Doctor Who Series 14
SPOILERS TOTAL. You've been warned.
X01: The Star Beast 2023 November 25
X02: Wild Blue Yonder 2023 December 2
X03: The Giggle 2023 December 9
X04: The Church on Ruby Road 2023 December 25
1401: Space Babies 2024 May 10
(First watched 2024-05-10) A collection of diapers so large it lets a space station fart itself from the orbit of one planet to another. Hoo boy, RTD really is back.
Fifteen seems much more flippant than we've seen the Doctor since... Ten's later days when he got full of himself? At least he's presenting himself that way. Talking about fun and freedom, versus helping people.
Computers in the world of Doctor Who screw up in ridiculous ways. Sure, we sometimes see "the system screwed up and so things are shutting down", but we're also likely to see "the system screwed up and now is traveling through time looking for body parts" or in today's case "the system screwed up and created a life form out of snot".
1402: The Devil's Chord 2024 May 10
(First watched 2024-05-11) They played this up as a "Beatles episode", but they were a very small part. The direct connection to The Giggle was unexpected. The Toymaker did warn that more things would be coming, but I didn't expect it'd be so soon or some sort of god offspring.
Second episode in a row we see the Doctor run away from something in fear.
The Doctor mentions that across town his past self is living with his granddaughter... and to me it really begged one of those timey wimey questions a show like this mostly has to ignore because it would be a mess. If we WERE to see the First Doctor in 1963 as seen in this episode, would it be a First Doctor to whom the music-less state of Earth seemed the normal state of affairs?
The idea of a chord releasing or banishing some entity seemed... far fetched to me. Ignoring the actual summoning/banishing, just that it would seem there'd be a pretty finite set of chords people using standard musical notation could even try, and it would seem either way would be activated just by chance frequently. Let a cat walk on a piano, oops, there's the Maestro.
(First watched 2024-05-17) You wouldn't have the episode without it, but really the Doctor being unable to move kind of got old. But that aside, great to have the Moff back. Some familiar tricks and turns of phrase, and far fewer farting aliens than average this season. Though the dead bodies did uhhh kind of look like fleshlights.
I've previously heard people say they thought last week's episode wasn't always meant to be so early in the season, and now I have to agree. It was set about half a year after the Doctor and Ruby met. Now this week we see Ruby supposedly being on another planet for the first time. So either things are a bit out of order, or they spent the whole half year just visiting times on Earth. Or other spacecraft / space stations, I guess.
(First watched 2024-05-24) Much of a Moffat fan as I am, I think I liked this week as much as last week. I don't understand the internal logic of everything... fairy circle leading to weird loop effect? But the FEELING worked. There being something out there in your life that's survivable, but disastrous enough to ruin your chance at any sort of lasting connection with people.
The Roger ap Gwilliam bit seems a bit beside the point, in the end. Ruby used her weird condition to "save the world", but that's not going to happen in the "normal" state of things, and whatever happens in the "normal" state of things must've been both crazier than that but also without nuclear armageddon for the Doctor to speak about him in such a way.
1405: Dot and Bubble 2024 May 31
(First watched 2024-05-31) Blink comparisons are obvious, with the Doctor (and companion) almost entirely appearing on a screen rather than in the main action. Some interesting concepts, too, about how our skills devolve as we allow machines to take them over. In this case people who can barely walk without a navigation system telling them precisely how to move. I don't know how much I like the ending, though. I think I get what it was trying to say about people stuck in their bubble and not willing to believe people from outside of it, but that still being the case for every single survivor after a civilization-wide catastrophe they managed to be exceptions to still seems hard to swallow.
I'll walk that back a bit. I think the racism aspect is bigger than I first thought. I noticed it, then thought I was putting too much emphasis on it vs the "bubble" element, but now I see there were more subtle clues to it earlier that mostly went over my head.
(First watched 2024-06-08) Too many specific namedrops of Bridgerton which I don't give a shit about, but the concept of alien shapeshifters whose goal is just playing around in different roles by taking people over is not bad.
Fifteen is definitely a horny Doctor. And Rogue himself being sent off to some unknown dimension leaves a big dangling thing to be returned to... maybe soon, maybe far off, maybe never. Speaking of which, the Doctor was against killing the shapeshifters, and sending them off to some dimension with nobody to harm was deemed the humane solution... but sending them off to some random unknown place could be the closest thing to an execution anyway, yah? Unless their machinery specifically knew how to choose a dimension and planet with some nice fruit trees around or whatever, they could just get dumped some lonely place and dehydrate in a few days.
The term "cosplay" is thrown around liberally in this episode, but might it be more precise to say the aliens were LARPers?
1407: The Legend of Ruby Sunday 2024 June 14
(First watched 2024-06-14) First parts of multi-parters have an unfair advantage in that they're not expected to stick the landing, so my impressions could be very different after next week... but this was very entertaining. Finally the threads of the season coming together, with weird sci-fi machinery and oddball characters. That's what I'm looking for.
So all the Susan stuff making the Doctor think about his granddaughter was entirely a red herring? After nearly 60 years, too bad if that's as close to a return to the character as we get.
They never get around to saying what actually is the technology that S Triad was supposed to be giving out to the world. I assume it was something of a bigger scale than, say, a new browser.
Something I had been wondering about is whether in their off-screen adventures during this season there would have been more Susan Twist appearances. They answered that one pretty conclusively.
1408: Empire of Death 2024 June 21