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  1. And as someone one of whose oldest friends – since January ’76, when I was newly 18 – is a trans woman – it was glorious and very moving to see a trans actor in a vital role (literally, in terms of the storyline).

    And it was moving in a different way to be shown just a hint of the bullying – in the first episode a touch of cycle-by teenage deadnaming – that trans people like my dear friend have had to live through.

    NB (Hopefully unnecessary pre-emptive strike.) Anyone even thinking of uttering the term ‘tokenism’ can, in the nicest possible way, go fuck themselves.

  3. It was fab, wasn’t it? Fast, exciting, funny and completely engrossing. After several fallow years it felt like a return the Who I loved and was excited to see return in Russell T Davies’ first run.

        • I’m currently a mystery to medical science, @Freddy Steady, in that my left side leg problems have got incrementally worse over the last couple of months.*

          My gorgeous locum oncology consultant doesn’t think this is down to the tumour, while the stroke doctor doesn’t think it’s stroke related. When I saw her in early October, the oncologist said something about the neurology department getting involved. I spoke to her on the 18th of this month when she had the results of the late October MRI scan (showing no appreciable change), and she asked whether I’d heard anything from the neurologists. I hadn’t, so she said she’d chase them up.

          My next MRI (for oncology) is in a week’s time, and a couple of days ago I got a letter announcing an initial neurology appointment on Jan 8th, so watch this space…

          *I should stress that I can still manage a 2 hour walk with my rollator, including a couple of steep climbs up to the by-pass en route, but it’s constantly as though the force of gravity is acting much more strongly on my left leg than on the rest of me, while – apologies for using a technical term here – the leg feels really fucking weird from the moment I get out of bed these days, a feeling exacerbated by sitting or standing for too long. Which isn’t that long at all. And – sorry if I’ve mentioned this before, but I can’t be arsed to check at this ungodly hour – around the house, sans rollator, I shuffle and lurch like a bad impression of Frankenstein’s monster…

  6. Won’t watch anything with Catherine Tate in it.
    Dreadful actress/comedienne or whatever she is plus Dr. Who of no interest to me.
    Wish this post was about The Who after all.

  8. Really enjoyed this, reminded me of how warm, inclusive, and optimistic Who was in RTD’s first go round. It also reminded me of just how unsubtle and fond of a gobbledegook ending he is, but that’s a price I’m willing to pay.

    Baffles me that people don’t like Catherine Tate’s character, I think Donna Noble is my favourite companion. Who else is gong to yell “there’s a Martian in my shed” like that?

  10. New Who?

    You had me very excited for a moment that Townsend and Daltrey had dropped a new album.

    I won’t get fooled again!

    Glad to hear that the Doctor is in rude, good health.

  11. Asking alien villains their preferred pronouns, though. I hope they do this in every future episode. It’s important not to misgender the being whose cunning plan to destroy humanity you’re just about to foil with a screwdriver, an industrial vat of hair gel, and any incredibly intrusive music score,

  12. I know Nigel has fired a warning shot across the bow, but I’m going to risk the wrath of the Afterword and state that I think it was awful. Completely fucking awful.

    For some context, my eldest son is a Who obsessive, and I have a half-completed life-sized Dalek and TARDIS in my shed to prove it. I watched all the Eccleston episodes with him, most of the Tennant and then the occasional one thereafter. As a casual viewer, it was obvious that all was not well in the Who-niverse, with awful writing and acting and big, bloated, IMPORTANT story arcs.

    My son almost lost his faith after the last season of Who but was giddy with excitement about the return of Tennant and RTD for this episode. He’s currently at the beach celebrating his completion of school, but he watched the episode and sent us a text yesterday saying that he loved it. So last night the remaining three of us sat down as a family to watch it (a rare achievement).

    Let me go through a few of my observations, from the generic to the specific. I’ll number them to make rebuttal more straightforward:

    1: One of the unsettling aspects of classic Who episodes was the idea that Daleks/Cybermen/whatever had secretly arrived on Earth, and that there was a clandestine war being waged that the population was oblivious to, apart from the odd chance encounter. In modern Who episodes this has been thrown out the door, with large-scale invasions, spaceships etc in full view of the population. Yet London/The Earth (the show doesn’t differentiate the two) seems to reset back to normal every time, despite these momentous happenings. I know this is a more general complaint, but this episode is a prime example.

    2: Building from this, there is no consequence to any events in this universe and when there is nothing at stake there is no tension. I presume there was a drawn-out, weepy moment in an earlier season where Donna’s memory was wiped because if she remembered the Doctor she would DIE. And here it was hand-waved away in a 10-second bit of incomprehensible exposition and whammo, everything is back to normal again.

    3: The hyper-kinetic editing. Was probably deliberate to draw attention from the story. Or their trial license for Final Cut Pro didn’t allow any clip longer than two seconds.

    4: The story. Let’s put it in context. Who had been jettisoning viewers for years with the main culprit identified as the quality of the writing, so a lot was on the line for this RETURN TO FORM. They even resurrected the most popular recent Doctor to give it some oomph. Someone (prob RTD) wrote this, it was reviewed, workshopped, commissioned, rehearsed blah blah blah for a year or more, and yet I genuinely believe I could come up with a better plot outline in a couple of hours (for a start, it wouldn’t be set on Earth). This wasn’t the worst Who story I have seen (that goes to an episode with a giant traffic jam on a whale in space), but it’s certainly in the bottom five. And that’s really saying something.

    5: We had to get to it (shield your eyes Nigel). The almost-comical virtue signalling. So there is a trans character, and of course the entire plot has to pivot around this one aspect of this one character, the way that Michael Crichton used to shoehorn the pop-science zeitgeist into each of his novels (“Dinosaurs, blah blah, chaos theory” etc). And the trans character can’t just be a character; no, their trans-ness has to be at the core of all dialogue and interactions concerning them. Oh, and they have to have special ‘minority’ superpowers. In the first five minutes we had a trans character, an inter-racial marriage and a UNIT leader in a wheelchair (their superpower- a wheelchair that launches missiles), and I thought for a minute that this was setting up to make some clever point, but no, of course not. I’m sure if had been made a few months later there would be a scene with an Israeli and a Palestinian embracing. In fact, why doesn’t the Doctor fuck off to the Middle East for a while where he is actually needed and give central London a break?

    My son texted me after I watched it, and I think he was gutted after receiving my muted response (Quoted in full: “Hmmm…”). He so desperately wants this to be a return to form and for Who to regain some sort of critical weight. I really hope it does, and I’ll be sitting on the sofa next to him for at least the first few episodes.

    • I can kind-of understand a certain amount of handbag-clutching if a trans character is front-and-centre in a children’s show, but what on earth is virtue-signalling about having a character in a wheelchair? Or an inter-racial marriage?
      Has the TARDIS taken us back to 1963?

      • No handbag clutching here, and I applaud Who for being socially progressive, but would it not have been more powerful and inclusive to have the trans character as just a character instead of that being literally the only facet of their existence? It’s like 70s and 80s US sitcoms where black characters were wheeled on solely to trigger plot points about their blackness, and then wheeled off again.

        The danger these days of criticising something like this episode is that it invites lazy dismissal that the critic is opposed to the principles being proposed rather than the implementation. My problem with this episode was that it was not very good.

      • I think a bit of it is RTD’s performative doing of these things.

        Personally, I don’t like him. The conclusion of Tennant’s very first episode “Don’t you think she looks tired” was very clearly a petty shot at Eccleston, whose parting was not the most amicable. In short, I think RTD is a petty fuck.

        Davros comes out of the wheelchair because RTD doesn’t think having disabled people be the baddies is quite the thing. (Speakibng personally, if anyone with any of my ailments was a Davros, I’d find it great). So UNIT Head has to be in wheelchair because…performative.

        He seems to have forgotten that character development and changes should be in service to the story and not so that he can virtue signal. I don’t need him telling me what I should be thinking about anything, least of all disabled people.

        Moffat’s Matt Smith was clearly the best NuWho.

        • Davies has always put marginalised communities at the centre of his work and while it’s usually clumsily done, as in this case, I believe it has a positive impact. It’s worth a few minutes of clunky dialogue and crowbarred plot points here and there. You could argue that a children’s show that has for 60 years made ‘different’ a synonym for ‘evil’ has a lot of catching up to do.

          If nothing else, it encourages debate and promotes understanding – which is why it’s frustrating to see that pre-emptive ‘go fuck yourself’ on this thread. We should be able to talk about how this issue is handled in popular culture without having to contort ourselves like that.

          • Did anybody see Years and Years? I did feel that he’d written it with a kind of checklist-of-things-to-include in mind.

            Mind you It’s a Sin and Cucumber were both fantastic – two of the best TV dramas of the last 10 years.

            • I remember Years and Years not being that popular here, on account of its “virtue signalling”. I absolutely loved it. Preferred it to It’s A Sin (didn’t see Cucumber) and would definitely describe it as one of the best TV dramas of the last 10 years. I thought the dinghy crossing in particular was really well done. And the phrase (muttered by the great Anna Reid) “Beware those men, the jokers and the tricksters and the clowns. They will laugh us into hell.” stayed with me, especially when Johnson was PM.

          • It’s less about the actual placement of characters with disabilities or gender identities, and more about how “look at me” RTD is about it.

            If the writing is good enough, the characters should be able to stand on their own, rather than having him having to explain to me why a certain character is a certain way.

          • II’ll “contort” myself however the fuck I want, @chiz – I have skin in the game. I wasn’t aware that you’d been made comportment monitor.

            ( The same applies to anyone using the loaded phrase “virtue signalling”. )

            • We all have skin in the game. We’re not talking about being pro- or anti-trans, I thought that was obvious. We’re talking about how the issue is presented in popular culture. If we can’t even do that there really is no hope of progress.

                • I don’t think “my post, my rules” cuts it. It may be your post, but it is our blog. And, for the avoidance of doubt, that includes you too.

                  I wasn’t going to join in this post until I saw the “my post, my rules” comment, but I have joined in because I object to being told that I can go fuck myself for even thinking of uttering any term I wish to.

                  I have not watched Dr Who since I was a kid (the Tom Baker years), although I have seen a few odd bits since. I watched Star Beast only because of how good you said it was. It was fun and I enjoyed it for what it was. I like watching David Tennant. I am not keen on Catherine Tate, but she was OK.

                  I agree with the comments above about the lack of subtlety in the social messaging. The delivery of some of the lines almost came with a klaxon and a red flashing “social message” banner. That is a comment about the writing and the acting, not the messages themselves.

                  Whether Dr Who or any other programme is an appropriate vehicle for such messaging is a whole different debate. I don’t know, perhaps a case can be made for saying that television has always been used as a vehicle one way or another to put across the prevailing view of how society could (or should) be.

                  You may express your attitudes as you wish, but you must surely agree that others ought to be able to express theirs too without being told – in advance – to go fuck themselves.

                  • “…you must surely agree that others ought to be able to express theirs too without being told – in advance – to go fuck themselves.”

                    No, I don’t. As I said above, I have skin in this game on the issues of trans and disabled representation, and anyone complaining about “tokenism” or “virtue signalling” is asking for, and getting, my contempt.

                    • Nigel, a lot of us have skin in this game mate, but it becomes a bit silly having a pissing contest about how many trans/disabled people we know/are related to etc. Your friend probably went through hell in the 70s and it’s great that you provided support at a time when our society was truly horrid to people who didn’t fit a very narrow norm.

                      Some of us are criticising the sub-Grange Hill way that this episode introduced it’s social commentary, especially in a much-heralded ‘return to form’ for the series. I don’t think any of us are disagreeing with the intent of that commentary. I’m not sure you are making this distinction.

                      On the ‘virtue signalling’ issue, some of us work for very large companies and know how these things work with any sort of public-facing content, so forgive us for being cynical when we recognise the handiwork of our own.

                    • The thing is, Nigel, your ban on discussion appears to be based on an experience which, to be honest, most of us have.

                      I still remember the effort it took me, a lifelong coward, to walk towards the out-of-towners who were picking on the cross-dressing regular in my local 30 years ago. I have a niece who may or may not be trans – I don’t know, neither does she, to be honest. She’s 14.

                      I think the best way to understand these things is to talk and to listen, and that’s why your go-fuck-yourself dictats are so frustrating for me.

                    • I’m not banning discussion, @chiz, I’m indicating my contempt for those who use such weasel words.

                      People have been discussing the matter since I posted. Perhaps you missed that?

                    • Sorry, yes. You’re banning the words themselves, but not the concepts they convey. I see that now.

                  • Reasoned, even passionate discussion – welcome. “Go fuck yourself” (and similar attitudes) – not welcome here. Save those for Twitter, X, Facebook etc etc please if you really must do it.

                    Future “discussions” along those lines will be removed. Play nice here, however divisive the issue.

                    • @nigelthebald

                      No worries, N. Comment was meant to be lighthearted.

                      Tend to steer clear of these sort of debates as they invariably bring out the worst in people on both sides of the issue(s).

                    • Is there any situation in which those terms have any validity? Because what if something genuinely strikes someone as being tokenistic or virtue signalling? Are they not allowed to say so?

                      The thing about tokenism to my eyes is that it’s really insulting to the minority being tokenised because instead of being given a character who just happens to be X, the writer makes X the entirety of their character (or worse, makes their “superpower”, which couldn’t be easily be more patronising). A TV show isn’t made good just because it represents X in a positive light. Were people who found, say, The Green Mile, objectionable on “Magical Negro” grounds wrong to feel that way? Should Spike Lee go fuck himself?

                      (Not my phrase: Lee’s, I think, originally)

                    • Ok fine. As long as people are sufficiently circumlocutory we’re ok to express the ideas, just not the specific words.

                    • That appears to be the embargo. I suggest we use ‘Tolkienism’ and ‘Virtual Symbolics.’ That should keep us unautofucked.

                  • “My post, my rules”

                    – I tried this that time I insisted all contributors had to be in the nude. I was told that this was “immoral in principle and unworkable in practice. ”

                    Not fair.

                    • Talking of nude, I’m just back from a gig by the stupendously good Alice Night, who regular readers may or not remember I’m rather keen on. Since I last saw her she’s become something of a performance artiste, which is probably why she ended the gig entirely in the altogether. She tried to sweet talk the audience into getting their kit off, but that was never going to happen, even in northern New South Wales. It all seemed perfectly reasonable though. Here she is wearing a wedding dress and standing on a milk crate.

                    • Stand up guy @pencilsqueezer …

                      So @hubert-rawlinson you got naked with one of my colleagues. She says there was hanky panky going on at the margins of this event – I assume you weren’t involved.

                      Not judging though, what happens when you’re covered in body paint stays … er… on massive photographic prints on the walls of the Ferens Art Gallery

    • @Podicle On point 1 above, it was faintly ridiculous though that the Cybermen could rise from the sewers, March through St Paul’s, eliminating passers by BUT a week later the human race had collectively forgotten this. As with Autons coming to life across the U.K., smashing through shop windows and causing havoc.
      The new WHO recognises that this just isn’t viable storytelling anymore.

      As for the overall, I think it was mainly designed to be a romp to bring back lost viewers. We’ll see if it works

    • You’re entitled – although wrong 😜 – to think it was awful, @Podicle, but I find inclusivity a positive thing, even more so since going from being the fittest person my age I knew to disabled, literally overnight – 7th to 8th May this year. I had to learn to walk again while in hospital, an exhausting and very scary process, and remain acutely aware of how the environment is often skewed against someone who relies on a wheeled contraption to walk without fear of falling, from cambered pavements – there are many places where it’s easier and safer for me to walk in the road – to heavy shop doors. (I often have to rely on the kindness of strangers.)

      Furthermore the show didn’t revolve around just this one aspect of Rose’s character. Her modelling of monsters encountered by the first Rose set up a continuity sub plot, which may yet be expanded on.

      And the Jodie Whittaker series was based in the north of England, not London.

      I’m tired and can’t be arsed to pick any more holes, but I’ll finish by saying see my response to chiz above.

    • I was in a busy city centre on Saturday afternoon, and I saw some trans and disabled people. When I got home I watched a programme on the telly that was set at the same time and in the same country, and there were also some trans and disabled people in it. What’s the big deal?

    • This said everything I felt too, @podicle. Really well said. I thought it was ultimately pretty poor: many of the worst of RTD’s most typical excesses – Doctor Who plus the kitchen sink, a big bag of coke and a memo from HR instead of characters. The jokes didn’t land, the stakes were non-existent, the cute-not-cute monster twist was visible a mile off. Lazy, lazy stuff, I thought. Not flatly terrible, but really should’ve been so much more skilfully done.

  13. To be fair, one area where people with disabilities or some type of disfigurement have never lacked for representation is as the villain. It’s a real bugbear for many disabled people and there’s no shortage of examples of this trope right up to recent years and I would commend RTD for addressing it. But this is a minefield which takes a lot of skill to negotiate (There’s an important difference between “Hitler has only got one ball and he started World War Two” and “Hitler started World War Two because he only has one ball”) and it’s possible to overcorrect until NO disabled or non-white or gay character can be bad or even flawed. As you say, these elements need to be in service of the story which is all-important and it would certainly help if the dialogue was more natural (most of the dialogue in this episode is leagues ahead of the last three series, but the parts featuring Rose were a bit clumsy and felt shoehorned in). But this is the first story of three, and there was a lot going on, so maybe being trans won’t ultimately be “the only facet of this character’s existence”? It doesn’t seem unreasonable to me that UNIT’s scientific advisor is someone in a wheelchair (it looks like the new TARDIS is totes wheelchair accessible, so I expect we will see her again) when Britain’s foremost Physicist of recent decades was confined to one.

  14. I know a few people who will moan like hell next time I see them about all this woke nonsense on the BBC. These are the same people who have stopped watching Strictly since they started having same sex couples, so Saturday would have had them apoplectic.

  16. Is there some kind of AW formula in play here?
    With anything from TV-land that gets written about here, we first get the gushing praise, then we get a vehement dissenter or two, followed by point-by-point over-analysis to the death.

    Dr. Who is popular culture, entertainment. It’s not serious drama.

  17. For what it’s worth, yesterday my 17YO son returned from the coast (with full-blown COVID) and was keen to discuss my thoughts on the episode. I told him my verdict, and he agreed fully with all points. His response condensed down to the fact that, not having watched Who for some years, I had no idea how low it had sunk, so this was indeed a return to (partial) form.

    I’m happy for him, as Dr Who is such a big part of his life.

  18. I watched it this evening. Or some of it. I gave up after about 30 mins. Just not my sort of thing at all. A long, long way from the heights of Blink, or Human Nature/Family of Blood. One little detail I found oddly offputting was David Tennant’s stubble. Why didn’t he shave before filming, the lazy feck? I don’t remember him being unshaven in his previous episodes. It made him look different and older, when he should have looked the same as was. I’m not sure if that’s just me being a weirdo though.

    • Ah, but should he look the same as he did? Or is this regenerated version subtly different, as in when he used the word “love” and seemed shocked himself.

  19. Just saw the end of the second ep. They’ve made a right dog’s breakfast of the theme tune and David Tennant is too old to have hair like that.

    It was nice to see him one last time though.

    • I’m about to watch it. My son says it is excellent. He did a u-turn on the previous episode, initially liking it but then, as he rewatched it in his COVID fog, he turned against it. I’m skeptical but happy to go along for the ride. I’ll post an update later.

        • I’ll be the dissenting voice. I like The Doctor being chased by aliens, which is pretty much the entirety of this episode, but I disliked the ‘tell not show’ nature of all the explanation of the nature of being The Doctor. I much preferred the first, and with chaos breaking out in Camden Market next week’s is looking like it will be back on form.

    • A lot of the problem I find with modern productions is that they use a lot of background music or effects when people are talking, and also the levels vary wildly so you turn it up to hear the voices, and then you get assaulted by deafening effects. You really do notice when they get it right – for instance, the later Star Wars films are excellent for getting the balance right. I really don’t like resorting to subtitles, but my wife and I often look at each other…’What did he just say?’….’No idea’….wind back…’Nope, still can’t get it’….subtitles on…’Oh…ok, not that important anyway’.

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