you gonna do more big finish reviews this year? because theres alot going on. out of time, dalek universe, war doctor begins, some other time war stuff, masterful/MASTER!, diary of river song with 3 k-9s, eighth doctor stranded, the timelord victorious storyline, the end of the beginning that will end the monthly range and start a new era beyond and of course the ninth doctor adventures with christopher eccleston returning

Honestly, I loved it! Didn´t take too long for me to pick these words, but this episode managed to do so many things for me successfully, about which I was complaining up until this point. Most impressive feat: I finally started accepting and liking (? weird!) 13 as a character! I can finally say "she´s THE Doctor" without questioning it! But other than that, this had still lots of stuff to love, cinematography and music gorgeous, stellar acting at parts, humour in places where it fit, an overall decent script, a wholesome companion departure and Captain Jack "m-fing" Harkness! Easily the best episode of the Chibnall era for me so far, but of course it´s still a long way from being able to actually top the most brilliant stuff like Heaven Sent or A Good Man Goes To War.... I´ve actually developed a soft spot for The Return of Doctor Mysterio and even Hell Bent over time, they have now actually become my #1 and #2 all time favourite episodes....

So two years after Resolution, we get Revolution with a completely botched resolution. I guess one of the issues was they had to write out Ryan and Graham. The time away from the Doctor was the catalyst for that, and they needed a story in the middle before the characters left. If they had cut the Timeless Child entirely out of the prior season, maybe they could have done more of the prison and companion separation before having to shove so much into one "special". That might have allowed for a less grating escape, and resolution of the dalek part of the episode. All much easier in hindsight than for Chibnall and the other writers, but they are the professionals.

Don’t forget that in _Revolution of the Daleks,_ the human workers that were hired by the dalek were all transformed into _“an excellent concentrated protein,”_ as The Great Healer called it in _Revelation of the Daleks,_ in order to be edible for the dalek clones.

@@qwertyuio404 I spotted the parallel with Davros's "recycling" of bodies, too. Nice to know the Great Healer's techniques are still being put to good use :)

that's the problem with this episode, they had so many ideas that could make great standalone episodes, stuffed into one half hour special

Maybe get Russel T. Davies to write that episode?

Does the pandorica count?

Just another wasted story idea, theyve had so many by this point, thats why what Stuart says about longer story arcs is salient, they should go back to the old way the show was done, you cant chew through all this stuff in one episode, alot of Dr Who stories needed the 4 parts, that was the idea so you got a full story not just flashpoints all crammed into one, even the sontaren experiment which was a fairly minor pause between two longer adventures was still a two parter.

PRECISELY!!!

What we get is her somehow trying to find 13 or something

Exactly! Why have that line to setup him being killed them come back to life? It's just like the Neural blockers for the psychic planet in battle of ranskor av kolos, unnecessary exposition for something that doesn't have any relevance or pay off in the episode itself.

Yes, not iconic per say but when he said that I thought: here we go, he’s gonna die and wake up shocking Yasmeen but we can’t even have cheap fun anymore 😞

Of course, that time honoured story method of 'tell, don't show'.

Yeah, true, he keeps talking about it in the episode, and then he outright yells it at the Daleks, and I guess with the Daleks maybe he was being smug about how they failed to kill him in the future? I don't know

Well at least it's consistent with the character of 13...not good, but it's at least consistent

@@Stubagful maybe 13 regretting this and feeling remorseful is what chibnall's 5 year plan will depict. who am I kidding? this is chibnall we're taking about

When was the first time? I genuinely cannot remember when this last happened

@@christianwise637 She calls the Nazis on the Master

@@wren7980 Oh yeah, that was...definitely a choice wasn't it?

What! A white male with 'priviledge' (and immortality) rescued the damsel in distress? Surely thats a crime against Woke?

Yes. Chibnall forgot that the Doctor could have just jettisoned rooms to get rid of the Daleks or left them on some barren planet.

Well you can blame RTD for running that "coming back to Earth" to death

@@TheJaviferrol I mean even then: Rose wanted to keep going with the Doctor and is implied to travel years at a time before visiting her family again occassionally. (sort of how you sometimes visit your grandparents and such) Martha was on bad terms with her family in Series 3 and only came back to present-day earth when there was some alien threat, threatening the earth. Donna only goes back to earth the first time after asking the Doctor to take her home after witnessing the brutal slavery in Planet of the Ood, and only goes back again in The Stolen Earth when it is revealed Earth is under threat. The constant unnecessary visits back to earth only really started happening when Moffat was in charge. (and even then he's mostly good when it comes to Amy and Rory, its more Clara and Bill he has problems with)

@@calumbishop7082 Clara has a boyfriend and a changed, less trusting, relationship with the doctor in series 8, her spending time on Earth inbeween episodes makes sense. On the other hand, Bill only travels in the tardis on the occasions the doctor can get away with not fulfilling his vows to watch the vault at all time, and the main relationship she has with the doctor is with him as her teacher, and her as his student, so it makes sense that theyre not constantly travelling

(Many decades earlier): Susan, Ian, Barbara, Dodo... etc: "We're choosing to leave the Doctor"

Sarah Jane, Martha Jones

That speech could have been worded better. It should have been something more like "travelling with the doctor is a wild ride, you can get off whenever you like, or you can cling to it for dear life. But either way, it eventually comes to an end."

@@quinnsinclair7028 Which rather proves a point. You've made a better fist of it in a KZfaq comment than the man actually responsible for the production of the show managed for an episode which aired on Television.

Pretty sure the full quote was actually "nobody chooses whether they get to decide when to leave or the decision is made for them," or something similar to that

Jack was expressing his disbelief and disgust, which is the kind of thing anyone might do in the circumstances. Indeed, the Sixth Doctor reacted similarly when he twigged that Davros had been doing pretty much the same with human corpses in Revelation of the Daleks ("You've turned them into food?").

@@ftumschk All right; maybe i´ve grown a little oversensitive picking up things like this during this era but, personally, i got the point before Jack said it out loud.

Yep, the companion characterisation felt poor in the past two series, especially spread over 3 of them. One would be much more practical.

See, on a story level I agree with you, Yaz should really be on her own to give her and the Doctor full development together. But on the other hand, I do think representation is important, in being able to have a character you can relate to and if you have two women in the Tardis then men might be less interested in watching? Or maybe most don't care, idk. So I'm okay with having a guy character included in the Tardis just so women watching can relate to the Doctor and Yaz and men can relate to this new guy. (and maybe older people don't care so much about this, but I think it's important to have a little kid who's a boy have characters they can relate to and look up to just as much as characters for girls to look up to and relate to)

Yaz is only there to tick a box. Her police skills have never matterialised. Perhaps she is just an inept cop?

Chibnalls motto is "tell don't show". He is probably the worst choice for a showrunner.

You want him to feel pain? Why? I thought he was a popular character...

@@____uncompetative he's died 1000s of times what's one more? Especially to establish his character to a new audience, instead of just being said he's immortal. Its such a boring option to pick.

@@____uncompetative Are you pretending to completely misunderstand my point as a joke, or are you serious? Imagine if a character's superpower was that they could fly, but they never once used that power, and instead just mentioned it?

That probably sums up the episode in a nutshell. See "The Stolen Earth/Journeys End", for example of a better way of using Jack's Immortality.

Chris Chibnall , Who can’t be arsed

It could be a lot worse anyway. I think he's all right.

It seems like Chibnall is putting in the bare minimum to make average DW.

That's extremely generous

@@EthanKnight97 Yeah it is because Timeless Child was a bad idea. I stated majority not all.

God. I love you. You did it, I've been looking for someone to say this for MONTHS. Maybe if more people like you were out there, they would stop saying shit like "dOcToR wHo HaS aLwAyS bEeN pOlItIcAl"

Crackpot or not, I would be interested in reading your theory. You make a pretty good case already.

@@billmilligan7272 Alright it's difficult to put this into words but bear with me because I'm going to try and articulate it as good as I can. It's no secret we live in very divisive times, I think no matter where anybody is politically we can all agree on that. I'm not here to start a political arguement, but I think a very unfortunate side effect of all this is that "escapism" has become something of a dirty word. There seems to be this unspoken rule nowadays that anything that embraces any form of escapism or tries to distance itself from the contemporary world is simply childish and naive at best, selfish and delusional at worst, and that anyone who enjoys this work is a selfish child who refuses to acknowledge the world's problems. The reason I bring all this up is because this mindset is not just detrimental to one's mental health (I'm sorry, but everybody needs a fucking break now and then, no matter who they are), it's flat out destructive towards the genre of speculative fiction as a whole. The fact is that no matter how hard you try to be "relevant" and "topical", speculative fiction requires a certain amount of escapism, even minimal ones. If you create a fictional setting, and then jam in contemporary attitudes and issues it shatters the illusion, and the audience suddenly becomes keenly aware of the stage and the curtains. Russell understood this, it's why I respect his era the most out of nuwho. He integrated his progressive themes in a way that wasn't intrusive or detrimental to the story and was internslly consistent. He didn't just have the Doctor go on a rant about capitalism like Moffat did (i must be the only person who didn't like series 10 very much) or insert a time traveling space racist from 5,000 years in the future who thinks the civil rights movement will magically disappear if he plays some pranks on Rosa Parks. That last example is a particularly detrimental one. These writers seriously expect me to believe that 5,000 years from now, in an advanced spacefaring civilization further removed from the Civil Rights movement then we are from the Roman Empire, that a psychotic 50's greaser is going develop contemporary views on race, become a white supremacist as we would understand it and hyperfixate on an individual who has been dead for thousands of years. Not only is that so ridiculous as to shatter the illusion but it's bleak as fuck, the idea that there is nothing else, that we as a species will never achiever anything else. That contemporary society with its ills and woes is all that we can ever be. Tell me, would New Earth or Gridlock be any better if the Doctor stopped, looked at the camera and gave a 10 minute lecture on the evils of the pharmaceutical industry? No because those episodes were smart enough (unlike oxygen) to take a step back, not treat the audience like drooling idiots, let the horror of the situatuin speak for itself. And a lot of people would probably call me a bigot for even saying this. And that's the problem. Nobody thinks anymore, everything is based off knee-jerk emotional reactions. And the people these companies hire all fall into this mindset. It's why Star Trek got dragged down from an optimistic speculation on what we could potentially become into a grim dark nonsensical mess. This has all led to a cascading effect I like to call "the death of nuance", it sounds hyperbolic I know, but I believe in it. Take my favourite game ever. Fallout New Vegas. New Vegas dealt with a lot of heavy subject matter, rape, imperialism, slavery, the collapse of human society, the nature of humanity, and in the process it explored a wide range of different cultures and ideologies. And it treated all of them with respect and nuance, even the ones we would consider deplorable like Caesar's Legion or the Great Khans are given understandable, realistic motivations. I don't than anybody at Obsidian was a devout Mormon but Joshua Graham's faith was treated with the amount of respect, reverance and depth that he would have done. The writers of that game made a concentrated effort to get inside the character's head and imagine how he would think. We will never get another New Vegas. We now live in an age where the Twitter mob considers any portrayal of amoral ideologies as anything other than cartoonish buffoons as an endorsement and a reflection on the character of the writer. Moral of the story here isn't "woke stuff bad" or "no politics", more just "can we please just destroy Twitter and reddit already they are a detriment to humanity." Mind you, Russell's return surprised me. I'm not holding my breath, but I am cautiously optimistic, which is more than I can say about Moffat or Chibnall's work in a very very long time.

Maybe the cell is made out of space meat.

Aren't we all a bit season 6 Buffy these days?

Jay Exci?

"I touched the fire and it freezes me. I look into it and It's black. This isn't real, and I just want to feel."

"I was happy... Wherever I was... I was happy... At peace. I knew that everyone I cared about was all right. I knew it. Time... didn't mean anything. Nothing had form. But I was still me, you know...? And I was warm. And I was loved. And I was finished. Complete... I-I don't understand theology or dimensions, any of it, really... But I think I was in heaven... And now I'm not. I was torn out of there. Pulled out... by my friends. Everything here is hard and bright and violent... Everything I feel, everything I touch... this is Hell. Just getting through the next moment, and the one after that, knowing what I've lost..." -Buffy, on Hell

It would only be as harmless as the people controlling it. And as Jubilee showed, humans and Daleks are terrifyingly similar

@@EditedAF987 exactly, the whole thing could have been something great but once again Chibs isn’t willing to go that route abs he’s packed the episode with too much already

We're inching our way to Pudding of the Daleks :)

@@carealoo744 for me personally, we're watching twelfth's fever dream before he regenerated.

As far as I remember, she hasn't floated through the ari or fired lightning-bolts from her hands. Now _that's_ what I call proper Space Jesus stuff, and it was Davies wot did it.

Yeah, DW has gone from something I made time to watch on first broadcast, with family... to something I watch on iPlayer when I'm to tired to do anything useful.

@@ftumschk That wasn't just the doctor doing that though. That was the effects of the (effectively magic, I'll give you that) Archangel Network. The doctor also didn't fire any ebergy beams, that was the Master's Laser Screwdriver. If I've got the the wrong end of the stick, please notify. I'm not 100% sure if that's the scene you meant.

The Doctor has been Space Jesus since Cartmel

We only hear "Tel..." so it might not be Telos. It's obviously implied but it could be another planet

@@jamesdunne8504 well it's also heavily implied that it is and the two planets are even in the same system. It probably depends on whether Blood of the Daleks takes place before or after the Cyberman series since the Telos story mentions that the planet got eviscerated by (I think) an asteroid. Why is it that stuff like that hard to fit into the chronology of the show? It would help if we got firm dates for stuff by at least a century.

You know Chibnall has written Jack more than anyone else. If anyone was gonna get it right it was him

You could even stick some fun googly eyes on the Daleks or have the general public treat them like Beefeaters. Heck they could have been called DronyMcDroneFaces by the public and be one of those things we culturally love for being a bit silly before they turn on the humans.

It hasn't always maintained the TARDISes are living creatures; far from it, the show has overwhelmingly shown them as the machines they self-evidently are. TARDISes may appear sentient because they have Artificial Intelligence and telepathic circuits, but AI and mind-machine interfaces aren't the same as being alive in any literal sense. Yes, we have The Doctor's Wife, but even that can be seen allegorically.

Luckily, I don't buy that daft, unscientific idea of TARDISes being alive, so that bit didn't bother me in the slightest.

I was a bit irritated by the tech guy. Not as a person - the actor did a good job, but he was way too young to be cast as an accomplished robotic engineer. Even less credibly, he was _also_ a biologist skilled enough to clone an alien being. There should have been two characters, and they should have had older actors playing them.

I wish there was someone like you in the writers room, to embellish and world build other writer's stories. Like... a shadow showrunner.

@@anealingfeeling5356 Thats very nice of you, thank you :)

@@ftumschk We've had other child geniuses in the show before, Adam Mitchell and Luke Rattigan come to mind. I think writers just like to make the point that knowledge and youth isn't always better, it's a bit of a trope. I agree that Leo's role could have gone to Daniel Barton - the tech mogul from Spyfall - and would have been a brilliant way to worldbuild and a great, ironic way to wrap up his story (for him to be the one taken control of, and become a vehicle for someone else's whims).

@@anealingfeeling5356 I did't find Adam or Luke particularly convincing, either. To be fair to the character of Leo Rugazzi, I don't think he was meant to be a child genius, and was played by a slightly older actor. However, he wasn't so old that he could feasibly have become an expert in robotic design/engineering AND biological engineering too. I can only suspend my disbelief so far :)