This is why you keep a several hundred megabytes history file set to remember “forever”

fiercely confident of their own independence

In fairness, if you let the average cat out into nature it would be fine. Dump the average libertarian into nature and they wont last the night.

The retcon of Belinda’s history also bothered me. It kind of gave me those Moffat-era vibes, where women could go on fun, exciting adventures and all of that but eventually they’d settle down in the wife and/or mother role that represents the person they’re really supposed to be. Boo. I didn’t think RTD2 would echo Moffat like that and I’m as much disappointed that Ncuti Gatwa only had two seasons as that Varada Sethu is gone after just one.

This bugged me as well. I was very surprised in the last ep and the beginning of this one to see just how protective and loving Doctor and Belinda were being to poppy. But then by the end, only Belinda is the one that seems to care deeply for the child. The doctor is given a chance to make a farewell, but then he just leaves with (as I understood it) the implication that he is never going to come back and that he’s been replaced by a human dad. It just confuses me why any of that needed to happen.

I kind of enjoyed this, at least the first half.

On the first half, It was alright. The big thought I had was - if this whole Whoniverse thing doesn’t pan out, RTD and Bad Wolf would be great fit for doing a live action reboot of Captain Scarlet. A massive sci-fi weapons battery in the middle of a London disguised as a skyscraper is very spectrum.

• Using the time hotel’s doors was a great plot device to bridge from the last episode. It’s one of those times that make you go “well, why didn’t they use that big deus ex they had a few episodes ago…”. This time they remembered!
• The bone beasts were alright, but I feel like the explanation didn’t really make much sense, and surely they could have found a better name than “bone beasts”.
• The box that exists outside of time is a pretty scary concept, that you could end up stuck for eternity in a non-space, with no escape. I don’t know that I would have made the same choice given those circumstances.
• In the week between episodes I rewatched the old series serial which introduced omega. I didn’t really feel like the big bad we saw here was the same one. Omega, to me, seemed kind of stuck and abandoned and redeemable with a bit of work, here it was an eldritch bone beast that could speak.
• On seeing everything start to come back from the wish world, I had forgotten that rose hung out / worked at Unit, and seeing that she was basically denied out of existence is pretty blunt, but I am glad it was pointed out. The doctor’s new skirt dress was fantastic.

The “epilogue”, I guess you could call it, was not great. I think I would have enjoyed it most if they had wrapped it up after Ruby notices that poppy has disappeared. It would have been tragic, it would have been emotional, it would have had punch, it would have been a pretty clean ending - just sometimes you don’t get the happy one.

• I really don’t like that Gatwa only had 2 seasons, he should have been allowed more.
• Getting 13 in for a cameo was unexpected, and I quite liked the dig at it usually being 10 that turns up, but I don’t really get why she was there. The regen (?) into Rose(?) is weird, but very much RTD’s thing. There have been a LOT of cameos and references recently, and I feel like Doctor Who really shines best when it acts as a set of mostly independent sci-fi anthologies with maybe a little bit of overarching story. When it gets too up itself with the self referencing fanservice I am beginning to feel it weakens my enjoyment of it. The middle of this past season had the best episodes for this very reason.

Also, a thought that occurs as I type this - they had a Susan foreman reference not too long ago. She is established as being a descendant. But they’re sterile, so can’t have kids let alone grandkids? I know this is a timey wimey thing, and I really don’t want to encourage yet more cameos and self referencing, but surely this should have at least merited a mention. I really like the idea that you have a race of sterile people somehow trying to fix things, (I recently read The Old Axolotl, which touches on this concept) so why didn’t they do anything with it.

This is a fair point. If people demanded their money back when a film has bad audio, I wonder if that might incentivise the industry to care more about this.

This is a real pet annoyance of mine, and I have seeing apologist posts on the internet about it.

If the actors cant enunciate properly except when they’re shouting, that’s not adding realism, they’re doing bad acting.

If the sound engineers can’t get a good audio balance for anything except the loudest moment in a film, that’s not a limitation of technology/sound physics, they’re bad at mixing.

If the director can’t keep all of this in check and make a film that people can actually enjoy, that’s not artistic choice, they’ve made a bad film.

I’m surprised VLC fares that badly with CCs encoded this way. Usually it’s pretty good. I’m also now wondering if ffmpeg also shares the same problem

The skeleton walkers did initially give me vibes of the cybermen ghosts of 10’s run. They’re not quite there, but everyone can see and acknowledge them, and they seem to be bleeding in from another reality.

I think this seems to be a curse that almost every TV series is facing right now. Even for runaway critical and popular successes from companies with loads of funding (Thinking Wednesday from Netflix, all the Star Trek shows from Paramount-CBS, countless animated projects from HBO-Max-Whatever-they’re-called-this-week) they seem unable to just commit to a production pipeline, everything ends up stalling, and it prevents the kind of success that the production companies wanted, all but ensuring they fail to meet expectations, as multi-year long waits for follow ups means that only the core fan group is going to want to follow up.

I don’t know how you solve that, other than grabbing the executives by the shoulders and shaking them until they realise it’s nonsense behaviour.

I enjoyed this, but I’m not really sure what to make of it yet, I guess I’ll have to wait for the conclusion next episode.

Conrad’s vision of an ideal world is deranged, of course. Absolute centre of the universe misogynist, ableist, and dictator (though I guess not overtly racist, so I guess it could have been worse?). Not sure why he wished for giant skeleton monsters, maybe he just thinks they look cool.

Looking for cracks, not hiding your doubts, and questioning the world around you is a good message to take away. Though this goes both ways - you can point out the injustice in the world, but unless you have a strong positive framework around which to have a good faith discussion, those who believe the opposite can do the exact same thing. A Conrad type can and will speak up about how it’s weird that women have a voice and independence of their own, and they’ll see that as an aberration. The metaphor of mugs slipping through a table makes no sense to me, but I understood it from context.

Lots of cameos popped up here, I hope they end up doing something useful and weren’t just there for fanservice.

The Rani did go a bit villainsplainy towards the end, but the writers did catch that covering with the need to kickstart the doctor’s memory, so well done there.

Looking forward to next week.

This episode contains a very powerful and pointed message, but as the episode reveals at the end, it will be lost on those who need to hear it most. Some people are too far gone and will refute the obvious, even when they on some level know it is true, and I struggle to fit myself into their mindset to understand that. Clearly a stab at conspiracy peddlers, toxic masculinity influencers, the press and politicians that use scapegoats, and all the others that prey on insecure people’s worries and fear. They probably don’t watch DW and wouldn’t understand the point made here if they did, one can only hope this helps to immunise any kids watching against falling into these traps as they grow up.

Now, my thoughts on the plot here are not super positive.

First, Kate, what the hell? If Ruby needs to talk to someone, Kate needs to as well. The head of a global security org can’t behave like that, even if it is part of some calculated effort to undo the damage done by a conspiracy peddler. The public reaction to “the person we think is making stuff up to control us and out us in harms way is actually willing to put us all in harms way and she’s vindictive as hell, she just let that guy get his arm mauled off” being livestreamed should have gone the other way and made the whole situation and public attitudes to UNIT worse. At one point she says to tap the CCTV feeds into his livestream - if I understood that correctly, that means they could have just shut his feed down remotely from the beginning, and avoided this whole mess, if they’d just been a bit more proactive. Which brings me to my next grumble…

I really don’t like the writing trope of “here’s a super powerful group that exists to protect the world, only they have terrible OpSec so it’s easy for people to infiltrate them”. No-one, even the analysts (or was he a receptionist? I’m unclear what his job was) at UNIT would have access to all their staff’s names and addresses, and any looking into that would necessarily have to be done with more than one person, just to be sure there was no ill intent. They certainly shouldn’t be bale to remotely control the building’s door locks. And if UNIT can screen out applicants like Conrad for being untrustworthy, how did they let someone who’s into conspiracy sites in to begin with?

Now, positives:

I really enjoyed Gatwa’s performance here. He was hardly in this episode, but that bit at the end really shows his range. He can go from happy and carefree to deadly serious in an instant.

Our monster of the week, the shreek, is an interesting idea. The exist out of our dimension and can pop in to attack those they’ve previously marked. I’m kind of getting Predator vibes from it’s behaviour and looks. It does sort of beg the question why they wouldn’t just attack and kill their victims right away. Waiting a year to juice up the taste of fear hormones can’t have that much pay off, unless they live in a timestream that means they’re not actually waiting that long.

I enjoyed seeing ruby again, following along Doctor’s prior companions after they’ve left the Tardis is always nice. Seeing her breakdown and admit the need for help is refreshing, and honestly that should be more commonplace. I’m glad to see Ruby’s family is staying strong, they can be there to support her. Though I suspect they might be even more dangerous to Conrad than Kate was if they ever got close to him.

Assorted notes:

• The prison below(?) the building reminds me of Torchwood a bit, they had one of those if I’m remembering right.
• Mrs Flood is a prison governess. A woman of many talents. I wonder if she dodges tax with all her paychecks.
• If the Doctor can land on planet earth, why couldn’t he just find a spot and sort of “fast-forward” with the brakes on for a few years until 2025… I’m sure there’s a timey wimey reason why that wouldn’t work.
• It’s been a long time since we’ve seen Trinity Wells presenting the news (I had to look that name up)
• UNIT using a cargo heli to move a dangerous alien that can disrupt electronics across London via the sky? No. Just… no. That’s screaming “what could go wrong” :)

It does matter. It’s safer for everyone if cyclists travel side by side in one lane because then the car driver has to spend less time in the oncoming lane to complete the overtake. A long string of bikes takes more time to safely pass.

At this point the web is about as complex as an operating system in terms of complexity. That needs really strong specific standards in order for it to work, and in turn projects like web browsers are huge and complex.

If someone wanted to build a web browser that only followed the simpler parts of the specifications, it wouldn’t work for many websites* and people would not use that browser.

*Whether or not sites need to be so complex is another question entirely, but the reality right now is that they are