The technobabble and lore wank is even worse here than the previous episode. The Doctor talking about the Bone Beasts from the Underverse is so painfully flat compared to the much more to the point description of the actually-conceptually-very-similar monsters from Father’s Day. Kate all but calling out “Omega, he’s a thing from the ’70s!” to the audience is pathetic¹.

Is the Time Lord infertility from whatever the hell the Dhawan Master did? Who knows! The deftness of handling and recuperating elements from Chibnall that was present in the 60th anniversary specials is completely gone now.

When we get through all of that and the Doctor shoots the Binding of Isaac boss giant monster corpse baby that we are calling Omega with a big laser we get back to things that Davies is better at: The big emotional melodrama. This is still a mess (apparently not helped by a lot of last-minute reshoots so Gatwa can leave) but it’s a more compelling mess.

It was hard to tell what the hell they were doing with Poppy initially. The heterosexuality enforced by the wish world on the Doctor felt so wrong and it made him and Belinda pushing to keep Poppy so much come off as unsettling, especially just before Poppy disappears when they are acting so couple-y. Anything that is making Gatwa’s Doctor act straight cannot be right.

I think with the flashback scenes where they insert Belinda talking about getting back to Poppy in the context of previous episodes we are meant to understand that what we are seeing there is the “correct” timeline. That Poppy always existed and was always Belinda’s daughter and that her disappearing was not reality reasserting itself but one of the glitches like the border between Norway and Sweden moving and we have been seeing that glitched version of reality for the whole series up until now. That her demanding to get home at a particular date is meant to be recontextualised as always having been about Poppy.

But it’s as hard to swallow that as it was hard to swallow the Doctor acting so straight: Belinda as a mother seems like a different character who has been swapped in. She seems like she has been overriden by this new woman who only talks about being a mam. Maybe if she had been developed more as a character it would have allowed a sense of continuity to shine through but it comes across as the Doctor having semi-Stepford-wifed her by shooting magic sparks into the TARDIS.

Whittaker getting to be in a scene that’s good was a nice novelty and while it was certainly not the intent of the line I did laugh at little at the knife being twisted in the Thasmin shippers’ wounds again.

And well I guess the stuff with Susan went nowhere again. Maybe the Bad Wolf Doctor will meet her if that actually gets its own series.

There is a lot of fun here but most of fails to link up or go anywhere. I like the wrongness of jolly fascism land the way it is limited by Conrad’s perspective. The disabled being able to leverage their invisibility as a strength in order to tear down and kill God is wonderful! It is a shame nothing like that actually happens and that grand statements results in them sitting in a square and watching a tablet while waiting for the cliffhanger to happen. Rose being absent because Conrad cannot even comprehend trans people feels a bit of self-congratulatory cleverness about erasure of trans people that still ends up erasing trans people itself but honestly Yasmin Finney is the weak link of the UNIT cast so I don’t particularly mind her being absent (though I would prefer if UNIT itself were more absent from the era in general).

Similarly the mugs falling through the table is a cute visual that is beautifully mirrored in the cliffhanger by the bottom just falling out from under reality itself but is very transparently just serving as the big “oh no it’s the cliffhanger!” scene with little else to it after the wind has already been taken out of the sails by ten minutes of dull technobabble and the show wanting you to clap like a trained seal whenever some shite from the ’70s is mentioned. I have seen The Three Doctors and even I don’t give a shit about Omega.

Other small comments:

• I saw this in the cinema as part of the special two-part finale showing. It started with an add for the BBC iPlayer, which is not available here in the Republic of Ireland.
• Carla disowns Ruby in an wrong version of the world again.
• It took me a minute to remember who Rogue was. That scene also looked hilariously bad.
• I rolled my eyes at Conrad’s Doctor Who book covers being based on Harry Potter.

Like many of Davies’ big episodes each act does feel very disconnected, with the initial big problem of the eponymous giggle not really mattering at all after the source of it is found and everything in the back of the toy shop just sort of happening. Does feel a bit like an old serial in that way I suppose.

And then everything kind of gets swept away for the bigeneration and getting Doctor Who into a therapy programme, which somehow actually manages to land. The ball game is a bit naff but introducing Gatwa in this absurd way, with his self-assurance and energy contrasting with Tennant playing a Doctor who has been worn to the bone by everything he has gone through is great.

I do love Tennant and Tate in this. Wonderful acting for them in all four roles and it manages to really thread the needle of taking elements from Chibnall’s shitass lore, salvaging some core emotional beats from them and using them in interesting ways while glossing over the asinine details.

Basically the same humour as the opening of Wild Blue Yonder but about Doctor Who history instead of real history.

Weird as hell. Much prefer this view into magic as inexplicable and horrible than the pantheon stuff.

Very much Steven Moffat taking a grab-bag of elements from his previous script and throwing them together. Does fall victim to the era-long problem of somewhat unsatisfying ending. It feels like it is relying on you having seen similar stories in the show before to fill in the gaps rather than coming together really neatly like many of Moffat’s episodes do.

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.

On a rewatch this is still a great episode but some of the less well developed parts of do stand out. “It’s in alphabetical order” is a very dull reveal for how much the question of why the sinister mister sloogs are not eating certain people gets repeatedly emphasised by the Doctor. It could at least have been in order of subscriber count or something so they were picking off people who wouldn’t be missed first. Homeworld being also wiped out is glossed over so quickly in the episode to perhaps stop you from considering that that means that all the poors and minorities were also wiped out because rich people were annoying on Instagram.

One thing I think about this episode is how so many previous Doctors and previous versions of this show would see a bunch of racist rich kids go off to get themselves killed in the wilderness and would not only have not realised they were racist in the first place but have wished them well and waffled on about how wonderful the human spirit is. It’s not hard to picture Tennant or Whittaker’s Doctors smiling and waving them off and talking about how humanity always keeps going and how wonderful their new colonial project will be.

I think this is my favourite of the series so far. I think it does have a lot of problems—the story feels like it’s jumping around between things that don’t gel well with the more sci-fi-y elements clashing with the storytelling theme, the cast of the barbershop are not fleshed out at all other than Omo, Belinda suddenly being so at home on the TARDIS now that she is knowingly laughing along with the Doctor about hanging out with the gods and spouting technobabble.

But it is bursting with charm, throwing out a lot of great ideas and manages to be more than the sum of its parts. I like the Doctor setting down some roots on Earth (and not just in England) and then feeling betrayed that he is still seen as this outsider spaceman, the emphasis on storytelling and exploitation and commodification of it and how the African oral tradition doesn’t fit easily into that. Though it does feel a bit backwards then in the end that the engine is overloaded by the weight of the story of Doctor Who the television programme.

Quite enjoyed this one. The dodgy politics were mild enough to leave just a little bit of a bad taste in my mouth rather than send me into a bloody rage like with Kerblam!.

There is a very abrupt gear-shift half way through, but I enjoyed both Ruby trying to deal with her trauma and the conspiracy theory grifter shithead angle. I think the way that Conrad will immediately shift back into denial of reality rather than learn a lesson is astute. The worldview of a conspiracy theorist is one that justifies a desired conclusion more than anything else. He is not going to drop that over a little thing like his arm being bitten off.

That said, this episode falls into the trap of countering anti-vaxxers by uncritically aligning with the monstrosity that is the pharmaceutical industry. UNIT clearly is a nepotistic military hierarchy that operates opaquely and above the law. Kate Stewart is portrayed as going a bit too far here, but in a way that we are meant to take some naughty satisfaction in. The episode says that UNIT is necessary, and thus above any serious reproach. It is the quiet, acceptable authoritarianism of that free-floating quote that gets attributed to various famous, dead men: “We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.”

I think I am holding Doctor Who to a higher standard for these ratings than I would for other shows. I am giving this one a higher rating to the last two but I have been a bit disappointed with how every episode has gone this series so far. I was pretty drawn in at the start but it lost me in the middle a bit.

It making itself a sequel to Midnight distracted me from the actual episode a bit and made me keep comparing it to that (and sets itself a really high bar to clear) and the scene immediately following that where half the squad gets chucked around the room just felt a bit silly compared the the really good building of tension and camera work just a few minutes prior.

It does regain its footing towards the end and though I could nitpick further I don’t think it does anything too bad, though I’d prefer it hadn’t tried to show a proper physical depiction of the thing at all, no matter how dark, distant and blurred. The suggestion of a flash of motion behind someone and the little shadow creeping over Aliss’ shoulder was more interesting.

Actually one last thing that was interesting and I hope was deliberate is how shitty everyone, even the Doctor, is about casually excluding Aliss, reflexively turning off their subtitles whenever they aren’t directly talking to her and the Doctor repeatedly forgetting to sign to her even when he is. But it does feel like a dropped thread and reminds me of how some people thought Belinda’s reaction to the Doctor treating her as a curiosity might be her seeing him is a similar light to Al after The Robot Revolution, which does not seem to have gone anywhere. Perhaps Davies will surprise us and have a callout of the Doctor’s instrumental treatment of people despite his outward performance of care and kindness later in the series.

Better than last week but still feels like a jumble of ideas that don’t come together very well.

In The Church of Ruby Road I really liked the goblins. I enjoyed Doctor Who just un­self­con­scious­ly em­bracing silly fantasy elements and I wish that Mr. Ring-a-Ding had that same air of playfulness to it. That he could have just been a weird cartoon man that operates on his own set of rules and motivations and not tied into this set of gods that are increasingly bogged down by their own set of signifiers and rules. It seemed like the show was expanding the boundaries of what it could do and be but it also seems scared to keep going. It has pulled back and made a new box for itself to sit in. The rules only get broke in a specific type of episode with a specific formula and that formula is having diminishing returns for me. Or I am just judging this series too early. We did also have 73 Yards last year as well so there is hopefully weirdness still to come unrelated to this pantheon. That said it does seem increasingly likely that Mrs. Flood is just going to be one of these gods as well, which I will be very disappointed in if it turns out to be true.

Other thoughts: I love Belinda in this episode and I am also disappointed that she seems to have fully gotten over her doubt and worries about the Doctor by the end of the episode. It seemed like there was going to be a more interesting dynamic there that seems to have been closed off now. The bit with the fans was sweet and only a little bit annoying. I enjoyed the subtle self-deprecating humour of Davies holding up Steven Moffat as the better writer, both in making everyone’s favourite episode Blink but also having Gatwa’s Doctor thinking that Boom is his best adventure so far. The Doctor and Belinda being turned into cartoons was disappointingly slight and I rolled my eyes at the Doctor supposedly being given depth by him repeating the last of the Time Lords title, something from two decades ago at this point that Chris Chibnall’s tenure on the show has reset us back to.

A lot of cute ideas here but it doesn’t really come together. The mid-century pulp sci-fi aesthetics, the idea of taking the star certificate seriously and Belinda herself are all really fun. The every ninth word idea is cute but only matters at all for two scenes and the incel comparison just comes out of nowhere. Al really needed more characterisation for the one scene he was in at the start for that to work. And another big deal about a character being played by the same actor as a previous one or even just another mystery around a companion in general is a bit tired at this point. Hopefully like Gatwa’s first series this will improve as it goes on.

I got this on a whim as part of a three for two offer, being a fan of Doctor Who since the 2005 series but only having seen bits and pieces of the older show and not much in the way of expanded universe material. I enjoyed it. The title story is by far the most substantial, trying to be a condemnation of the misogyny of a lot of sci fi adventure fiction but making the female cast suffer by way of demonstration. Emblematic of the approach is when Ace is told to put on a gold (presumably; the comic is in black and white) bikini, to which her response is to kick a guard square in the chest, steal his sword, and escape, only to quickly fall back into peril and be forced into the slave attire anyway. Much worse things happen to women in the story from there.

The art is impressive enough at times but often falls into uncanny and offputting in ways that extremely realistic styles do. It’s feels like making a comic out of stills taken from the show paused at unfortunate moments mid sentence that make the characters look as bad as possible. Included in this version are some redone pages that might be argued to look better than the originals in isolation, but in practise massively contrast with what’s either side of them in a terribly jarring manner. In the originals you have strict black and white with clear lines and contrast with the redrawn ones done entirely in digital brushes with no sharp lines and a million shades of grey. The contrasting styles could, maybe, have been used to dilettante the reality of Earth with the imaginary construction of the titular empire but that is not how they are used at all. In fact when I saw how the soldiers in fatigues looked in the painted pages I thought it made them look like plastic figurines, which I thought might tie into how Ace describes the empire of stinking of polystyrene cement, but those were the real UNIT troops, not part of Alex’s mindscape.

The second largest part of the book is The Grief which is a fairly middling riff on Aliens in which the Doctor guilt trips a guy into doing a big heroic sacrifice and then leaves him to die, followed by him in The Raven picking up a samurai to bring to the future so that he can murder a bunch of gangsters. I know these stories are trying to be part of an era of constructing the Doctor as a darker, more ambiguous, schemer but it just comes across as petty and mean.

Memorial tries to put this scheming to a better, more touching use, but the backstory being a highly advanced purely good lovely alien species being wiped out by another purely evil alien species seems very unimaginative, especially coming just off The Grief which had the same thing. Cat Litter is kind of fun with the chutes and ladders spread but I felt like I was missing some context reading it, which the commentary at the back of the volume confirmed and I have nothing much to say about Conflict of Interests or Living in the Past.

Lovely mix of silliness, heartfulness and fun scifi plotting that one would expect from Moffat. I love the wee lesbian though I am surprised that she wasn’t more central to the episode and Anita obviously hits it out of the park with the surprise mini episode she got to be co-star of in the middle of this one.

The weak link, which I felt as a recurring issue with the last series, is a resolution that is fairly thinly justified and in this case also feels like reheated leftovers from Boom, which itself felt like it was relying on established tropes from previous Moffat stories to fill in the gaps. Like the ending is a photocopy of a photocopy of a person’s consciousness uploaded into a computer to exist in some sort of cyberspace afterlife.