Doctor Who?

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Re: Doctor Who?

Postby KleinerKiller » Tue Nov 13, 2018 5:36 am

"Demons of the Punjab" time!

Spoiler: show
This episode is entirely centered around Yaz, a character who's gotten almost nothing to do in any of the previous episodes, and still manages to give 98% of the interesting material to other people. That's hilarious. Luckily, though, this episode's also pretty alright -- the first one of the season I didn't get really bored watching, anyway.

The setup is simple: Yaz's grandma gives her descendants gifts from her past because she's getting old, and Yaz -- despite being the favorite grandchild -- gets a broken watch that apparently belonged to Yaz's late grandfather. Curious about what it could mean, Yaz asks the Doctor to take her to India in the 40s, and the Doctor willfully ignores that traveling to one's family history has always gone horribly wrong with little objection. Unfortunately, they land in August of '47 on the day of the Partition of India, when half of the country was split up along religious majority lines into Pakistan by the British government to an immensely violent response; Yaz's Muslim grandma Umbreen is set to marry a Hindu man named Prem amidst the violence, and Prem is decidedly not Yaz's grandpa. Also, there's weird demon monster alien Predator knockoffs teleporting around, giving the Doctor threatening visions that look like they were thrown together with a default Photoshop filter. We're off to the races.

So this is another educational episode, like "Rosa", which I guess was the least terrible ep of Chibnall's initial writing run. Just like that one, there's the minor annoyance of the fact that nobody ever checks the importance of the date they've landed in and the Doctor only realizes it in a "dramatic" moment. But unlike that one, I didn't actually know a lot about the Partition before watching; I was never taught about it, and I've never had much impetus to learn more about it beyond the most cursory knowledge. But again unlike "Rosa", "Demons of the Punjab" isn't very interested in actually exploring the horrors of the Partition beyond angry exposition and the climactic death, while the former episode at least had some onscreen racist horror even if it still dramatically underplayed it for the sake of keeping it family-friendly. Trouble is, as I've come to understand it from post-episode research, there's really no way to do an effective family-friendly depiction of the Partition -- the Doctor's not going to encounter burning refugee trains filled with brutalized corpses, or anything.

But you know what? Still an okay episode. Okay enough that I actually felt somewhat engaged and didn't take as many notes as I have for prior episodes.

We learn very quickly that the Predator knockoffs are called the Stenz- I mean, the Fajarians. Thajarians? Vajarians? I couldn't really tell, and I couldn't be arsed to look it up, so I'll call them Jerries. The Jerries are supposedly the deadliest assassins in the entire known universe -- which, just like those stupid jobbers in "The Girl Who Died" being called the deadliest army in the universe, feels incredibly silly and stupid -- and for unknown reasons, they've killed the holy man who was going to marry Umbreen and Prem. The Doctor and friends, accompanied by Prem, investigate and find the Jerries' ship fairly quickly, whereupon the Doctor steals their Macguffin and a few vague barrier things while the Jerries accuse her of desecration. It's at this point that a lot of the plot becomes blindingly obvious, in case the setting and central mystery (gee, I wonder why this man in an inter-religious marriage during a time of tumultuous violence between India and Pakistan isn't the grandma's only husband!) didn't make it clear already.

Anywho, the Doctor uses the vague barrier things to give them protection against the Jerries for 12 hours, and also does some more of the "mad inventor" stuff I've been wanting for tragically little ultimate effect. She then decides that Umbreen and Prem getting married is their highest priority, but it isn't long before the vague barrier shits out and the Jerries spirit the Doctor back to their ship for some third-act exposition.

Yes, despite being set up as decently threatening enemies -- at least by comparison to the Stenza, Evil Blankets, Space Nazi Mac, NotTrump and his Pollution Spiders, and Putter -- the Jerries are just remorseful remnants of a dead assassin race who now go around bearing witness to people who die alone and forgotten. They just happened to be caught at the worst times standing next to the holy man's corpse (and a dead soldier in a flashback), don't alter their dress at all or use cloaking tech even though they look like sinister monsters, only communicate in a way that hurts people's brains sometimes before conveniently stopping, and acted needlessly aggressive and violent without explaining themselves because the Doctor stole their vat of dead peoples' ashes. Yeah, it's really fucking stupid and contrived and just wastes time on a sci-fi conceit that's almost entirely extraneous. It also feels like a slightly more competent version of those dumb crystal monsters from Twelve's final episode, who acted like assholes for no reason before suddenly revealing their peaceful nature.

But then, who killed the holy man, and why are the Jerries still here in '47 India? The answer to the former is forthcoming, but the latter is given immediately: they're there to witness the death of Prem, who will die hours after his wedding to Umbreen. As obvious as it is, and as much of a one-dimensional good guy Prem is, and as much as the revelation of the Jerries' mission takes the wind out of the sails to set up an entirely new threat in the eleventh hour, this is admittedly executed decently. I liked Prem well enough for a generic one-off supporting character, and it almost makes up for Umbreen -- the episode's supposed focal point -- getting next to nothing to do.

It comes time for the wedding, but not before Best Boy Graham gets some really nice character moments in the middle of an episode supposedly dedicated to Yaz. Weird how that shakes out. The wedding is quite nice, with the Doctor officiating while Umbreen and Prem share in each other's religious customs*, but Prem's brother Manish is now being a bitch about everything: he's a Hindu nationalist who's been mildly irritated about Prem marrying a Muslim throughout the episode, but now that the episode no longer has a villain, he leaps into the role with the aplomb of a wet shoe flopping onto the pavement. It turns out Manish is the one who killed the holy man to try and stop the wedding, which is revealed as he threatens the Doctor with the rifle he used to do it. Firstly, I'm so glad this scene doesn't lead to the Doctor going on another child-level anti-gun rant that manages to irritate me even though I mostly hate guns. Secondly, this episode's entire plot hinges upon no one -- including The Doctor -- not noticing that the holy man was killed via a huge gunshot wound presumably to the chest, because internal logic is for babies.

* = It amuses me to no end to see hard-left sites praise this episode and this scene in particular, when they deride this exact thing as cultural appropriation otherwise. Feh.

Manish is a bit of a confusing and two-dimensional villain, for reasons Marc already went into, but again, he's somehow better than the absolute drek the last five episodes have served up. He runs off to alert a nationalist gang who are going around killing people who "don't belong", and when he comes back, shit goes bad. Umbreen runs away to survive and completely disappears, while Prem stands in the gang's way and gets shot as the Jerries look on to censor the blast. The Doctor and companions walk away, and the emotional cut to a shocked face is bafflingly given to the Doctor rather than Yaz. This is a fine climax, albeit one that makes me wish they just went wholesale on the historical context and made Manish and the gang the villains full-time instead of wasting half of it on the Jerries. After that, the crew return to the present so Yaz can have one last scene with her grandma, and we're out.

Again: this episode was okay! I liked it, even! It was nothing special and a lot of it was wasted, but I was engaged in watching it and I didn't have any major complaints beyond the Jerries twist and some really contrived writing. Perhaps not coincidentally, this is the first episode of the season that Chibnall had nothing to do with writing, and the marked improvement in quality should be a red flag going forward. This is not a problem with the series. This is a problem with the new showrunner. Either fire him or pay him to stop writing episodes -- or at least to just make outline scripts and hand them off to people with actual talent.

Anywho, next episode is about Space Amazon, I guess. The awful but convenient corporation, not the rain forest or sexy muscular women. There's some really creepy androids, and I'm sure there's some subtle and poignant satire to go along with them. Cannot wait.
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Re: Doctor Who?

Postby Australia » Tue Nov 13, 2018 4:33 pm

More and more with this show, this great Abed speech pops into my head.



The second a show has an agenda, the characters suffer because they have to react the way the creator or target audience would instead of in a contrary, interesting way. Doctor Who has always been the exception to that rule since the Doctor has a more or less Utopian outlook and has lived so long that she knows what she's talking about but now they're bringing in Trumpian characters and on-the-nose threats just so they can say 'we don't agree with this' when so few people actually would agree that it's preaching to the choir and it really feels forced.

This episode was fine but I'm half expecting the Doctor to announce next week that she doesn't like Turkish Delight and for people to be floored that somebody had the guts to say it when nobody has liked it in well over a century and anyone who does is just taking a bullet for the rest of us so that we don't have to eat it.
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Re: Doctor Who?

Postby ftl » Tue Nov 13, 2018 5:12 pm

Looks like the historical pieces are a trend and not a one-off - we've had two now and I don't think I can remember two from the whole time of Moffat's run.

I was a fan of the twist that this time, it wasn't about the aliens, they were just there to watch.
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Re: Doctor Who?

Postby Marcuse » Tue Nov 13, 2018 8:37 pm

I think for me the question that keeps coming around is "why were the aliens even in the episode?" I don't think that Doctor Who absolutely needs to have aliens in every episode. When you have ones that feel so lazy and so tacked on, I think it would have improved the episode to write them out completely and just have the Doctor have to handle the interpersonal drama and the pitfalls of interfering in someone's history directly. It might even have given more space for there to be real characters from the place.

If they're going to do these episodes in the future, I'd prefer there just be a temporally consistent threat, rather than just throwing some random aliens in for no reason. Rosa would have been improved if Krasko didn't exist, and I think that the Demons of Punjab would have been improved without the Thijarians.
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Re: Doctor Who?

Postby ftl » Wed Nov 14, 2018 3:22 am

It feels like the aliens are put in to answer the question of "Why is the Doctor involved at all". Like, if there were no aliens, they pop in to the past, check it out, and then leave without interfering. The aliens provide a convenient hook for them to stick around. Dunno whether they can find a convincing other hook like that - I'm no writer so I can't think of one, but it's their job so maybe they can!
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Re: Doctor Who?

Postby ghijkmnop » Wed Nov 14, 2018 4:09 am

Redacted
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Re: Doctor Who?

Postby Marcuse » Mon Nov 19, 2018 12:02 am

Episode 7 - Kerblam!

Spoiler: show
So let's start with this, this time. I really liked this one so if you haven't seen it, go see it.

In another episode not written by Chibnall, we see a slightly murky, fun plot where the author appears to have paid attention to the brief for the various characters. It's easy to grasp the concept; shady goings on at space Amazon, but I found that the plot threw me for a loop somewhat by executing that in a way that felt a bit different, and wholly Doctor Who in nature.

The episode opens immediately, with a Kerblam! you might say, with the TARDIS doing that "shaky running away from something" thing. Turns out that's a teleporter sending a creepy looking mail bot to deliver the Doctor a parcel. After succinctly telling the audience what they're about (the biggest retailer in the galaxy) she opens the box to get a message that says "help me". So far so believable, it's not like that hasn't happened in real life.

So they go to the moon orbiting the planet where the deliveries are made from, because the company is so powerful they bought a moon and made it a warehouse.

As an aside, there's a lot in here that's ripe for fridge logic. There's nothing in the episode that dwells for longer than it takes to make the bare point, but when you engage with it it reveals something about the thing you're considering. Rather than tell us the company is so powerful and unregulated that they literally bought a jurisdiction of their own (there's literally no law enforcement) they just present the bare fact of it and leave it there. All the fridge logic stuff is gonna be in italics for easy reference.

They kinda crash the TARDIS getting there, and I'm starting to wonder if they're trying to make The Doctor a bad driver because she's female. How do you get into a warehouse like that? You work there. Ryan actually offers something as a character by being the person to speak about his experience working in a warehouse and this clues the Doctor into the idea. Ryan did something. Amazing.

They go inside to meet the Head of People, Judy. She's a chirpy woman with a strikingly similar Yorkshire accent, who seems to genuinely care about people, even though she sometimes refers to them as organics. She explains that even though this is the far future and automation has completely replaced human labour, the law requires 10% of the workforce to be human, at all levels. This is because crippling unemployment has ruined their society, but the show doesn't dwell on this.

After a suitably goofy use of psychic paper and hacking, they're on the payroll and are left to the creeeeeeeeepy robots to be assigned tasks. They're also body scanned to judge physical and mental capabilities, then clamped with leg tags which tell which job they're supposed to do and where they are. It's loosely compared to being arrested, which it is. It's shown and feels oppressive, but the show doesn't dwell on this too much. It makes the point and moves on, leaving it unspoken for most of the time.

Yaz is assigned to shipping the items to be packed from the large storehouse, a job she shares with Dan (played by hangdog everyman Lee Mack). Both Graham and Ryan are assigned to packing, and the Doctor to something. But the Doctor wants to be in packing, she thinks the help me message must have come from there and swaps jobs with Graham before we learn what that job is. Turns out it's janitor, womp womp.

Now I know what you're thinking, the Doctor? Janitor? What the fuck kind of plot is this? Remember it.

Yaz gets used to working with Dan, who warns her that the robots can hear everything. Eventually they're encouraged in as creepy a way as possible to get back to work by one which is following them around. An order suddenly comes in for Yaz to go to the near abandoned end of the warehouse, which Dan suggests is inherently dangerous because people who don't know their way take too long and get fired for poor productivity. Well, he actually says he didn't see the last person to get sent there ever again, but TOTALLY NOT EVIL ROBOTS WORKING HERE NO SIREE. Along the way he tells Yaz about his daughter whom he is working to support, even despite having been a crap husband to his former wife. He shows her a pendant which she gave him which says "dad" on it Remember that too.

Dan walks down there, followed by Yaz who smells a rat. Almost like she's a police officer trained to figure things out or something. He comes across a postman unit which doesn't respond to him at all, until he turns his back and gets grabbed. Scary. Yaz finds nothing but the broken order tablet and the pendant. She goes looking for the Doctor, but is almost accosted by the evil robots too. There are also random power outages blighting the system and switching everything off in an ominous way.

Meanwhile The Doctor and Ryan are packin' crates, neatly wrapping things with bubblewrap in little red Kerblam! boxes with a nice girl called Kira. She's a bit of a naive wallflower, who's pleasant and wants to talk. One thing she tells them is that people are disappearing. Another thing she says is a long story about how she thinks what she's doing there is a good thing because it's making other people happy. I have to say I did not expect a defense of this kind of system wrapped up in an episode I expected to critique it. She also tells us she only ever got a parcel from Judy the head of Organics People. Ryan has remembered his dyspraxia again, almost like this writer was given a brief and paid attention to it. Wow so writing. The Doctor wants to know what's going on, so when a harassed looking suit walks by she intentionally provokes him in order to ask outright if anything is going awry in the company. The guy is a dick to Kira and Ryan sticks up for her, which is the first time I've liked the guy in this whole series. The Doctor does too and manages to deliver a reminder that good management is caring about your staff without it taking 30 minutes to build up to.

Meanwhile, in the janitor closet Graham is done being lectured about the rules of janitor-ness. He meets Charlie, a pretty unassuming berk who he leans on to get information and things he needs. Of particular note is how Graham is written, claiming to have superpowers and to be 310 years old without anyone batting an eyelid. Bradley Walsh's delivery is so deadpan and checked out that it just works somehow. I love it. One thing that comes to mind when Graham asks if there's a plan of the layout he can get hold of, and Charlie tells him yeah he can get that, janitors have access to everything and nobody notices them. Remember this.

Yaz reports back to the Doctor and the three of them rush to the head of people to report this in a confrontation in the evil looking suit guy's office. The Doctor literally calls them out on people disappearing and they deny knowledge and responsibility in much the same way as the not-Trump does. This time however, the plot is a bit thicker than that one. Remember Kira saying she'd gotten a gift from Judy before? Not the actions of someone trying to murder people, is it? Following the meeting where the suits promise to investigate, the Doctor has them hide behind a panel and steal into the office to get the real lowdown.

For a space age computer based robot warehouse, having paperwork is telling. Even more telling, the guy is keeping a list of the disappeared people. Smoking gun established, they're confronted by Judy who points out they were still wearing their electronic locator tags. Doiy. Now this is a pretty dumb thing to do, but I felt like it was a vague comment on the ubiquity and insidiousness of wearable tech and surveillance. I could be reading too far into that one though. Now they've been caught by the bad guys, shit's gonna get real.

Either way, the power goes fucky again and Graham and Charlie show up just as the lights backlit red and an evil droid goes for them. It tries to throttle Charlie, but Judy literally screws it's head off, saving Charlie's life and ending the power outage. Um, okay Doctor Who, is the rich person in a suit a bad guy or not? I know capitalism is evil and all so I expected this to be the villain. But Judy swears not, she does actually care about humans even though the system she works in is a bit shit. She's also unaware of the records of the people going missing. Suit bloke turns up and the Doctor presents this damning information to him. He also denies it, saying he was monitoring the disappearances trying to figure out why they happened. So...none of the suits are bad guys? But we've been playing up the evils of automated technological advancement and its effects on labour, surely these are in fact the bad guys?

But the robots are sure evil. While the gang are on a rest break they abduct Kira on false pretenses (which we care about because Charlie is sweet on her and she's genuinely just a nice person) and chuck her in a cell on the dispatch level. The Doctor and gang split up to try to solve this because they need to figure out a way down there, being made for robots only no humans can get down there and no entrance exists. To find out how, they need an original plan of the warehouse, which is contained in the little dinky delivery bot in another artifact locker they can get into because Graham has clearance.

The bot is hilarious. "Turn off sales protocols please" "Even upselling?" :lol:

The Doctor links the bot to the network to get it to find an old route to the dispatch level and...comes across something else. It turns out the automated system itself was the one that sent the help me message to her. This is...well I certainly didn't expect that, and I really put it down to good writing that in a story ripe with better and more sympathetic characters to be asking for help, the author chose to make the person asking for help an automated planet sized computer system managing deliveries. The Doctor figures out they can just teleport to dispatch, which really should have occurred to her sooner.

Meanwhile, Ryan and Yaz and Charlie get to dispatch the hard way: through crappy CGI. It's Doctor Who I can live with it. They rock up at Kira's cell just as she's delivered a box (she was told she'd won a prize) by teleport. She proceeds to open an empty box with nothing but a sheet of bubble wrap in it, and idly begins to pop it and...

...she explodes. The nice gawky friendly girl who they're trying to save dies in front of Ryan, Yaz and Charlie. That's a bit hardcore actually, maybe even a little too far. Evil bubblewrap is a concept which is genius in its simplicity. Everyone on the planet pops bubblewrap, it's satisfying in so many ways. The evil robots want to blow us up with exploding wrapping! Evil Amazon! All my suspicions have been fulfilled!

But it's this that makes them realise something is up with Charlie, of all people. He knew beforehand that the bubblewrap would explode and Ryan notices this. The Doctor shows up with Graham, Judy, and suit guy to figure all this out. She's shocked to see all the deliveries have been halted, legions of postbots have been stored waiting to deliver their cargo. She reasons that the power outages were the teleport system storing power for one big jump at once. But why? Is it an army of evil bots? Why would the machine be asking for help if it's created an army of bots to kill people?

But we know now something is up with Charlie, and putting two and two together, they figure out that the army is actually his doing. The disappearances have been tests for the explosive and the reason is because he's an anti-automation terrorist trying to make a point that machines can't be trusted. The machines called for help from the Doctor because they were trying to stop him. They killed Kira to hurt him so he wouldn't do it to others. They tried to kill Charlie in the office (remember that?) because he was the problem. He can do all this because (remember?) janitors have access to everything and nobody notices them. The Doctor was assigned to be a janitor against all reason because she would have been placed in the same room as the ultimate villain. Charlie has his detonator in his hand so I'm expecting a stand off where he...no, he just presses it then immediately breaks it to ensure nobody can stop it happening. Okay expectations, you're drunk go home.

The only thing the Doctor can do is direct the robots to deliver to themselves, so instead of teleporting out they open the boxes and press the bubblewrap to explode themselves...but Charlie has run into their midst. Graham calls to him to come back and not die, but he refuses and explodes with the bots. Problem...solved I guess?

The management meet with the gang afterwards, promising to temporarily close (paying the staff for the time) and reopen with a more than 50% human workforce. So...did Charlie get what he wanted then? Man this one is murky. When they're back in the TARDIS, Yaz is overcome with emotion because (remember?) she still has that locket from Dan, who died earlier, and wants to give a message to his daughter about how much he loved her and how much it meant to him. I was very surprised they bothered to include that, but I liked it that even the random mook who dies first is given some degree of respect and the thing they had that defined them is revisited. Graham then almost kills them all and destroys the TARDIS by popping some bubblewrap idly, just to demonstrate that this plot is classic proper Who fodder of "thing what everyone does but doesn't think about is actually evil".

So overall, this was a massive step up from the last six episodes. The writing is funny without being too goofy (at least in ways that detracted from the episode), and the story is convoluted enough that I was still unsure about what was going on near the end of the episode. The morality of the character was switched around and people who appeared to be the bad guys weren't, and others were not what they seemed to be. I enjoyed how it twisted around the issue of large unaccountable companies acting with no oversight by having it run by people who did actually care and tried to do good but didn't have all the facts. The system itself was trying in a fractured way to do good, though obviously murdering someone isn't a good thing. It also avoided all the things I've been complaining about in the last few episodes; giving the companions nothing to do, forgetting who they are and what they're like, and one-dimensional soapboxing about really complicated issues that merit at least hearing more than one side of the story.
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Re: Doctor Who?

Postby Australia » Tue Nov 20, 2018 1:30 am

Marcuse wrote:Now I know what you're thinking, the Doctor? Janitor?

Image

This is what I meant by fun episode. Crazy plot, quotable, fun interactions. Best episode in ages. Having said that...

Spoiler: show
They go to an alien planet and the inhabitants all look like Earthlings. I guess they are Earthlings and it's the future so they've migrated across the galaxy but half the fun of this show is the kooky alien designs and this just felt lazy. Not asking for much, just give them unusual bumps or something. I'm all for quasi-evil Krytons but is it too much to ask for a space episode to have space beings? I probably would have cared more about their demises because they'd stand out more. Personalities are great but weird looks are more memorable in a visual medium.

Villain logic: People need more jobs. So if I kill people, there'll be more jobs. I didn't realise humanitarians were so anti-human. Not a complaint. Crazy villains are fine. I just figured if his brain was that disconnected (techno pun), he would have tipped his hand at some point.

Did that conveyer belt scene remind anyone else of the chase scene in The Fifth Element? It's all I could think of. Guess it didn't help that the effects also looked really 90s.

Fez who's back? Back again.

Seven episodes in and a certain Sontaran still hasn't shown up and not been able to tell that the Doctor has changed gender. Missed opportunity.
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Re: Doctor Who?

Postby ftl » Tue Nov 20, 2018 7:48 pm

The season is leaning hard into "the real villain is the hate inside all of us". Alien space robots - not the problem! Terrorist willing to kill people to make a political point - the problem! Except for Tzim-Sha in the first episode, the "bad guy" has always been basically human, with human motivations.
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Re: Doctor Who?

Postby SandTea » Wed Nov 21, 2018 3:19 am

I really like "humans are the real monsters" stories but I'm also a dude who gives big leeway to silly shows where I can say "it's magic" instead of deep explanations about everything.

Not that I don't also enjoy pointing out how certain aspects could be monumentally world changing, but that's mostly just for sadistic fun against die hard fans. Like, "Yeah, inspector gadget is a monster."

I haven't had any real issue against this season. If anything I'm sorta glad cop, widower and can't ride a bike aren't being focused on too much.
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Re: Doctor Who?

Postby KleinerKiller » Wed Nov 21, 2018 10:56 pm

YES! YEEEEES! FUCKING FINALLY! A GOOD EPISODE!

Yeah, I liked "Kerblam!" a lot more than I expected to, even with the positive tone of everyone's comments here priming me for a step up in quality. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, it's the best episode of the season so far, and I'm not even having to grade on a generous curve like with "Demons of the Punjab". Tightly written plot with a couple of genuinely good twists, strong focus on this Doctor's unique traits and at least casual attention toward the unique aspects of the companions Chibnall's handily ignored (I particularly liked Yaz restraining the villain toward the end, presumably because she's, y'know, a trained officer), a satisfying resolution that -- while a little murky -- doesn't make the Doctor seem like a massive hypocrite, and just the fact that it was generally fun to watch.

That being said, I regrettably don't have a long-form analysis for this one. Most of my thoughts lined up neatly with Marc's synopsis, and the writing was good enough that I didn't have too many notes to take. I do have a couple of separate points and things I just want to elaborate on, though.

Spoiler: show
Very minor complaint: the whole conveyor belt sequence just seemed like filler to give the companions something to do, and filler with exceptionally poor greenscreen at that. It took up needless time, nothing of much interest happened during it, and the immediate revelation that the Doctor could've just teleported everyone to the foundation level to begin with -- while amusing -- made it worthless. And I have a hard time believing such a monolithic corporate entity would have a security system composed of easily dodged laser blasts, rather than something like an incineration grid, but at that point it's just me nitpicking.

The reprogrammed antique delivery robot is perfect and I love him. I've seen a lot of reactions from people outraged that Kira was "fridged" instead of being put on the TARDIS crew, but fuck that, should've brought the little robo-bro along. He could have been like a new K9, except not shit.

While Charlie isn't exactly a master-class villain by any means, I'm very pleased with how he turned out. Next to Tim Shaw, the evil blankets, KKKrasko, NotTrump, the vicious and unstoppable Putter, and Barely-Written Nationalist Brother, he's unquestionably the best. He had an understandable viewpoint that the entire episode beforehand justified, a scheme that was actually threatening, and enough huge red herrings beforehand that I only started to figure him out when he saw Kira about to get blown to smithereens. And his actor did a pretty good job making him, if not menacing, than suitably psychotic and pitiable.

I'm very happy that while the Kerblam system took some ethically dark measures to stop Charlie, it was ultimately concerned about the loss of human life and wasn't depicted as a bad thing in the end. As we get closer and closer to the development of true robots and artificial intelligence, I'm sick and tired of our culture's supposed sci-fi stories continuously going back to the Frankenstein well and treating such things as fundamentally doomed (Black Mirror, while a genuinely great show I quite enjoy, falls into such a Luddite-adjacent well a lot). Nice to see an episode that's actually forward-thinking.

And lastly, since I'm a masochist who reads review comments a lot, I'm delighted to see so many fans freaking out because they didn't get the straight "capitalism is evil and Amazon will destroy us all" plot they were set up for. Instead, the episode showed a very realistic gray area where the oppressive business actually had some good to it and the plucky rebel out to change the system went too far, and if there's one thing internet debate does not tolerate, it's gray areas. Freak-out levels vary from implying that the writer was "confused" and didn't clearly convey the message he must have meant to, to screeching that the episode was "corporate bootlicker propaganda" that's reason enough to drop the season. And I keep seeing "Oxygen" brought up as if it was a superior episode in the same vein, which I can't stop laughing about.
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Re: Doctor Who?

Postby AboveGL » Thu Nov 22, 2018 12:25 pm

The episodes have ranged from "average but reasonably enjoyable" to "very dull" (particularly that episode with the weird thing that eats ships, I fell asleep partway through it and didn't care to rewatch what I missed). I prefer it to Moffat's episodes and I love The Doctor, but still.

And finally, we get a really good one. This has been the best episode yet and I hope this is consistent for the rest of the season.
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Re: Doctor Who?

Postby Marcuse » Thu Nov 22, 2018 8:05 pm

(I particularly liked Yaz restraining the villain toward the end, presumably because she's, y'know, a trained officer)


I noticed that too, it was a really good example of why that writing is good. Yaz just did that amongst a group because that's how she'd do it and nobody pointed it out.
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Re: Doctor Who?

Postby Anglerphobe » Thu Nov 22, 2018 8:11 pm

I have a question about this episode. Please excuse and explain if it's merely an expression of my A-1 idiocy.

Spoiler: show
The actions of the computer don't make sense to me. Why would the computer need to combat the threat of that terrorist guy in such an inefficient way? It knew who he was and what he was doing, going as far as to kill his girlfriend with his own exploding bubble wrap apparently out of spite, and yet allowed him to carry out his plan to the verge of completion without impeding him in any way with the tools at its disposal. Just one robot made one pathetic effort that wasn't followed through on at all and only served to aid the reveal to the audience. It knew about his bomb packaging and failed to do anything about it being packed into the deliveries ready to go to its customers. Why blow up his girlfriend? Why send one solitary robot to try to take him out while he's surrounded by backup instead of several robots at 3am to bung him in that unexplained underground people exploding room until the space police arrive? Why all the fuckery?
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Re: Doctor Who?

Postby KleinerKiller » Thu Nov 22, 2018 10:45 pm

Anglerphobe wrote:I have a question about this episode. Please excuse and explain if it's merely an expression of my A-1 idiocy.

Spoiler: show
The actions of the computer don't make sense to me. Why would the computer need to combat the threat of that terrorist guy in such an inefficient way? It knew who he was and what he was doing, going as far as to kill his girlfriend with his own exploding bubble wrap apparently out of spite, and yet allowed him to carry out his plan to the verge of completion without impeding him in any way with the tools at its disposal. Just one robot made one pathetic effort that wasn't followed through on at all and only served to aid the reveal to the audience. It knew about his bomb packaging and failed to do anything about it being packed into the deliveries ready to go to its customers. Why blow up his girlfriend? Why send one solitary robot to try to take him out while he's surrounded by backup instead of several robots at 3am to bung him in that unexplained underground people exploding room until the space police arrive? Why all the fuckery?


Those are all very good questions, and my answers might not be right, but I'll do my best.

Spoiler: show
Due to how late Charlie was revealed as the villain, a lot of the context is left to interpretation, but he mentioned that he had extensive knowledge of robotics and programming, which is how he got the hijacked bots into the teleporting room in the first place. I took that to mean -- and maybe I'm just doing a bit of work on the episode's behalf, because I actually have goodwill for this one -- that he knew enough about the ins and outs of the system to easily counteract any of its attempts to stop him. The robots themselves are clearly so easy to disable that an elderly woman can twist one's head off no problem; it's just a matter of knowing about that weakness. And when you're dealing with a mechanical genius who apparently knows all of your systems, there's not a lot you can do as an artificial construct not expressly prepared to deal with terrorist threats. It's entirely plausible that it tried to alert the managers before contacting the Doctor, but those messages were either ignored or intercepted by Charlie.

The reason it killed his girlfriend was actually stated, more or less: it wasn't out of spite, it was a desperate attempt by computer logic to try to force empathy for his victims at the last minute by making him go through the tragedy he was about to inflict en masse. It's ethically suuuuper dark gray, but it was a last-ditch attempt and the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, etc.

The only part I'm not completely sure about is the solitary attack in the office, but I have a reading of it that you may or may not accept depending on how bullshitty it sounds. I think it wanted to enforce a no-win situation for Charlie; fail to fight back and he'd die, fight back and he'd reveal how adept he was at disabling the robots in front of witnesses. I'd imagine a lowly janitor isn't supposed to know about such an exploitable security flaw, and with both his boss and the Doctor in the room, he'd have a hard time explaining his way out. It wasn't a great plan since the boss easily struck first, but this was the eleventh hour before the mass teleporter was due to go off.
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