Bring on the model collapse!

I didn’t catch that police bit, I love it when background characters get fun business to act out.

I have a no real strong feelings about this one. Kind of middle-of-the-road.

The domestic plotlines are something that this era of Doctor Who has done well. Casual references to “beating it out of you”, presumably referring to homesexuality, casual mysoginy. The final speech confronting the father about fascism is excellent and stands the test of time.

This is another episode where the pair of Doctor and Rose feel to have jumped around a bit. After last episode’s downer ending they’re all upbeat again. This has happened a few times this series. I really enjoyed Detective Rose being clever in this episode, without any prompting from the Doctor.

The monster of the week is kind of confusing and annoying. We’re not given a whole lot of motivation other than “it should have died, but it’s trying to come back” so it’s a ghost story without a ghost. I do not care for the fact that every big villain in DW seems to insist on screetching out a catchphrase: Exterminate. Delete. “Hungry” is particularly offputting. It makes the monster mechanical rather than something alive living in the airwaves. The colour TV joke was a nice bit. At the very end I’m not entirely sure what the Doctor’s plan involved, and how it was supposed to save everyone, but it worked and the episode ends with all the victims smiling and being happy even though they’ve just spend days(?) in non-corporeal hell.

One thing that stands out during a rewatch is the CGI of the people being sucked into the TV does not look anywhere near as creepy as I remember when watching this on a small CRT. I guess there’s something a bit meta about that, given the episode’s TV theme. Depending on the lighting, the faceless toe the line between genuinely creepy and immersion breaking. I could see this working well re-made to discuss mobile phones and being sucked into the internet.

Kor was good. When a new Klingon character is introduced, they need something to differentiate themselves from the stereotype of the honor-bound aggressive wine-guzzler. Kor here stood out in his approach to running the occupation and his presence on the screen.

This is the first episode this season that I’ve really enjoyed.

The direction, lighting, filtering, was all great and on point. I really enjoyed the story, the A plot was a nice wartime rebel story and the B plot was pretty decent too. I was feeling shades of some of the “retro themed” ST episodes from the 90s. The set design was great on the planet.

The Klingons here are used well - seeing the way they act during wartime here they feel almost cardassian in how they treat the native population, but out also makes sense given what we’re told about how they acted during this time. I liked seeing Scotty and Ortega just hanging out. La’an getting help to deal with her problems is good, and seeing her doggedly chase down the truth was nice, though I’m a little unclear in exactly what the chain of events was with the signals and the transporter. Mbenga and una were really sharp on the planet and I enjoyed their acting.

Mickey going off on his own is fitting in a way, though the constant flip-flopping of whether Rose was happy for him to be there or not made it difficult to know if this was a good or bad outcome.

This follow-up is decent. A cliffhanger in usual fashion resolved almost instantly using some well-set up doctor ex machina. Plenty of action scenes balanced by a tense walk through the underground tunnel. Throughout the conversion factory there’s references to Nazis - emotionless processing, people walking in unawares, rejection of impure stock, the incinerators. The scene of the lone cyberman being euthanised after its emotion chip gets broken is pretty harrowing. But this is undermined later on when they’re running around with their heads exploding when all the chips go down at once.

Why is lumic in a wheelchair throne, he’s got a metal body? Thankfully by the end he’s standing up and a bit more menacing, but even then he’s easily defeated in what must be the 3rd “tense quick climb up a ladder while being chased” of the episode. The most terrifying cyberman was converted jackie, and the subsequent scene of them looking back and being unable to tell which is which is quite sad.

The scene of jake reacting to Rickey’s death seemed a bit off for me, I couldn’t figure out why, it seemed dramatic and over the top. I read up on the wiki later and realised they were meant to be in a gay relationship. This completely changes the dynamic and the scene, and I wish had been stated explicitly.

At the end we’re back to doctor and Rose, alone together. Ending with a return trip to see Mum is good. I imagine happening all the time off-screen, given all the trauma everyone usually gets, so seeing it is nice. Ending on a random shooting star twinkle in the alternate universe is weird and makes no sense, but it got a chuckle out of me.

Other minor things I noticed:

• A news anchor says London is “now under martial law”. It already was, we saw military checkpoints in the last episode.
• At one point lumic “declares independence” - this dialogue makes no sense
• The Cybermen in “cold storage” in the underground tunnel is a nice callback to an earlier series episode with the 2nd doctor.
• Lumic is the only cyberman who survives a broken emotion chip - because he was already a psychopath.
• I really like the teardrop design of the eyes,and the moulding of the faces, they look much more disturbing than the old cybermen.
• In “our universe” the cybermen originally come from a planet in the solar system close to earth’s orbit. THIS is the subtle reference Pelia should have made in that recent star trek episode with an extra solar system planet.

Can I get paid a billion dollars to do nothing?

Mixed bag of an episode.

I liked that we got some proper character development - Spock and Kirk coming closer together, an origin point for their friendship is good to see, and the hallucination was a useful way to explain why spock would be willing to open up to such a friendship in the first place. Ortegas and Scotty similarly got some satisfying growth, and the quite unprofessional arguing between them didn’t end drag on for too long.

I did not like the first couple of acts. I know this is meant to be a comedy episode, but none of the jokes really landed for me, it was just kind of a slog to get through. I’m not a big fan of “stoner / drunk” humour in other shows, and it’s not a whole lot better here. I am not sure if the alien host was meant to be funny or charming, but they just came across as mildly annoying. If I compare this to pleasure-planet episodes we’ve seen in other trek shows, I don’t feel the pleasure planet really added a whole lot. CG sequences aside, they were in a fancy hotel more than an actual planet.

Something that really bugged me is that despite repeated references to alternate shifts, at no point did any of the “alphas” think that maybe it might be worth handing off the negotiations or asking for help with the bomb. It speaks to a kind of arrogance that doesn’t really play well given the whole point of the episode is learning to rely on others.

The final act is again mixed. The idea of a pressure bomb, the sci fi equivalent of a landmine, is a great way of building tension, brings ortegas and scotty together fully. But that it then also provides the solution for the diplomatic problems make no sense. The aliens say that particular type of bomb is part of a peace ritual that hasn’t been seen in generations, but then why would a separatist use that for their sabotage?

Overall it was alright, but not amazing.

I enjoyed the interactions Rose had with her not-parents. The rejection she got from Jackie gives a payoff to the Doctor’s insistence that they not involve themselves.

I do think that Rickey and the whole underworld rebel gang needed a bit more space to really feel meaningful. Maybe with some different story opportunities Ricky’s character could have been more fleshed out. Also, I’ve just realised, this is the second time now we’ve had a fake mickey, after the plastic one in S01E01.

I disagree about Lumic and cybermen - these ones in particular. I find the bland horror around the cybermen and Lumics motivation adds to how scary they are. Given what we know about these cybermen specifically, I think they needed someone psychopathic and narrow-focused to make them happen.

Rose is a dinner lady again for the 2nd time this series. :)

I like a good steampunk airship alternate reality. I quite like a lot of what’s hinted at in this alt universe, though it doesn’t all come together perfectly. I enjoyed the UK having a president, one that is no-nonsense and willing to stand for what is right, Don Warrington did a good job. We get basically no explanation for how we ended up in the alternate universe, but I can let that slide.

I was aware of cybermen as a general villain prior to watching this, but this reboot showing them having an origin in a billionaire’s immortality fantasy is pretty horrifying, and sets them up as a more horrifying monster than I remember from the original series. I enjoyed Roger Lloyd Pack as Lumic. As villains go he is kind of pedestrian evil, but I think that works for this story. He has no moral compass or drive beyond saving himself, and thinks he knows what is best for everyone else. As the Doctor mentions, this universe is very close in many respects to our current reality. I’d argue 20 years later things are even worse. We don’t get a daily download, many of us are permanently doomscrolling, and we have far too many tech billionaires being sycophantic about machine intelligence and human connected systems. I could easily see engineers working 24/7 at the office putting on pop music to mask out the horrible stuff they have to do.

As much as I’m not a huge body horror fan, I like that this episode (and the following, as I recall) pulls no punches about how awful everything is. As a kid watching this it was pretty scary, and it set a tone for how I’d think about technology the rest of my life. At the end of the episode we get an pretty good cliffhanger ending.

Praise aside, there’s a lot of stuff in this plot that doesn’t really go anywhere - A throwaway mention of a curfew, class-divided militarized slums, but also there’s people even lower down who’re actually being taken away, Jealous rose is back going at a nobody background character, cybus seems to own and control everything but also needs to get government approval.

• The big attention grabbing line during the cold open “Set sail for great Britain” is nationalistic and pandering and doesn’t make any sense in the context.
• Rose smirking at the doctor when she realises he’s hooked on a mystery is cute and delightful, but it completely undermines the whole overprotective “thou shalt not interfere” he was going on about for the first half of the episode.
• Mickey going off on his own to find his gran is nice, but he had so little time with her it doesn’t feel like it really added anything beyond the Rickey setup.
• The earpod hack could be more subtle. Sure, let’s make a giant antenna pop out of it, never mind who might be nearby to see it happen. It doesn’t work as a foreshadowing device because we already know this is a cyberman story.
• Production-wise You can see “Cybus Welcome.jpg” scrolling on roses phone, I’m guessing it was just a fully green jpeg they uploaded onto it, then edited in everything afterwards.
• Also during the download scene the frozen crowd has far too few people, after a crowd of about 15 folk the rest of the street is empty behind them.
• Torchwood is repeatedly mentioned in this episode, which doesn’t make sense. Torchwood only came about because the doctor existed in the main universe.
• One of the rebels says “Protocol Search” - why, just call it a search, it’s fine. Not everything needs to be jazzed up with technobabble.
• In that same scene “Your father had a bike” - I’m trying to figure out what that phrase means but I have no idea.

Finally, I hate the “delete” catchphrase. The cybermen could have just killed the guests. As maniacal as Lumic is, the one thing he isn’t is funny, so there’s no reason to program the cybermen to use a catchphrase, as I could imagine a Musk or Altman type villain doing.

I don’t disagree with that… I guess limited character growth is one of the disappointing outcomes for any prequel media.

This was a very creepy episode, and as a standalone sci fi fantasy horror piece it works well. But it doesn’t feel trek. Here’s my conspiracy: With the dramatic different in tone, direction, the repeated references to section 12, this is a Poorly Disguised Pilot that the producers were using to test the waters for an x-files like section 12 spinoff.

Overall, I did not enjoy it. I don’t seek out this kind of film normally, and I might have enjoyed it if it had led to anything interesting happening, but ultimately it has not left them with any further progress. All the dramatic moments between the away team and the “others” they hallucinated were basically “then they woke up and it was all a dream”, so no relationship progress there. And within themselves, aside from more unresolved trauma, Spock seems no closer to aligning his human and vulcan selves, La’an hasn’t really learned anything new about her violent tendencies she didn’t already know from the last episode, and Kirk never even got to have the chat with his family because the network apparently cut out.

Agreed about Rose’s jealousy.

On Rose and Mickey get along really well - it felt a bit too quick after her pouting at the end of last time. Given what I remember happening over the course of the remaining episodes, they should have done a bit more to cement Mickey’s place on the team, rather than it feeling like he’s just there for a little bit. That Cleopatra episode sounds like it would make a nice story of its own.

Doctor as the “Romantic Hero” does work well. On the actual romance itself, I tried to ignore the whole “I met you as a 10-year old just as many minutes ago”.

This was a pretty good episode. The humour of this one feels very 2000s, in a good way, almost Scooby-do esque sneaking around. The contrasting ship and castle set design is nice, and for once the show doesn’t simply use time travel to jump to somewhere, it plays an integral part of the episode’s plot.

The clockwork robots is a great idea. The ticking broken click is a fantastic way of building tension, it easily gets in your head as some of Moffat’s other monsters have. The inclusion of an AI that goes off the rails because of improperly bounded instructions is very timely, and that remark about the meatship smelling like nice bbq is perfect dark humour, and fits the whole body horror theme going on in this series.

The kid version of Mme Pompadour is not great at acting, but her adult counterpart played the role really well. This episode is a nice follow-on from the previous episode where the Doctor spins out a bit thinking about grief and ageing companions - this time much accelerated. I hadn’t made the connection before, but this whole story feels like a protoype for Amy Pond’s introduction.

While the Tardis is “locked in events”, once the link is fully broken, I think at that point they could easily have pre-programmed the Tardis to go back in time and pick him back up, rather than needing to use the fireplace, but then we wouldn’t have had the tragic ending. The final scene is a nice way to loop back around and tie everything together, it leaves me wanting to know more.

Overall, this is a good self-contained monster of the week show, and has some important messages about mortality and stop making stupid AI!.

Random things I noticed:

• Noel Clarke didn’t get an intro credit. He’s just tagging along, not part of the main cast, I guess.
• The weird gallifrey mind meld is back!
• It looks like the outdoor scenes are filmed in the same place as the end of last episode. A nice way to save on production costs.
• We got a “but… doctor who?”. ding ding ding. Again, an idea that Moffat ends up developing a bit more in his series later on.

Vulcans can be arrogant, but they also have some personality to balance it out. I think part of the problem is we haven’t seen much, other than a sliver of backstory at the end of the episode

I do think the away team section needed another pass, either on the writing or the direction. It had some action moments, but at the same time it didn’t feel like anything the away team actually did carried any impact,and never that they were in any real danger. The only bit that actually felt it had real energy was the archeopteryx getting punched in the face.

I have mixed feelings about this episode.

The A story, with the diplomacy, philosophising about how to encounter and deal with new species, I enjoyed a lot. The ending of the time loop was rather inevitable, it being a time loop set in the past, but it worked. It was a difficult choice and it had to be made. “Pike must suffer” I guess. The translation system leaking information through subtle differences in grammar is a nice idea, it felt a bit underused as a concept though, would have been a good topic for Uhura to explore. This kind of political, philosophical, with a hint of sci-fi, story is exactly what I want from Star Trek. More of this please.

The B story, down on the planet, with the dinosaurs, didn’t grab me. First off, I don’t understand why they couldn’t just fly the shuttle right to the wreck, why did they need to deal with the Rex? Other than getting the drive, this entire section could have been cut and the episode would not have lost anything. I get the feeling the VFX artists had a lot of fun with that section though.

Overall, it was an okay opener. Extra remarks:

• Our new vulcan is a flanderisation of vulcans, and not in a good way. “I am familiar with all earth dialects”. Really? All 7000+ of them? I hope they get their comeuppance at some point soon.
• Pelia’s voice seems much raspier this season. She makes another DW reference. Didn’t work for me, it felt a bit too obvious and in your face. If they’re going to keep making these, something more subtle might have worked, particularly for this episode given DW has had a few dinosaur episodes.
• I am really enjoying the Scotty vs Ortegas game. Looking forward to more of this
• La’An’s business looks interesting, though I hope wherever this goes is distinct from the stuff we’ve already covered with Bashir, Una, and Khan.

If it does leave a big crater, I really hope this doesn’t inspire (persons who shall remain nameless) to start developing rodding tech.

I both love and hate this. At least here we can hand wave it away as “alien computers”