Ok, so the Sue behind Sue Tech is all monstery now, but Mrs Flood could still be Susan; it'd be annoying if she isn't now that we have all that setup about how Susan exists and could have regenerated as a disguise.

I'M MAD ABOUT HARRIET, SHE WAS COOL

always delighted at more Kate, Mel, and Rose Noble

and Carla and Cherry

Kate going "oh no we have a strict rule not to study that sort of technolo... okfine we have one in the basement" was so good.

as I said to Dad: "give me some of that nitra 9 you're not carrying"

I am firmly on "So basically if we removed the entire Susan Twist bad wolf from the season literally nothing changes." which is par for RTD 'I said the thing!' mystery boxes.

(I hate RTD's 'I said the thing' mystery boxes as they are utterly worthless foreshadowing, as largely they don't do anything.)

Nothing about Sutekh's previous powerset says 'being an ambulance' is good foreshadowing.

DryadGurrl AHAHAHAHA

he knows, he always knows

rakath Yeah, his mystery boxes aren't intended for the audience to actually solve.

They're "look forward to the thing" boxes, not clues.

Except when they're clues for a returning big bad from the 4th Doctor they should, I don't know, tie into the character?

We could have had this episode without that mystery box. Because the Doctor was already heading for Unit to investigate Ruby's mom. Having him show up and there's a brand new state of the art totally alien tech mogul with an anagram for TARDIS in her name just also being there would have been fine.

But the episode clearly painted like three different things out in the opener because of the mystery box this time it was actively a hindrance to the show.

Yeah, but they weren't really clues for a returning big bad. The way it was set up, all that's tied in is the trend of random old gods emerging. Nothing would have changed if it wasn't a returning character. He just picked one and seeded the Sue Tech thing accordingly.

(Disclaimer: I'm watching through react channels and may well have missed things)

The fact that it's a returning character is more of an easter egg for oldskool fans than anything else.

Except he didn't seed the Sue Tech thing, it's just 'look at Susan Twist in various make-up and that's kind of weird' (but wasn't weird that Twelve was a guy from Pompeii, Amy was a girl from Pompeii, Martha was turned into a Cyberman in S2, etc etc England has so few actors.)

see also: Richard E. Grant as the Great Intelligence

yeah, he basically just used her face as the "we're going to do something with this, aren't you curious" cue

oh! oh! also Colin Baker as that one guard in a Fifth Doctor episode

it wasn't a mystery, just a tease.

Which- has nothing to do with the answer and I just find it annoying. Every plot beat in the episode could have been done without it, and we'd still have a mystery box (the snow), we'd still have a reason for the Doctor to be there (Ruby's Mom questions), and we could still do the 'maybe Susan Forman (definitely not Susan Foreman)' beat.

Yeah, exactly.

And honestly better because now the Sutekh return is an actual curious mystery that ties to Sue Tec at the end and not painted obviously from the start.

(Because now the Sutekh reveal is tied to the Time Window and then the weird Sue Tech thing going on, instead of... what we got.)

Look, at me, whining about RTD season finales (because he's bad at them).

I do think problems like this are made more acute and annoying because of the not-enough-episodes issue, but this would have been a problem (as it has before) anyway.

Ehh, this is a problem of plot focal points rather than time management (the low ep count/misused runtimes are a problem, but mostly for other things like Doctor and Ruby characterization).

Agreed.

If we just removed the Susan Twist thing this episode would be fine to good.

Meanwhile for me this is waiting for Part 2 to save it.

I'm relieved RTD's not making 9999 fat jokes per episode anymore, but yeah, this is something he hasn't improved on.

(I'm still more down on 373 Yards, which is a good episode that should not have been here because of the season run.)

(I love Voyager's Year of Hell 2 parter but if Voyager seasons were 10 episodes only that would have to fucking go.)

(say more?)

73 Yards is a fun little self-contained episode, but it can't really build any of the season arcs, character arcs, or character dynamic arcs because it gets excised from canon at the end.

Ruby doesn't remember it.

true

So Ruby can't grow from it, the Doc is missing so she can't have a dynamic with him. And yes it has Snow and Susan Twist but, again, Ruby doesn't remember it.

I thought her recognizing Susan Twist in Dot & Bubble was an indication that she did remember something about it, but what's weird is that she didn't recognize her as Mrs Flood

who seems to be her neighbor

If I Was Writing It, there'd be a perception filter involved

So unless they show her surprisingly remembering it the way Clara remembered Journey to the Center of the TARDIS, it doesn't do anything but be a creepy ep.

yeah

Which it's very good at.

a very good creepy ep, but not an arc-useful ep

But 10 ep (-2 for Christmas last year and holiday next year) season.

Even a bottle ep like Blink actually did something with Martha and the Doctor, because they are doing stuff and trapped somewhere in time without the TARDIS.

yeah, it's not enough

and yeah, Blink wasn't erased from their memory afterward

I guess my main Susan Twist thing is that unlike Bad Wolf (weird but mostly unobtrusive), Torchwood (okay that actually is foreshadowing one time in the werewolf episode), Vote Saxon (not a mystery you can solve but a cool payoff on rewatch), and missing planets (stuff DoctorDonna needs in the end) this feels like it actually gets in the way.

I'm not sure a casual offline viewer would have noticed much of it (or maybe I'm underestimating neurotypicals' ability to recognize faces) until the Doctor started pointing it out,

but once that happened, I was annoyed that it ended with the Doctor going "oh well I guess I was wrong about the whole thing then" as if RTD was standing in the back going "mwahaha see even the Doctor can't see through my tweeests"

...oh I missed Flood going "he's done waiting," that puts her chances of her being Susan further down

Council of Geeks' overview reminded me of the remark in The Devil's Chord about the destruction of the Time Lords reverberating out through time and space so they're all absolutely definitely 100% gone,

and that makes me feel the dialog about Susan in the latest ep weird: it's all "but I bring disaster, I'd only hurt her" instead of "it can't be, they're all dead." (Also that feels like RTD and his "the Doctor is unhealthy to be around and hates himself for it" fetish that 15 was supposed to have gotten help with.)

................welp the finale was everyone acting the heck out of a giant pile of beautifully high-budget RTD facepalm.

So much of the stuff the Doctor said was RTD's Usual Issues with making the Doctor the most specialist cleverest good boy evar while simultaneously having him blame himself for the entire universe

and then he credits Ruby for making him think about family in A Whole New Way after spending his fourteenth reincarnation as part of a family and never bringing up THOSE changes

and then he keeps the Mrs Flood mystery box CLOSED

Gatwa was amazing, Gibson was amazing, everyone was amazing, Kate and Mel were perfect (except for Mel just sitting there being talked at by Sutek WITHOUT MENTIONING IT, that was terrible idiot-ball-for-no-reason writing)

but can someone please kick RTD in the memorabilia collection and force him to get an editor >|

he has never been able to write the Doctor as JUST ANOTHER PERSON IN A BIG UNIVERSE.

RTD managed to clear the incredibly low bar of 'explaining his bullshit' but then proceeded to stop there. (And I kind of don't like most of his explanations long term.)

And in spite of this it's still probably his best season finale? Which deserves a 'that's rough buddy' gif.

It really does.

"I don't think you tried at all" star right there.

Bonus for going "lol oldskool Sutek is cultural appropriation" directly before keeping the actual name of an actual Egyptian deity but filing all references to Egypt off so he can have it be his 0r1g1nal Strongetst DW Villain Of All Tiem, Do Not Steel.

(another of his problems is, I'm pretty sure that when he advertises his enemies as The Worst Thing The Doctor Has Ever Faced Ever he actually literally believes that's true and tries to lock down that his version will always be the best/most/biggest/scariest, and that just does not work due to, you know, the series format)

(there will always be another scary thing. that's the show. it doesn't have to be the scariest thing IN ALL OF SPACE AND TIME EVER to be horrifyingly effective.)

The actual takeaway from all this is that there should have had another ten episodes so we could have five interspersed to give the season more room to breathe and then another five trapped in the hilarious smol TARDIS figuring out what to do.

Give them a fetch quest, let all the deaths actually last a while so there's some real weight there, let Mel be an ongoing companion again just for a little bit!

Also let Ruby explore the Doctor's past some more! Bottle episode where the memory-TARDIS is trying to tell them something with all the props and they have to rifle through the junk and figure it out!

There's one thing the episode really did right, though. That's how to do a motorbike chase in DW.

So ignoring the 'this was a 9 ep season' of it all (there is a fix, the fix is not do absolutely over the top effects in some of the episodes), the set-up and payoff exchange all felt bad?

I don't mind Mrs. Flood being left unanswered with the other answers just feeling empty? "Surprise Ruby's parents are only important because the plot, I wrote, said they are important to the plot, that I wrote"

Sutekh has been riding on the back of the TARDIS for over a thousand years and it only matters now. His avatar of return is a random woman who he invented everywhere I've ever gone but we only realized this now.

If I don't think about any of that, it's a fun episode.

See, I had the opposite response: with the other answers feeling so empty I wanted to get Mrs Flood's answer over with too, on the principle that either it'd also be empty and we could all just move on or it'd be better than the others and at least one thing would have been somewhat satisfying. But I get your response too.

I am enjoying the "haha Sutekh and Jack must have had interesting conversations when Jack was stuck on the outside of the TARDIS" threads.

Also I think I've put my finger on why the Doctor's grief over everything dying felt weird to me. RTD's stuck having things matter because they matter TO THE DOCTOR for some reason, usually "you guys the Doctor accidentally contributed to sad thing and feels bad about it, plz feel sad for him."

But for me, it would have been much more impactful if he'd skipped all the "I did this" dialog (a sentiment we are all supposed to immediately and sympathetically contradict) and gone straight to the Doctor feeling bad because DEATH AND LOSS IS SAD and he would be grieved and horrified even if he hadn't caused it or had done all he could to prevent it.

Even if we didn't know everyone would immediately come back because death on that scale was never going to stick, grieving an enormous disaster isn't "understand you're not evil for accidentally making it happen and then make it all better by reversing it."

It's "process the loss and grieve it, and process the trauma which is still a trauma even if immediately reversed."

My reason for Mrs. Flood being left hanging as fine is:
- There is no way in hell with this plot that would have resolved satisfactorily.
- This plot already had too much shit.

This Doctor was supposed to have got all mentally healthy; this would have been an amazing chance to bring in current best practices wrt grief work and moral injury, but that's just not being done and I'm disappointed.

Rak: very fair, honestly.

Currently I'm on her being the Rani (although the comparisons to Clara's outfits does make me go hmm), but there's no way she could be anything remotely interesting in this episode.

I think the problem is that RTD has an actor playing the Doctor who is really good at looking sad so his only goal is to make them look sad at all times forever and really he needs to stop.

I think you've hit the nail on the head. He did the same with Tennant for probably the same reason.

There's a comparison to one of Romana's outfits too, but yeah, I don't really want her to be either. This whole thing isn't the Rani's style and I'm really not interested to see what RTD'd do with Romana.

There are plenty of other awful Time Lords who'd fit right into this role.

I don't like when RTD plays with the history of the franchise because when he does he never does it with a ton of care...

So I know Mrs. Flood is a returning character, but I am pretty sure I'm not going to like it no matter what.

It should be one of the supercilious back-bencher bureaucrats who has always disliked/envied the Doctor but has not understood that other life forms are people. The Rani had little regard for other life forms, but her whole thing was being amoral-scientist clinical about it; this character's shaping up as inconsistently cruel.

Wait, has he said she's a returning character?

No, but the way she's set-up it'd be really lackluster if she was new.

Ahhhh.

...which to be fair is more or less how I felt about the Susan Twist/Sutekh stuff in how it played out so par for RTD.

Yeah, this is why I want it to be an unimportant jealous bureucrat who didn't matter when they originally appeared, so nothing of value is lost.

New and unimportant things can be built up, but doing justice to a classic character is, as you say, a difficult job at which RTD is not doing well rn.

But his MO is to take something good and go "my version is moar better because in my plot it's moar better" so I'm trying not to keep my hopes up.

Like- if I don't think about the greater scope, it's fine. The cast is amazing, they gave it their all. The overall scenes hit. But then I look at the whole season and go 'you know you could have not?'

Yeah.

I do wish RTD would stop doing everybody lives. Moffat did it and it worked (and he cheated and got a second one in the Time Heist), but every other time Everybody Lives it just feels so cheap.

ahh, Time Heist is one I missed because I fell off after about three episodes of how Moff was writing Capaldi (and also because access issues and rl stuff). and there's always been the occasional "everybody lives" here and there, but yeah, it's almost always a cheap way to heighten the drama and an equally cheap retcon.

I mean- Time Heist it is a retcon, but it's a retcon within the construct of an elaborate bank heist amnesia plot.

(Which is why he cheated in a second one. It is an elaborate retcon but since that's how heist plots work it's fine.)

Yeah, there are acceptable ways to use it.

... yeah RTD's need for everything that happens to be The Most!!!!! has definitely been a burden to the writing in the past.

It really has. He doesn't seem to realize that serial storytelling never should be at its peak, because then there'd be nowhere else to go for him either. But also his "clever boy" thing feels like another instance of telling on himself, as in he thinks his cleverness will always find a way to be The New Most?

...also I thought of something I really don't like: in The Giggle he wrote 14 as his usual broken Doctor and then introduced 15 as the gentle comforting big-hug it'll-be-okay figure to comfort him and support him, but now that 15 is the main protagonist he's still trying to write a broken Doctor?

THAT'S IT! Thank you, I was trying to figure out what was bothering me and I think that's the thing

\o/<3

like yeah he's still charming af (but I'm pretty sure that's Ncuti more than the writing) but yeah, still trying to make him be torn up about things even when there's no real reason for it

Absolutely. Ncuti is absolutely killing it but the Doctor aggressively blaming himself for Sutek and then hiding his emotions about Ruby leaving until she was gone just does not fit the premise we were given in The Giggle.

And the whole time everyone else was rallying around him and telling him it's not his fault, like RTD can't tolerate someone standing there and processing his own emotions without being cosseted from every side, only this time it's the companions doing it and not the next regeneration.

Not a good look for how to handle the first black Doctor either: comforter to the white main character and then ooooh not so stable after all when he's the main character.

It wouldn't have been that bad if he was consistent either way, but he's not.

The "I love you" was also a terrible case of tell-don't-show and I don't understand why it's there when the Doctor's response is so insulting.

(also apparently people are talking about Kate taking Colonel Redshirt's hand at the end of the episode as if it implies some kind of ship and augh no? srsly no? SHE'S HIS BOSS?????

if the episode actually intended it to be read that way, I DON'T LIKE IT)

yeah I didn't see it as shippy either

good /o\

Maybe the "I love you" bit was supposed to correlate with the part where he did say he loved Mel when he thought she had just died in front of him, so now (becaaause there's still zero sign that he's been attending to his own mental health after each of the season's traumas) he has an unaddressed wound about loving his friends?

But if that's it, it didn't work at all.

The more I think about it, the more I like the episodes of this season (yes even Space Babies) but not how the season coalesces together? A bit of this is more 'Showrunners do not know how to do sub 10 ep runs' but a lot of this is just RTD bullshit (made worse without breaks from it).

for me it felt like the episodes were out of order?

not all of them, but a lot of them, like Devil's Chord should have been much later for instance

and 73 yards should have been earlier I think? IDK

For me it's two things:
- The episodes retread the same point as each other (which is fine... In separate seasons).
- The episodes needed spacers between their beats (Devil's Chord and Boom shouldn't have run back to back, Rogue shouldn't have been right before the finale). But that's more 'showrunners do not know how short season runs work' issues.

I joke 'RTD decided the Doctor should cry in every episode' but that's largely due to the episode order. In that you get huge strings of plots where the Doctor cries at the end is the big breaking point at the end of act two and literally don't do that for two thirds of your season!

But if I put each episode in its own little box removed from the season (and purposefully ignore the season arc shit) each episode is fun. Ranging from fine (Space Babies) to amazing (Boom) to 'kind of mid but that fucking ending' (Dot and Bubble).

yeeeah, Dot & Bubble was 'ok but Black Mirror (and The Orville) did this better' right up until that ending

(In the same way Midnight is RTD tried to write a Moffat script and made something very different but good, 73 Yards is RTD trying to do Moffat foreshadowing and tanking it so badly... But somehow lucksacking into a good episode anyway.)

i'm not sure if lurking these conversations makes me want to watch more or less, but i still refuse to give D+ the win

(I'm still laughing at their insistence that Rogue is the first time the Doctor has pursued a male love interest, for multiple reasons)

well you know RTD really likes to be The Progressive One In The Room even though he's not actually

oh I was figuring it was Disney more than him

bc they've been doing 'first day [fill in the blank]' about so many things

I'm sure Disney's on board with it and much louder about it

from what I remember, RTD at least is usually subtle enough to not explicitly be like "HEY LOOK WHAT I DID GIVE ME A COOKIE"

obviously that should have been 'first gay' and not 'first day', thx fingers for doing that and brain for not noticing, but yeah, that sounds right.

I don't really have much frame of reference, the Ten/Tennant fangirls were too much for me and I had to stop watching (also I just missed Eccleston and Tennant wasn't the same)

TenRose fans sucked so much of my enjoyment out of the show. And on rewatch RTD lovingly coddling TenRose fans made Series 3 and 4 so much worse.

If I had a nickel for every time RTD created a back-up David Tennant I would have two nickels etc and so on.

three nickles now, innit? (Either way: Ten was never my favorite and so I ignored so much of it)

like I didn't start watching regularly again until Thirteen

(I saw the Christmas Specials, and a few scattered 11 and 12 episodes, definitely would have watched more 12 if I'd had the chance)

I like David Tennant, because he's very fun and does a good job. I dislike how RTD writes Ten, because RTD seems only interested in him looking sad and pathetic in the rain. (Are we sensing a pattern!?)

yeah RTD's top priority was always making Tenant make sad faces for him

But thankfully the Gods smiled upon me, and if I want David Tennant to play an impossibly skilled timeless swash buckling adventerer I have Duck Tales to rewatch.

second priority was his weird obsession with the Doctor-Rose ship

Oh, I definitely agree that each episode give or take Space Babies is perfectly good DW on its own, and some of them are quite good verging on excellent, and the way they were all crammed in (even with the suggestion that Ruby and the Doctor were traveling together for some huge amount of time outside of them) felt very disjointed.

Even if RTD wasn't trying to speedrun TenRose with Fifteen and Ruby, speedrunning the friendship they kept saying they had just felt hollow.

The pantheon didn't work for me because Sutek just doesn't fit into the same modern-trickster-made-up-for-the-show category as the others. It felt like apple orange pear cassowary. He could have, especially since the mythological Set was more about chaos than death, but that would have required exposition.

(It'd also have been nice to separate him from the mythological Sutek entirely and go "oh he showed up in the 19th century and took on that identity to gain a cult". That kind of thing always feels better than "your deities were aliens all along haha.")

The scars from RoseTen are very much part of my disquiet about FifteenRogue; I complained back then that companion turnover is fundamental to the series and this was just setting everything up for heartbreak, and oh look, the heartbreak was the point.

Tennant's an excellent actor and the fact that he never really felt Doctory to me is probably more about me and RTD than him, but right now it's feeling like Gatwa's not having a chance to be his own Doctor because all his screentime is going to RTD standard story beats.

(Somehow, to me, Tennant always felt more like A Guy Playing The Doctor than The Doctor. That was less the case with 14; idk why.)

(Maybe it was because of TenRose and the way it defined him for his first season or two.)

I have general weird over Doctor romance plots. I feel Eleven gets away with the most because his style is to be the weirdest nerd in the room (which means he is not, and never will be, cool with River). But even RiverEleven feels weird to me.

(This is me being old and enjoying my classic who.)

But so much of Ten's run is defined by TenRose it's hard to really... separate them.

(Which isn't a thing with Fourteen, which probably helped on this.)

Series 2: TenRose.
Series 3: Ten moping and sad about a lack of Rose.
Series 4: The least TenRose of all. Has all the best Ten bits to it.
Specials: Half of them carry the lingering 'Ten's going to regenerate' ominous air that just kinda fogs over any actual fun in the specials.

Fourteen is literally just letting Tate and Tennant hang out for a few months and they are having so much fun.

all of this

I liked RiverEleven because they (originally) weren't a codependent mess and could care about each other while also having their own separate lives and admiring each other for being that separate person.

But then. >.<

/kicks Moff

But the big problem is that the Doctor is central to the show and nobody else is (except the TARDIS). Everything else and everyone else will inevitably, constantly change around them. That's how the premise works, and it only works because the Doctor can regenerate and the TARDIS is the vehicle through which all the change happens.

(The TARDIS as a conscious/linear being rather than a friendly transport doesn't happen often enough to mess it up.)

(In the main show, at least.)

Aside from the unique circumstances of the bigeneration, the Doctor can't settle down with anyone or else the show ends, and he can't keep traveling with anyone forever because companions don't have a mechanism to survive cast changes

and they're not going to stick him with another Time Lord because that would water down his impact as an isolated Time Lord who answers to nobody.

Sadly RTD is really married to the Lonely Angel Last of his Kind bit.

Yeah. I hate it so much.

That story has been told better elsewhere.

Overall it changes the tone of how the Doctor works if there is no authority for him to flaunt.

Yep.

Like- Gallifrey plots generally are bad, but having them exist allows for a degree of 'I've elected to be a space vagrant because my homeworld is full of beaurocrats and weird egomania I want no part in. I have my own better egomania.

Yeah. And RTD already demonized the Time Lords past any credible "working for them as an agent like Two in The Two Doctors" scenario.

They were already bad but RTD made them "there isn't room for them and the Doctor in the same universe" bad.

Plus being the one who destroyed Gallifrey is such a juicy source of angst an listless brooding.

How could RTD stop doing that.

And then Moffat put together a long con way to undestroy gallifrey only for Chibnall to surprise redestroy it for zero actual payoff!

rakath: ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I'm gonna die mad about that particular writing critfail

At some point I'm going to have to catch up on Twelve and Thirteen so I can yell at the screen too

Bonnie Langford's Remembered TARDIS Tour | Behind th...THIS THOUGH. THIS IS ADORABLE

I'm so glad we get to have so much more of her

she seems like a delight in person too

I will eventually watch all the Chibnall era, but not a thing I'll watch solo.
Even if some idiot bought all of the seasons on BR

She does seem delightful

I kept hoping for a blue star in there somewhere but I know there wouldn't be, it got used to disable a cyberman

Rak: yeah. >.<
Sterling: aaaaaaaaaaaaa ;;

sorry but only a little

</3

unfortunately with the actor gone there's no chance to retcon it, even if it hadn't been extremely effective as an episode

(You had me worried for a minute, Matthew Waterhouse is still around)

(IDK that he's acting anymore, though, just writing)

(OH!!! Berenstein moment there -- I really thought he'd died before NewWho started! I'm glad he's ok!)

Sorry for worrying you! XD;

Haha, nah, I get it. But yeah, Memory Tardis would have been the perfect place for that y'know?

It really would! ;;