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Tag: Nu-Who

Walking Someone Else’s Minefield

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Review of Demons of the Punjab
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

A few hours before the episode aired, I saw someone in one of the Doctor Who-related Facebook groups I’m in express his apprehensions about the potential for an episode set in India in 1947 to be a preachy, anti-British Empire bash-fest (totally paraphrasing)—airing on Remembrance Day.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2018 BBC

I have rarely felt as much of a cultural divide with the UK as I did in that moment. Such a concern had never—would never have—occurred to me. I thus sat down to watch Demons of the Punjab feeling like I was about to walk through someone else’s cultural minefield. But the type of mines that were actually scattered about were completely different than what I’d expected. And unlike the Doctor and her friends, I really had no context for what was coming.

The US and the UK share an awful lot of cultural DNA. As the former colony rather than the former colonizer, though (and here I’m entirely skipping how my ancestors helped to slaughter the original inhabitants of the land I now live on as they colonized it), the people of my country generally stopped paying much attention to Britain’s affairs after about the turn of the nineteenth century, where “American history” and “British history” diverge.

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The Showrunner Conundrum

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Review of The Tsuranga Conundrum
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

The cautious optimism with which I entered this series has begun to wane.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2018 BBC

Here we are, halfway through the series, and I’m still not really excited about it. Yes, I love Whittaker’s Doctor. Yes, I really like the Companions—what I know of them, anyway. And yes, each story has had some really good, enjoyable elements to it. But it’s starting to feel very same-old same-old; after only five episodes, that seems like a precarious place to be.

Strangely, that feeling didn’t really hit me until my second viewing of The Tsuranga Conundrum. That is, the first time through, when I was just watching for the pure experience, I liked the episode fine. It didn’t fill me with giddy delight or move me deeply like some of the best ones do, but it also didn’t set my teeth on edge like the worst. However, when I went back to watch and take notes for this review, I found myself checking the run-time counter again and again, to see how much more I needed to sit through. Bad sign.

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Spiders, Families, and Other Sticky Topics

Review of Arachnids in the UK
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

This episode is not for arachnophobes. Straight up—if spiders squick you out, skip this one. Do Not Pass “Go,” Do Not Collect $200.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2018 BBC

If you can handle spiders, well… It’s still plenty creepy. There’s something primordial that just gets at one’s brainstem when something is crawling rapidly toward you with purpose, especially when it has many legs. As usual, though, the creatures are just a convenient (or inconvenient, depending on your perspective) backdrop for a deeper story.

This time that story is nominally about the greed and egoism of a man who is such an obvious analog for the current US President that they actually had to use said President’s name in the dialog in order to maintain deniability. The parallel actually made it hard for me to watch whenever that guy was on screen (that and the fact that the actor will forever be Mr. Big to me, though that actually worked relatively well in context).

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Hitting It Out of the Parks

Review of Rosa
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

I’ve managed so far to stay unspoiled for Series Eleven; I don’t even know the names of the next episodes until I start poking around the BBC website looking for details of the current one. So my first inkling of what was coming for episode 3 was its Next Time trailer. It made me nervous.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2018 BBC

I wasn’t nervous because they were going to look at the beginnings of the US Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s—quite the opposite; I love a historical. But it has been the habit in Doctor Who to depict the real events of history as being caused by the Doctor, either through direct action (e.g., The Visitation) or through her influence (e.g., giving words and ideas to Shakespeare or Christie). I didn’t want to see Rosa Parks’s very real, very human bravery be cheapened by implying she wouldn’t have acted as she did without the Doctor arriving on the scene.

I thus spent my first viewing watching with a constant underlying tension, always fearing that some major faux pas lurked around the next page-turn of the script. I shouldn’t have worried, given that Malorie Blackman, the first woman of color ever to write for Doctor Who, was the primary writer for this episode (a fact that escaped me until a subsequent viewing). She hit it out of the park.

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Intellect Over Brute Strength

Review of The Ghost Monument
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

If I hadn’t bought into Whittaker as the Doctor after her first episode, I would have within the opening minutes of this one.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2018 BBC

As part of our cliffhanger resolution, we find the Doctor on the bridge of a ship arguing with its pilot in tones so familiar we don’t even need to hear or comprehend the words fully to get the sense of the conversation in progress: something dire is happening, she’s trying to convince the pilot to take a particular course of action to prevent a tragedy, and he’s wondering where this random person who showed up out of nowhere gets off telling him how to fly his own goddamn ship. It’s such classic Doctor fare as to be cliché. And yet it did my heart a world of good to watch that cliché play out—all the way to her casually stepping out of the wreckage with a witty remark.

Yes. She’s the Doctor.

I suspect winning over the skeptical long-term fans was high on Chibnall’s list of desired outcomes for this episode. He certainly gave it the old college try with such blatant nods to the Classic era as the Doctor’s causal use of Venusian aikido and her exclamation at the end of the episode, “You’ve redecorated!” (even if the following line was a predictable subversion of that trope). I don’t know whether or not he’s succeeding, but so far I’m happy to go along for the ride.

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The Doctor Is In

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Review of The Woman Who Fell to Earth
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

I really wish I could remember the exact moment—I wasn’t taking notes during that first viewing—when one of my daughters felt moved to declare her verdict: “Yep, she’s the Doctor!”


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2018 BBC

I think that, no matter their view on changing up the actor’s gender, that question gets at the crux of what fans have really been especially anxious about for this particular regeneration: would the Doctor still feel like the Doctor? The answer we got after this opening episode of Jodie Whittaker’s first series was, as far as I’m concerned, a resounding “yes.”

It always takes me a while to warm to a new Doctor (the exception being Capaldi, whom I was so ready to love going in that he was the Doctor to me from the moment those attack eyebrows first appeared). Even though I’ve been eagerly anticipating Whittaker for months, it was a tough change even for someone as favorably inclined as me to wrap my head around. But my kiddo is right: she’s the Doctor. She showed us so over and over again throughout the episode as both she and we recognized some parts of herself and not others.

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Confession #122: I’m Already Impressed

We finally have an air date for the first episode of Series Eleven (07 Oct 2018), which will now go out on Sundays for (I believe) the first time. It’s been a long haul; we’ve known Capaldi was leaving since the end of January last year, and there’s been more than a nine-month gap between new episodes. Further, we’ll have known Jodie was destined to be the next Doctor for nearly fifteen months before we get to see her in action for real.

And yet, we’ve heard precious little about what will—or won’t—be on screen this year. I’m actually pretty impressed.

It has become the norm since the show returned in 2005 for a certain number of details to leak. In fact, whole episodes (e.g., S01E01 Rose, S08E01 Deep Breath) or scripts (much of Series Eight) have made their way to the Internet well before they were slated to air. The Night of the Doctor reportedly had to be released earlier than intended to head off a similar leak and the spoiling of the reveal within.

But episodes and other plot elements aren’t the only details to leak. Casting surprises like last year’s return of John Simm as the Master have also been a victim of loose lips. And because there’s a part of fandom that’s eager for any scrap of news they can get—and loves to share it as soon as they hear—spoilers run rampant in such a way that it’s hard to avoid them if one uses the Internet at all (which is to say, a huge number of fans).

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Confession #121: I Don’t Mind the Wait

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As the first official trailer for the upcoming series gets micro-analyzed and reports roll in that filming for Series Eleven has wrapped, we all continue to twiddle our thumbs waiting for an announcement of the date for the premiere episode. The “wilderness months” (if you will) between seasons are always trying for fans, especially when there’s the promise of a new Doctor to come.

And yet I’m not frothing at the mouth in frustrated anticipation these days.

I can’t tell whether my remarkable indifference—it’s not outright apathy, because I am eager to see Jodie in action—is due to that background feeling of anxiety about how “the first woman Doctor” will be written, a result of the fact that much of my mental energy is being spent on personal/family issues, or merely a side effect of my natural cyclical media interests. Whatever the case (okay, definitely that middle part, so let’s let that one slide), I find myself puzzled when I come across others having reactions I would another year have found to be normal, expected, and shared. I almost don’t recognize myself.

Granted, I don’t participate as thoroughly in internet fandom as I once did, nor have I ever gone looking for spoilers or those breathlessly titled clickbait articles that promise a deep dive into the hidden meaning in every frame of a forty-second spot. I’ll admit that it’s possible that I’ve simply missed something that’s got the rest of fandom abuzz. But my little corner of the internet has been quietly marking time, content to let things come as they will.

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Waiting to Exhale

Deep Breath (Series Eight, Ep. 1; 2014)
Viewed 25 Apr 2018

Doctor/Companion: Twelve, Clara Oswald
Stars: Peter Capaldi, Jenna Coleman
Preceding Story: The Time of the Doctor (Eleven, Clara)
Succeeding Story: Into the Dalek (Twelve, Clara)

The end of the school year and start of our summer break has taken us down several different binge-watching paths. As I mentioned last time, for a while it was the MCU. More recently it’s been other programs. And I’ll be honest—with “Kill the Moon” next up in our Who marathon, I’ve not pushed them too hard to get back to it.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2012 BBC

Before everything went sideways, though, I did manage to get them through the early part of Series Eight. New regenerations always make for interesting viewing, so I thought I’d record their reactions to this “new” Doctor to share here.

Of course he wasn’t new to them, which makes this an odd sort of not-quite-full-circle episode. The Twelve my girls know is actually rather different than the Twelve that first appeared on screen. Not only is his hair far too short here (I love that you can gauge where both Three and Twelve are in their regeneration based on how bouffant their hair is), but he’s still über antisocial (“I don’t think that I’m a hugging person now”). That persona put off a lot of fans at the time, and some of them never warmed to Twelve.

However, I’ve always held that early Twelve is a big hedgehog (prickly on the outside, but soft and tender on the inside). Perhaps having known his later, mellower self made it easier for my girls to agree with my assessment—or devise their own—and accept this awkward, uncomfortable goober as the Doctor. Whatever the case, they took him in stride and most of their comments and reactions were aimed at other characters.

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Nu-View #23: Time Marches On

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The Time of the Doctor (Christmas Special; 2013)
Viewed 24 Apr 2018

Doctor/Companion: Eleven, Clara Oswald
Stars: Matt Smith, Jenna Coleman
Preceding Story: The Day of the Doctor (Eleven, Ten, War, Clara, Kate Stewart)
Succeeding Story: Deep Breath (Twelve, Clara)

I don’t know what others’ families are like, but in ours obsessions come and go in waves. We’ll get all excited about something and dive in head-first, only to get derailed somewhere along the way for one reason or another. Sometimes it’s a scheduling issue that throws us off our groove, or sometimes something else piques our interest and supersedes the current passion-of-the-moment.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2013 BBC

Such is the way of the girls’ run through modern Doctor Who. Once we got on a roll, we were powering through episodes at an incredible rate. With only twenty-one left to get them up-to-date on the entirety of the modern era, we hit one of those bumps in the road. It’s now been more than a month since we last watched Who, having for the time being move on to the MCU.

All this is by way of explanation that my recollections of the girls reactions to this (and the following) episode have already been blurred by time. I have my notes, but they’re spare, and lack of temporal proximity makes them more difficult than usual to interpret. Besides, the girls did more watching than openly reacting. But there are a few key moments in the Eleventh Doctor’s last story that made an impression on them, and therefore on me.

Moffat threw everything but the kitchen sink at us here. There are Daleks, Cybermen, Silence, and the Crack. In fact, there appears to be a message coming through the Crack that no one can interpret. But the Doctor conveniently has something that can help his new “friend” Handles the Cyber-head decode that message: the Seal of the High Council of Gallifrey. “Nicked it off the Master in the Death Zone,” he explains, and the girls bark a laugh. We’ve only recently watched The Five Doctors, and they understand the reference perfectly.

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