Oh in terms of the maid and the moving guys or in like a Back to the Future Marvin Berry way?
I wasn’t sure what to make of the former. Not portraying it is weird but portraying it and not acknowledging seemed like a worse move. It’s been a while since I saw that Shakespeare episode (or maybe it was that boarding school one) but I thought I remembered some dialogue that handled that sort of issue a bit better in previous seasons.
I don’t know where to start but those seemed like some actors that were picked so they could fall back on claiming they weren’t actually supposed to look like the Beatles if someone got litigious.
like some fucking liverpudlians making novelty songs are the only people who can bring music back because, unlike the black lead of the show, they know how to play a c major chord
I don’t think they thought that much about it, didn’t read as an intentional blunder in the script, but it was the first thing I noted when the episode ended.
Right! Because I’m me I’m of course thinking how these guys apparently don’t have Motown songs to cover so we should go see what happened with Barrett Strong recording Money or whatever.
I know everyone here bailed on the previous seasons after they did that hand and the head need to meet at the heart thing with future Amazon, but there was also an episode after that where they did City on the Edge of Forever but instead of shoving Joan Collins, the Doctor’s old dude companion tearfully had to be the one who asked Rosa Parks to move.
Scrolling up responses to that episode (my own included) seemed a lot more positive than I remembered. I honestly totally forgot that episode existed til like an hour ago, and I still don’t remember what the plot was otherwise. I guess I’ll know for sure the next time I happen across it on Pluto or whatever.
3rd episode was bog standard ‘doctor in a quarry lecturing everyone about how stupid they are’
not terrible but utterly forgettable, and with a contemptible ending. In other words, a vast improvement over the first two but still not worth anyone’s time.
4th episode is actually pretty watchable until the ending. I didn’t know RTD had it in him to make an episode that wasn’t just characters screaming and running down hallways while an alien farts. The whole episode is like a kid friendly It Follows punctuated by an incoherent ending. RTD should just stick to ripping off popular movies because at least this was 90% fine instead of 0%
Ruby really benefits from the Doctor’s absence, since we get to see her think and act on her own with only minimal reference to her actual status as TV series macguffin. Still a sketch of a character, but such is to be expected with this show.
people online are so weird and negative about anything that messes around with form, but this and the last davies episode (ignoring the moffat-does-moffat in between) are some of the best and strangest and most interesting stuff to come out of the modern series.
i adore the themes the series has been playing around with from different angles—boundaries of reality, heralds, systemic isolation and abandonment, the stories we tell ourselves to cope with the tragic and the inexplicable.
this all is really some next-level use of the form to explore what’s making life so fucking difficult in the world we have been handed lately.
new stupid headcanon the giant macra in Gridlock were all standing on top of Kroll and got big by eating his farts
Damn do i not like these talking babies. I really really hate CGI mouth manip stuff on babies and animals and always have, its a major pet peeve, this could be the most compelling Doctor Who story ever written (as opposed to Ark in Space 2024 now with blaring Murray Gold music) and it would still be a struggle for me to get through. Gatwa is so so damn cute (more like Ncutie am i rite??!) im trying to do it for him but i cant fuckin look at these blank faced infants wheeling around mumbling technobabble argh
Remember the early aughts when every other live action kids movie was doing this shit with cats vs dogs and baby geniuses and whatever? i sure fuckin do
Robert Holmes built his empire by being unusually good at dialogue, in spite of everything else about him.
Running down hallways is fine when you need to pad out 4-8 episodes per story, but that’s what it is, padding. If modern who writers feel the need to pad out their 40 minute stories, something is very wrong.
73 Yards ruled. The ending left a bunch of stuff up in the air but I don’t like things that are neat. I think the theme of making do when stuff goes sideways overpowers the mechanics of why that distance or what was she saying anyway.
“Dot and Bubble” was awful. Elderly white man tries to write a script exposing racism in white society and he ends up turning the doctor into a magical negro who tries and fails to save the racists from themselves. Who cares, it would have been respectable if he just stopped helping them the second they said “you people” but no he is a white liberal fantasy of what black people should be like. Whole episode reflects poorly on the colonial mindset of white brits.
how is he being magical negro in this episode as opposed to being the usual magical spaceman but the idiot colonists mistrust him for a more painfully real reason
i usually dont think youre doing a bit itt but thats a pretty loaded phrase to just chuck out there especially given how much the actor shapes the role in Doctor Who? Is Gatwa playing a magical negro character in this episode vs his other episodes?? Like thats a specific trope that if anything is rejected in Dot and BubbleLindy doesnt learn shit from him trying to better her life she’s a traitorous racist rich scumbag. thats literally the whole ending lol
The episode is about his blackness and he is intentionally positioned in a subservient role throughout the episode which he quietly accepts until the end. He is a good actor, and he’s able to make the second half of that last scene work (where he is raging helplessly) but the writing itself feels as hypocritically racist as Rosa in series 11
think i will just have to (ugh) agree to disagree i thought Dot and Bubble slapped and Rosa was neolib filth
Did you at least like the detail that the Dot AI got so fed up with these horrible nepo babies that it hatched a sadistic plan to systematically murder them via google maps? i thought that was fuckin hilarious, thats a doctor who baby
