In Which We Finally Get An Episode Not Written By Chris Chibnall

[astrogirl2]

New Who! And my DVR seems to have stopped glitching out on me at random the way it did in the last few episodes, so that's nice.

Comments

[anonymous]

The review I was reading pointed out that good hasn’t really won out over evil much this season, which is what I meant by dark. In Demons and Rosa, the Doctor has no choice but to let terrible events go ahead. In Ghost Monument, she has to collaborate with pretty shady people in order to win a very shady race and get to the Tardis, and is then stabbed in the back by the race organiser; it’s just luck that the Tardis turns up after all that. In Arachnids, the real villain of the piece, the billionaire, seems to get off scot-free, the Doctor acting as if there’s nothing she can do about him despite the fact that he’s broken laws (someone pointed out that Yasmin could have arrested him, but never does so). And even in the first story, the victory over Tim Shaw is spoilt by Grace’s death. Plus, the stories take place against a larger backdrop of a universe rife with oppression, hatred and injustice, against which the Doctor can only fix small things, never the greater problems. Even those assassin aliens are like this: faced with the death of their planet, they change their ways, but seemingly can't actively work to make the universe better; they can only witness. Whether this is actually darker than other things we’ve seen in NuWho, or even classic Who, is another matter, but I think it’s disturbing that the Doctor seems so helpless. It undermines a bit the theme of hope running through the stories; after all, in the end, hope is something that must be actively created, not something that just happens.

I’ve never seen Broachurch, but I’d heard that Whittaker did anger very well in that show. I’d really like to see her get to do that in future stories.

Diona the Lurker

[astrogirl2]

Whether this is actually darker than other things we’ve seen in NuWho, or even classic Who, is another matter,

I guess it's a different sort of "dark" than what I'm usually thinking of when I think about dark moments in Who, but when you lay it out like that, it certainly sounds pretty dark. And I think everything you point out is true. (Heck, in the last bit of my post above, I started to say there was a theme about "the power of love" and then I stopped, thought about it, and changed it, because love, while still important, doesn't seem to have any real power here in terms of actually making things happen in the world.)

I think I actually like, once in a while, to see the Doctor focus on small-scale problems like this, or to see an acknowledgement that she can't or won't or shouldn't fix everything. (I mean, I liked "The Fires of Pompeii.") But having that basically happening in every single episode doesn't seem like a great pattern.

[anonymous]

Well, at least we have fanfic to fix the problem with the billionaire guy:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/16451624

Also has Kate Lethbridge-Stewart in it.

Diona the Lurker

[astrogirl2]

I should have known someone would come through with fic!

If only Kate had shown up like that on screen...