📝 SHOW NOTES | 'The Giggle'

Hey everyone!

Firstly, welcome to 300 fully paid-up RoDers here on the Patreon! What a milestone to hit before the end of 2023. We can't wait to start mapping out our plans for 2024 and we'll let you know what's in the pipeline in the new year!

Here are Billy's notes for the final 60th Anniversary special, 'The Giggle'.

• Soho, 1925.
• "Splishy splashy".
• STOOKY BILL! John Logie Baird needs something to film for his TV experiments.
• Donna objects to the term, "companion". She says it makes it sound like she "parks [the Doctor] on the seafront in Weston-super-Mare" - who'd have thought WSM would get name dropped in the same episode that Bristol gets its 15 minutes of fame?
• "Everyone started thinking they're right" / "Every human thinks they're right" - with the mention of cancel culture later on, I expected Russell to do more with this, but he has a new Doctor to introduce and a whole plot to get going so fair enough.
• Hell yeah, I predicted that inhibitor thing months ago. Bang on, give yourself a biscuit.
• The Vlinx. Hm. Dunno about him. Looks shifty. Of course every spin-off needs its tin-dog, but I'm not convinced by the design.
• Arpeggio, which is Stooky Bill/Toymaker's laugh gets into everyone's head, which is what drives them crazy. Nice idea, would've been cool to see some of this hinted at in the earlier special?
• Sabalom Glitz died 151 after tripping over a whisky bottle - it's the least he deserves.
• In a single line of dialogue, RTD has given Mel more character than her entire Classic Series run, with a tiny mention of the fact she's an orphan. Lots to dig into there, and the line about her finally having a family around the table in the last scene elicited a slight, "Awh" from Stella who's never seen Mel before.
• Donna got a glimpse of the Doctor's recent past and suggest he's wearing himself out, staggering around the universe. She brings up the idea in the fist special of settling down on Earth, but only because she wants to hang out with him more. This is the first time we're hearing that he's running on fumes and I don't buy it tbh.
• The marionettes are creepy as hell, especially the 14th Doctor one, "I thought I was clever".  Wish we got a bit more of that psychological introspection of the Doctor. Loved the time we spent in the Toymaker's domain. 
• Donna caves a desperate mother's head against a wall in front of her weans.
• Clara was killed by a bird! HAH! I love the posh voice he puts on for the Clara puppet's introduction. And another mention of the Flux. So it's really being set up like it's had the same impact on the Doctor as the Time War?
• The Toymaker turning the UNIT soldiers into screaming balls was an excellent moment to break up the pure insanity of the 'Spice Up Your Life' scene.
• I love 14 trying to convince the Toymaker that he's bigger and better than Earth and that they could play his games across the cosmos. Makes the Doctor a total hero and bigs up the threat the Toymaker poses.
• Third Doctor in a row (12, 13, 14) to be killed by a big red laser beam.
• Bi-regeneration. (N.B. On reflection, I feel like this is being done purely to explain the age of any returning Doctors both on TV and audio, and perhaps to extend the lifespan of Big Finish's output, so they're not crowbarring stories into established gaps which are already packed to bursting with alternative media adventures. For that, fine. But again, I still stand by the feeling that it's not really needed, as we've accepted and waved away those semantics before.)
• Toymaker fumbles the ball (gosh, that scene feels like a massive afterthought, now.)
• Who grabbed the tooth? Top guesses: Kate Stewart, Lucy Saxon, THE RANI, Jinx Monsoon.
• Why was the Toymaker's massive hammer in the TARDIS? (As mentioned by Matt on the RoD Patreon Q&A #12, the fact Ncuti takes the box he knocked out of the original TARDIS makes it seem like he's a consolation prize Doctor).
• I like the idea that 14 can't help himself and just goes off on adventures with Rose. But at the same time, it kind of goes against the point that Donna was making. It doesn't feel like he's retiring, just slowing down or having a working holiday.

- RoD 💜💚