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but then he just leaves with (as I understood it) the implication that he is never going to come back and that he’s been replaced by a human dad.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.

Yes, this helps, thanks.

I already understood the need to avoid private money agents like Paypal, visa, etc. In the UK we have the BACS and FPS systems that allow for direct free money transfer. Though they should be more usable for day to day transactions, they work well enough if you need to send a significant amount of money between bank accounts.

Your explanation of the anonymity seems like the real value add of these digital currencies. The fact this only applies to the buyer and not the seller is a good choice, and definitely wins over blockchain crypto. Looking at it more closely, the fact they use signed tokens rather than proof-of-x is also a very good choice.

I will need to read up on Taler’s docs more closely. But looking at the summary of features on their site something hits me as an immediate problem - you need to “load up” a wallet. If Jane Doe wants to buy a coffee, it’s far easier to just use a bank card (which may interface through a private money agent like visa, or a middleman like google/apple). Loading up private wallets isn’t a difficult concept (it’s how gift cards work), but it does add extra steps of friction that I think will need to be removed before this can really be taken up by the general public.

It may harm the anonymity aspect, but I think that to get people using it a system that could operate like a tap-once-and-done bank card payment, loading up a wallet for immediate spend seems like the best solution. It would also help alleviate any fears that typically are associated with blockchain based digital currency - primarily of losing the signed digital money as it sits in a wallet out with the bank account’s protections. And once the system is normalised and people are used to it, then all the architecture is there for anyone that really needs the anonymity.

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.

There’s something I’m really struggling to understand when talking about things like Taler, and the “Digital euro” idea which has come up recently as well: What is it actually doing that’s new?

Money is distributed digitally already. When you get a paycheck, no-one is actually moving physical paper and metal cash from a business account bank vault to a customer account bank vault, it’s just numbers in a spreadsheet. So what’s actually new when we’re talking about digital currency like this post?

There must be something I’m missing here.

Preface: I’ve heard people say far too often that the ESC is “too political”, and that’s nonsense. The ESC is not political enough. It is produced and sanitised and sterile with just enough of a hint of backroom politics to keep people angry in the right way without causing too much damage to the status quo. It needs to be more political, and it needs to be the artists themselves being political. Art without politics is worth less.

Now on to the episode: I enjoyed it. Being an ESC episode, I knew there had to be a Graham Norton cameo, and that did not disappoint. The acerbic “wish I hadn’t signed away my appearance rights” was great. I recognise the name Rylan, but I actually have no idea who that is IRL.

We have in this episode one of the most dangerous villains we’ve ever had, and it was a random wronged victim, not a demigod, not a race of nazi-standin stormtroopers, just a regular person who was maligned by society. I like this a lot. It’s a reminder that if you push people too far, you make them into lone wolf villains that can be more dangerous than you could imagine. The fact that the Corp killed an entire planet for fake honey is disgusting, but makes for an entertaining story. Totally not subtle but at this point I feel like subtlety even outwith doctor who is kind of dead, at this point I don’t mind it that much. The fact that the threat was really high stakes but not “the entire universe” high (because someone has to stay alive to hold the Corp to account) paradoxically makes it seem like higher stakes than usual. As in, it could actually happen without meaning the series has to end. Doctor going nuts is a bit off putting to watch, but that’s the point. It reminds me a bit of 10s first outing where after the PM kills all the Sycorax he loses it, though certainly not as off the rails as happens in this ep.

I enjoyed the song contest parody, especially the juxtaposition of the horror and the camp awfulness. Lots of diversity here in the casting and characters, which is good as always. The gambling rule was a good justification for the plot to proceed as it did. The whole episode is poking fun at and criticising the awful things that sponsors of nice events and causes do. I wonder how the ESC / Morrocanoil feel about this - the ESC’s main sponsor, and there’s suggestions they operate in Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, which bears some echoes to what the Hellia went through. I notice that they didn’t explicitly mention the ESC by name once in the episode. did they have difficulty getting the rights to that? Can’t imagine why… The whole hellia story needs to be explored in more detail.

Grumbles: Plotwise I am a bit confused how Kid got into the station in the first place. Surely it would take more then just having one Helper already on the inside. I’m getting the same annoying reaction of “this highly important place has really shit security” that I got from UNIT previously. Is there no 2FA in the future?

There was a pronoun thrown in there (she/her), and aside from a “definite article” gag it was the only one. I usually dont nit-pick on these things but it stood out in a bad way here. It would have fit in better if they had done that more than once, maybe with a few neo pronouns thrown in as well (there are aliens after all).

Miscellaneous wider plot notes: A confusing susan cameo, amazing they actually got Carol Ann Ford for that. Wonder if that’s going to be followed up or not. Finally got answers for Mrs flood. I’m glad it wasn’t the master. Interesting they’re making bigeneration a general thing, and not just a one-off.

For a brief brief moment I was elated when I parsed the title as ‘Palantir says it has given up on AI’. Then I read the article and was left dejected.

I really enjoyed this one. A nice tight mostly self contained sci-fi story, set in Lagos, but with some nice ties in to the wider plot.

Random aside, this isn’t the first time I’ve come across Lagos in a multi-dimensional sci fi story. M.R. Carey’s Pandominion series uses the locale to good effect. In a perfect world that shouldn’t really stand out but having been through enough London/New York focused stories from so many franchises it’s nice to see somewhere new take the role of global crossroads for interesting stories.

The idea of an engine powered by stories is a great sci fi concept. I did feel some of the elements were a tad in my face - the heart of the engine is a… heart? ok, ;). Imagery aside, one of the last lines is just wanting credit for your work, and that’s very timely given the current space of the creative landscape being very unforgiving for artists. Stories are a massive part of our culture, and sharing them, adapting them, remixing them to our needs, and then resharing them with yet more people is vitally important.

The inclusion of Martin’s doctor was totally unexpected, and I hope that eventually leads somewhere. I can see a lot of potential there. Exploring the full story with Anansi would be great.

Mrs Flood relies on the NHS for her meds. Something to rile up the “Doctor Who’s gone too woke” haters - An interdimensional immigrant using our healthcare (and I’ll bet Mrs Flood doesn’t even pay taxes)!

Adjusted to the initial sale value of the car - Less easy to cheat by not declaring income, and bigger cars (likely more expensive) that take up more space, pay more.

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” :)

Absolutely. Screenshots of 3d desktop cube on ubuntu more than a decade ago is what taught me linux existed. It’s an absolutely terrible and inefficient way to run desktop workspaces, but it hooked me all the same.

Users need to know what this dot means, and some like children or the elderly will likely not understand the ramifications

A true “Thanks Obama” for modern times

I really enjoyed that. Going into it blind, it was very fun to watch. Not quite as good as Midnight, but then sequels rarely are. But I think it was a good choice to revisit it - if the humans have vanished, then the doctor wouldn’t have been able to go to midnight and play a part in defeating the monster first time around, so it would still be there. The final ending scene was a bit cliched though, the episode would have been better to just end with the Tardis dematerialising.

The inclusion of a deaf character was done well, and the use of live subtitlers is a really great “future gadget” to invent and then explore in a sci-fi context, from how it can offer help, and how it can be used to exclude people easily.

The idea that civil servants that interact with the public must know a sign language makes sense to me - it might indicate that something about the Lombardy population has a high population of deaf people. Maybe a side effect of the war. That would also explain why they were all equipped with subtitlers available as a backup for everyone else. SLs are not universal though, so I guess the translation matrix can help “translate” gestures as appropriate to the local context just as it does text and speech (and BSL to us watching). A side effect of this is it would have been illegible to any American signers watching.

Exploring the wider plot about how humanity is gone makes me think we’re facing a planet out of time situation, as we saw in season 4 (another callback?). Though if the lombardy are that similar to humans, they must be related in some way. I guess whatever that link is would have to come pre-2025, because we’re not out in space yet, and we won’t have any time to do so afterwards.

I really enjoyed this episode, this season is going very well.