That is actually really dangerous booking.

We should usually be able to wave that away as off-screen shenannigans. As in the Doctor obviously takes care of the clean up, but we're not showing it, because frankly it's a bit boring. As soon as you incorporate moral inconsistencies into the character, you have to address this, however. Either show it or give us a throwaway line. Because right now the character isn't convincingly portrayed as a white meat babyface. So you're left with a morally somewhat ambiguous character, which isn't addressed for at least another year.

It doesn't help that we're thrown a quick line about how robots are people, too, just for a one-off throwaway joke and then see her murder 50k of them. That's not how you get someone over.

Yep. The narrative is a quick, clean death by gun=bad because guns are bad yo. But slow, agonizing starving to death in a locked vault= ok because no guns, man. "And I'm ok with that, and I am not ok with that." (I love CinemaSins).

capaldi was and is, at least for me, the best Docotor ever.

[rant]
anyways, the first time i heard about the new Female Doctor, i thought boy would i like a Male Companion... i thought they would play with it... a Female Doctor and a male companion, but ................................................... :/
.
and even if it's old, even if they are old, where are The Daleks, the Cyberman or the fkn creepy as fk Weeping Angels?[/rant]

ciao

I doubt it's a matter of gun rights. The finale's moral would have been the same if it took place in a sword-and-sandal setting, or if it was about hanging the baddie.

It's more about capital punishment versus imprisonment. And dumb. Because it completely misses the point. The logic of imprisonment is lost in a case of perpetual stasis. It's as nonsensical as Batman's anti-killing rule in a fictional world of comics baddies knowingly defined as unredeemable and one-dimensional. It's just incoherent references to disembodied values. Principled formulations, dutifully parroted but disconnected from their reasons. Akin to consensually (post-ww2) anti-fascist discourses that still praise nationalism, ethnicism, authoritarianism, anti-intellectualism, social darwinism and the fetishism of might and manhood.

We live in a superficial world of cardboard ideas, devoid of depth or roots, with appearances (and self-appearances) as a sole purpose. Makes such incoherence expectable, but, still, I used to rate Doctor Who's worldviews higher than the average superhero comic. But again, it depends on the intelligence of individual authors.

There was some laughably wonky moral discourses in earlier seasons too. I remember a hatching moon egg threatening to destroy Earth, but spared simply because it's a living organism. The script validates this choice by making the moon creature turn out harmless, with no in-universe reason to expect that. If the coin had dropped on tail instead of head, the Doctor's position would have looked pretty silly in retrospect.

Beh, I may ask too much from tv shows.




ALSO I MISS MURRAY GOLD.

And besides skipping what could have been an interesting discussion of what they set up in "Kerblam!" in terms of the man vs machine vs jobs, the ending seemed rather ironic given the Doctor's penchant to avoid unnecessary death.

The concept of that episode was certainly intriguing. You had a little bit of AI popping through and the whole social commentary about jobs vs automation. You even had a decent bit of drama over the missing people. But the problem was they couldn't write their way out of a paper bag.

The pacing of the drama was constantly interrupted with such things as the Doctor espousing how management needs to treat people. The man vs machines vs jobs I guess was resolved with "Automation Bad" and they completely ignored what they had been preaching throughout this series about the Doctor minimizing harm which I guess just doesn't apply when it's a robot or even that villain this time. Rather inconsistent morality. Not to mention the likely after effect where a whole universe loses their gift delivery as they rebuild (i.e. the Doctor literally just killed Santa).

-----

I think the only episode this series I could say I liked was the India/Pakistan one. Outside of the brother who was just a little too evil to be real and arguably being anti-Hindu, it at least posed the question without as much judgement about ethnic or religious separation in state rebuilding and how separating two religious factions as was done with India and Pakistan is not without its consequences. The first episode wasn't bad, but it seemed to be ripping off the overdone alien bounty hunter plot of Predator.

I didn't like Rosa. It was just too over-the-top to me. Rosa Parks was brave in her actions, but it's not as is if segregation weren't already on its last legs at that time. If it weren't Rosa Parks, it would have been something else to be the spark of change. It was inevitable. My biggest problem though was the break from canon. Clearly, if Rosa was so important then that was a fixed point in time. And the whole escaped convict from the 67th century who wants to blame race relations for his problems makes little sense when we know how humanity has supposedly evolved by the 51st century with everyone's favorite metrosexual Captain Jack Harkness.

I'd argue that the Daleks and the Angels are completely dead and unusable at this point. The Cybermen not so much, but there's been a lot of cybershennanigans in the last seasons.

I'm all for new material. Seems to be in the spirit of the show, the old classics often don't translate very well into modern TV and we've got some fairly decent antagonists in the reboot. Racist space greaser isn't exactly what I was looking forward to, but I think in principle it's not a bad idea to mix it up a little.

I don't think it's even that. Imprisonment implies certain things like rehabilitation, release and keeping your prisoner alive in the first place. There's also the matter of "if you kill him, you're no better than him" - when in fact the villain in the final episode, as far as I could tell, actually didn't kill anyone but rather imprisoned planets with his stasis technology. Which is exactly what the gang are doing in the end.

The doctor, as shown in the season, clearly has no problem with capital punishment. Or murder in general, it's not like the Kerblam robots really did anything wrong. It's other people dishing out the punishment who are the problem.

If I thought someone was actually going somewhere with that, it could be rather intriguing.

After having recently rewatched The Impossible Planet I couldn't agree more.

I mostly agree with what's been said.

I like Jodie, I think she makes an excellent Doctor and the fact she's a woman makes absolutely no difference. I preferred this season to Moffat's run (despite loving Matt and Capaldi as Doctors) but I absolutely couldn't stand Moffat so that's not surprising. Unfortunately it has just gone from one kind of bad writing to another...

The moralising of violence is ridiculous, but it always has been. It's basically just killing is bad but it's ok as long as someone else does it. The difference is they've dropped all the shades of grey that Tennant or Eccleston had so even mercy killing a creature that has no hope of surviving is bad or killing someone who would happily slaughter half the galaxy.

It feels (ironically considering Torchwood was so adult) like it's been aimed at kids very firmly and has lost a little nuance because of that.

I don't think it was dreadful, but I think it lacked a certain something.

Reminds me of nethack's pacifist extinctionist challenge. Basically, you have to make every possible enemy species go extinct (by getting enough of them to die) while not breaking pacifist conduct. *You* can't kill without breaking that conduct, but your pets can.

Anything since William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker played the role, Doctor Who has been shite...

Aaaaaand watched the special. Aaaaaand it was more of the same. Still an over-narrated audio episode with pointless redundant images "oh no it is still holding on ah there it is gone now run i am running i stop running let's duck behind this chair ah it has a laser pew pew pew now i have disabled its laser oh not it has re-enabled it it is a problem because there are explosions around us i must think of a solution i am trying to think of a solution i have found a solution i am pushing it into space okay it is gone now we have won it is the end of the pisode we are happy there will be other epis..." SHUT UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUP

I'll keep following the series waiting for it to become watchable again, but I really think I'll do it without the images from now on. Or without the sound. One or the other.

How did you like the "invincible" Dalek out of its shell that apparently could use UV light to teleport it's parts together? Now even the inside of the Daleks are nearly invulnerable. Or the "Let's go to your apartment to analyze these samples so we can let the situation get out of hand while the TARDIS is right there."

It's the writing that is letting us down...

I should start by saying I don't watch nor care about Dr. Who, but to the point of established characters - I don't see the problem in them being rewritten or a problem with the 'gender-bending' of the examples you gave. Not everything has to be for you. It's not like there's not going to be another Dr. Who after this one. How many iterations of Sherlock Holmes have there been? Some women no less. Some performing martial arts as well.

Rewriting characters keeps them fresh and interesting to new audiences. That was certainly the case when I went to see Robert Downey Jr. as slow-mo-kung-fu Holmes. If it were just another dry Sherlock Holmes movie that was soley a detective story I wouldn't have been interested. New paint is a necessary part of longevity and change is ultimately inevitable. As the famous quote goes, tradition is the illusion of constancy.

That said, a simple change in gender doesn't automatically make anything immediately progressive, leftist, etc. Last year I finally got around to catching a few episodes of the new Star Trek (with 2 female leads no less!) on a plane trip and found the political subtext deeply reactionary and antithetical to the progressive history of the show - which was ironic given the alt-right tantrums leading up to the show's premiere.

At this point I did hardly mind. I'm used to dalek logic being a bit wobbly (sometimes a dalek shell is invulnerable, sometimes they explode when colliding, sometimes they're killing machines, sometimes they aim like stormtroopers, and rebuilding a microwave oven around them is the safest way to destroy a threat to all of earth's armies, whatevs). It was nice to see a gritty grey metal dalek after the colorful plastic ones, treated as threatening, even if the music itself ridiculed it by going all cybals and trumpets at each mention of the word "dalek". So, I was okay with the retarded backstory, and the "Puppet Master" element. And with the doctor's selective sonic scan of the archeologists. And the... okay, I mean, it's Doctor Who, some plot holes and incoherences are part of the game. As long as you've got cool, stylish narration, and fun and intense characters.

But I'm really not convinced on those aspects, unfortunately. Besides the not too convincing "angry Whitaker" ("i want you to see how serious my face is" - yeah bad idea, it's basically as intimidating as Ice Cube in "Ghosts of Mars", especially compared to how scary the previous doctors could get), it really sounded too much like the recording of a kid playing with dalek toys and narrating the story while waving them around and doing the music with the mouth. I really dislike this season's style. Even when I discipline myself into not overthinking the plots themselves (and the so soft rules of the doctor who universe).

Thing is, also, that I had just finished watching "Upgrade" minutes before, so I couldn't help comparing Logan Marshall-Green's performance and Charlotte Ritchie's. That raised the bar a bit too much.

Daleks work better when they fully embrace their silliness. This season has taken itself too seriously for its own good.

Also, I think all the scenes with Ryan's dad were a waste of time. They could be skipped and nothing really changes, except for the microwave.

New doctor seems like some kind of preacher; not surprising from a women who's an active feminist and doesn't seem to have her own character (tries to act like the last doctor).
I have nothing against women being in the role, but it shouldn't have gone to a woman due to affirmative action based around a possible populist repercussion (trial by twitter).
Missy would of made an awesome and far more believable new 'doctor'; based on the idea the doctor was out of regens and handing over the reins was something already happenning as the character was on probationary reform.
It also would of openned up the series instead of it just trying to 'kick the can along'.
You know not quite the hero people want, the hero people deserve, one way or anouther; doing the best she can with a philosophy she herself doesn't fully commit to.
You know real moral texture.