#whoblogging

Struggling to find anything critical to say about this one tbh. It kind of gave me everything I've been wanting/expecting from RTD2 since it was announced. Finally nailed the perfect blending of mythic and threatening stakes with quietly effective melodrama with outrageous maximum camp with ostentatiously provocative retaliation.

To put it another way, the first new Doctor Who episode since 2017 that actually feels like it was made by someone who watched the Moffat era, and thought of ways to evolve from it.

Ring-a-Ding himself is easily the best villain since at least the Toymaker, and the best new villain in I don't even know how long. On a technical level he's such a smart concept for doing an effective CG villain on a Doctor Who budget. If it's going to look like a cartoon anyway, just lean into it! Make the best evil cartoon you can dream of! Also you can taste the cackling glee from RTD at putting lines like "I am the glint in the eye of the mad! I am the last things you see before you fall into the Abyss!" in the mouth of a tap dancing rubberhose cartoon.

All I can think to say right now about THAT scene is that the reason Doctor Who is the greatest television premise that's ever existed is because the Doctor can escape through the fourth wall and discover his own existence as a fictional TV character in the course of a routine monster-of-the-week adventure, and not only does this not break the show entirely, it's actually what empowers him to jump right back into the plot, defeat the villain and move right on to the next adventure. Fucking superb.

This is what I mean by the series actually meaningfully absorbing the lessons of the Moffat years. Taking literally and seriously the full implications of the Doctor as the ultimate transgressor across the boundaries between worlds. He alone can harness the power of his own fictionality to defeat the enemies who are confined by the laws of the type of story they're in. The Doctor's true superpower is being Genrequeer.

TL;DR: Paul Magrs won.

I've been wondering for weeks now why McTighe is the one Chibnall era writer to get invited back and it seems pretty clear now that it's because he actually is pretty solid at both characterization and propelling forward an entertaining narrative. He just can't stop stepping on politics rakes Sideshow Bob style.

Also I still haven't forgiven him for girlbossifying Ace

Some little details I really enjoyed here:

* Love when Ncuti rolls his Rs McCoy style.

* The costuming on Conrad and Ruby's first date, where they're both dressed in riffs on Fifteen's outfits.

* The little domestic bits between Kate and her hunky trophy BF. This is how UNIT is supposed to function.

Actually the main thing threatening to completely break this episode is that the eternal tension between "UNIT is a familiar and loveable ad hoc family of Earth based supporting characters we like" (Season 8 UNIT) and "UNIT is a ruthless clandestine international paramilitary with world-ending technology and little to no oversight" (Season 7 UNIT) is stretched to its furthest ever extreme. Another user refers to it as the Avengers-fication of UNIT. I don't think that tension gets resolved here. I'm actually not sure it can be resolved. And I sort of wonder if stretching and prodding at that tension may actually be the point of the exercise for these 45 minutes? It would be in keeping with other deconstructions of aspects of Doctor Who RTD has overseen in the past

Moving on, the actual most interesting part of the episode for me is the "Ruby has PTSD" section. It's deft character work, well acted, and crucially it's an angle on Life After The TARDIS thats never been done before. It gets paid some lip service with Martha but we don't stick around long enough to dig into it. Looking forward to see where they go with this in the finale.

Also the fact that Ruby explicitly cites "getting trapped in a double bass" as one of the things that traumatized her is hysterical. Doctor Who is such a silly silly show but even the silly parts would be completely terrifying if you had to actually experience them!

Also also imagining Belinda one day having a similar conversation but one of her traumatic experiences is "I met some nerds."

Trinity Wells you will always be famous. Also love that we're just stuck with Fox News Trinity Wells now.

Re: the TARDIS scene at the end...You can tell McTighe has only written Jodie's Doctor before now because the Doctor talks like a cop here. It's his version of the Capaldi one-liners in Boom.

I really liked this scene actually. It's completely in keeping with other times the Doctor has gone Vindictive Bastard mode on people who've personally hurt his friends. And its great to see Ncuti get a proper Vindictive Bastard Doctor scene! It's really good, juicy stuff. Just, man. The actual lines he's given...you can really hear the Supercilious Yorkshire Lilt in some of those authoritative moral condemnations...

It's naturally mostly Ncuti's performance that makes it interesting. Because right at the end, when Conrad refuses to show remorse, the look on Ncuti's face is just...sadness. Because this Doctor would be sad about it! He starts the scene seemingly brushing off Conrad's suggestion that the Doctor is there to "save his soul" but then when Conrad refuses to have his soul saved...he's disappointed after all! He was hoping to save his soul! It's a really savvy performance note that cuts against the obvious reading of the scene. People who keep saying they "don't know Ncuti's Doctor" aren't watching!!!

The buildup to "Rose has been gone 12 months" is legit upsetting. It's really the only time they've ever interrogated the terrestrial consequences of the companion's absence in quite this much depth.

On a related note, this is the one "mom slaps the Doctor in the face" beat that feels truly earned. It's become a bit of a synecdoche for the way RTD writes moms in general, but here you're genuinely on Jackie's side.

I love this scene so much:

It looks like dogshit. It looks like the roof scenes from The Room. This is the greatest show of all time.

This is also the first episode that dives really heavy into another prevalent Davies persepctive: that the world is something primarily mediated through television. The Doctor watches the plot unfold on TV, and not just the news, children's programming as well. He even does so from inside the TARDIS which "gets all the basic [cable] packages". This theme of course returns in the mid-season and the finale in a big way.

Many of the Doctor Who alien species that has really stuck around in the memory or the show have done so because they are anchored by a single representative character, embodied by an excellent character actor. The Sontarans stuck around because of Kevin Lindsay. The Zygons stuck around because of John Woodnutt. And the Slitheen are memorable primarily because of Anette Badland.

The scene where the Doctor instinctively starts shouting orders at the UNIT soldiers is indicative of two things: how recently he's come out of the time war, and the fact that (I believe) RTD is always writing the Doctor with Jon Pertwee in the back of his mind.

I really think the Slitheen were always a great concept and have aged incredibly well. A cackling gang of crude, puerile manchildren using the apparatus of the state to burn the Earth for money? It's more likely than you think!

I reach for Capaldis from the random rewatch pile fairly often but I actually hadn't seen this one in a few years so this was nice to revisit. I think in my head I kind of just took it for granted that it was good but seeing it again really drove home just how extremely good it is. It's very possible that Time of the Doctor-Deep Breath might be the best pair of regeneration episodes there's ever been. The only other contenders in the same league honestly would be War Games-Spearhead.

Its still so cool that they got Ben Wheatley to direct Doctor Who and equally cool that they got an extra 15 minutes of runtime. The way this absolutely luxuriates in its long quiet drama scenes...I really miss Doctor Who that had time for scenes this long. The "Strax does Clara's physical" sequence is such a delightful little sketch and there's no way a scene like that makes the final cut now.

Most companions never get an All Time Great Companion-Introduction episode, so its pretty fucking nuts that Jenna Coleman got fully three of them, with this being the third and arguably most important. Another thing we tend to take for granted now is how Deep Breath softly reboots Clara's character for the Capaldi era, but what's really impressive is how it does it so convincingly that you just immediately buy that she's always been written this way. I actually don't think it's true that she's a completely different character between S7 and 8 but the emphases are definitely different, and she gets grounded and foregrounded in a significant way here.

I actually think the same is true of the Capaldi Doctor. Everything his Doctor ends up being is actually here from the start, just shaken up and in a different configuration. I think as written, Twelve arrives pretty fully formed. A lot of the change we perceive is just Capaldi redialing his performance.

Definitely on board with the anti Gamer stance. Some discourse is holding the episode to a higher standard of Condemning Fascism than seems fair to me given that 1. It is not the job of Doctor Who to defeat fascism and 2. this episode was filmed and in the can like 2 years ago and written like 3 years ago.

Major points for the handling of the AI Generator. Compared to almost every other Boomer writer's responses to the AI hype cycle, Davies is spot on with the take that The AI is actually Just A Guy. The hype is just a smokescreen.

Like, well-made, but underwhelming. Listen I'm sure some people loved this but at the end of the day, episodes whose entire hook is "it's a sequel to a well-liked monster from 17 years ago" are just fundamentally not what I'm watching Doctor Who for. (Lookin at you, Earthshock.)

There's good tension here, particularly in the first half, but that really only works once. Beyond the Big Reveal there's just kind of not a lot going on here. The characters are pretty undercooked, though the acting is fine. The monster seems to work completely differently than it did 400,000 years ago, which is fine (that's a lot of time to evolve) but the way it works now is kind of a one trick pony that doesn't particularly illuminate anything new. Likewise nothing new is added to the planet Midnight really.

Shaya's sacrifice just barely feels earned and that's mostly down to the direction.

Idk guys. I can't see that there's much else really to say here. Sure was one of the Doctor Who episodes of all time.