The last three episodes

[daibhidc]

Right. Main points only, I'm afraid. (I swear, the Sunday schedule has me all wrong. I'm used to watching the episode, and then either spending the rest of the night on stream-of-counsiousness rambling, or letting it percolate away in my brain overnight and writing something more considered but still fresh the following day. Neither of these approaches are compatible with having work in the morning. And even less so with forgetting it's on and catching up during the week.)


Orphan 55

A well done base under siege, as such things go. Some nicely-realised secondary characters, a Green Aesop that even I thought was overegging it, and an unfortunate belief that suddenly throwing in another plotline near the end,  revealing the true true backstory of a woman who had already admitted to making one up, was remotely a good idea.

(We shall not go into what "just a possibility" means for Doctor Who's History of the Future, because while I am happy to play along with the pretence that Doctor Who chronology makes sense or that Doctor Who time travel makes sense, I refuse to attempt both at the same time.)


Nikolai Tesla's Night of Terror

Well, I do love me some Teslapunk. I was kind of annoyed that they glossed over the fact Tesla's dream of broadcast power was not in fact the precursor of the modern world, but something that didn't work. Could they not have saved the "invented wifi" claim for a potential Hedy Lamarr episode?

But then, claiming Tesla made mistakes isn't something the episode was interested in. Casting Edison as the money-hungry baddie in Tesla's story is probably fair enough (indeed, the electric chair story suggests he was much worse than the episode portrays him), but by all accounts Tesla himself was difficult to work with, and to the extent the episode acknowledged this, it seemed to be presented as being impatient that NOBODY could SEE his VISION OF THE FUTURE. Which was based on something that didn't work.

Some cool scavenger-aliens, though. And an impressive recreation of Wardenclyffe Tower (even if...)

Fugative of the Judoon

Okay, there's a lot going on here.

Except, there isn't, really. The whole episode just felt like some exciting headlines (Judoon! Captain Jack! A past incarnation of the Doctor we've never seen before!) as wrapping paper covering some mysteeeerious foreshadowing and not much else. And we already have a mysterious arc word that needs explained. And while there's an attempt to suggest a connection (at least with Ruth, if not with the Lone Cyberman), piling further mystery on top of mystery just gives me flashbacks to the time it became very apparent that Chris Carter had absolutely no idea what the Conspiracy in The X-Files was actually about.

On the other hand, Doctor Ruth was great, with some classic multi-Doctor bickering, a retro-TARDIS, and a fun wardrobe. And I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have seen it coming, if I hadn't watched it after 24 hours on Twitter. I look forward to seeing her again.

(Oh, and our Doctor might be shocked by the old booby-trapped gun trick, but she can't believe that none of the past selves she remembers would have done something like that, surely? Hand of Omega ringing any bells, Doc? Nemesis statue? Or, heck, how about the wooden Cyberman?)

Comments

[john_amend_all]

Regarding Thirteen's pacifism: the lady doth protest too much, methinks. Quite apart from all the times previous Doctors have gunned down Ice Warriors and Ogrons and Sontarans, it was only last week that she was prepared to blow the Skithra to pieces.

Given how I reacted to Spyfall part 2 and this week's, I think I get on better with this Doctor when her Chorus are sidelined and she's dealing with the problem of the week on her own.

(I was partially spoiled for Doctor Ruth too, and I was only a couple of hours late on catch-up. Google News can be far too helpful at digging up articles of interest).

[daibhidc]

Yeah, the Doctor's pacifism has always veered between "inconsistent" and "downright hypocritical", but it does seem to be getting worse. (The nadir, of course, being "How dare you shoot those spiders! Let them die slowly and painfully on their own!")

There are definitely too many companions. I thought that with Graham and Ryan's big emotional arc resolved we might at least start alternating which of them gets short shrift, but no, it still seems to mostly be Yaz.

[julesjones]

I think the Doctor's pacifism has always been a) an ambition, b) try pacifism *first* because sometimes it actually works, and save the Big Stick for when it doesn't. Which in some ways makes the Doctor a lot scarier, because you know that when they finally get pushed far enough there is a lot of pent-up Big Stick waiting to be released.