. God knows what we’re supposed to make of the fact that most of the fake torrents on The Pirate Bay actually contain black gay porn, or rips of ‘Love and Monsters’. (I know which I’d rather see. Sorry, Elton.)

Anyway! Eggs.

I am still behind on this, so we’re still having to do two episodes at a time, which is probably not a bad thing as the egg references seem to vary from week to week. Certainly ‘Hide’, which was next on the list, has relatively little to show for its forty-five minutes. At one point, Emma Grayling appears to be wearing a blue painted egg.

Except it’s not really an egg at all, it’s more of a gem. I’m grasping at straws with this one, because the only other time we get even close to that is when the Doctor gets a bottle of milk out of the fridge.

 

Oh, you know. Milk. Eggs. The whole…soufflé thing…

[Tumbleweed]

But then – then – we get to ‘Journey of the Centre of the TARDIS’, and all is forgiven. Because while I had to watch this one with the sound off so I wouldn’t have to listen to that excruciating dialogue, there are plenty of egg references in this episode. Let’s start with the more abstract images, like the door to the Exploding Room of Lava.

 

There’s also the Eye of Harmony itself, which – while circular – appears to have a jelly bean / egg hybrid attached to it, like some kind of interstellar wart.

 

But these are trivialities next to the revelation that two of the main plot devices are egg-shaped. First there are the luminous objects that sit on the end of the tendrils that form the architectural reconfiguration system.

 

And then, of course, there’s this, which is not only egg-shaped, but also just about the right size.

So there you go. It was a shit episode, but from the depths of despair we draw new life. Anyone fancy a Big Friendly Omelette?

Eggwatch, part 8

You know, the more I watch this series, the more I fear we might have been off about the eggs. Either that or the eggs are off. You pick. What was once a fertile and abundant sprinkling of imagery – building to a glorious climax in ‘The Angels Take Manhattan’ – appears to have dwindled to a barren sense of nothingness, like the sense of sexual arousal you feel when Bonnie Langford gets her kit off. It’s as if Moffat got wind of this blog and deliberately re-shot scenes from the second half of the series so that all the eggs were removed. In fact, I’ll bet that’s what he’s done, the spoilsport bastard.

Still. ‘The Rings of Akhtanen’ does its best. I mean, these sort of look like eggs. Don’t they?

 

Come to think of it, so do these.

 

But then you get ‘Cold War’, WHICH HAS NONE AT ALL. This is hardly a surprise, given that eggs don’t travel well on submarines.

Still, after minutes of fruitless scouring I examined the transcript, and discovered that the word ‘shell’ is mentioned not once, not twice, but three times. That has to count for something, surely?

 

Eggwatch, Part 6 (and 7)

Gareth and I were talking about the God is in the Detail posts. I was explaining that they really are a joy to produce. There is no sense of logic, no planning, no structure. I simply scrub back and forth throughout the video and grab any still image that I think could be significant if you were looking for something incredibly obscure. Anything goes, the sillier the better.

“It is very silly,” said Gareth, “and, rather disturbingly, not so far from some of the discussions I encounter online.”

That struck a chord with me. I do hope the satire is obvious, and that no one is looking at this lot and thinking that I’m actually serious about anything I post. I have tried to be increasingly flippant as time goes on, but if there’s one thing I’ve leaned about the interweb over the years it’s that someone is always on hand to miss the joke.

“But wait a minute,” said Gareth. “These episodes are part of series 7, aren’t they? Which means we should do Eggwatch again!” And he was right, dammit.

For those of you who are new round here, Eggwatch was something we ran last year, when we realised that the ‘subtle’ arc that Moffat talked about for the first half of series 7 was eggs. And behold, there were eggs in every episode, if you knew where to look. Sort of. Egg-like substances, anyway. Of course, this half of the series is all about Clara, but there’s no reason why eggs shouldn’t continue their recurring appearances. There’s plenty of room to share.

Except, of course, I’ve just spent forty-five minutes going through ‘The Snowmen’ and I can’t find one. Single. Egg.

Well, almost. Oh, and Gareth has pointed out that Clara talks about soufflés again – ground we covered in Eggwatch, Part 1, but no harm in revisiting. Still, all told the results are a bit disappointing.

But I will not be deterred, so let’s move on to ‘The Bells of Saint John’, which has a lengthy sequence in which the Doctor and Clara order breakfast in a cafe, where there is again not a single egg on show. It’s a wasted opportunity, but then you look at the monster-of-the-week, and it’s enough to restore your faith in humanity.

A spoonhead, of course. And what do you put on spoons? Specifically on sports day? Josh, has the answer.

There will be more Eggwatch in a few days. Take us home, Roy Zippy. (Scrub to 7:05.)

—

Eggwatch, Part 5b

“We’re fools!” said Gareth. “I made a quip about the ‘timelines being scrambled’, but I was more right than I imagined.  Look at this sequences of screen captures, which occur as the Doctor fights to get the Tardis back to 1938.

1. We see an egg on the scanner!
2. The egg cracks.
3. Dangerously..
4. The timelines are scrambled!
5. Uh-oh.”

To illustrate, here are the screengrabs he provided.

I cannot believe we missed it before. Anyway, it’s nice to be right.

(Postscript: Gareth has also pointed out that ‘No Signal’ is an anagram of ‘Song in L.A.’, which – given Doctor Who’s obsession with cracking America – is a clear indication of what they’re going to do for the anniversary year…)

Eggwatch, Part 5

I am in mourning.

After much scrutiny, analysis, Googling and a fair bit of scrubbing back and forth in sheer desperation, I cannot find one single egg in ‘The Angels Take Manhattan’. I was convinced that this was it: that eggs would somehow be crucial to the story, that there would be some sort of gigantic cosmic chicken that would reach down and squash the Angels flat at the Eleventh Hour (you see what I did there)…hell, anything poultry-related would have done. I could even have coped with the return of Margaret Slitheen. But zero. Zilch. Zip. Not an egg to be found anywhere. It’s like a Russian supermarket. And it’s bloody annoying, because we were so close. You let us down, Steven. I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed.

I was in need of a lifeline, and Gareth provided one: late in the day, when the Doctor says “We could’ve blown New York off the planet. I can’t ever take the TARDIS back there. The timelines are too scrambled.”

OK, that sort of works…

Eggwatch, Part 4

I still haven’t seen ‘The Angels Take Manhattan’ yet (so please don’t spoil it for me), and a review is thus forthcoming. In the meantime let’s look at the this-really-is-getting-old-and-the-joke-is-wearing-thin egg reference in ‘The Power of Three’.

We do have the rather egg-like appearance of the episode’s token villain. I still think he looks like the spawn of Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine, but that’s not to detract from his resemblance to something that’s just dropped out of a chicken.

Anyway, insofar as non-visual links are concerned, here’s Brian.

To be precise:

“What if they’re bombs? Billions of tiny bombs? Or transport capsules maybe, with a mini robot inside. Or deadly hard drives. Or alien eggs? Or messages needing decoding. Or they’re all parts of a bigger whole. Jigsaw puzzles that need fitting together. “

The crucial line of this little monologue occurs at 3:09. The episode is called ‘The power of three’. Three squared is nine. Cubes are square. This episode is (sort of) about cubes. And – depending on who you ask – it takes three minutes to soft-boil an egg.

Layers on top of layers on top of layers! And while we’re on cubes, Gareth sent me this…

And now I’m hungry.

Eggwatch, Part 3

Today, we’ll look at ‘A Town Called Mercy’.

Personally, if I never see this episode again it’ll probably be too soon, but I do need to talk about the eggs. Well, the egg.

I really was hoping that the moment the Doctor unscrewed the top we’d find a little plastic stegosaurus in two halves. “Dinosaurs…in a spaceship!”

Kinder Surprise eggs are great, of course, although I recall an ad from the eighties which made my blood boil, then and now. Have a look.

Why is this annoying? Well, because the impossibly attractive mother offers to bring the kid something nice when she gets home from her high-powered job as a supermarket mystery shopper, and what does he say? “Thank you Mummy, but just to have you home on time would be enough”? No, he asks for three things. Not one. Three. He doesn’t even pause for breath. No son of mine would have been so greedy. He’d have got a clip round the ear. “You obnoxious little brat,” I’d have said. “Just look at everything you have. When I was your age we didn’t even have a house! There were a hundred and fifty of us living in a shoe box in the middle of the road!”

Oh, and I know I did this the other day, but just for the sake of completeness, here’s that Terminator-vision again. Eggs…

I think I need coffee.

Eggwatch, Part 2

Following on from last week’s realisation that this season’s arc is all about eggs, here’s the egg stuff from ‘Dinosaurs on a Spaceship’.

To be precise:

And, just to confirm, here’s the shot of that sleeping dinosaur, right next to…

There we go. I think they’re dinosaur eggs, anyway. They could be really, really big sugared almonds.

Those of you who saw the episode will recall that this was the scene were Amy explores the facility with the pointless supporting characters who will turn up in a random scene next spring Nefertiti and Riddell. I do wish there were some way to make this more interesting and amusing, but I am fresh out of ideas today. To compensate, here’s a picture of a panda trying to water ski.

Eggwatch, Part 1

From Comic-Con, San Diego (and retrieved from Den of Geek)…

Of course there is, and we’ve found it.

To be precise, Gareth found it. I was going to do one entry that connected all the threads, right after episode five, but he suggested eking it out, which is probably more sensible. The theme for series seven, as you may have gathered from the title, is eggs.

No, come back. Just bear with me. I know there are threads about lights going out and that this has something to do with the Weeping Angels. I know there’s a whole thing about the Doctor’s dehumanisation, and the moral decisions he gets to make – for good or for evil – in each episode. And yes, I know the wretched Ponds are about to leave and we’re being reminded of it with lots of lingering looks, not-so-subtle dialogue hints and a press conference every…sodding…week about how episode five “is going to make you cry”. (For ref, someone really should tell the BBC’s press department that the more you build all this up, the less effective it’s bound to be. Star Trek Generations made a huge fuss about the death of James Kirk – not once, but twice – and in the end, it really wasn’t a very big deal when it happened.)

But the arc has nothing to do with the Ponds, or the Angels. It’s all about eggs. We will start with ‘Asylum’.

Oh look, it’s a soufflé. Made with eggs. And yes, the Doctor wants to know where Oswin got the milk, but UHT keeps for years. Where on earth did she get the eggs?

Wait a minute, here’s one.

“F…U…N…E…X?”

There we go. That’s where they were all hiding.

“Eggs….”

And then, of course –

I’m jumping the gun a bit with that one, but it goes in here for the sake of narrative cohesion. Coming up next: “DINOSAURS!…on a SPACESHIP!” ‘Dinosaurs on a spaceship’. You can see where we’re going there, can’t you?