Doctor Who ? 05 + 06
May. 17th, 2025 02:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakI lilked last week's episode, but didn't find myself able to say much about it.
You could nitpick some stuff, like: if the Doctor can by now recall enough about being the Fugitive Doctor to remember what her deal with Abby was, why is the experience of living in a black body still new to him? But honestly, we're talking thousands of years experience in between there, and also it was an episode about the power of storytelling and myths, second chances and the futility of revenge, so: not the point. Especially since choosing Lagos as a setting and African, not European myths as a basis worked so well with the theme. I'm not entirely sure on how clear the whole "removing the gods would destroy the myths, ergo the gods might be jerks but we need to keep them around" worked as to why the antagonist needed to be foiled but since we were talking not just about killing the gods, as in the DS9 invented Klingon myths, but erasing their existence from the timeline which would by necessity erase all the stories featuring them as well, okay, plus the whole kidnapping and energy sucking method clearly was of the bad.
Now, on to this week's contribution. Here I must confess I have not watched a single Eurovision contest, not even the one time in my living memory that Germany won (though I do remember the winner, Nicole, as her "Ein bisschen Frieden" was played everywhere all those decades ago). So I had to google Ryan Clark whom based on Belinda's reaction I judged to be a real person doing a DW cameo, ditto for Graham Norton. But thankfully, even a complete ESC ignoramus like myself got captivated by the episode, even before You Know Who graced the screen. Let alone the MCU like tag scene after the first few credits which was a ZOMG! capper on a ZOMG! episode.
So, before I talk about the two returns/reveals, the episode itself. I thought it did manage the tricky balance of (despite the eventual rescue by the Doctor and friends) getting the horror of (intended) mass murder across while also then revealing the horror of what happened to the planet Hellion, i.e. the motivation. The set up was cleverly done (almost the very first thing we see at Harmony station is the advertising for the honey which the Corporation turns out to have ravaged Hellion for, Ghorman from Andor style), and the episode does not postulate this justifies massacres, hence the Doctor telling Kid he (Kid) just likes to kill and is using what happened to his people as an excuse. At the same time, of course, this is the episode where this most cheerful and openly emotional of Doctors gets into very personal revenge and brutality with it that we haven't seen since Ten condemned the Family of Blood to an eternity of scarecrow and mirror image existence all the way back in New Who s3 - and even then the physical aspect (i.e. the sci fi equivalent of electroshocks to the heart the Doctor deals out to Kid) was missing. Now, the combination of Kid intending (and but for a sci fi handwavium committing) the murder of three trillion people plus the presumed death of Belinda certainly is plausible as a trigger of the Doctor's dark side, even of a Doctor who had therapy, but I'm not so sure about the physical aspect of it. I mean, what he did to the Family of Blood was awful, but he didn't deal out physical punishment while he was at it. And when the Master murdered a third of the universe back in Old Who, he didn't - okay, Five did let the Master burn, which is incredibly painful and certainly physical, okay, I'm wrong.
(I still suspect it was physical so Belinda upon seeing him would immediately get what the Doctor was doing and thus stop him, which wouldn't have been the case if he'd done something mental.)
(This episode was written by Juno Dawson, not RTD, but the mixture of camp and dark themes up to and including genocide is certainly very his era of DW.)
I thought the episode did a good job of individualizing its characters, from Mike and Gary the originally disgruntled ISC fans and gay couple to Cora and Len to Kid and Wynn to the chief of the tech staff played, unless I'm mistaken, by the same actress who played Naomi in Wheel of Time. The scene where Cora tells Belinda the truth and reveals her cut-off horns makes you flinch in the right way. And the scene earlier, where Belinda, assuming the Doctor is dead and she's stuck on a space station in the process of getting depleted off air, freaks out and Cora calms her down is a rare role reversal between Companion and guest star. Which doesn't take from Belinda's general bravery - it makes her human.
And now to the two big ones in terms of Whovian lore. Welcome back back on the show after decades (The Five Doctors, to be precise), Carol Ann Ford as Susan. ZOMG. I definitely blinked a lot when the Doctor started to see and hear her. After RTD teased us with Susan last year, I did hope he'd deliver the genuine article sooner or later, but I assumed it would be a new actress. But no: Original Susan! Carol Ann Ford! Wearing Gallifreyan garb instead of 20th century Earth clothes for the first time!
Given the Doctor never saw Susan at this age (that we know of), I'm assuming it is a living Susan, not something his own oxygen deprived brain conjures up, and I really really hope for her to get lots of good character stuff (and no twisted ankle ever again) if she does appear in more than cameos in the show!
The other big reveal isKalinda from the Good Wife Mrs. Flood's true identity - turns out she is the Rani, who due to being the last person to be defrozen and rescued gets into regeneration mode only to have a bi-generation like the Doctor himself, now consisting of Anita Dobson and Archie Panjabi. Say what you like about RTD, but casting Archie Panjabi, Kalinda herself, as the Rani was inspired. (And I do hope, since he kept her around, that Anita Dobson will get to do more than being cryptic right now.)
As to what the Rani wants: her being a (n amoral) scientist was key to her characterisation, and this episode for the first time in a while mentioned all of Gallifrey being gone "in an instant" (the first time or the second time, one wonders), and then, with exactly the same phrasing, Earth being gone in an instant the day Belinda left. So my current speculation is that the Rani somehow caused this, not for the evil laughs (she's not the Master), but to trade it in one planet for the other, and the Doctor in order to bring back Belinda to her parents and her parents and Earth back to life will have to return Gallifrey to oblivion again Then again, I could be wrong, and her goal is something else altogether.
Lastly: do I think this whole episode wants to comment on Current Events? Probably. If so, it does so in a thankfully unsimplified manner, except for the ending, of course; as reality does not offer a Doctor to prevent massacres.
You could nitpick some stuff, like: if the Doctor can by now recall enough about being the Fugitive Doctor to remember what her deal with Abby was, why is the experience of living in a black body still new to him? But honestly, we're talking thousands of years experience in between there, and also it was an episode about the power of storytelling and myths, second chances and the futility of revenge, so: not the point. Especially since choosing Lagos as a setting and African, not European myths as a basis worked so well with the theme. I'm not entirely sure on how clear the whole "removing the gods would destroy the myths, ergo the gods might be jerks but we need to keep them around" worked as to why the antagonist needed to be foiled but since we were talking not just about killing the gods, as in the DS9 invented Klingon myths, but erasing their existence from the timeline which would by necessity erase all the stories featuring them as well, okay, plus the whole kidnapping and energy sucking method clearly was of the bad.
Now, on to this week's contribution. Here I must confess I have not watched a single Eurovision contest, not even the one time in my living memory that Germany won (though I do remember the winner, Nicole, as her "Ein bisschen Frieden" was played everywhere all those decades ago). So I had to google Ryan Clark whom based on Belinda's reaction I judged to be a real person doing a DW cameo, ditto for Graham Norton. But thankfully, even a complete ESC ignoramus like myself got captivated by the episode, even before You Know Who graced the screen. Let alone the MCU like tag scene after the first few credits which was a ZOMG! capper on a ZOMG! episode.
So, before I talk about the two returns/reveals, the episode itself. I thought it did manage the tricky balance of (despite the eventual rescue by the Doctor and friends) getting the horror of (intended) mass murder across while also then revealing the horror of what happened to the planet Hellion, i.e. the motivation. The set up was cleverly done (almost the very first thing we see at Harmony station is the advertising for the honey which the Corporation turns out to have ravaged Hellion for, Ghorman from Andor style), and the episode does not postulate this justifies massacres, hence the Doctor telling Kid he (Kid) just likes to kill and is using what happened to his people as an excuse. At the same time, of course, this is the episode where this most cheerful and openly emotional of Doctors gets into very personal revenge and brutality with it that we haven't seen since Ten condemned the Family of Blood to an eternity of scarecrow and mirror image existence all the way back in New Who s3 - and even then the physical aspect (i.e. the sci fi equivalent of electroshocks to the heart the Doctor deals out to Kid) was missing. Now, the combination of Kid intending (and but for a sci fi handwavium committing) the murder of three trillion people plus the presumed death of Belinda certainly is plausible as a trigger of the Doctor's dark side, even of a Doctor who had therapy, but I'm not so sure about the physical aspect of it. I mean, what he did to the Family of Blood was awful, but he didn't deal out physical punishment while he was at it. And when the Master murdered a third of the universe back in Old Who, he didn't - okay, Five did let the Master burn, which is incredibly painful and certainly physical, okay, I'm wrong.
(I still suspect it was physical so Belinda upon seeing him would immediately get what the Doctor was doing and thus stop him, which wouldn't have been the case if he'd done something mental.)
(This episode was written by Juno Dawson, not RTD, but the mixture of camp and dark themes up to and including genocide is certainly very his era of DW.)
I thought the episode did a good job of individualizing its characters, from Mike and Gary the originally disgruntled ISC fans and gay couple to Cora and Len to Kid and Wynn to the chief of the tech staff played, unless I'm mistaken, by the same actress who played Naomi in Wheel of Time. The scene where Cora tells Belinda the truth and reveals her cut-off horns makes you flinch in the right way. And the scene earlier, where Belinda, assuming the Doctor is dead and she's stuck on a space station in the process of getting depleted off air, freaks out and Cora calms her down is a rare role reversal between Companion and guest star. Which doesn't take from Belinda's general bravery - it makes her human.
And now to the two big ones in terms of Whovian lore. Welcome back back on the show after decades (The Five Doctors, to be precise), Carol Ann Ford as Susan. ZOMG. I definitely blinked a lot when the Doctor started to see and hear her. After RTD teased us with Susan last year, I did hope he'd deliver the genuine article sooner or later, but I assumed it would be a new actress. But no: Original Susan! Carol Ann Ford! Wearing Gallifreyan garb instead of 20th century Earth clothes for the first time!
Given the Doctor never saw Susan at this age (that we know of), I'm assuming it is a living Susan, not something his own oxygen deprived brain conjures up, and I really really hope for her to get lots of good character stuff (and no twisted ankle ever again) if she does appear in more than cameos in the show!
The other big reveal is
As to what the Rani wants: her being a (n amoral) scientist was key to her characterisation, and this episode for the first time in a while mentioned all of Gallifrey being gone "in an instant" (the first time or the second time, one wonders), and then, with exactly the same phrasing, Earth being gone in an instant the day Belinda left. So my current speculation is that the Rani somehow caused this, not for the evil laughs (she's not the Master), but to trade it in one planet for the other, and the Doctor in order to bring back Belinda to her parents and her parents and Earth back to life will have to return Gallifrey to oblivion again Then again, I could be wrong, and her goal is something else altogether.
Lastly: do I think this whole episode wants to comment on Current Events? Probably. If so, it does so in a thankfully unsimplified manner, except for the ending, of course; as reality does not offer a Doctor to prevent massacres.
no subject
Date: 2025-05-17 02:56 pm (UTC)Very excited to see Kalinda! <3
no subject
Date: 2025-05-18 07:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-17 09:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-18 07:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-18 12:47 am (UTC)Ooh, I like that speculation. She 100% would.
no subject
Date: 2025-05-18 04:15 am (UTC)It will be interesting to see where they go with Susan and what they fill in (or not) about her backstory. I don't know why the Doctor wouldn't have ever seen her at that age. My default assumption is that at some point after her husband died, she went back to Gallifrey, where she could readily have still been in her first regeneration, and I think the Doctor made it back to Gallifrey frequently enough to meet up with her in that window. Though what they said to each other...
no subject
Date: 2025-05-18 07:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-06-05 07:53 pm (UTC)But they are time travellers. They can meet when they are any age.
She doesn't have to be a later regeneration. Think of River Song...