Very cool social commentary, I think better than the Orville episode with the Up and Downvote society.
Though, at the end, I did hate everybody and wanted them to be eaten.
I do question having two “doctor lite” episodes back to back.
Imteresting music choices too… Didn’t we just have the Flying Purple People Eater? Now we have Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini…
Edit My bad, Flying Purple People Eater was in X-Men '97, which I also just watched. Easy mistake to make!
If next episode is Everybody’s Heard About the Bird…
With the exception on Boom, every episode this season seems to have a huge pacing problem. To me every single one seems to drag with very little happening, until suddenly there is a massive climax that invariably is unsatisfying and makes no sense, before the episode abruptly ends. How is this the same show that gave us complex stories like Midnight or Heaven Sent in the same amount of time?
Quick rundown:
- Space Babies: Everyone is scared of the monster, until suddenly the monster was made by a computer error and needs to be saved
- The Devils Chord: Jinx Monsoon is stealing all the music, until suddenly they have a ridiculous music battle, which the Doctor somehow loses, but the beatles return to play a note and the day is saved
- 73 Yards: A great horror concept of Ruby being followed by a mysterious entity, that turns out to be herself as an old women making herself lonely for her entire life??
- Dot and Bubble: Turns out the Dot hates humanity and is killing them off, but instead of instantly braining them all, as it is clearly capable of, it creates giant slugs to eat them? And the people don’t want to be saved?
I genuinely think a lot of the themes and concepts in this series are very good, but the scripts need to be tightened up, instead of juggling so many metaphors and societal commentaries in each episode.
I actually liked this one more than I thought I would from the trailer, but once again the resolution just leaves me confused and unsatisfied.
I definitely wasn’t expecting this one to be an intense episode about racism from the trailers, and I really didn’t think they’d tackle it in such a head-on way in general.
Also I liked that they used a futuristic society for it and suggested that these problems persist is the future instead of just doing it in a historical episode which would have been the obvious choice IMO.
Someone saw Black Mirror’s Nosedive and thought “let’s do this but do it right”
Two Doctor-light episodes in an eight ep season is definitely a choice.
IIRC Ncuti was still filming Sex Education during the first filming block so that might be why. Not sure why they had to start filming while the lead actor was still working somewhere else, but that’s the BBC for you I guess lol
You know, I’ve been wondering why everyone is talking about all these new Doctor Who episodes and yet I couldn’t find it in any of my lists. Today I did a search for just “Doctor Who” without the year (2005) or season number (14)… and WTF is “Doctor Who 2023”??? This is still the 2005 series, and still season 14, so why is it now being listed under 2023 season 01 which isn’t even when the current season began? None of this makes any sense.
Picked up by Disney+.
They ran a series of specials between 11/25 and 12/9 2023, ending with the new regeneration.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_specials_(2023)
Then they re-numbered the current season as “Season 1” starting with “The Church on Ruby Road”, which was the 2023 Christmas episode.
Decent episode, not amazing but certainly not bad. As you say having 2 Doctor lite episodes back to back is a weird choice, hopefully we’ll see more of him in the last few episodes.
And hey, the outside scenes were filmed at my old university campus, too bad I wasn’t there when they were filming
I’m just wondering how a whole planet got eaten by slugs. Or why slugs were needed at all.
I am also very confused about the slug part because the dot is supposedly killing in alphabetical order. Yet the dot was going to have her walk into a slug in the elevator a while before her name was up.
Apparently this entity cares so much about the alphabet it stopped targeting her to go after the september guy so what gives?
Someone theorized the slugs may hold you and kill you off when its your time but the list the dr uses to realize its in alphabetical time isn’t time of death, its time of disappearance. These slugs do capture on video so If people cant have been alive inside a slug without anyone or themselves noticing.
Very good points. After watching the final episode, I don’t think the writers very much cared to do any good explaining this season.
Well, they wouldn’t put their phones down…
But yeah, it seems to me the slug thing was not needed since they revealed it was the Dot killing everyone anyway.
All it had to do was walk someone into an open elevator shaft or off the top of a building or into traffic.
Shit, GPS is doing that NOW:
and has been for a while now…
Maybe the slugs made the dots and they’re just smarter and cooler than we assume? I have no idea really lol
Maybe the dots had grown to hate the inhabitants of Finetown so much that they just enjoyed watching them get eaten by slugs. I mean sure they could just headbutt them to death…but which is funnier?
After the end of the episode I can totally understand that point of view.
I could totally see that… plus the slugs dispose of the bodies, keeping the city neat and clean.
I could see the slugs already existing as a waste disposal solution and the dots just ‘redirecting’ them too…
Miscellaneous thoughts:
The social media society is a trope that has been done before, and I don’t feel like this episode did anything interesting with it. The character of Pepper-Bean did not have an arc, she began as a vapid mole, and ended as a vapid mole who killed a guy. Not engaging, and felt like a bit of a waste of an episode.
I did not feel any of the tension they seemed to have intended, because the characters were so insufferable that their death would have been a relief.
Ruby and the Doctor needed Pepper-Bean to turn off her Dot because they could not see into the Dome. How then did they switch to an external camera to have a chat with the pop star towards the end?
Feels like an episode written by a Boomer just to take the same old digs at the younger generations. “Kids these days can’t find their way without a gps”, “Gen Z literally can’t see past their phone screens”.
I don’t know if it was intended, but the conclusion felt like a commentary on racism, considering that a majority of the finetime characters that got screen time were white, and talked about their “God given duty” to “maintain standards”. And calling The TARDIS “voodoo”. I dunno, it could definitely just be more commentary on vapid millennials, but it felt more pointed, especially considering the Doctors reaction.
I had problems with 73 Yards, but at least it was an engaging watch and felt like it was trying to do… something?
No the episode is definitely a commentary on racism. The inhabitants of Finetime are not just gen z, they are explicitly upper class gen z. They have literally blue blood. They are very Tory-coded.
The whole episode is riddled with micro aggressions from Lindy towards the doctor. Here is a possibly incomplete list of them:
- declining the Doctors call in the cold open. but taking Ruby’s later on
- suspecting the Doctor is responsible for the situation
- being disgusted by Ruby and the Doctor being in the same room
- not noticing the Doctor and the person calling her in the morning where one and the same, saying she just thought they “looked the same”
- Introducing the Doctor to her friends with the words “he is not as stupid as he looks” and suggesting he would be punished later on
There is also the mention of a cleanse, which takes on a very different meaning after the twist especially since not just the majority of the Finetime characters but all of them are white.
The whole episode is designed to make you question your own perceptiveness of racism. After the twist you are supposed to go “how could I have been so blind?”. I recommend a rewatch. And no, I didn’t pick up on it at first. I did notice some of them as weird, but noticed what all of them have in common only at the end.
You are right. A lot of the micro aggressions I put down to the Finetimers just being naive, and wanting to live in their safety bubble, but all of your points made me feel uneasy at the time, and it makes sense that they were all related to racism.
