Doctor Who SE30E08: "Silence in the Library"

[andrewgpaul]

Ah, right. Fair enough. I suppose in that case, it depends how quickly they move.

[Stark]

Except they aren't shadows, they just look like them. Torches won't work. They'll let you figure out which is the Vashta, but not fight it. They were 'making' a shadow appear in broad daylight, after all. Hitting them with light makes them hedgy, but doesn't outright stop them cold.

Dude, they have guns that can soundlessly remove square wall segments, and later 'digital rewind' the section back into place. I don't think an easily identifyable black mass on a surface is going to threaten the 51st century.

Except Moffat likes turning ubiquitous things into alien terrors. It just worked far better with statues, is all. Their behaviour is also very strange; simulating shadows, but simulating IMPOSSIBLE shadows so even a keen-eyed observer without tools can see it, and then just sitting there for some time before striking. Their shadows also appear far too definite and dense to just be 'dust motes', although they are staying inside near artificial light which might help them. Anyway, I'm sure the second ep will clear some of this up.

[Lord Woodlouse]

I think the main problem was with the filming. I reckon it would have been far more effective if they'd had the place very well lit, so the shadows were more defined and it looked less like people were casually wandering up to shadows or even through what seemed to be shadows without any fear they'd get their skin eaten off. It wasn't until the final few minutes when any kind of immediacy hit the group, and that would have been better explained had they had a more definite "safe zone" for them to mill around in and then for it to begin to artificially collapse during the final part of the show.

[NecronLord]

Dude, they have guns that can soundlessly remove square wall segments, and later 'digital rewind' the section back into place. I don't think an easily identifyable black mass on a surface is going to threaten the 51st century.

To be fair, given that the Doctor saw fit to blow up the factory making those, that may be anacrhonistic technology.

Incidentally, I did think River should have rewound that wall into place behind them, but like I said. The episode was enjoyable enough that I'm willing to overlook little errors. Presumably she's low on battery power.

Except Moffat likes turning ubiquitous things into alien terrors. It just worked far better with statues, is all. Their behaviour is also very strange; simulating shadows, but simulating IMPOSSIBLE shadows so even a keen-eyed observer without tools can see it, and then just sitting there for some time before striking. Their shadows also appear far too definite and dense to just be 'dust motes', although they are staying inside near artificial light which might help them. Anyway, I'm sure the second ep will clear some of this up.

I got the impression that the problem here is that there's lots more of them than there are elsewhere.

Presumably the 51st century army could deal with it anyway, by napalming the Library or something.

[Tychu]

Why not? Fast enough FTL (and indeed, interstellar teleport) and it's not so unreasonable.

Hell, remember Star Trek's Memory Alpha? That was a whole colony devoted to data storage too.

An entire planet. Think. An entire fucking planet filled with nothing but books. I could easily buy a city-sized library, a continent even, but a planet? Can you even begin to imagine the size of it, an entire planet devoted to one, barely pragmatic, purpose?

That's not accounting for stuff like how the planet's weather works. The planet needs atmosphere circulation, it needs an ecosystem. Saying that an entire planet is a library is a typical case of the "every planet is an island" (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlanetOfHats) brainbug or the more common "the author has absolutely no fucking sense of fucking scale".

Oh, and I do think that Star Trek is a poor gauge for realism in sci-fi shows, with the ass-pulling every couple of episodes or so.

I think the idea of a whole planet being a library is not that far off. That was the purpose of Terminus in Asimov's Foundation series. Give the Encyclopedists a couple of centuries and they could have turned the planet into a library. If you can make a whole planet a giant city with controlled weather you don't need to keep track of other items.

[Tychu]

They weren't scary AT ALL, and it doesn't help that any impact they may have had was lessened by poor prop design (lol 120mm fan in helmet lol) and poor blocking (stay out of the shadows, oh except those shots where everyone's constantly walking through shadows).

Just remember the Doctors words. "They're shadows but not all shadows" or to some similar extent. Plus he also said just run fast.

[Zixinus]

I think the idea of a whole planet being a library is not that far off. That was the purpose of Terminus in Asimov's Foundation series. Give the Encyclopedists a couple of centuries and they could have turned the planet into a library. If you can make a whole planet a giant city with controlled weather you don't need to keep track of other items.

First off, if I remember correctly, the Encyclopedists didn't turn the planet into a library, GIVEN a couple of centuries. They had allot of room, yes, but I recall that most of the planet was still agricultural.

Second, a city is not the same thing as a library. Having a planet-sized city makes some sense: its the ultimate in urban expansion. A city does many things aside just house people: it has offices, it has factories and other processing and production facilities. It has an economy.

A library on the other hand fills out only a single purpose. Granted, that's a good purpose, but here is the obvious question: who pays for it? Where do the people doing stuff in it eat, sleep? How do they go where they go? If its a planet, don't they have to do at least interplanetary, if not interstellar travel to get there, and even if so, wouldn't it be a bit redundant just to get to another planet for a book?

[Lord Woodlouse]

I think the idea of a whole planet being a library is not that far off. That was the purpose of Terminus in Asimov's Foundation series. Give the Encyclopedists a couple of centuries and they could have turned the planet into a library. If you can make a whole planet a giant city with controlled weather you don't need to keep track of other items.

First off, if I remember correctly, the Encyclopedists didn't turn the planet into a library, GIVEN a couple of centuries. They had allot of room, yes, but I recall that most of the planet was still agricultural.

Second, a city is not the same thing as a library. Having a planet-sized city makes some sense: its the ultimate in urban expansion. A city does many things aside just house people: it has offices, it has factories and other processing and production facilities. It has an economy.

A library on the other hand fills out only a single purpose. Granted, that's a good purpose, but here is the obvious question: who pays for it? Where do the people doing stuff in it eat, sleep? How do they go where they go? If its a planet, don't they have to do at least interplanetary, if not interstellar travel to get there, and even if so, wouldn't it be a bit redundant just to get to another planet for a book?

The thing would probably be as much a tourist attraction as it was a pure honest to goodness library. It's likely they had a spaceport, and from there you can teleport all over the place. It seems pretty logical that for this human civilization interplanetary transport is fairly mundane, and if not then it's probably an area of entertainment for the wealthy.

The place could be maintained largely by robots (it certainly seems heavily hinted so far that the place was administrated by an AI).

Seriously, Doctor Who has done far more bizarre things than this in it's history.

[Zixinus]

Seriously, Doctor Who has done far more bizarre things than this in it's history.

I know, but its still pretty retarded, especially if you consider the idea of an electric idea being more viable. A single USB drive can store more books then some school libraries (assuming good compression). I am pretty sure they can crank that up in the future. The idea to store PAPER books planet-wide does not make that much sense. Sure, I can believe that some people will insist on paper for the sake of it, but to take it up to the point of storing it planet-wide?

[NecronLord]

I know, but its still pretty retarded, especially if you consider the idea of an electric idea being more viable.

Did you miss the bit about the vast, vast, overwhelming majority of the planet's mass being devoted to comptuer storage medium? Everything below the crust is hard drives. I see no reason to assume that the books on the surface aren't just either hard copies people have had synthesised, or particular favourites that tend to be requested in hard copy a lot. And hell, it's also partly reading and confrence rooms (recall the area where Miss Evangelista was eaten? That's obviously a lecture or meeting room {it is in fact, a council chamber, out of universe} of some flavour.)

Chances are, the upper levels, with the actual, traditional, books, do their business by providing an antique, traditional, (though, to be fair, it could vary by style according to region, we've seen biographies, which fairly reasonably, looks like the past, if there's an area devoted to sci-fi or science textbooks, it might look blisteringly futurusitic) venue for events (confrences, games, business meetings, book launches, etc etc) as well as general tourism, while the core of the plent does the real business of storing and distributing information.

[Lord Woodlouse]

Seriously, Doctor Who has done far more bizarre things than this in it's history.

I know, but its still pretty retarded, especially if you consider the idea of an electric idea being more viable. A single USB drive can store more books then some school libraries (assuming good compression). I am pretty sure they can crank that up in the future. The idea to store PAPER books planet-wide does not make that much sense. Sure, I can believe that some people will insist on paper for the sake of it, but to take it up to the point of storing it planet-wide?

But it's not that retarded for all the reasons explained already. They have the luxury to do something like this. The Doctor explained that there's more advanced digital recording methods, but people still enjoy books. This is basically the ultimate nostalgia-fest for people in this time period.

It's not sensible, by any means, but sensible and plausible are not always the same thing. In-universe it makes plenty of sense. The thing is a monument (seriously, it's a good idea to stop thinking of the place like a big version of your local library), and a monument that at the end of the day makes more sense than building a giant pyramid for the sake of one dead-guy or something similar. In relative terms, it's probably about the same expenditure of effort.

[Darth Nostril]

Part two about to start ..... drinking game rules, take a drink everytime the Doctor yells "RUN!!!"

[Thanas]

So I take it nobody caught the Rose reference then?

[Drooling Iguana]

I don't think that's a Rose reference. It looks like she's wearing glasses.

[Thanas]

Not really, that's just makeup. Besides, it is a blonde girl with a wolf ("Bad wolf") and a "doctor". How much more reference can you get?

[Ryushikaze]

I thought that was a poorly drawn gray duck til you mentioned that.

Still, as references go, it's pretty obscure. I can see how it can be Rose, but I can also see how people will just see it as just a blonde woman in glasses.