Doctor Who S2E6 The Interstellar Song Contest ★★☆☆☆
A lot to like and hate here. It is very hard to look at this and not read it in terms of Palestine and as much as I love that there is a trans woman writing for Doctor Who it’s not surprising that the woman who also wrote The Good Doctor (where the Doctor berates a slave uprising for being too violent) comes out with a story that has the ultimate resolution of a genocide being that a woman sings very beautifully about how sad that makes her and little else. The Doctor going absolute psycho and that being so quickly walked back with everyone being absolutely sycophantic to him afterwards is all the more disturbing for the fact that it doesn’t seem like the sycophancy was intentionally written as disturbing.
On the good side, well, it was fun when it wasn’t horrifying and Varada Sethu’s delivery of “IT’S RYLAN!” had me in stitches even though I did not have a clue who Rylan was (which my friend who I was watching it with found very endearing).
Mrs. Flood being the Rani is whatever. Pretty dull resolution to that. We’ll see where the stuff with Susan finally goes.