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More DW ramblings
A weird thing happened today.
I was using Google Flights to find out prices for a flight I might need to take later this year. In case you've never heard of Google Flights, it's a service that Google provides that searches multiple airlines' websites for flights for you based on what you tell it (date, number of passengers, departure and arrival airports or cities, etc), so that you can compare them all and select the best flight for your needs. When you select your flight, Google sends you to the airline's website to purchase the ticket; in other words, Google gets nothing from this service - no commission or payment from the airlines - so it isn't promoting any specific airlines and is unbiased, unlike travel services like Expedia.
I entered the departure and return date for a round trip and browsed through flights for the outgoing leg, then I returned to the first page and changed it to a one-way to see how it compared. When I clicked Search, no results came up, as in the page said, "There are no options for your search. Try a different date or arrival/destination." That was odd, since the first search had given me tons of flights for that departure date.
I then spent the next fifteen minutes or so changing things around and trying new browsers and new incognito windows (hey, I'm web QA, I know this kind of behavior is likely from a stale cookie, so the first thing to try is a new browser or a clean window), to no avail. It just seemed broken.
I noticed something else odd. When you are entering the date you want into Google Flights, it pops up a window that displays the calendar, two months at a time. It actually does a quick search behind the scenes for each date and displays the cheapest fare below each number. When I was doing this for my date, every single day, from today until the end of the year, displayed the cheapest fare except the date I'd chosen -- that was blank. I tried choosing other dates, and they all worked fine, but that first date I chose was always blank, as if the world planned to go completely silent on that date.
I was talking to my husband over Slack at the time and told him about this difficulty I was having, and he wrote back, "Did you try using the Vindicator?"
It took me a few minutes to realize what he'd said and what it meant, and I burst out laughing. An excellent, subtle joke.
In other news, the upcoming episode is still our #1 topic of conversation.
I mean, obviously it is, as this makes three posts about it in as many days. I don't post about anything that frequently.
We've gotten to the "resignation" phase of dealing with this. There's not much we can do about our disappointment with the end of "The Interstellar Song Contest", so now we're looking forward. Our discussions are now more focused on what could possibly happen in the finale to fix all the things that we're unhappy with, because we both believe that RTD excels at character and continuity, so drastically altering the Rani's character and breaking so many of the clues he'd planted in these two seasons just doesn't make sense.
My husband liked my idea that Mrs. Flood was chameleon-arched at the beginning of "The Church on Ruby Road", which is why she didn't recognize the police box as the Doctor's TARDIS, and then had reverted by the time the episode ended. This would also explain how the Rani is still around after Gallifrey's destruction (any of them). Unfortunately, this really hearkens back to Professor Yana in "Utopia" and gives it a cheesy re-used idea vibe, so hopefully it'll be something similar but entirely different.
However, we continued exploring that possibility. Something about seeing the TARDIS triggered Mrs Flood to revert. Or maybe she found a way to suppress her memories until she experienced that specific trigger. We definitely have had hints that she was living next to Ruby because she knew Ruby would be a companion and was waiting for the Doctor come get her, so perhaps she moved in and then arched herself or suppressed her memories until the Doctor arrived.
And of course, as she told Cherry, she had "such plans". Okay, so what does she want? Everything seems to point to her destroying the Earth on May 24th, but I don't think so. I think that was caused by something else entirely, and since the Rani is currently based on Earth, it's also scuttling the Rani's plans. So now she's trying to recover her plan and her things by using the Vindicator readings that the Doctor took, so that she can get to May 24th in her own TARDIS. This is much more like the Rani we knew, concerned only with her own work.
If this is right and she's not actually targeting the Doctor, why would she say she's bringing him "absolute terror" and suchlike? Well, she probably knows what's waiting for them on May 24th and that it's awful (I mean, it does destroy the planet), and she probably expects that the Doctor is going to fight it and die a horrible death. While I don't think she wants to harm the Doctor herself, she's certainly not above gloating about him meeting a horrible fate.
Going back to the thing I mentioned last time, that maybe she's the one that picked up the Master's tooth -- and this would make sense, as she's a biologist and probably the most qualified to bring him back -- this opens up the possibility that it's the Master who destroyed the Earth on May 24th. I'm not a fan of this conjecture, though, because it mimics RTD's previous Master episodes (the series 3 trilogy and "The End of Time") even more.
The one thing I like about these ideas (with or without the Master) is that the Rani may end up having to work with the Doctor against the unknown opponent, much like the Master had to do in "The Claws of Axos". Enemies calling an uneasy truce to battle a common enemy is one of my favorite story devices. Not that the Rani wants to save the Earth; she just wants to save her plans.
What things don't our theories address? 1) Why can the Rani break the fourth wall? 2) What does the Rani need Conrad for? And 3) Why is the previous Rani so willingly subservient to the current Rani? I will note here that we had both been hoping that Mrs. Flood would be directly fighting the Doctor and were disappointed that she now looks like a secondary character. So, if it's actually the case that the Rani is directly battling the Doctor, we are hoping that Mrs. Flood has a significant role, such as ultimately betraying her future self and helping the Doctor because she resented having to take a backseat.
So that's where we are with our thoughts right now. Only one day to go! We'll be rewatching TISC, and probably also TCoRR, tomorrow in anticipation.
I was using Google Flights to find out prices for a flight I might need to take later this year. In case you've never heard of Google Flights, it's a service that Google provides that searches multiple airlines' websites for flights for you based on what you tell it (date, number of passengers, departure and arrival airports or cities, etc), so that you can compare them all and select the best flight for your needs. When you select your flight, Google sends you to the airline's website to purchase the ticket; in other words, Google gets nothing from this service - no commission or payment from the airlines - so it isn't promoting any specific airlines and is unbiased, unlike travel services like Expedia.
I entered the departure and return date for a round trip and browsed through flights for the outgoing leg, then I returned to the first page and changed it to a one-way to see how it compared. When I clicked Search, no results came up, as in the page said, "There are no options for your search. Try a different date or arrival/destination." That was odd, since the first search had given me tons of flights for that departure date.
I then spent the next fifteen minutes or so changing things around and trying new browsers and new incognito windows (hey, I'm web QA, I know this kind of behavior is likely from a stale cookie, so the first thing to try is a new browser or a clean window), to no avail. It just seemed broken.
I noticed something else odd. When you are entering the date you want into Google Flights, it pops up a window that displays the calendar, two months at a time. It actually does a quick search behind the scenes for each date and displays the cheapest fare below each number. When I was doing this for my date, every single day, from today until the end of the year, displayed the cheapest fare except the date I'd chosen -- that was blank. I tried choosing other dates, and they all worked fine, but that first date I chose was always blank, as if the world planned to go completely silent on that date.
I was talking to my husband over Slack at the time and told him about this difficulty I was having, and he wrote back, "Did you try using the Vindicator?"
It took me a few minutes to realize what he'd said and what it meant, and I burst out laughing. An excellent, subtle joke.
In other news, the upcoming episode is still our #1 topic of conversation.
I mean, obviously it is, as this makes three posts about it in as many days. I don't post about anything that frequently.
We've gotten to the "resignation" phase of dealing with this. There's not much we can do about our disappointment with the end of "The Interstellar Song Contest", so now we're looking forward. Our discussions are now more focused on what could possibly happen in the finale to fix all the things that we're unhappy with, because we both believe that RTD excels at character and continuity, so drastically altering the Rani's character and breaking so many of the clues he'd planted in these two seasons just doesn't make sense.
My husband liked my idea that Mrs. Flood was chameleon-arched at the beginning of "The Church on Ruby Road", which is why she didn't recognize the police box as the Doctor's TARDIS, and then had reverted by the time the episode ended. This would also explain how the Rani is still around after Gallifrey's destruction (any of them). Unfortunately, this really hearkens back to Professor Yana in "Utopia" and gives it a cheesy re-used idea vibe, so hopefully it'll be something similar but entirely different.
However, we continued exploring that possibility. Something about seeing the TARDIS triggered Mrs Flood to revert. Or maybe she found a way to suppress her memories until she experienced that specific trigger. We definitely have had hints that she was living next to Ruby because she knew Ruby would be a companion and was waiting for the Doctor come get her, so perhaps she moved in and then arched herself or suppressed her memories until the Doctor arrived.
And of course, as she told Cherry, she had "such plans". Okay, so what does she want? Everything seems to point to her destroying the Earth on May 24th, but I don't think so. I think that was caused by something else entirely, and since the Rani is currently based on Earth, it's also scuttling the Rani's plans. So now she's trying to recover her plan and her things by using the Vindicator readings that the Doctor took, so that she can get to May 24th in her own TARDIS. This is much more like the Rani we knew, concerned only with her own work.
If this is right and she's not actually targeting the Doctor, why would she say she's bringing him "absolute terror" and suchlike? Well, she probably knows what's waiting for them on May 24th and that it's awful (I mean, it does destroy the planet), and she probably expects that the Doctor is going to fight it and die a horrible death. While I don't think she wants to harm the Doctor herself, she's certainly not above gloating about him meeting a horrible fate.
Going back to the thing I mentioned last time, that maybe she's the one that picked up the Master's tooth -- and this would make sense, as she's a biologist and probably the most qualified to bring him back -- this opens up the possibility that it's the Master who destroyed the Earth on May 24th. I'm not a fan of this conjecture, though, because it mimics RTD's previous Master episodes (the series 3 trilogy and "The End of Time") even more.
The one thing I like about these ideas (with or without the Master) is that the Rani may end up having to work with the Doctor against the unknown opponent, much like the Master had to do in "The Claws of Axos". Enemies calling an uneasy truce to battle a common enemy is one of my favorite story devices. Not that the Rani wants to save the Earth; she just wants to save her plans.
What things don't our theories address? 1) Why can the Rani break the fourth wall? 2) What does the Rani need Conrad for? And 3) Why is the previous Rani so willingly subservient to the current Rani? I will note here that we had both been hoping that Mrs. Flood would be directly fighting the Doctor and were disappointed that she now looks like a secondary character. So, if it's actually the case that the Rani is directly battling the Doctor, we are hoping that Mrs. Flood has a significant role, such as ultimately betraying her future self and helping the Doctor because she resented having to take a backseat.
So that's where we are with our thoughts right now. Only one day to go! We'll be rewatching TISC, and probably also TCoRR, tomorrow in anticipation.