Latest / A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast / Strictly Come Hamster - Series 10a (featuring Si Hart, Daniel(s) Rawnsley & Knight & Elliot Mair)

Transcript

Strictly Come Hamster - Series 10a (featuring Si Hart, Daniel(s) Rawnsley & Knight & Elliot Mair) · A Hamster With a Blunt Penknife - a Doctor Who Commentary podcast

• 0:00
  Seriously, what's wrong? I've never seen anyone die
• 0:05
  before. A few hours ago, we were
• 0:07
  standing in a garden full of dead people.
• 0:10
  It was different. How?
• 0:12
  They were dead already. Morally and practically, that is
• 0:16
  not a useful distinction on. Learner, don't tell me what to
• 0:19
  think. I'm your teacher.
• 0:22
  Telling you things is what I do, yeah.
• 0:24
  Tell me this, you've seen people die before?
• 0:27
  Yeah. Of.
• 0:28
  Course you still care. Of course I care.
• 0:30
  How many? How many world?
• 0:33
  If you care so much, tell me how many people you've seen die.
• 0:40
  I don't know. OK.
• 0:45
  How many before you lost count? I care, Bill, but I move on
• 0:51
  care. How quickly?
• 0:54
  It's not me you're angry with. Have you ever killed anyone?
• 0:59
  There's a look in your eyes. Sometimes it makes me wonder.
• 1:04
  Have you? There are situations when the
• 1:08
  options available. Are living?
• 1:09
  No? I asked.
• 1:11
  Sometimes the choices. That's not what I asked.
• 1:21
  Yes. The Poudy the final half year,
• 2:01
  he's found his groove at last. They've put him in a university,
• 2:06
  he's going to give lectures, he's got a chalkboard.
• 2:09
  These are the things that we've been waiting for from his
• 2:12
  doctor. Yes, we're here for Strictly
• 2:16
  season 10 and I've got a whole bunch of pudding brains with
• 2:20
  their stupid opinions, some more stupid apes that we've rounded
• 2:25
  up to come and talk about the first half of Doctor Who series
• 2:29
  10/20/17. It's the last year of Capaldi
• 2:33
  and finally they've got his Doctor right.
• 2:37
  Or have they? I think we're going to hear some
• 2:40
  opinions tonight because this is Strictly and you're all going to
• 2:43
  get it wrong, so we better get on and introduce everyone.
• 2:49
  I've already got an opinion. Who are you Sir and how did you
• 2:53
  invade all your way into this podcast?
• 2:55
  I've never heard or seen your face before in my life.
• 2:59
  Well, it's so nice that this far into Strictly come Hamster that
• 3:05
  you keep finding new talent and talk about Doctor Who.
• 3:10
  You're just so open to people who've never ever had a chance
• 3:14
  to podcast and have never ever done a single episode of a
• 3:17
  hamster with a blunt pen knife. So I'm I'm so grateful.
• 3:21
  Fellas, have you ever seen this gentleman before?
• 3:24
  Doesn't No face, doesn't ring a bell.
• 3:26
  No, Daniel, I'm just so emotional.
• 3:31
  Because. He's taking his first steps.
• 3:33
  It's podcasting now he's hosting us Strictly.
• 3:37
  You crop so fast. Do you know this man?
• 3:41
  The no and I thought I was the newbie round here.
• 3:44
  Taking my position, you're. Already.
• 3:47
  I'm sorry. Well, look, consider this your
• 3:51
  trial run on hamster, a blood pen knife and we'll sort of
• 3:54
  gauge how you did throughout the episode and then see if we can
• 3:57
  have you back again. OK, well, that seems fair.
• 4:00
  Thank you very much. I would like to say that every
• 4:05
  time you do that joke, it makes me laugh.
• 4:08
  So thank you very much. Fraser Gregory, of course.
• 4:12
  Well. Who else would it be?
• 4:15
  So yes, so strictly come Hamster Series 10, are we ready?
• 4:20
  We've got we are dealing with the episodes from Oxygen through
• 4:24
  to No, we're not, because that's just what I've got in front.
• 4:27
  Of me. And we're doing.
• 4:28
  One episode are we we're. Doing we're doing oxygen through
• 4:32
  to the pilot in true Steven Moffat style.
• 4:38
  And you know, people might say this is a difficult era, but
• 4:44
  here we are. We are going to, I'm going to
• 4:46
  gauge all of your opinions on Series 10 before we start.
• 4:50
  And I would like to say just before we start, that the
• 4:53
  Strictly Come Hamster episode for Series 10 has been released
• 4:56
  before the Series 10 soundtrack. I was waiting for that joke.
• 5:00
  Yeah. I mean, it's currently being
• 5:02
  recorded side that's still to be determined.
• 5:04
  So you know what? My release schedule's like it's
• 5:08
  worse than Murray. It could all go horribly wrong
• 5:11
  with that joke, but so French. Daniel, what is your opinion on
• 5:19
  Series 10? Well, I've been thinking
• 5:22
  recently about conventional wisdom in Doctor Who fandom,
• 5:26
  Things that we as fans hold up to be true but don't necessarily
• 5:30
  stand up to scrutiny. So myths like, you know, oh,
• 5:34
  William Hartner was the grumpy Doctor, Oh you wasn't Blink or
• 5:39
  Heaven Sent are the best episodes of Doctor Whoever.
• 5:43
  No, they're not. No, bless you.
• 5:46
  And one myth I'm hoping we might examine tonight in in a totally
• 5:50
  fair, even handed, unbiased way is this notion that Series 10 is
• 5:54
  the last great season of 21st century Doctor Who bullshit.
• 6:00
  Yeah, I do. I don't know about that now.
• 6:03
  I want to stress, I I like this season a lot.
• 6:05
  I think it's very good. I think Steven Moffat going back
• 6:07
  to basics with a kind of soft reboot was absolutely the right
• 6:11
  decision he made. I also feel though, a lot of the
• 6:15
  goodwill towards series 10, especially this half of the
• 6:18
  season that we're talking about, it might be down to a bit of a
• 6:22
  novelty effect. So it's Moffatt's last year,
• 6:25
  Capaldi's less grumpy, we're back to stand alone stories
• 6:28
  again, got this brand new TARDIS team Who after nearly three
• 6:32
  seasons of Clara Oswald, such a welcome breath of fresh air.
• 6:36
  So everything else just feels brighter and better by by
• 6:40
  comparison, even though for me, there's a fair few stories here
• 6:45
  that when you get right down to it, are kind of just your bog
• 6:48
  standard traditional meat and potatoes Doctor Who episode that
• 6:53
  is just OK. And that's fine.
• 6:55
  It's totally fine for Doctor Who to be just OK.
• 6:59
  But one, because once you get to the middle of the season, which
• 7:02
  we're not talking about tonight, there's a big chunk of it that
• 7:06
  really drags everything down. We will get there, but we will
• 7:09
  get there, Which conveniently enough, tends to get left out of
• 7:14
  most appraisals of Series 10, so there might be a little bit of
• 7:17
  selective revisionist history going on there.
• 7:21
  All that being said, I do look back on this year quite fondly
• 7:25
  because I didn't actually see it on broadcast.
• 7:29
  I remember being on a train watching the return of Doctor
• 7:32
  Mysterio on my laptop when it was announced that Jodie
• 7:36
  Whittaker was going to be the first female Doctor.
• 7:40
  So literally just as I was catching up on Capaldi's final
• 7:43
  season. And The funny thing is, knowing
• 7:46
  what was coming, it only enhanced the experience for me
• 7:49
  because it just made everything this year feel that much more
• 7:52
  fun and exciting. Almost like Moffett was kind of
• 7:56
  celebrating the spirit of Doctor Who, the optimism of Doctor Who,
• 8:00
  and sort of laying the groundwork for what was to come
• 8:03
  just around the corner. So that's probably my favorite
• 8:07
  aspect of this whole series is the lightness of touch.
• 8:10
  It's fun. It's fleet footed.
• 8:11
  It's a lot funnier. Capaldi's so relaxed and fun in
• 8:15
  the role. He's got a twinkle in his eye,
• 8:17
  you know, this lovely new TARDIS trio.
• 8:21
  And yeah, so for the most part, it's fun.
• 8:24
  You might even say it's fluff. And but candy floss is very
• 8:28
  fluffy. And I like candy floss.
• 8:30
  And so sometimes candy floss Doctor Who can can be the best
• 8:34
  Doctor Who. You know, most people find train
• 8:37
  journeys extremely boring. Yeah, I can only assume that.
• 8:41
  I mean, you chose to watch the return of Doctor Mysterio on a
• 8:45
  train journey when you have the whole of Doctor Who to watch.
• 8:48
  What is wrong with you? Well, there was no Wi-Fi, so it
• 8:51
  was a it was a saved file on my laptop.
• 8:54
  And. And there was no bored on a
• 8:57
  porn. Yeah, that's what you're saying.
• 8:59
  That's all you had on there. Well, no one came crashing
• 9:01
  through the roof and brought the train to complete standstill, so
• 9:05
  that was still to come. And Elliot, what about you?
• 9:11
  This is it's a very peculiar series, this for me.
• 9:15
  So I I to give you a better background, I, I stopped
• 9:18
  watching Doctor Who series six. Yeah, I was.
• 9:23
  I was still a child. My sanity.
• 9:26
  Sanity round. Yeah, that's an opinion I've not
• 9:30
  really changed since I was a child, but yeah, the general
• 9:32
  feeling amongst my family being it's too complicated and not
• 9:35
  very interesting to follow anymore.
• 9:38
  So when this series was airing, I was at university and maybe I
• 9:41
  was in my sort of edgy cool. I was at an art uni.
• 9:44
  You maybe I was in my cool arty phase, but I remember seeing
• 9:47
  snippets of it from people. Funnily enough, my Co host
• 9:49
  Amber, who is, is, you know, was a massive Doctor Who fan.
• 9:52
  So at the time just being like, Christ, this is, is this, what
• 9:55
  is this Doctor Who? Is this what people are watching
• 9:57
  now? Oh my God.
• 10:01
  And then in lockdown, I watched everything in order and I, I
• 10:06
  enjoy this initial run of stories.
• 10:08
  I don't think everything is, is great or or perfect.
• 10:14
  And then we're watching them now.
• 10:15
  I just think broadly fine. I have nothing particularly
• 10:21
  profound or interesting to say. And like I'd like Daniel says,
• 10:24
  you know, French Daniel, sorry. You know, sometimes, like, fine
• 10:28
  is is is good. It doesn't mean fine.
• 10:31
  Yeah, doesn't all need to. Be fine.
• 10:33
  If you described me as broadly fine, I would consider that a
• 10:37
  huge insult. Well, I mean, you know, fine has
• 10:40
  got many different because, you know, if someone described me as
• 10:42
  fine, I would immediately think like, oh, fine, but you know,
• 10:45
  broadly fine. You know, it's it's dead having
• 10:47
  a faint praise, isn't it? I I think it's a real mixed bag.
• 10:50
  There's nothing here that I feel strongly about loving.
• 10:52
  There's nothing that I feel strongly about disliking.
• 10:54
  I their their comfort episodes I could put on and enjoy watching,
• 10:58
  I think at random times and yeah, powder drive later in the
• 11:01
  season, but you know, it gets much, much worse.
• 11:03
  So that's so I'll enjoy it while I can.
• 11:07
  Absolutely. And how about you, UK, Daniel?
• 11:12
  I I've fallen out of love with Doctor Who from series 9.
• 11:16
  Also, the tail end of series 8, it wasn't, it wasn't fun
• 11:22
  anymore. You're getting storylines where
• 11:25
  characters that you, you hear people screaming, don't cremate
• 11:28
  me and you get trash like the, the the the magician's
• 11:34
  apprentice and the widows familiar, which which is
• 11:36
  familiar rather, which are just as absolutely awful.
• 11:40
  So I, I kind of, I was still watching it, but it wasn't, it
• 11:46
  wasn't sort of, you know, really got to watch it, get home and
• 11:48
  watch it. Interestingly, if I was actually
• 11:51
  at uni or was doing a college course at the time and I was in
• 11:53
  the third, third year of my BA degree and it was, it was
• 11:59
  something to look forward to thinking.
• 12:00
  Well, yeah, there's a new companion.
• 12:02
  I didn't dislike Clara, but I think she did stay far, far too
• 12:05
  long. So it needed some fresh blood.
• 12:08
  And I think Pearl Mackie is the the star of this season.
• 12:13
  She's absolutely wonderful. She's effervescent.
• 12:18
  The characters just sings. She's she's too good an actress
• 12:23
  to mess this up. Interestingly, I've got the
• 12:25
  she's always think of her as having a big smile on her face.
• 12:28
  And yet I've got the the action figure here and she looks as
• 12:30
  miserable as sing. It's quite I think it's just
• 12:34
  before she got shot in the chest.
• 12:36
  So Daniel, possibly. Yes, yes.
• 12:38
  So that's yeah, they should actually maybe should drill a
• 12:40
  hole in it. You know, that was, I think that
• 12:45
  would upset this is actually my son's side.
• 12:46
  I'd better not do that. So yeah, it it did feel like
• 12:50
  back to basics a little bit more fun, although the fun does stop
• 12:54
  sort of when we get to oxygen, which is well, keep my powder
• 12:57
  dry, as they say. And then the Monk trilogy, which
• 13:01
  I kind of thought, Oh, no, really, go back-to-back to grey
• 13:04
  drab Doctor Who with inappropriate plot lines of
• 13:10
  people committing mass suicide. And you think this is supposed
• 13:13
  to be for a family audience? And I don't really.
• 13:16
  There are some parts of this season which, you know, my, my
• 13:20
  children are 10-8 and five. I would be a bit reluctant.
• 13:24
  I know they're all rated 12, aren't they?
• 13:25
  The DVD is rated 12. So yeah, I'd have to sort of be
• 13:29
  careful about what they what I wouldn't let them watch, but,
• 13:32
  yeah. But on the whole I was I was
• 13:35
  impressed and felt Doctor Who was back to being good, broadly
• 13:41
  fine. Broadly.
• 13:43
  Broadly fine. Joe Ford, do you have opinions?
• 13:47
  One or two, I think there's Luke Malloy says this season has a
• 13:51
  great vibe. Yeah, it's like a one season
• 13:54
  shot. The university setting the fresh
• 13:58
  set of regulars. You're right, initially it's
• 14:01
  quite light and peppy with the possibilities of of travelling
• 14:06
  the universe being something that's to look forward to.
• 14:11
  But I don't think we've been there for a while with Moffett
• 14:13
  Who and it does have a great set of regulars.
• 14:17
  I think Kapoli is amazingly good this year and Nardo brings such
• 14:22
  a brilliant relief and we'll talk about him in this episode.
• 14:27
  Bill, I actually think he's one of the more boring new series
• 14:31
  companions. Now, hear me out as a character
• 14:34
  because I don't think there's a lot to her beyond her family
• 14:37
  history. What do we learn?
• 14:39
  She she likes watching movies. That's it.
• 14:42
  In do 13 episodes, that's all we learn about her as a person.
• 14:46
  But Pearl Mackey has like the Elizabeth Laden effect.
• 14:49
  Yeah, she was handed an I'll define character.
• 14:52
  And she's just so charismatic. She's so great to watch.
• 14:56
  And she almost makes the worst of almost the worst episodes of
• 15:01
  this year in durable. We'll get to one or two today,
• 15:05
  but I do think it's a kind of underwhelming season of stories
• 15:08
  overall. So I think the vibe is good, but
• 15:12
  the content is, you're saying broadly fine.
• 15:17
  I'd probably say, all right, you know, with a couple of striking
• 15:21
  moments. There's a couple of great
• 15:23
  episodes we're going to talk about today, I think, and
• 15:25
  there's a couple of great episodes in the second-half, but
• 15:27
  I think maybe more than half the season is below average.
• 15:32
  That's a shame. That's a shame for Moffett to go
• 15:34
  out on on a year where perhaps he's not firing on all
• 15:37
  cylinders. But we'll get there.
• 15:40
  We will. So for me this has come off the
• 15:44
  back of my least favorite season of Doctor Who.
• 15:47
  So me and Daniel UK Daniel quite often agree on our opinions and
• 15:52
  Doctor Who and I really really struggled through the whole of
• 15:56
  series 9 and that's the closest I ever came to thinking.
• 15:59
  What did you explain? What was?
• 16:01
  What were the difficulties? Everything.
• 16:04
  Outside how? How many seconds in eternity
• 16:11
  were you? Like the balding punching that
• 16:13
  wall You were punching your telly like every week?
• 16:16
  To sleep, stop when I think my my big problem is when you've
• 16:21
  got a Doctor and a companion that you are not invested in and
• 16:26
  actually aren't particularly likable and particularly they're
• 16:29
  really unlikable together, it makes watching the show really,
• 16:33
  really difficult. And the the Clara and Doctor
• 16:38
  relationship was so dysfunctional by the end that it
• 16:42
  was just so hard to watch. Even though it's all paid off
• 16:45
  and it is all all sort of dealt with well, as much as it's ever
• 16:49
  going to be, you know that they're they're just bad for
• 16:52
  each other. Well, that's fine, but that's
• 16:55
  not great fun to watch in Doctor Who, to be honest.
• 16:58
  So I. Really struggled, she stepped
• 17:01
  into the TARDIS in what was her first episode.
• 17:03
  Clara Bells of Saint John, Our Clara, did you not see, you
• 17:07
  know, the future ahead of her between two heartbeats
• 17:11
  travelling around universe without her from Game of Thrones
• 17:14
  in a time travelling diner. Beautifully plotted out that.
• 17:17
  Art, wasn't it? She had more farewells than The
• 17:21
  Rolling Stones. Different character every year.
• 17:24
  Yeah. What is it?
• 17:25
  Austin Power says? Why won't you die?
• 17:31
  So you know I. Somebody said impossible.
• 17:34
  Yeah. Impossible girl.
• 17:35
  Impossible to warm to. Impossible to like or something.
• 17:37
  Yeah. And impossible to kill off me.
• 17:42
  Apologies to all Clara Flan's out there.
• 17:44
  Yeah, I'm sure there are a few, but anyway, I came into this
• 17:47
  season not thinking very much. I was not optimistic, was not
• 17:52
  hopeful. I'd seen the the sort of
• 17:55
  minisode that they've done introducing Bill and thought,
• 17:58
  oh, God, this is good, she's going to be awful, this is
• 18:01
  terrible. What are they thinking?
• 18:03
  And then the pilot happened, and I loved it.
• 18:08
  So yeah. And I came in and it's just like
• 18:11
  they found the perfect place for Peter Capaldi's Doctor to be a
• 18:17
  university lecturer absolutely suits him because we've seen him
• 18:20
  lecturing the audience over the last three years, you know,
• 18:24
  director camera telling us what to think.
• 18:27
  So this is perfect, absolutely the right place for him and it
• 18:31
  suits him perfectly. He is so good as the as the
• 18:34
  lecturer. So yeah, I came in with lots of
• 18:38
  optimism and gradually that decreased through the season.
• 18:42
  But this is a Moffett season, so that's not unusual.
• 18:46
  But yeah, so there's lots to discuss here.
• 18:49
  I think the shame. They dropped that uni thing,
• 18:52
  isn't it? I think Oxygen is the last
• 18:53
  episode where it's a significant part of an episode.
• 18:58
  It comes back briefly in world enough in time, I believe.
• 19:02
  It's just so it it's so perfect. And yeah, you think to yourself,
• 19:06
  my God, a grounded Dr. with a, a mission statement in a, a
• 19:11
  location that suits him. I mean, you just lean into that,
• 19:14
  wouldn't you, if you'd found it, You found the magic formula.
• 19:18
  I do think, though, that it's, it's it's the kind of thing you
• 19:21
  only come up with when your back's against the wall.
• 19:23
  Like, I've got to stay for another season.
• 19:26
  Let's do Sharda again. And yes, let's do a university.
• 19:29
  That sounds good. And it works.
• 19:31
  It works. It's quite inventive when my
• 19:33
  back's against the wall. So yeah, so coming back to these
• 19:39
  these stories, I haven't watched many of them very much.
• 19:43
  And so coming back and watching 5 episodes in one day on Sunday
• 19:48
  was a bit of a was interesting. So yeah, we'll see as the
• 19:54
  episode goes along. So no one's fully endorsing this
• 19:59
  and no one is completely trashing it.
• 20:02
  That's an interesting position because no, I mean, yeah, I, I
• 20:04
  like it. I don't love it.
• 20:07
  Broadly fine. Broadly fine.
• 20:09
  Yeah, probably fine. This is the sort of a season
• 20:12
  that just everyone is kind of yeah, it's there.
• 20:14
  It's there and. It's all right.
• 20:16
  Yeah, it's the. Season that wasn't meant to be
• 20:17
  there, isn't it? Yeah, exactly.
• 20:19
  It was supposed to come in this year and it's only the fact that
• 20:21
  he was doing Broadchurch series three that Moffitt had to write.
• 20:25
  He was under contract and obliged and he was under a lot
• 20:29
  of pressure I think during the middle of the season, which we
• 20:33
  won't talk about tonight. But it it did actually kind of
• 20:36
  start affecting his personal life and things like that.
• 20:39
  So which is the kind of thing where you think, well, maybe a
• 20:42
  producer should have stepped in and said, Stephen, maybe we can
• 20:45
  just lose a couple of episodes this year.
• 20:47
  We don't have to do, you know, 12 episodes.
• 20:49
  Saves the money for chippers. Yeah.
• 20:52
  It's the only time I'm going to say this in the episode because
• 20:55
  I don't think it's worth dwelling on.
• 20:56
  But I know with some authority now that Capaldi was fired at
• 21:00
  the end of Husbands of RIP Song and this season wasn't supposed
• 21:05
  to happen, but he was under contract in case they wanted to
• 21:08
  pick him up for another year. So they basically said we'll see
• 21:10
  you later. You're not very popular with
• 21:12
  Home with a new female Doctor. Oh shit, he's not ready.
• 21:16
  Well, you've got to come back and do this year then, because
• 21:17
  we don't want to hear about Doctor Who.
• 21:19
  The grace that he shows 1. Professionalism and two like
• 21:26
  keep delivering his best work almost as like a finger in the
• 21:30
  face to every to those exact. You wouldn't know.
• 21:32
  You're going to. You wouldn't know.
• 21:33
  You will. You can't tell.
• 21:34
  I didn't know that, actually. So, yeah.
• 21:38
  And I think that's why he distanced himself afterwards.
• 21:41
  And why wouldn't you? You know, that's an appalling
• 21:43
  way to treat possibly the best actor to have ever played the
• 21:47
  Doctor. Anyway, sorry.
• 21:51
  So. I guess we need to start with
• 21:54
  some comments from our listeners.
• 21:58
  Joe, would you like to go first? Oh yes, Kane Parker says.
• 22:01
  A superb run of episodes with only Knock Knock not quite
• 22:04
  hitting the high mark for me. Please bear in mind we were
• 22:08
  going to do some Christmas specials as well but I was
• 22:11
  reliably informed it was done about two years ago.
• 22:14
  Husband's has a gorgeous rapport between Capaldi and Kingston.
• 22:17
  Definitely River's best outing. Bill Stroke Pearl is superb from
• 22:21
  the off, with Oxygen being my pick from this batch.
• 22:25
  Elliot. Luke Malloy says pretty much the
• 22:29
  best opening and best closing to a season we've ever had.
• 22:32
  Extremists aside, everything else is mediocre.
• 22:35
  Who guff significantly raised by the joyous performances of
• 22:38
  Capaldi and Mackie. Capaldi's best season by a mile.
• 22:43
  Oh dear Prince Daniel. He says who?
• 22:45
  Golf. And it's his best.
• 22:46
  Season. Oh shit, yeah, OK.
• 22:49
  Malloy, isn't it? Doesn't say much for yeah,
• 22:54
  sorry, Harry. McKeown, McKeown, McEwan, I
• 22:59
  think McEwan. OK Thank you.
• 23:02
  Honestly a really strong run on episodes.
• 23:04
  Really enjoy them a lot. Peter is Peter is at his.
• 23:08
  Peter is at his best firing on all cylinders and Bill has a
• 23:12
  really strong introduction. Thin ice and Oxygen especially
• 23:15
  are really good, and Husbands of River Song is the perfect ending
• 23:18
  for River. UK, Daniel.
• 23:23
  Darren lit roundels. It felt fresher than season 9
• 23:26
  series 9 but ultimately it was stale.
• 23:28
  Pilot was a load of nothing. Smile was OK until the guest
• 23:32
  characters arrived. Thin Ice Mare Knock Knock is
• 23:35
  creepy with an awesome sushi cop out ending.
• 23:39
  Oxygen is brilliantly made. Oh, and a mystery box.
• 23:43
  Sorry for not being Clara. Bill was a nice addition, but
• 23:47
  she became she becomes rather forgettable since.
• 23:50
  Or she's become rather forgettable since.
• 23:52
  Mackie impresses in the small moments.
• 23:54
  I quite like the university based home.
• 23:57
  That is a distinct lack of joy. The series feels weary.
• 24:01
  Down lit lap down lit roundels feels weary.
• 24:06
  Not the biggest fan of the new series, you know.
• 24:08
  No, it's true. Check out his comments and all
• 24:11
  the other new series. Oh, it's Joe's nemesis Michael
• 24:15
  Storm, who says Series 10 is a strong run of stories with one
• 24:19
  of the strongest core teams in New Who.
• 24:22
  Bill is a welcome changing pace of companion after Amy and
• 24:25
  Clara, with the mentor student relationship bringing out the
• 24:28
  best side of Capaldi in terms of character and acting.
• 24:32
  I'm going to jump up because I added a comment to this batch
• 24:36
  and then didn't send it to the rest of you.
• 24:37
  So Anthony Carroll from Too Broad and Too Deep says it sets
• 24:42
  up something that should have been the dynamic for Capaldi all
• 24:45
  along instead of am IA good Malcolm Tucker tribute acts of
• 24:48
  series 8. We have a Doctor Who is much
• 24:50
  more cozier and yet aloof. Never mind a UNIT family.
• 24:54
  I wish we'd had more of the UNI family.
• 24:57
  Oh oh very good. And the season using the UNI as
• 25:01
  a base more. Chris Curtis says.
• 25:05
  I view this series as being like the shift between seasons 7 and
• 25:08
  eight in the Pertwee years, a massive shift in tone.
• 25:12
  Season 9 was very grim and depressing.
• 25:14
  Even the color of the series was Gray and brown if we got to
• 25:16
  entertain, and that's what I think series 10 got right.
• 25:19
  The combination of Bill and Nadal added something that was
• 25:23
  lacking Humor, reality, audience identification.
• 25:27
  Clara stopped being the audience figure for a long a long time
• 25:30
  ago. Bill just the flaky's ego,
• 25:32
  whereas Clara, no laughing, just stroked it, no.
• 25:38
  Is it stroked or stoked? I read.
• 25:41
  Stroked it. I mean, you do you stroke.
• 25:43
  An ego I don't have Elliot's mind.
• 25:45
  Just for you stroke egos, you don't stroke egos.
• 25:48
  This is our. PG I should know podcast How
• 25:50
  dare you. Sir Charlie Barnes, Moffat and
• 25:56
  Capaldi depart the series in style with a near perfect
• 25:59
  season. The Doctor as a university
• 26:02
  professor. Brilliant.
• 26:04
  Having him turn into Professor Chronitis inspired yon apologies
• 26:14
  to Mr. Morris or Miss Morris. Joanne.
• 26:18
  Thank you Joanne Morris. Part relaunch, part end of an
• 26:21
  era, A likeable TARDIS gang with Capaldi in his pomp and an
• 26:25
  interesting tweak to the format, even if the university stuff
• 26:28
  fades away later on. And yet, despite it feeling like
• 26:31
  a breath of fresh air at the time, there's very little here
• 26:34
  I've ever been compelled to revisit.
• 26:38
  PJ Gallery says the 12th Doctor finally gets to be played as he
• 26:42
  should always have been. Bill Potts is the companion he
• 26:45
  always needed and she is brilliant.
• 26:48
  The partnership really cliques loved.
• 26:50
  It. Kevin Bianco succinctly says an
• 26:53
  enjoyable season dragged down by the boring Monk trilogy 7 out of
• 26:58
  10. What?
• 27:01
  What? What was what?
• 27:02
  7 out of 10 is sort of broadly fine.
• 27:04
  Broadly fine. Just like that joke.
• 27:11
  Getting a bit thin, isn't it? It's it's on very Thin Ice.
• 27:15
  Very good. Thank you, Sean Bradshaw says.
• 27:20
  Love the cast. Bill and Nardal are intriguing
• 27:23
  companions. Unfortunately, I remember lots
• 27:25
  of this season having flaws, such as the absurdly abrupt
• 27:28
  ending in Knock Knock. I haven't been back.
• 27:30
  Thin Ice comes out as the best even if a kid died, though some
• 27:34
  hamster hosts may count that as a bonus.
• 27:36
  Yes, fabulous. Tom Newsome.
• 27:40
  It's not completely my sort of Doctor Who, but definitely
• 27:42
  improvement. An improvement on the previous
• 27:45
  series. Having the University in the
• 27:47
  vault as a regular place was a fresh idea, which of course got
• 27:50
  completely forgot about in the second-half of the series.
• 27:54
  Nathan Bottomley. It's wonderful seeing Capaldi
• 27:56
  get the chance to introduce someone new to the show, and
• 27:59
  Pearl is just great. Also, in a long running show
• 28:02
  like Dog 2, tweaking the premise for a year is something that
• 28:05
  should have happened much more often.
• 28:07
  The brilliant and correct Nathan Bottomley.
• 28:10
  Yeah, absolutely tell him that. His egos big enough as it is.
• 28:14
  We're not stocking his ego. Australia.
• 28:18
  Tom Turlo says season 10 seems to be the Moffett season that
• 28:22
  the anti Moffett crowd think it's okay to like.
• 28:25
  As someone who is in the very pro moffer and pro Capaldi, I'm
• 28:29
  actually not that big a fan. It has some good episodes and
• 28:32
  Bill is a breath of fresh air, but I think it lacks the
• 28:34
  ambition of the previous two seasons.
• 28:37
  Oh. See you ambition or likability.
• 28:40
  Yeah. Which direction do?
• 28:42
  You go the flirtatious that I do not approve, Matt Michael says.
• 28:46
  My favorite run since Matt Smith's first.
• 28:48
  Kuldi becomes the doctor I wanted him to be from the start
• 28:51
  and now don't still bring a more engaging and healthy chemistry
• 28:56
  to the mix. Healthy.
• 28:57
  That's an important word there. It's not all brooding about
• 28:59
  being a good man. And she cares, so I don't have
• 29:02
  to anymore, and all the better for it.
• 29:06
  Mark Donaldson says in its best moments, it's some of the
• 29:09
  funniest, scariest, most thrilling Doctor Who of the
• 29:11
  modern era. In its worst moments, it proves
• 29:14
  that letting Doctor Doctor Who take a pause is preferable to
• 29:17
  punishing exhausted showrunner to take one last trip on 1/2
• 29:20
  empty tank of ideas. A lot of words for just saying
• 29:23
  broadly fine, Really, isn't it? Broadly fine?
• 29:27
  Johnny Morris. Absolutely wonderful.
• 29:29
  Probably Stephen's best year. He's had a bit of a rethink
• 29:33
  about Capaldi's doctor, given him some friends that bring out
• 29:36
  his fluffy side. Fluffy and realised but that
• 29:39
  before you go grim and dark you need lots of fun and joy.
• 29:43
  No duds and oxygen and the Cybermen stories all time
• 29:46
  classics. Did he say no duds?
• 29:50
  We'll. Discuss.
• 29:51
  That interesting? I've just noticed the next quote
• 29:55
  from Paul Quinn. I haven't got all of it.
• 29:58
  It's just Paul Quinn, says a cock of a season that wastes the
• 30:01
  talents. And I think it's the talents of
• 30:03
  Capel that yeah, I was just trying to look for it.
• 30:05
  I've just noticed it was missing.
• 30:08
  Yeah, go for a Daniel. OK.
• 30:11
  A cock of a season that wastes the talents of Capaldi, Mackie
• 30:14
  and Lucas. A group of most mostly
• 30:16
  ultimately ho hum episodes that feels like a season marking time
• 30:20
  until the big middle episodes. Just like 7A Oxygen and maybe
• 30:26
  thin eyes aside, lots of build up, not much payoff.
• 30:29
  Disappointing sort of mixing. I'm getting a mix sense here.
• 30:34
  Oh, I've just had a late comment from a Fraser Gregory.
• 30:38
  Oh, sorry, who never heard of him?
• 30:41
  Never heard of? Him maybe the second-half is by
• 30:44
  far the superior half. Wrong as always.
• 30:49
  Daniel, did you say maybe he'll be somebody one day?
• 30:52
  No. Yeah.
• 30:52
  I was about to just lock him in the vault, you know, stand guard
• 30:57
  over it. He'll never be somebody.
• 30:58
  I'm telling you now a lot with opinions like that, Grief. 5
• 31:02
  episodes, 5 people. This means everybody's vote
• 31:05
  counts tonight, which makes a change.
• 31:08
  So put put your theories through for the episode that you're
• 31:11
  championing because your vote counts tonight.
• 31:15
  So we're all in it together. So no getting out of this.
• 31:19
  This isn't High School Musical, you know, University Musical.
• 31:24
  We're all in this together. I'll pump it in.
• 31:29
  So shall we get started? I think we'll go to UK Daniel to
• 31:38
  begin tonight. So which episode are you going
• 31:41
  for, Daniel? Well, let's start at the very
• 31:44
  beginning. No, I'm not going to sing that
• 31:46
  either and go for the the pilot because out of these five
• 31:51
  episodes, this is I think my favourites.
• 31:54
  And it's certainly where I realised I felt how Doctor Who
• 31:58
  was suddenly fun again. And but that's mainly, as I said
• 32:03
  that previously, down to Pearl Mackie.
• 32:05
  I think she's absolutely amazing.
• 32:08
  I think she's instantly likable. There are times in the season
• 32:13
  when her sexuality is basically as a used as a close peg to put
• 32:17
  a character on. But I think Pearl Mackie's more
• 32:20
  too good an actress to to let us really notice that unless we're
• 32:24
  doctoring fans and we watch this more and more.
• 32:29
  That said, I mean, I, I, I, I do love, love this episode.
• 32:32
  But when I watched it, I'd forgotten about the joke right
• 32:36
  at the beginning, the fat shaming one where Bill's talking
• 32:40
  in that scene and she's talking 19 to the dozen.
• 32:42
  And it's, it's, it's, it's an amazing introduction.
• 32:46
  But she's saying about how she was giving extra chips to this
• 32:50
  girl, this student that she fancied.
• 32:52
  And then suddenly she realized that because she'd be giving her
• 32:56
  these extra chips, this girl had put on weight.
• 32:59
  And it was almost, the implication was that she
• 33:01
  couldn't fancy this girl anymore because she put some weight.
• 33:04
  And I'm like, really? Is that where we're going?
• 33:07
  But apart from that, I think the chemistry between Capaldi and
• 33:15
  Mackie is is exceptional. They seem to like each other.
• 33:20
  She teases him rather than goads him in the way that Clara used
• 33:24
  to do. She doesn't tell him to shut up
• 33:26
  like Clara tell used to. Sometimes There's just there's a
• 33:32
  sort of deference. She knows that you know this
• 33:34
  he's this really clever professor whose lecture she's
• 33:38
  sneaking into. And she's there's there's a sort
• 33:41
  of like that, that idea of she's slightly ignore of him, but
• 33:46
  she's not going to take any nonsense.
• 33:48
  And and so there's a slight sort of Professor Higgins, Eliza
• 33:52
  Doolittle, which doesn't really get developed later on in the
• 33:56
  season, but there are times when she does sort of call him out,
• 33:59
  particularly in in thin ice. Capaldi is brilliant here.
• 34:04
  It's just as, as we've said, this is how he should have
• 34:07
  played the Doctor right from the start.
• 34:09
  None of this, oh, your friends over there on the top layer.
• 34:13
  Horrible, I mean, you know, occasionally even even even
• 34:17
  tenants doctor, which everyone says he's he's lovely.
• 34:20
  But then, you know, you remember in in Smith and Jones when he
• 34:23
  says to Martha, come on, leave your friend because she'll slow
• 34:26
  us down. All the doctors have that sort
• 34:30
  of snarkiness about them. But here that that snarkiness is
• 34:34
  gone and he's just he's just adorable.
• 34:39
  He's like the adorable uncle. I mean, you know, Elliot, you
• 34:44
  said that you're a union when this was first shown and I was
• 34:47
  doing my, my degree as well. And there are those lecturers
• 34:51
  who they might go off tangent, they might go off topic and you
• 34:56
  just listen to them because what they listen, what they're saying
• 34:59
  is just full of enthusiasm and full of weight and full of
• 35:04
  they're, they're so engaged with what they're talking, even if it
• 35:06
  isn't what they're supposed to be talking about.
• 35:09
  So it's sort of like a real doctorish sort of thing with
• 35:14
  that with whereas at the same time doing something different
• 35:17
  with the formula, having the Doctor as a a college, you know,
• 35:20
  university professor, you kind of think, why haven't they never
• 35:23
  done that before? And I love that bit when he goes
• 35:27
  in, when they go into the TARDIS to escape Heather, how he says
• 35:32
  that wonderful line, you're saving here, you're saving here
• 35:35
  and you always will be such a beautiful doctorish line.
• 35:38
  And he just says that when he's putting on his his sort of red
• 35:41
  velvet coat to try and look a bit more doctorish and a bit
• 35:43
  more pertwish. It's so reassuring.
• 35:48
  I know it doesn't last, does it? Which is all, yes, a shame.
• 35:52
  This, this optimism that's at the start of this season.
• 35:55
  It it soon goes downhill. But unfortunately it's it's two
• 36:00
  seasons too late for a lot of the viewers.
• 36:02
  So of course, the viewers don't really, you know, stay on for
• 36:07
  this season, which is a shame, really, because there are some
• 36:09
  wonderful stories. Wonderful stories.
• 36:13
  Yeah. It's a fresh start.
• 36:14
  No, doll. Matt Lucas is great.
• 36:18
  It's a shame that he doesn't get to do a little bit more than
• 36:20
  just be the the quirky, funny sidekick because we know later
• 36:25
  on in the season when we see him in the Doctor Falls, he does
• 36:27
  have the acting jobs to do more than just being, you know, the
• 36:30
  quirky, funny sidekick. The actress playing Heather is
• 36:34
  really good, the star affecting her eyes really well done.
• 36:38
  The scares where you see her first in the puddle and it's
• 36:41
  clearly she's been dragged down to her to her death.
• 36:45
  You do have that bit where they're in the the quarry planet
• 36:48
  and Bill is suddenly looking into this puddling.
• 36:51
  You know you're not. I'm sure some people in the
• 36:53
  audience, you know, watching over shouting.
• 36:55
  What are you doing, you idiot? That's a puddle.
• 36:57
  Why are you looking so closely in?
• 36:59
  But it's still is quite a good jump scare.
• 37:02
  Then we get the Daleks in and we get the Mavellan's, which is
• 37:05
  great. Although why, why are robots
• 37:08
  screaming? Why are they shouting and
• 37:10
  screaming? Never mind them, it's who
• 37:13
  they're fighting, it's who they're fighting.
• 37:16
  So it's a nice little bit of fluff for the fans from I think
• 37:20
  it was Mark Gatiss who suggested it, but it doesn't quite work.
• 37:24
  But it's it's a nice, it's a nice soft reboot for the series
• 37:27
  after the real interminably dull and grey Series 9.
• 37:33
  And there's no thank goodness Gloria's gone with her shoulder
• 37:35
  because I couldn't stand her either.
• 37:38
  Lady, me. Lady, me.
• 37:42
  Yeah. Thanks.
• 37:43
  Yeah. No, thank you.
• 37:44
  So yeah, I'm, I'm, I want to put this through because because
• 37:48
  it's it's back to being fun and nobody screams don't cremate me.
• 37:51
  So, you know, it's great. Yeah.
• 37:54
  It is a little bit fluffy, but yeah, bit lightweight, but So
• 37:57
  what? Elliot, what about you?
• 38:02
  Well, I, I agree with UK Daniel, when I, when I first pressed
• 38:07
  play and we got, yeah, like I said, quite a quite an out of
• 38:11
  the blue joke about, you know, Bill actually fatting someone, I
• 38:17
  believe is the word that she uses to sort of imply that you
• 38:20
  can't love her. I was like, OK, this is and and
• 38:23
  the doctor comes out of a cupboard playing an electric
• 38:25
  guitar to insist to the audience that he's actually really cool.
• 38:28
  He's really cool, guys. He's really cool.
• 38:31
  I thought I I don't know, but you know, this is it's it's fun.
• 38:37
  That's the word that you kept using.
• 38:38
  And I agree 100%. It is just fun.
• 38:40
  I'm having so much fun watching this.
• 38:43
  A puddle. A puddle is a villain and it
• 38:48
  should not work on any level, but it really, really does.
• 38:52
  There's some really creepy moments in this.
• 38:54
  It kind of Harkins back to the field of some of the waters of
• 38:56
  Mars with some of the sort of the horror elements of it.
• 38:59
  When Bill is investigating her flat at night and the shower's
• 39:03
  running but no one's there and then the water's trickling down
• 39:06
  the drain. It's horrifying.
• 39:07
  It genuinely so edge of my seat nerves with the with the horror
• 39:11
  aspects. Never edged along a pavement
• 39:14
  where there's an enormous puddle in the roads and there's loads
• 39:18
  of curls coming. Puddles can be very scary
• 39:21
  sometimes. I I think as well, it's just
• 39:25
  sort of not to again, not to sort of damn Stephen Moff out of
• 39:28
  faint praise, but a lot of the stuff that I like in this is
• 39:31
  because it feels like a return to things that I like working in
• 39:34
  in Doctor Who the ordinary, you know, I don't think we learned
• 39:38
  tons about Bill's character, but it was so nice for her just to
• 39:41
  work in a canteen and she wants to be a student.
• 39:44
  It just instantly grounds her for me.
• 39:45
  All the companion should always be contemporary Earth people
• 39:49
  just because I think you need that anchor for the audience.
• 39:52
  And I think having the villain be a, you know, concealed in a,
• 39:56
  in a puddle is, is is another sort of feather in in in the cap
• 40:01
  for ordinary ordinariness. I suppose, if that's a word.
• 40:06
  I don't think it is. And again, it's just what it's
• 40:09
  what it's what makes Doctor Who's scary.
• 40:10
  I think. Why is there a puzzle when it
• 40:12
  hasn't rained for X number of days?
• 40:14
  It's a it's a creepy premise and I really like it.
• 40:18
  And yeah, despite. Say there being some of the the
• 40:22
  shackles of maybe the previous eras right at the start.
• 40:25
  I think it does manage to to cast them off to do a a fun
• 40:28
  reboot. And it's the most Doctor Who,
• 40:29
  the Doctor Who's felt to me at this point since Series 5.
• 40:34
  So yeah, for for fun and for me not hating all the Stephen
• 40:37
  Moffattisms of it, I'm going to I'm going to keep the pilot.
• 40:42
  OK, well, that's two pluses so far, but will French Daniel
• 40:47
  continue this run? Well, it's that word again.
• 40:50
  Fun. I mean, I've forgotten how fun
• 40:53
  this was. It's just, it's, it's
• 40:54
  effervescent. Funnily enough, one of the
• 40:57
  things I want to celebrate about it is that very first scene,
• 41:00
  which on the one hand is the most muffety Steven Moffett
• 41:04
  opening we've ever had, with, you know, Bill giving this great
• 41:07
  big monologue about chips and perving on beautiful girls and
• 41:11
  I'd fatted her and all this bullshit.
• 41:12
  Darling, that's sort of dancing around the Doctor's very simple
• 41:16
  question of why do you keep coming to my lectures?
• 41:19
  And yet I, I, I don't know what I think it's Pearl Mackey
• 41:22
  because she gives such a unique spin on the dialogue that just
• 41:26
  by the end of that scene, I'm just laughing, you know, where
• 41:28
  she says, you know, still, that's life in it.
• 41:30
  Beauty or chips. I like chips.
• 41:31
  You know, she has, it's funny. It's interesting that she has an
• 41:36
  like an extensive theatre background, Pearl Mackey.
• 41:39
  So she doesn't have the same sort of Polish or the magazine
• 41:43
  glamour that that Jenna Coleman had because Jenna Coleman made
• 41:46
  her her name with TV soaps. And so she's the kind of
• 41:50
  companion who's just going to fire off all these left field
• 41:53
  questions. You know, what's that police
• 41:55
  telephone box? Did you build it from a kid?
• 41:56
  Did you have it lifted in? And the doctors clearly never
• 41:59
  been asked all these questions before.
• 42:01
  So you just get these very funny reaction shots of Capaldi
• 42:04
  looking slightly non flash like. What you know.
• 42:09
  So that's, I mean, that's what I like about about Bill is that
• 42:11
  she's very, she's very simple. We've had a very complicated
• 42:15
  companion with Clara. You know, she's the impossible
• 42:18
  girl. She's the only mystery worth
• 42:19
  solving. She splintered across the
• 42:21
  Doctor's timeline. And Bill's just, you know, she's
• 42:24
  fun, she's friendly. She's a bit of an oddball.
• 42:26
  She's got a bit of a quiet, melancholy side to her.
• 42:29
  But, you know, she's not the Doctor, She's not his
• 42:31
  girlfriend, she's his pupil and he's her teacher.
• 42:35
  And that's, you know, that's what works about it.
• 42:38
  And, and in the same way that the Doctor kind of takes on Bill
• 42:41
  as his as his student, this opening episode gives you a kind
• 42:46
  of refresh of refresher course in Doctor Who.
• 42:48
  So like, have you been away from Doctor Who for a bit?
• 42:51
  Well, don't worry because here's Doctor Who, here's the TARDIS,
• 42:54
  here's all the Sonic screwdrivers that you can get
• 42:56
  from character options. Here's Valerie from Gridlock,
• 43:00
  there's River, there's Susan. So connecting, you know, 50 plus
• 43:03
  years of Doctor Who history with just two simple photographs.
• 43:08
  And, you know, we start off in this very quiet sort of old
• 43:11
  university office and it just builds and builds and builds
• 43:14
  until it becomes this sort of mad Sprint across the universe
• 43:18
  as they try to run away from a puddle as as Elliot said.
• 43:22
  And you know, it's it's it's more it's kind of like the chase
• 43:25
  where we've even got the Daleks in there.
• 43:27
  We've got a they go to Australia instead of New York, you know,
• 43:30
  shark attack. We go to a quarry.
• 43:33
  We revisit, I think it's maybe we revisit Destiny of the
• 43:37
  Daleks. I don't know what they're trying
• 43:38
  to do there. It's only slightly kind of
• 43:40
  deflated by the fact that the the flashing Dalek Dome lights
• 43:44
  are kind of out of sync because they seem to have added them
• 43:47
  digitally or something. But no dole.
• 43:52
  So Nadal's here's 2 and he's now the Doctor's valet, you know,
• 43:56
  And you know, putting Matt Lucas in Doctor Who, it on paper it
• 43:59
  sounds like the worst idea ever. We think, oh, what?
• 44:02
  The guy from Little Britain. Oh God.
• 44:04
  But I just think he's a riot because it reminds me of what I
• 44:08
  think Toby Haydock said about putting Jackie Tyler in Doctor
• 44:13
  Who. This character straight out of
• 44:14
  EastEnders into Doctor Who. And Nadal was the kind of one
• 44:18
  off kind of annoying sidekick in Husbands of River Song, you
• 44:23
  know, straight out of a sitcom, really.
• 44:24
  And he he just kind of casually stands around going, yeah, it's
• 44:28
  good, isn't it? Yeah.
• 44:30
  You know. And you know, that little remark
• 44:32
  he makes to the doctor when they're on on the planet, he
• 44:35
  says, you know, you can be very silly sometimes, which I think
• 44:37
  is just sort of so sweet. It's sort of so full of
• 44:40
  affection. You're like, so yeah.
• 44:44
  And it's it's confident enough that they're not afraid to poke
• 44:47
  fun at recent Doctor Who either. So we mentioned Capaldi and the
• 44:52
  sunglasses and the electric guitar from Series 9, where he
• 44:55
  does, you know, Beethoven's Fifth.
• 44:56
  Oh, no, not be Mozart's fifth, I think.
• 44:59
  Or is it Beethoven's anyway? Beethoven.
• 45:01
  Yes, it's Beethoven's Fifth. That's how you remember
• 45:05
  Beethoven's Fifth. Oh, yes.
• 45:06
  There you go. So all those kind of, all those
• 45:09
  little tawdry quirks, you might call them.
• 45:13
  So they're all shunted off to the backroom like, like it's a
• 45:16
  teenager's guilty secret. Like wonderful Daniel.
• 45:19
  Like, yeah, we know. We know you like all that punk
• 45:21
  rock dark stuff, but who cares? We don't need that.
• 45:23
  Let's just have Capaldi be the space tutor instead, you know?
• 45:27
  And they make fun of the kind of awkward tiptoe where he runs,
• 45:30
  you know, like a Penguin with its arse on fire.
• 45:34
  And they make fun of the TARDIS reveal where Capaldi, you know,
• 45:37
  takes the out of order sign off the doors.
• 45:39
  Get it? He gets all dressed up.
• 45:42
  He delivers this great big speech.
• 45:43
  And you've got the triumphant Murray Gold music in the
• 45:46
  background. And bills are like, is this a
• 45:48
  knock through? Can I use the toilet?
• 45:50
  It's a posh kitchen, you know? And then she takes so long to
• 45:55
  realise that it's bigger on the inside that, that I just love
• 45:57
  that thing that. Nadal shakes Capaldi's hand.
• 45:59
  Like hey. We got there.
• 46:03
  And finally, just a word for the director, Lawrence.
• 46:07
  Go, go, go, go. OK.
• 46:12
  It's very flashy. It's a bit Sherlocky, but I
• 46:15
  think it makes the episode so sort of propulsive.
• 46:18
  You know, that that soliloquy that Capaldi delivers at the
• 46:21
  beginning where, you know, time and relative dimension in space.
• 46:25
  It means life. And we rattle through all that
• 46:27
  lots of boring narrative like, oh, Bill's life at the
• 46:30
  university, go through to Christmas, set up her
• 46:32
  relationship with Heather, which I kind of honestly wish they'd
• 46:36
  done a little more with. But you know, because it may, it
• 46:38
  would have made more sense more it made more sense than Bill's
• 46:41
  mum, I think. And then that very funny visual
• 46:44
  gag where Capaldi's sitting, sitting at his desk and you
• 46:47
  think Bill's opposite him, but no, she's actually looking out
• 46:49
  the window explaining what's going on.
• 46:51
  And then he runs by the window because, and my favorite visual
• 46:57
  flourish is the scene at the end, which feels like a sort of
• 47:01
  very deliberate corrective to the journey's end kind of mind
• 47:06
  wiping a companion without their their consent.
• 47:10
  So, you know, Bill calls him out on it.
• 47:12
  And then you get this shot of Capaldi's face and it's half in
• 47:16
  shadow and half in the firelight, and it's just like a,
• 47:19
  it's almost like a shot out of Return of the Jedi.
• 47:22
  So that's the doctor for you. He's the light and the shade.
• 47:27
  So yeah, put this through. I, I really like this.
• 47:30
  I think it puts you in such a good mood for the rest of the
• 47:33
  ship, the rest of the series. Salim, thank you, Daniel, Joe.
• 47:38
  I think I'm going to break some people's hearts now because I'm
• 47:41
  going to give you another piece of trivia that you probably
• 47:44
  don't won't want to hear. But it also it it reminds me
• 47:47
  again just how superb Peter Capaldi is.
• 47:51
  And that is not, I was never supposed to take on a role in
• 47:54
  this season. It was never supposed to happen.
• 47:57
  But Peter Cody and Pearl Mackey fell out in this episode in
• 48:01
  quite a spectacular way where she had her own Matthew
• 48:05
  Waterhouse moment in their very first scene together and said,
• 48:08
  you know, I don't think you should play it like that, Peter.
• 48:11
  I think, I think you should play it like this.
• 48:12
  And from that point on, for about 3 or 4 episodes, things
• 48:17
  were not good between the two of them, which makes their
• 48:20
  chemistry in this episode even more extraordinary because he's
• 48:25
  pissed at being fired. He's pissed at being given
• 48:27
  acting lessons by the newbie. And I just think he, he waltzes
• 48:33
  through this episode, sparkles. He's amazingly good.
• 48:38
  Sorry, I've, I've look at Daniel's face.
• 48:40
  I feel like I've broken his heart there.
• 48:42
  I am heartbroken. Yeah, but.
• 48:44
  You know, like, this stuff happens behind the scenes, but I
• 48:48
  think you can't tell. And that's my point is I think
• 48:52
  Capaldi is so good, yeah, that he he could sell anything.
• 48:55
  But what he's got here is an episode that confidently sets up
• 49:00
  its stall for this new season. It's basically I I don't really
• 49:04
  care about the details of the story.
• 49:06
  Is there a plot here? I don't think so.
• 49:08
  It basically it's like a shoot up of pure Doctor Who, full of
• 49:13
  possibilities. If Doctor Who was distilled as a
• 49:16
  drug, you'd basically get the pilot pumped into your veins.
• 49:20
  You know, innovation, wit, imagination, love of the unknown
• 49:24
  and the need to explore it. That's all there at the end when
• 49:27
  they're skipping off in the TARDIS.
• 49:29
  It you're right, it's the the the ultimate sort of since maybe
• 49:34
  last Christmas where they run into the TARDIS at the end of
• 49:37
  last Christmas. It's the that's the last time
• 49:39
  where I really felt like, yeah, let's go, you know, the universe
• 49:42
  is waiting, let's do it. Pearl Mackie herself is just
• 49:47
  stunningly beautiful, funny, charismatic.
• 49:51
  You said it, Daniel, full of great questions.
• 49:53
  All of those questions that nobody muff is like, I've got my
• 49:56
  last year right. Finally, I'm going to ask all
• 49:58
  the questions I haven't asked in the last five seasons.
• 50:01
  The university, a perfect setting, Unbelievable.
• 50:04
  We've never really done something like this before.
• 50:06
  I have seen Big Finish dipping their toes.
• 50:09
  You see that Colin Baker one that's coming out soon.
• 50:11
  Where is the university professor?
• 50:12
  Everyone's trying to nick the idea now.
• 50:15
  This is great. It's it's wonderful.
• 50:17
  I I very rarely remember anything about this episode
• 50:19
  because I don't think there is any kind of robust plot.
• 50:24
  It is just a celebration of everything that is really
• 50:27
  wonderful about Doctor Who and at the start of a season.
• 50:31
  Why the hell wouldn't you do that?
• 50:32
  Yeah, put it through. Absolutely.
• 50:35
  But it's going through, so my positive thoughts on this story
• 50:38
  are almost superfluous. And in fact, you've basically
• 50:43
  all said everything I was going to say, but you know, Steven
• 50:47
  Moffat has written more Doctor Who season openers until Russell
• 50:52
  T Davis came back. At this point, he's he's done
• 50:56
  the lot from the big epic 2 parters to the tiny little
• 51:00
  stories. And yet here he finds a groove.
• 51:04
  Last year it was Doctor and Clara in the TARDIS.
• 51:07
  Same old, same. Old didn't.
• 51:10
  Feel fresh at all this year just feels like right from the
• 51:14
  beginning we've got a fresh start, a real soft reboot for
• 51:19
  the doctor, for the series, for everything and it feels so
• 51:24
  confident and happy. You know it really does
• 51:29
  everything you've you've all said is absolutely true.
• 51:32
  It's beautifully directed it is plotless but because it's got
• 51:36
  momentum, it stops you from thinking that it's plotless.
• 51:40
  It's basically Heather is trying to find someone to travel with
• 51:43
  her and that's it. That's the basic story.
• 51:46
  And that's a lovely thing. Actually.
• 51:48
  That's not a bad thing. And it does get its payoff right
• 51:51
  at the end of the series as well, so.
• 51:55
  Fucking weird. Yes, this is Stephen Moffat.
• 51:59
  Of course it's weird do. You think they started with the
• 52:01
  pun title and worked backwards? Yeah, but I've got to do a soft
• 52:04
  reboot. I'll call it the pilot.
• 52:06
  Why? We'll figure it out.
• 52:08
  It was going to be called a star in her eye until I think the
• 52:12
  produce. The executive producer said, Oh,
• 52:13
  Stephen, that's a bit like stars in your eyes.
• 52:15
  And he's like, oh shit, that scene where she walks into the
• 52:18
  study right at the start of this episode, you know, so did you
• 52:21
  not see the the season arc ahead of you, you know, where she'd
• 52:25
  have a whole blown in her, turned into a side men and then
• 52:27
  for some reason go off with a puzzle.
• 52:30
  No, didn't see that coming. So beautifully posted, didn't
• 52:33
  they? But yeah, this story just
• 52:37
  carries you along with it, and it's got so much goodwill and is
• 52:40
  giving you so much back that you can't help but like it.
• 52:44
  Me and Joe, when Joe said I want to do a Capaldi episode with
• 52:48
  you, this was automatically my first choice because why
• 52:53
  wouldn't you do something that is joyful and fun?
• 52:57
  And like you said, Bill just comes in, asks all those
• 53:01
  ridiculous questions, and somehow it feels absolutely in
• 53:06
  character. None of this should work on
• 53:08
  paper. It's ridiculous because there's
• 53:11
  no way anyone would walk into the TARDIS and think it's a
• 53:14
  kitchen. I tell you what, let's just pop
• 53:18
  into my box. Your box.
• 53:20
  What can you get in your box? Going to do.
• 53:23
  What an extraordinary long evolved answer this is going to
• 53:25
  be. How do we stop it getting in?
• 53:29
  We're trapped in here. Nothing gets through these
• 53:31
  doors. They're made of wood.
• 53:35
  They've got. Windows.
• 53:41
  Look, this is all mad, I know, but that's the girl I told you
• 53:46
  about, Heather. Only I don't think it's really
• 53:50
  her. No, this is hard to believe.
• 53:54
  I know you're not exactly a sci-fi person.
• 54:00
  Time and relative dimension in space.
• 54:06
  TARDIS for short. You're safe in here, you're safe
• 54:13
  in here, and you always will be. It's a not true, but because
• 54:23
  it's so beautifully played and she feels so naive that it it
• 54:30
  just works. But the one moment I want to
• 54:32
  single out is 1 that none of you have have mentioned.
• 54:36
  And it's a moment of a beautiful moment from the doctor.
• 54:40
  Because what we're doing in this episode is following almost
• 54:43
  through a whole academic year and Christmas.
• 54:47
  And the present the doctor gives to Bill of going and taking that
• 54:52
  shoe box of photos of her mum. And just that moment where Bill
• 54:57
  can see him reflected in the in the mirror.
• 55:01
  And she never says, but it sparked something in her that's
• 55:07
  beautiful. That's what this doctor should
• 55:09
  have been all this time. He is a good man.
• 55:12
  He cares more than anyone. And this is and this is the
• 55:15
  thing. This is what all this
• 55:17
  interrogation over the last two years has been about is to get
• 55:21
  him to this moment where he realizes he cares about the
• 55:24
  universe more than anyone else. And that's what he's about.
• 55:29
  And that, you know, like Peter Davis said, sometimes small
• 55:32
  beautiful things is what what this is all about.
• 55:35
  And that is a small and beautiful moment that absolutely
• 55:38
  and completely works. And how she gives him.
• 55:41
  A rug just. That a rug bag and wraps it up.
• 55:44
  It's like, oh, what is it? But you don't compare that to
• 55:49
  her, to her step mum who gives her £20 in an envelope and
• 55:54
  question and says have you got the receipt for the present?
• 55:58
  You know this is someone who has been starved of love and
• 56:02
  affection and attention and of course Bill is going to lap that
• 56:07
  up from the doctor. When you've got the cleverest
• 56:10
  and most wonderful person in the room paying their attention to
• 56:14
  you, then yeah, of course you'd be entranced by that.
• 56:17
  It really feels like it's setting that stuff up to be
• 56:20
  explored throughout the year. Have mum being awful, who we
• 56:23
  barely see throughout the year, you know, and it's the sort of
• 56:27
  thing that Russell would come back to again and again and
• 56:29
  again if he was right this year. Or maybe not.
• 56:32
  We've just had two Interesting. Years.
• 56:34
  Interesting. Yeah.
• 56:35
  This is basically is this Capaldi's mysterious planet.
• 56:38
  You know where they've gone? Do you know it's a new season?
• 56:41
  It's time to make this guy likeable.
• 56:44
  Oh, yeah. Can we can we can we put that on
• 56:46
  the record? Yes.
• 56:47
  This is his mysterious plan. Except instead of bringing Perry
• 56:51
  back, they've started with Mel straight away.
• 56:53
  Exactly, yes. I used to.
• 56:57
  Have the verb. Yeah, I used to have an
• 56:59
  ex-girlfriend who would always ask if I'd kept the receipt.
• 57:03
  Wow. Really. ex-girlfriend?
• 57:06
  Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
• 57:07
  Yeah. I just say don't waste your
• 57:11
  money, you're only going to buy tat.
• 57:13
  Just come and see me. So, yeah, that's the pilot and
• 57:20
  that's the pilot going through. So that's our first one in. 5
• 57:23
  for five God. Well.
• 57:26
  What a triumphant way to start for Series 10.
• 57:30
  It can only can only be great after this, right?
• 57:33
  Could only build on that, yeah. Exactly that.
• 57:36
  Momentum is going to carry on through the whole of the big and
• 57:39
  through the whole of this episode, where we're going over
• 57:41
  to Elliot for our second choice. Oh God, that's.
• 57:48
  So impressive. That sounds very defeatist,
• 57:50
  doesn't it? No, it's because what I said
• 57:52
  broadly fine. I, I, you know, I did mean it.
• 57:54
  There's there's nothing that I'm, I'm passionately.
• 57:57
  I want to stand from the rooftops and bring you to to my
• 58:00
  way of thinking. Oh, really?
• 58:01
  I've got 2. I can probably do that 4 here.
• 58:05
  So I think I'll tell you what we'll have have a bit of bit of
• 58:10
  variety and I might ruminate on why I would not choose
• 58:15
  personally to keep oxygen. Oh.
• 58:18
  OK. OK.
• 58:22
  I think there's another story in in this first half that that
• 58:27
  feels similar to Oxygen to me, where I, I really enjoy the
• 58:32
  setup of where the story is, is heading.
• 58:35
  And then we hit about the 25 minute mark.
• 58:38
  Actually, there's a, there's a another one, you know, sorry.
• 58:40
  Anyway, this, there's this story has has this repeating themes of
• 58:44
  hitting about the 25 minute mark and I start getting very, very
• 58:47
  restless and bored because it seems to abandon it's set up to
• 58:51
  just sort of do kind of nonsense for a little bit.
• 58:57
  I, I like the, the core premise to it, the idea of, of, you
• 59:01
  know, in, in the future, space is controlled by capitalists and
• 59:05
  they will literally sell with the oxygen that you breathe.
• 59:07
  It's a very fun idea. Well, not a fun idea, but it's a
• 59:11
  very interesting idea. It brings up a lot of
• 59:14
  interesting questions. I think it's a problem I have
• 59:17
  with a lot of the Moffat tenure as a whole is I don't think it
• 59:22
  doesn't feel brave enough to want to actually confront
• 59:24
  anything about it. It kind of just likes to say
• 59:28
  some of the words and then we sort of don't really investigate
• 59:33
  the the sort of the the core problem lying at the at the
• 59:37
  heart of of of that as an issue. I think it's it's tone is kind
• 59:42
  of confused. I think it wants to be creepy,
• 59:45
  but I don't think it is creepy. I don't think it's very tense.
• 59:50
  This is creepy. I think I think it starts creepy
• 59:54
  and interesting again. There is another story where
• 59:57
  they set up a mystery where the setup of the mystery is undercut
• 1:00:01
  by the reveal of what actually is going on with the mystery.
• 1:00:05
  I think when they first encounter the body being propped
• 1:00:08
  up in its own spacesuit, I think that is is is creepy.
• 1:00:12
  Phenomenal. Creepy.
• 1:00:14
  Of weed and then it just, it just turns into zombies.
• 1:00:20
  Just turns into into zombies kind of all in a crowd chasing.
• 1:00:24
  I don't know, it doesn't have the space zombies.
• 1:00:27
  Space zombies. Well, that's the thing.
• 1:00:28
  It feels like, yeah, writing, writing zombies on a piece of
• 1:00:31
  paper and then sort of next to writing space and being like,
• 1:00:33
  right, I've got it. This is what we're doing.
• 1:00:37
  Yeah. It just kind of fizzles out in
• 1:00:40
  in that way for me. There's a lot of you know, to to
• 1:00:44
  quote. I think Chris Chubb know there's
• 1:00:45
  a lot of running down corridors and silly monsters.
• 1:00:49
  He never did that, did he? Yeah, exactly.
• 1:00:54
  He said that. I then wrote the Saranga Canon.
• 1:00:56
  There's nothing but running around corridors.
• 1:00:59
  No, I think there's, I think the problem is there's a lot of
• 1:01:01
  standing around corridors. I think they, they talk a lot
• 1:01:05
  about how to, to get to act 3 and I just kind of find myself
• 1:01:10
  being a bit on the world. And I'm not 100% sure how I feel
• 1:01:13
  about, I don't know if I dislike the doctor turning blind in the
• 1:01:15
  second-half of the story because I know the arc that it's setting
• 1:01:20
  up and how intently I dislike that arc.
• 1:01:23
  But I don't know. It just sort of feels like with,
• 1:01:27
  with, with Bill kind of, you know, needing to go out to the
• 1:01:32
  vacuum space without, without protection, kind of turning into
• 1:01:34
  a zombie momentarily that, that just feels like where the steaks
• 1:01:38
  should be for me. I think.
• 1:01:39
  Then adding on, well, now the doctor's blind.
• 1:01:41
  It feels like, funnily enough, what a uni lecturer used to say
• 1:01:45
  about things when it got too much.
• 1:01:47
  It's like putting sugar on ice cream.
• 1:01:48
  You don't, you don't need it. The ice, the ice cream I think
• 1:01:51
  is enough. The steaks of Bill is enough.
• 1:01:52
  I don't know how I feel about the blindness, but yeah, like I
• 1:01:57
  to sum it up in 2 words, broadly fine.
• 1:02:01
  I just think it fizzles out for me towards the second-half.
• 1:02:06
  Interesting. Well, there we go.
• 1:02:09
  Well, this is of a season where we're going to have lots of
• 1:02:11
  opinions, so that I didn't see that one coming.
• 1:02:14
  Joe, what do you think of this one?
• 1:02:17
  I completely disagree. I think this is this is maybe
• 1:02:20
  not my favorite of the first half, but it is a banger.
• 1:02:23
  I love the look of this like the the the aesthetic that they go
• 1:02:27
  for. It's stark, cold, clinical,
• 1:02:30
  silent spaces ready to kill you in so many ways in this episode.
• 1:02:34
  And it really leads into that. It looks stark and did it.
• 1:02:39
  It's like it's like they're in ice sometimes.
• 1:02:41
  It's got a blue shadows everywhere.
• 1:02:44
  It's just gorgeous. I'm just going to say the joke
• 1:02:47
  because I think I laughed out loud and I don't often laugh out
• 1:02:50
  loud at Peter Capaldi when he's doing that speech in the lecture
• 1:02:53
  hall. And she goes, what's this got to
• 1:02:54
  do with crop rotation? He goes nothing but space is
• 1:02:58
  great, isn't it? That's so great.
• 1:03:03
  He's sort of like poetry at this point, isn't he?
• 1:03:04
  When he was stuck on Earth, totally missing the adventure.
• 1:03:07
  And this is the one story where we lean into that, that he
• 1:03:10
  really wants to get out there and he's stuck with his boring
• 1:03:13
  old box that he's got to look after.
• 1:03:16
  It's I think it's the one story where the university setting
• 1:03:19
  pays off extremely well. I have just here an exercise
• 1:03:26
  book of stories that I wrote many, many years ago, right?
• 1:03:33
  And I came up with one probably half good idea, that in the
• 1:03:37
  future, sunlight and oxygen were going to be charged for.
• 1:03:41
  And if if you couldn't afford it, then you were going to be
• 1:03:46
  suffocated or you were not going to be exposed to sunlight.
• 1:03:49
  You're going to be murdered in horrible, spectacular ways.
• 1:03:51
  Jane Matheson, I know you got hold of that.
• 1:03:54
  I'm coming after you. It's a great idea, though,
• 1:03:57
  right? It's a wonderful idea to base a
• 1:03:59
  Doctor Who story on. What's the blue man's name in
• 1:04:02
  this? Is it Darren?
• 1:04:03
  I can't remember. Darren.
• 1:04:05
  That's right. Yeah.
• 1:04:06
  Yeah, He goes great. We rescued a racist.
• 1:04:09
  When? He's talking.
• 1:04:11
  About all my best friends are bluish.
• 1:04:13
  Oh my God, that's such a funny line, isn't it?
• 1:04:16
  I love Nardo. You can't get too indulgent with
• 1:04:21
  the anger and the horror of this episode because Nardell was
• 1:04:25
  around making great jokes in every single scene.
• 1:04:27
  But I think Kapoldi's sort of doing it as well.
• 1:04:30
  There's that wonderful bit that you said earlier where you've
• 1:04:32
  got that zombie just staring straight at the camera and
• 1:04:35
  Kapoldi sort of comes around behind him and goes, hello,
• 1:04:40
  clearly this man is dead. But it's very funny.
• 1:04:44
  I don't really like the doctor being punished for his kindness
• 1:04:47
  at the end, the blindness and I, I'll get into this when we did
• 1:04:51
  the second-half of the series, but I really think that should
• 1:04:55
  not be treated as a disability, but actually as a strength.
• 1:04:59
  They really sort of treat it as if he's less of a man because
• 1:05:03
  he's blind. That's why it's the cliffhanger
• 1:05:05
  to this episode. It's a shock that he's blind.
• 1:05:09
  But now Jesus. Christ man the the opening scene
• 1:05:12
  of this with the zombies on the exterior of the station like
• 1:05:16
  coming after this couple that try that.
• 1:05:18
  Oh, and the space helmet, like, drifts by the direction of the
• 1:05:24
  scene where Bill was unconscious, and we watch her
• 1:05:27
  progress to sort of coming back awake again, sort of waking up a
• 1:05:30
  couple of times. Stunningly good.
• 1:05:33
  Yeah. I think Matheson is my favorite
• 1:05:35
  writer of the Steven Moffett era by a country mole.
• 1:05:38
  He doesn't put a foot wrong in four scripts.
• 1:05:41
  And this is. Yeah, this is scary stuff.
• 1:05:44
  It's scary in conception, I think, as well as execution.
• 1:05:48
  But yeah, I would definitely keep this one.
• 1:05:51
  Right. It's one each French, Daniel.
• 1:05:53
  What do you think? Oh, I think it looks great as
• 1:05:58
  well. I like the fact that the the
• 1:06:00
  kind of the the interiors are quite cheap and ugly because
• 1:06:04
  that's very in keeping with the sort of functional logic of this
• 1:06:07
  this company, you know, that that values just just the bottom
• 1:06:11
  line over everything else. It's got a lot in common with
• 1:06:15
  Gravity, the film Gravity with Sandra Bullock and George
• 1:06:18
  Clooney, which was also this kind of very taut, nerve
• 1:06:22
  racking, very well made thriller about the fragility of human
• 1:06:26
  life in space and how hostile spaces are to our survival.
• 1:06:31
  And it's kind of nice to kind of be jolted out of the kind of
• 1:06:34
  very complacent sort of sci-fi mindset we have of, oh,
• 1:06:38
  artificial gravity, oh, consistent atmospheric pressure,
• 1:06:42
  oh, oxygens everywhere. Oh, the doors that go shuk,
• 1:06:44
  shuk, as Nardal says, even, you know, even if, like, by the time
• 1:06:50
  we get to the end of the season, we're back to, you know, a
• 1:06:52
  spaceship in the middle of a black hole.
• 1:06:54
  So, you know, it doesn't matter. And that's why we have the dig
• 1:06:58
  at Star Trek in the opening narration.
• 1:07:01
  Space. Final.
• 1:07:02
  Frontier Final. Because it wants to kill you.
• 1:07:06
  And that's why you have also that very far away, off kilter,
• 1:07:10
  kind of very unspectacular shot of the TARDIS materializing in
• 1:07:14
  the at the end of the hallway, which is my favorite shot in the
• 1:07:18
  episode. It's like this is going to be
• 1:07:20
  creepy. It kind of announces itself in
• 1:07:22
  that in that in that landing, it's a very creepy landing.
• 1:07:26
  It's very nuts and bolts Doctor Who.
• 1:07:28
  So, you know, big business and capitalism are the baddies
• 1:07:32
  again. You know, the company has got no
• 1:07:35
  name. So it could be the same one from
• 1:07:37
  Terminus or it could be the Waylon Gitani company in the
• 1:07:41
  Alien franchise. So you know, no distinguishing
• 1:07:43
  features, it's just profit over people.
• 1:07:46
  Very easy, kind of easy to grasp sort of idea of.
• 1:07:51
  And just like, like a lot of nuts and bolts Doctor Who
• 1:07:53
  stories, it's kind of very smart enough to realise that if you're
• 1:07:57
  going to tell this story about an, a corporate entity killing
• 1:08:00
  off the crew of a space station, because that's cheaper and, and
• 1:08:03
  more efficient with all these space zombies in it.
• 1:08:07
  If you have everyone kind of racing from one predicament to
• 1:08:10
  the next at a breathless pace, breathless, then it works much
• 1:08:15
  better because you don't have you don't have time to think
• 1:08:18
  about it too much. I do wonder, though, why I don't
• 1:08:22
  remember it very well. So every time I go back to this,
• 1:08:26
  I'm go, oh, this is so exciting. But I never sort of lingers in
• 1:08:29
  my memory. And I think it's maybe because
• 1:08:32
  the supporting cast are all a bit unmemorable.
• 1:08:34
  Apart from bright blue Daniel. Yeah.
• 1:08:37
  Apart from the Blue Man. Yeah.
• 1:08:39
  Darwin and and Ivan and Ellie. I quite like at the beginning,
• 1:08:43
  they're all kind of more victims than than characters, which I
• 1:08:46
  suppose is is in keeping with the story because you know,
• 1:08:49
  again, they're it's it's it's all about how capitalism is is
• 1:08:53
  killing you. I love the doctor Nardol and
• 1:08:57
  Bill in this. I think this is Nardol's best
• 1:09:00
  outing by a mile where he's just not, he's not just the cute
• 1:09:04
  comedy sidekick. He's not just the doctor's
• 1:09:06
  valet. Sometimes he's the doctor's
• 1:09:09
  equal where you know, he knows just as much as he does.
• 1:09:12
  He's just as capable. And and he actually takes him to
• 1:09:15
  task at the at the end of the episode where he's like, no, you
• 1:09:18
  look, you look at me like never again.
• 1:09:20
  We're not doing that again. Does.
• 1:09:22
  It work. Does not work.
• 1:09:25
  Making a complaint Head office. No idea, I've never had head
• 1:09:28
  office, but as far as I remember there's a successful rebellion
• 1:09:32
  six months later. Corporate dominance in space is
• 1:09:35
  history. That about wraps it for
• 1:09:38
  capitalist. Then the human race finds a
• 1:09:41
  whole new mistake, but that's another story.
• 1:09:45
  Can't wait. But you will.
• 1:09:49
  Letters. Never again.
• 1:10:02
  Stop talking now. I'm serious.
• 1:10:05
  We were so close to not making it back then.
• 1:10:08
  What happens to the Vault? You know what's at stake here,
• 1:10:13
  Philly, Stop talking. What have you got killed out
• 1:10:16
  there? What happens to your precious
• 1:10:19
  Earth? Then?
• 1:10:20
  You need to be here, and you need to be ready.
• 1:10:23
  If that door ever opens. Look at me.
• 1:10:26
  I can't. What if you came back injured or
• 1:10:29
  sick? You really think our friend down
• 1:10:31
  there won't know that? Won't sense it?
• 1:10:36
  Look at me. Although I can't, I really
• 1:10:38
  can't. I can't look at anything ever
• 1:10:43
  again. I'm still blind.
• 1:10:47
  You know, all those little touches like, you know, when
• 1:10:51
  they mention artificial gravity, Bill jumps up and down to test
• 1:10:54
  it, you know, and the the back and forth between the doctor and
• 1:10:58
  Nardol where he says, oh, I sent you to Birmingham for a packet
• 1:11:00
  of crisps. And he says, I saw through your
• 1:11:02
  cunning Roos. And then when Nardol goes at the
• 1:11:06
  end, oh, cuddle again. He's so asleep sometimes.
• 1:11:11
  So I think, yeah, it works best as this kind of very blunt
• 1:11:14
  instrument. It's not subtle, but it doesn't
• 1:11:16
  need to be subtle. You know, right out the Sonic,
• 1:11:19
  right out the TARDIS at the at the beginning.
• 1:11:21
  And let's constantly hit you over the head with the ruthless
• 1:11:24
  kind of commercialism of this company, You know, all the
• 1:11:27
  characters announcing it out loud.
• 1:11:30
  You know, we're all going to lose our jobs as the robots take
• 1:11:32
  over. You know, AI is going to outwit
• 1:11:35
  as everyone, outwit everyone in the end.
• 1:11:37
  And then even even that kind of really lame ending where all the
• 1:11:40
  surviving crew members say, well, we're going to make a
• 1:11:42
  complaint to head office. And then the doctor tells Bill
• 1:11:45
  that, oh, we've ended capitalism and don't worry, humans will
• 1:11:48
  find another problem six months later.
• 1:11:50
  I think he's just lying to her. I think he's just because he's
• 1:11:52
  blind, it just rings so hollow that he would say, oh, we've
• 1:11:55
  we've saved the world from capitalism.
• 1:11:57
  It just I don't, I don't believe that for a second.
• 1:11:59
  You know, I don't think it's made to be taken very literally.
• 1:12:04
  And so, and it does deliver the scares too, because, you know,
• 1:12:07
  those corpses in the suits are, it's just on the line of family
• 1:12:12
  viewing, I think. And because, you know, that bit
• 1:12:15
  where Nardo looks out the window and they're all walking up
• 1:12:19
  towards them, that's just that's terrifying.
• 1:12:23
  It's not as scary as the flood, is it for walls of miles?
• 1:12:26
  No, but it's pretty close, you know, And just.
• 1:12:29
  Yeah. And also the idea that, you
• 1:12:30
  know, that the company isn't just selling oxygen, which is
• 1:12:33
  the very stuff of life, you know, the back to people in an
• 1:12:37
  environment where you can't survive without it.
• 1:12:40
  But it's doing it because that. But killing the crew is cheaper
• 1:12:45
  than keeping them alive. And, you know, to to not to
• 1:12:48
  quote Russell T Davies, but this was always the plan, you know,
• 1:12:51
  to so and I just just the final thing would be, I'm not sure
• 1:12:58
  that you needed to to kind of kill Bill at the air or pretend
• 1:13:05
  to kill Bill just to kind of up the stakes even more.
• 1:13:08
  Because if the stakes are already high enough, we've got,
• 1:13:11
  you know, space zombies breathing down on X.
• 1:13:13
  We've got a race against the clock.
• 1:13:16
  And it kind of reminds me of the same kind of issue I had with
• 1:13:19
  Gravity towards the end where it's not enough that Sandra
• 1:13:22
  Bullock's stuck in space. We have to kind of have her, you
• 1:13:25
  know, mourn a dead family member, I think, or something.
• 1:13:27
  And you think, well, do you need that?
• 1:13:29
  Really. It's kind of, again, like to
• 1:13:31
  quote Elliot, it's putting sugar on top of ice cream.
• 1:13:34
  You know, sometimes I think less can be more so.
• 1:13:38
  But yeah, it's, it's good. So put it through.
• 1:13:41
  Have you ever heard the Big Finish audio, The Feast of
• 1:13:43
  Axels? It's a sick Doctor audio with
• 1:13:47
  Evelyn Smive. And it does the dangers of space
• 1:13:52
  better than this because at the end of 1 episode, Evelyn pushes
• 1:13:57
  against the space station. She's out floating in space and
• 1:14:00
  she's literally like a meter away from everybody else and
• 1:14:04
  very slowly going out into space.
• 1:14:06
  And she's like, I'm just here, just reach out for me.
• 1:14:09
  I unhooked myself when you said we were going over just then.
• 1:14:14
  I thought it was an instruction. Well, hook yourself back onto
• 1:14:17
  axos again quickly. Trouble is, I can't quite reach
• 1:14:23
  it. Yeah, let me.
• 1:14:26
  It's silly. It's only a couple of inches
• 1:14:28
  away. Maybe if I turn this way?
• 1:14:31
  Whatever you do, stay perfectly still.
• 1:14:34
  Evelyn, stop. Stop, please.
• 1:14:36
  But I'm only a couple of inches away from the line.
• 1:14:40
  I'm I'm sure I can. Oh, it's more like 6 inches now.
• 1:14:46
  Even in the Don't move, whatever happens, don't move a muscle.
• 1:14:50
  Remember Newton's third law? It is no more than a foot away.
• 1:14:55
  Surely you can just jump and get me?
• 1:14:57
  Hold the line, Joe, I'm going to push off and grab her ready.
• 1:15:03
  Here we go. Oh, missed you.
• 1:15:09
  It's too late. We've lost her.
• 1:15:13
  What are you talking about? I'm still here, not 2 feet away
• 1:15:18
  from you. Yeah, I'm unhooking too.
• 1:15:20
  Daisy chain Joe, stay attached to Axos.
• 1:15:22
  You hold David, I'll hold him. You ready?
• 1:15:24
  Doctor, she's too far out. The safety line is already
• 1:15:28
  stretched as far as it'll go. You'll never reach and of.
• 1:15:31
  Course I will. What are you doing?
• 1:15:34
  I'm hooking myself from the safety line and detaching my
• 1:15:37
  oxygen supply. I can use it to repel myself.
• 1:15:40
  Push equals shove and then what? You'll both go floating off
• 1:15:44
  together. In which case, get the Jules
• 1:15:47
  Verne over there to pick us up. It's not over there anymore.
• 1:15:51
  But where's he gone? Oh, it doesn't matter now.
• 1:15:56
  I have to save Evelyn. Even if you reach her, doctor,
• 1:15:59
  it'll be suicide. By the time the Jules Verne
• 1:16:01
  comes round again, you'll already be miles away in a new
• 1:16:04
  orbit. They probably qualify as a
• 1:16:06
  couple of extra moons in here. You.
• 1:16:08
  Never mind them, Evelyn. Concentrate on me.
• 1:16:11
  Concentrate on my voice. How far away from you all am I
• 1:16:16
  now? 20 feet 30?
• 1:16:22
  I can't seem to judge the distance anymore.
• 1:16:24
  Evelyn, please stay very still. Any additional motion might
• 1:16:28
  cause you to accelerate. I'll be with you as soon as I
• 1:16:32
  can, Doctor. You have to let her go.
• 1:16:35
  Don't be ridiculous. They're right, Doctor.
• 1:16:38
  It's too late for me now. You look after yourselves.
• 1:16:42
  Evelyn, I'll find you, do you hear me?
• 1:16:44
  I'll find you and I'll bring you back.
• 1:16:50
  Don't worry doctor, it's not your fault.
• 1:16:54
  Silly it messing around in space like Barbarella and my earache.
• 1:17:05
  Dear, dear Evelyn. Evelyn.
• 1:17:13
  And she's getting further and further and further away until
• 1:17:16
  her voice just vanishes into the distance.
• 1:17:19
  Does it absolutely brilliantly. You're right.
• 1:17:21
  Yeah. Maybe we didn't need that.
• 1:17:23
  Can I just add one more thing? So I because I think, and I
• 1:17:26
  really did want to say this, Murray's music is really bad in
• 1:17:30
  this episode. It's too bombastic.
• 1:17:33
  It's too loud. This needed a space like forgive
• 1:17:39
  me, Brevy sort of score that sells the horror of the
• 1:17:43
  diminishing oxygen, you know, and said it's like all the time,
• 1:17:47
  like really loud music. And it doesn't really leave any
• 1:17:51
  space for suspense at times because it's filling the room
• 1:17:54
  with noise all the time. Yeah, sometimes he got it wrong.
• 1:17:58
  Second would have been great for this one.
• 1:18:00
  I think, yeah, yeah. So I'm going to go next and
• 1:18:07
  Jamie Matheson is definitely the writer of this era and it is
• 1:18:12
  criminal that he has not been back because he really gets
• 1:18:15
  Doctor Who. I think like Joe said, all four
• 1:18:19
  of his episodes are absolutely brilliant and this one is no
• 1:18:22
  exception. This is my favorite of this 5
• 1:18:27
  and so it's definitely going through.
• 1:18:29
  I think it's really effectively creepy.
• 1:18:33
  It's dark, it's funny. The bit where he's joining up
• 1:18:38
  the stars on his chalkboard and it goes into the skull.
• 1:18:42
  It's amazing. And I.
• 1:18:43
  Forget that is so good party, isn't it?
• 1:18:45
  Yeah, it's. So brilliant.
• 1:18:48
  And he's just sort of doodling it and it all comes together at
• 1:18:51
  the end when you see that. And that that whole speech at
• 1:18:54
  the start is there to reinforce to Bill when she goes into
• 1:18:58
  space, how dangerous it is and what to do when you're in the
• 1:19:03
  vacuum and how long you've got. And it pays that off
• 1:19:06
  beautifully. And I think Charles Palmer is
• 1:19:10
  back after Gridlock from Series 3 and in human nature blood and
• 1:19:18
  he's been away too long. He's.
• 1:19:20
  Really. Good at this he's he gets the
• 1:19:22
  pacing of this just right. It's tense, but it it's not
• 1:19:28
  again, like the pilot, it has a momentum all the way through and
• 1:19:31
  the stakes are building. I just agree.
• 1:19:35
  I really like the doctor being blind at the end of this because
• 1:19:39
  it shows again that all the things that he said, this is a
• 1:19:43
  dangerous place. This is not a good place to be,
• 1:19:48
  you know, And what he does has consequences.
• 1:19:53
  And in Doctor Who we don't often get consequences where for the
• 1:19:58
  doctor like this, the doctor usually gets out of danger with
• 1:20:02
  no, no trouble. And so I really like the fact I
• 1:20:05
  remember being absolutely stunned at that, that ending
• 1:20:09
  because. I was convinced he in that
• 1:20:12
  moment and I hadn't noticed the way he creeps around the Tardis.
• 1:20:16
  Yeah, that's right. And.
• 1:20:17
  Things like that and then puts the sunglasses on because you
• 1:20:22
  think, Oh well, it's just the Sonic sunglasses back.
• 1:20:24
  It's just that thing that Capaldi's doctor does and then
• 1:20:27
  suddenly it's the pay off to this episode.
• 1:20:31
  It's really, really nicely placed.
• 1:20:34
  You have. To be so careful if you're going
• 1:20:36
  to. Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:20:37
  Handicap and I don't think the episodes that follow this up no
• 1:20:41
  have the subtlety to walk that line.
• 1:20:44
  No, and that's not this episode's fault, though.
• 1:20:47
  They kind of get away with it here because it's just that one.
• 1:20:49
  It's a cliffhanger. Yeah, Yeah.
• 1:20:51
  Exactly. And we we're in this sort of a
• 1:20:55
  few episodes where the stories are flowing into each other
• 1:20:58
  quite nicely and they're all sort of dovetailing and leading
• 1:21:01
  on from each other. And it's got that that lovely
• 1:21:04
  sort of forward momentum for the whole season.
• 1:21:06
  Like this is all one big hole and they're off on all these
• 1:21:10
  adventures and it's all sort of sequential.
• 1:21:12
  And so to have this sort of big mid season cliffhanger feels
• 1:21:16
  kind of kind of brilliant, really.
• 1:21:19
  So yeah, I love the stuff about the oxygen being charged for
• 1:21:23
  because like I said, that's the ultimate end of capitalism.
• 1:21:27
  It'll charge you for the things that actually keep you alive.
• 1:21:30
  We're so almost there a lot of the time, you know?
• 1:21:34
  I can't, I haven't paid my bill goodbye as he floats away and.
• 1:21:42
  I like the facts, yeah. And I quite like the fact they
• 1:21:46
  didn't go for the orange space suits as well.
• 1:21:49
  And they built some new space suits for this story.
• 1:21:52
  So and that effect of them sort of stepping into the suit and it
• 1:21:57
  wrapping itself around them. And immediately you've got that
• 1:22:00
  peril of Bill having the suit that's faulty where nothing
• 1:22:04
  works. But then that's undercut by
• 1:22:07
  Nadal realizing that he knows the woman who did the voice over
• 1:22:11
  for the suit. Still saucy after all these
• 1:22:14
  years. Velma, Velma.
• 1:22:19
  Daniel, can you play Nortel in a series of audios please?
• 1:22:22
  You're great. Can be very silly sometimes.
• 1:22:28
  So, yeah, and while the crew may be forgettable, they're not as
• 1:22:31
  forgettable as the characters in Under the Lake and Before the
• 1:22:34
  Flood, who are the most generic set of characters in Yep, in a
• 1:22:39
  base under siege story ever. You know, it's got even.
• 1:22:43
  Even the start feels to me like those scenes at the start.
• 1:22:48
  And no one will will thank me for making this comparison, but
• 1:22:51
  those scenes at the start of Star Trek the Motion Picture
• 1:22:55
  where they're climbing on the end edge of the space station
• 1:22:59
  and space is turning upside down because it you don't know which
• 1:23:03
  way up you are. I think that's.
• 1:23:05
  That it absolutely is one of the whole Star Trek thing.
• 1:23:09
  If the quote is there, then yeah, yeah.
• 1:23:12
  You know, and just that design. So everything just sort of works
• 1:23:16
  for me in this episode and I think it's really effective and
• 1:23:20
  I love it to bits. So yeah, it's a it's a proof for
• 1:23:23
  me. So that's free one as we go over
• 1:23:26
  to UK, Daniel. Well, am I going to go and send
• 1:23:29
  this episode off to Birmingham for a bag of crisps?
• 1:23:34
  No, of course I'm not. The thing that really works for
• 1:23:38
  me is, is the opening scene. It is like something out of a
• 1:23:41
  horror movie because you know that at least one, if not both
• 1:23:45
  of those two characters are going to end up dead.
• 1:23:47
  I mean, it's a traditional sort of typical Doctor Who opening,
• 1:23:51
  but it's done so well. And if this was Star Trek,
• 1:23:55
  there'd be lots of twinkly nice stars in the background, but
• 1:23:58
  there's this really one harsh light and everything else is
• 1:24:02
  black. And that's what's, that's what
• 1:24:04
  space would be really like. I remember William Shatner
• 1:24:08
  saying about how when he went up for his flight up into space,
• 1:24:13
  how it wasn't how he imagined it at all, and he was actually
• 1:24:17
  quite sounded really quite depressed about it.
• 1:24:20
  He finally got into space, only to find that it wasn't this
• 1:24:23
  beautiful final frontier, but just blackness, and deadly
• 1:24:28
  blackness at that. So think of how Russell did Wild
• 1:24:31
  Blue Yonder. Yeah, that's got a quite a rich,
• 1:24:35
  colourful palette to it. You don't need the sets in the
• 1:24:37
  side, you know. Yeah, they're not doing that at
• 1:24:40
  all here, are they? It's functional.
• 1:24:44
  This is really this, this is this is dangerous.
• 1:24:47
  This is where you could any any of them.
• 1:24:49
  And that's why you're kind of wondering is, is this really the
• 1:24:52
  end for Bill when she gets through, when she starts to, you
• 1:24:55
  know, this starts to crackle and the you get the flashes through.
• 1:24:59
  And then of course, there's that little bit about, well, it
• 1:25:01
  obviously it won't be killing her because there's not enough
• 1:25:04
  energy in the suit leftover to transform her into a zombie
• 1:25:07
  because so she's she's going to be OK.
• 1:25:09
  I'm not sure I like the idea of the doctor being blind.
• 1:25:12
  I do think Capelli does a bit. It's a bit like Peter Davison at
• 1:25:16
  the end of Castro valve Episode 3 where he goes, we're caught
• 1:25:19
  the space-time trap. It's very sort of it's it's
• 1:25:22
  traditional cliffhanger acting, which you don't really get to
• 1:25:25
  see in the new series, but. I'm.
• 1:25:27
  Still blind. I'm still blind.
• 1:25:30
  Sorry. I should leave the impressions
• 1:25:31
  to you tonight. No, no, please.
• 1:25:34
  Suggesting. But it's, you know, like the
• 1:25:37
  cliffhanger is the the highest moment of of jeopardy.
• 1:25:40
  Yeah, So it seems to be suggesting that's a fate worse
• 1:25:42
  than death. A lot of people deal with
• 1:25:44
  blindness on a daily. Exactly.
• 1:25:46
  Yes, exactly. Yes, yeah.
• 1:25:50
  So, yeah, I mean, maybe there's one fly by too many of the space
• 1:25:54
  spaceship model, but the space station model.
• 1:25:57
  I mean, the downside is this is not Doctor Who for my kids, but
• 1:26:01
  then neither something like the Caves of Andrew Sandy or the
• 1:26:03
  Waters of Miles. So they can go watch something
• 1:26:05
  else while I can go and enjoy this.
• 1:26:08
  This isn't your kids, Doctor here.
• 1:26:10
  Go on, go on, go on. You can't have your cake and eat
• 1:26:13
  it. All right?
• 1:26:13
  Slacking off last year, Series 9 and saying that's not for your
• 1:26:17
  kids. And yet this year it's all
• 1:26:19
  right. I actually think.
• 1:26:21
  I actually think one of my. Yeah, I think, yeah, maybe my 8
• 1:26:24
  year old, we could get away with get away with him watching this.
• 1:26:27
  I mean, it is generally tense, genuinely tense and scary in a
• 1:26:32
  way. I think modern who very rarely
• 1:26:34
  is certainly the last. I could think maybe the well,
• 1:26:37
  maybe from last year Haunting of Villa Deodati, Village of
• 1:26:41
  Angels, maybe, but I don't who rarely gets this tense and
• 1:26:47
  terrifying and the sense of jeopardy, as you say.
• 1:26:53
  Charles Palmer. I was almost called him.
• 1:26:54
  Jeffrey Palmer. That's his dad.
• 1:26:57
  It's his dad, isn't it? It's it's very well done and
• 1:27:03
  it's very claustrophobic. Yeah, you could argue, you know,
• 1:27:06
  it's coming down one set of corridors after another, but I
• 1:27:11
  just think it's it's a it's proper scary.
• 1:27:14
  It's proper sci-fi and Doctor Who really does proper sci-fi.
• 1:27:19
  I would also this is probably Doctor Who at its wokest, even
• 1:27:25
  though it wouldn't be actually described as being woke because
• 1:27:29
  it's written by Steven Moffett and the Doctors, a straight male
• 1:27:34
  and not and not a woman or a gay black man.
• 1:27:36
  So I, I, I mean, the idea of, you know, capitalism literally
• 1:27:43
  sucking the life and the breath out of you is quite a would it
• 1:27:47
  be am I talking about my ask not So this is actually a woke
• 1:27:52
  story, but because of the setup and because of when it's been
• 1:27:56
  made, it's not really seen in that, in that, that respect.
• 1:28:00
  I mean, it's it's don't worry, Daniel, next year we're pro
• 1:28:03
  capitalism with Kablan. So, you know, Yeah.
• 1:28:05
  OK. That's true, yeah.
• 1:28:07
  Complete the other side of the coin.
• 1:28:08
  Do you think it was autobiographical maybe because
• 1:28:10
  this was, you know, the season he wasn't supposed to do and he
• 1:28:13
  was contractually obligated to do it.
• 1:28:15
  So he now makes puts all these messages about capitalism and
• 1:28:18
  the the value of life and. I mean, it's weird.
• 1:28:22
  Because for me, Series 9 feels like the contractual obligation
• 1:28:26
  1, whereas this one, he feels like he's back after having that
• 1:28:29
  little break and, you know, and having to write Husbands of
• 1:28:33
  River Song and the return of Doctor Mysterio does feel like
• 1:28:38
  he's had a bit of time to sort of recharge his batteries.
• 1:28:41
  I mean, Matheson is a good writer.
• 1:28:42
  He is, as you say, the best writer of the Capel, the era.
• 1:28:45
  Certainly he should have come back, and shame on you, Mr.
• 1:28:51
  Chibnall and Mr. Davis, for not inviting him back.
• 1:28:53
  But then there are a lot of writers, maybe Sarah Dollard,
• 1:28:56
  Maxine Alderton, who really should come back.
• 1:28:59
  Possibly more should have come back more than Moffy did, but
• 1:29:02
  there we go. So, yeah, I'm definitely going
• 1:29:04
  to put this through as well. Sorry, Elliot, keep listening.
• 1:29:07
  Husband's a River Song, you know.
• 1:29:08
  God that was that would have been a perfect ending to the
• 1:29:11
  Capaldi era. That happily ever after instead
• 1:29:14
  of that. Really.
• 1:29:15
  What was that episode called with those two old once?
• 1:29:18
  Upon a time. Twice upon a time.
• 1:29:21
  God, luckily that's what I've been talked about, so we don't
• 1:29:23
  need to go back to it. I can't even, I can't stress
• 1:29:26
  this enough, and obviously it's nothing to do with this half of
• 1:29:29
  the season, but this episode very adeptly as well shows how
• 1:29:32
  you can injure Bill and have her need medical attention without
• 1:29:38
  blowing a fucking great hole in her.
• 1:29:40
  All right, let's keep a count of how many terrible things Bill
• 1:29:43
  goes through that aren't as bad as blowing a hole in the latest
• 1:29:49
  Person of Colour companion, Stephen Moffett.
• 1:29:52
  Sorry. Dear, dear, dear.
• 1:29:55
  Well, there we go. But that is 2 for two so far, so
• 1:30:00
  shall we go back to the comments from our listeners?
• 1:30:03
  Oh Melvin, so positive about the Moffat era.
• 1:30:06
  This will be difficult. Series 10 Part 1 feels lighter,
• 1:30:10
  unencumbered and more fun than it's been maybe since series 5
• 1:30:14
  with the professor student relationship between the Doctor
• 1:30:16
  and Bill. Such a tremendous pairing.
• 1:30:19
  I love that she basically has to do a rigorous course of study
• 1:30:21
  with the Doctor before she can go adventuring.
• 1:30:24
  He's obviously learnt his lesson with Clara.
• 1:30:28
  He's he's vetting his companions more, more closely.
• 1:30:32
  Fraser, Gregory says. I've never.
• 1:30:36
  I've never. Yeah.
• 1:30:37
  I think he's locked in a vault, isn't he?
• 1:30:39
  Yeah, he's not coming back out. Says Christmas episodes aside,
• 1:30:45
  Series 10 is the classic example of the inverse ratio between the
• 1:30:49
  quality of Capaldi's Doctor and the quality of the episodes.
• 1:30:52
  He's in The Top Doctors as it is as enjoyable as we'll ever see
• 1:30:57
  him here, but it feels like Moffat's well has run dry, bar a
• 1:31:00
  few notable exceptions. And you've seen how many
• 1:31:04
  innuendos Moffat can get in a script.
• 1:31:06
  It takes quite a bit for his well to run dry.
• 1:31:13
  Is it me? Yep.
• 1:31:14
  Oh, OK, David Gillespie Pratt in order to help you keep to time,
• 1:31:19
  I'll keep this brief. Series 10 Part 1 equals very
• 1:31:24
  good. Oh David, well done.
• 1:31:26
  There we go. We may go to bed tonight.
• 1:31:30
  An even briefer comment by the wonderful Lucy McCall.
• 1:31:33
  I checked out by this point. Do you need any recommendations,
• 1:31:39
  Lucy? Just let us know.
• 1:31:40
  Yeah, the lovely Dave Rennie says Capaldi's best year, as
• 1:31:44
  he's finally having fun and isn't such a bastard to hang out
• 1:31:48
  with. Oh, and Clara is gone laughing.
• 1:31:52
  Emoji. Laughing emoji.
• 1:31:53
  Very appropriate. Yeah, Big Bang, the witch is
• 1:31:57
  gone. It's Joe.
• 1:32:00
  Oh, it's Joe. Is it me?
• 1:32:01
  Oh, John Iles says. Bill was one of my family's
• 1:32:04
  favorite companions. Made a nice change from
• 1:32:07
  companion being lovestruck with the Doctor.
• 1:32:09
  She was no nonsense and fun. I wish she'd been around for
• 1:32:12
  longer. James Hadwin Bennett says the
• 1:32:15
  Bill episodes in this batch are Capaldi's best part season.
• 1:32:19
  Just don't ask me to comment on the tripe that makes up the
• 1:32:22
  second-half of the series. Tripe.
• 1:32:24
  Moffett fan Jade Hadwin Bennett. Oh yeah, Oh my God, he's not on
• 1:32:29
  this one. Oh I'm so glad I got to read
• 1:32:31
  this one. The most important man in the in
• 1:32:34
  the whole of creation, Luke since Jenkins.
• 1:32:36
  I didn't see this series on air. 9 broke me.
• 1:32:40
  If only I'd have stuck around. Series 10 is wonderful.
• 1:32:44
  Moffat does in his last season what RTD one did in his give me
• 1:32:48
  a likeable companion. Why only one season of Bill?
• 1:32:51
  Why? Why couldn't we have had three
• 1:32:53
  seasons of this bug? Thank you Luke, we're all
• 1:33:01
  stories in the end, says finally.
• 1:33:03
  Capaldi got a gimmick. Free and straightforward series
• 1:33:06
  with another magnificent companion.
• 1:33:08
  The majority of episodes weren't very strong and haven't tempted
• 1:33:11
  me back to rewatch, but the beginning and ending of season
• 1:33:14
  10 were top tier. Fried gold.
• 1:33:17
  Fried gold. Well, there we go.
• 1:33:21
  OK, talking of Gold, it's Simon Fred Gold who says the start of
• 1:33:26
  an utterly magic run. There's a vibrancy running
• 1:33:30
  through its vein, supercharged by a lightning in a bottle lead
• 1:33:33
  cast who make a perfectly OK episode like Knock Knock more
• 1:33:38
  enjoyable than the best stories from less engaging eras.
• 1:33:41
  I love series 8:00 and 9:00, but this is something truly extra
• 1:33:45
  special. Truly extra special.
• 1:33:47
  Well the Moffett lover himself, John Arnold says having pushed
• 1:33:52
  the series is as dark as it could feasibly go Well, I don't
• 1:33:56
  know wait till welcome time. Moffett and Bill's farewell tour
• 1:34:01
  is blessed be lighter, mainly thanks to a less tortured Dr.
• 1:34:05
  Companion dynamic. Amazed that Big Finish haven't
• 1:34:07
  got legions of box set out of the season 10 format.
• 1:34:11
  It's. Only a matter of time.
• 1:34:15
  Paul Cresser says the first half of series 10 was so promising.
• 1:34:19
  Freed from being in the Clara show, Capaldi's Doctor finally
• 1:34:23
  starts to work for me. Add to that the likable breath
• 1:34:25
  of fresh air that was Bill and everything is looking up.
• 1:34:28
  Well, it did for a few episodes anyway.
• 1:34:31
  Doesn't that make you shudder? The Clara show Run, you clever
• 1:34:36
  boy. And oh wait, I can't.
• 1:34:38
  You can't Remember Me from Cliff Chapman.
• 1:34:41
  It's a very good season. The last great one.
• 1:34:44
  Boo. Incorrect, Cliff.
• 1:34:48
  Most episodes were bangers. Didn't think much of Knock
• 1:34:51
  Knock, but otherwise really strong.
• 1:34:55
  Andy Parkinson season series 10 is by far Capaldi's best.
• 1:34:59
  It's largely fun and light. Apart.
• 1:35:01
  From the finale and Capaldi himself seems to be really
• 1:35:04
  enjoying himself. Pearl is fabulous as Bill and
• 1:35:07
  it's a shame we didn't get more seasons with her.
• 1:35:09
  I love Nod all too, he's a perfect fit for this run of
• 1:35:13
  stories. Ah, the human palindrome.
• 1:35:16
  Mark Cockrome himself says Capaldi is pure class.
• 1:35:20
  A fantastic actor, possibly the best we've ever had, and a
• 1:35:23
  wonderful ambassador for the show at 2 very enjoyable
• 1:35:26
  companions. A redemption art for Missy and
• 1:35:29
  you've got yourself a solid final season for Steven Moffat.
• 1:35:33
  So, Doctor Who, he's right. He probably probably is the best
• 1:35:36
  actor we've ever had and given that bloody character to play
• 1:35:40
  for God's sakes. Dale Smith says it's absolutely
• 1:35:43
  Capaldi's best run, and I say that as a Capaldi lover.
• 1:35:47
  The new crew, including Missy? Oh, we'll get there.
• 1:35:49
  Dale is perfect and all of Moffett's troubling men are
• 1:35:54
  emotional illiterate. Stuff gets quietly jettisoned to
• 1:35:57
  let the Doctor and Capaldi have a bit of fun.
• 1:36:03
  John Deere, presumably fresh off designing and selling tractors,
• 1:36:06
  says Capaldi and Mackie were as good as it got.
• 1:36:08
  Most stories were excellent. The university was inspired.
• 1:36:12
  Only having Nardol as a regular was a mistake.
• 1:36:16
  No, Doctor didn't write that comment.
• 1:36:18
  No cuddles for you. John Deere.
• 1:36:23
  Andrew F Yeah, it's a shame we got the best of the 12th Doctor
• 1:36:27
  in his final year, but it was worth the wait.
• 1:36:30
  One of my favorite TARDIS teams. A strong run of episodes leading
• 1:36:34
  into my favorite modern year finale.
• 1:36:37
  I just wish they'd had more time together.
• 1:36:40
  Andrew F is a mid level terror Alfin from the Happiness Patrol.
• 1:36:46
  Finally Ian. I don't know if it's Levine or
• 1:36:49
  Chesterton. Best of the Capelli years.
• 1:36:52
  Strong runner for the best of any of the years as far as I'm
• 1:36:55
  concerned. That positivity, it must be,
• 1:36:57
  yeah, it must be chest. There's no block at all in that
• 1:37:00
  state. At all.
• 1:37:03
  So yes, here we go then for our third choice and it is over to
• 1:37:11
  French Daniel to lead on this one.
• 1:37:14
  What's your choice, Daniel? All right, well, let's put a
• 1:37:17
  grin on everyone's face and talk about smile, right?
• 1:37:22
  This won't take long. My apologies in advance for
• 1:37:26
  this. OK, Please, please bear with me.
• 1:37:31
  When I first saw it, I was wanting more.
• 1:37:35
  All this was stuff we'd seen before, and it's such a ball.
• 1:37:40
  When it first went out, I didn't know what to say.
• 1:37:44
  Never been underwhelmed that way.
• 1:37:46
  Pretty much left my mind the next day.
• 1:37:51
  OK, so the first bit's Brill. We get to hang out with the
• 1:37:55
  Doctor and Bill, but that's all there is before the rest goes
• 1:37:58
  downhill. As far as scripts go, it's
• 1:38:02
  pretty shy, even from the rider of In the Forest of the Night,
• 1:38:06
  and I don't want to fall asleep, but I just might.
• 1:38:11
  Series 10 started off on a high, but then you watch Smile and
• 1:38:17
  your interest dies. At best it's kind of fun for a
• 1:38:22
  while, but it's got no style. Emojis ain't worthwhile anyway,
• 1:38:31
  that's all I've got. You are all fired and people
• 1:38:35
  that don't bring songs to Hamster now are no longer
• 1:38:39
  welcome. I was just struggling to come up
• 1:38:41
  with something interesting to say about it because I just fell
• 1:38:44
  asleep halfway through. So I thought, oh, why not doing
• 1:38:47
  song so. So yes, I'm already bracing
• 1:38:50
  myself for all the jokes about being a young me being a young
• 1:38:53
  person or something, which is very kind by the way.
• 1:38:56
  If you want to buy me dinner sometime, that'd be great.
• 1:38:59
  So, but in the language of the hip young kids today.
• 1:39:04
  Sad face emoji, Skull face emoji.
• 1:39:08
  Bin emoji. Well, I think Daniel has made
• 1:39:16
  his point in in the best way possible.
• 1:39:19
  So yes, I'm going to take this one on next because firstly, the
• 1:39:25
  location, it is absolutely beautiful and I first visited
• 1:39:30
  the Park of Arts and Science in Valencia in, oh, about 2010 I
• 1:39:38
  think. And I went there and just
• 1:39:39
  thought this is the most amazing place and they should film
• 1:39:42
  Doctor Who here. I went back in 2016, two weeks
• 1:39:47
  after they had filmed Doctor Who there, and I remember recreating
• 1:39:51
  the picture of Pearl and Peter sort of finding the right
• 1:39:56
  location and recreating that with my partner at the time,
• 1:39:59
  Steve, and just wondering around thinking this is going to be
• 1:40:03
  really amazing because this is the most.
• 1:40:05
  Beautiful place. And I've been saying Doctor Who
• 1:40:07
  should be filming here for the last 10 years or whatever, since
• 1:40:10
  I first saw the photographs of it.
• 1:40:12
  It's like nowhere else in the universe.
• 1:40:14
  It is absolutely made to have sci-fi filmed there and then
• 1:40:19
  everywhere has been filmed there ever since.
• 1:40:21
  So Doctor Who at least got there sort of pretty early.
• 1:40:25
  And the location is beautiful and makes this story, makes it
• 1:40:29
  something really memorable and something big budget and sci-fi
• 1:40:33
  without it actually being big budget and sci-fi.
• 1:40:37
  And I'm completely flummoxed by the cornfields next to it
• 1:40:42
  because it's Valencia and it is dry and arid right next to it,
• 1:40:47
  except last year when it had the massive floods.
• 1:40:49
  But hey, that's climate change for you.
• 1:40:53
  So yeah. So I was immediately, absolutely
• 1:40:56
  going to love this story. And then I saw the story.
• 1:41:02
  We've got half an episode and a brilliant half to 3/4 of an
• 1:41:07
  episode of the Doctor and Bill wandering round an alien city
• 1:41:12
  working out what the mystery is. So for a lot of the time it's
• 1:41:16
  just the two of them and that is really fantastic.
• 1:41:19
  They're such a delight to watch and then they make the mistake
• 1:41:22
  of bringing in rave little and the kids and then the kid is in
• 1:41:28
  jeopardy straight away and the emoji bots are going to kill it
• 1:41:32
  because he can't smile because his mummy's dead and Oh my
• 1:41:35
  goodness, in the forest of the night territory here where yeah,
• 1:41:43
  it's all going to go wrong. He.
• 1:41:45
  Loves kiddie wings. Doesn't he?
• 1:41:47
  He does. Yep, and Steve Rumble.
• 1:41:50
  Does, yeah. Yeah.
• 1:41:53
  I mean, they were armed, the Vardy, you know, they could have
• 1:41:56
  just murdered all the kids. Yep, it was so close.
• 1:42:02
  So yeah, it's a really forgettable and dull episode
• 1:42:06
  despite the beautiful location work.
• 1:42:09
  But I'm going to put it through because when I watched it on
• 1:42:14
  Sunday in as the second episode in my my marathon Capaldi watch,
• 1:42:19
  I found myself really, really enjoying it.
• 1:42:22
  Unexpectedly, I got carried through by those scenes of the
• 1:42:26
  Doctor and Bill wandering around the city like the Doctor and
• 1:42:29
  Sarah Jane or Dr. Ian and Barbara and Susan in the Daleks
• 1:42:35
  just for this is so Doctor Who and they're working things out.
• 1:42:38
  They don't know the answers straight off.
• 1:42:40
  The doctor doesn't know the answer straight off.
• 1:42:42
  He doesn't know where they are. They've just arrived somewhere
• 1:42:45
  and there's a mystery. And it's a really engaging
• 1:42:48
  mystery. And even this time where the
• 1:42:52
  first time round when I thought, oh, God, oh, the humans are here
• 1:42:56
  and it's. And that's destroyed the whole
• 1:42:58
  story. I was quite engaged with them
• 1:43:01
  this time. And this has really taken me by
• 1:43:03
  surprise. And so, yeah, you know, it's not
• 1:43:07
  doing anything like the rest of the season.
• 1:43:10
  We've said it's not doing anything particularly new, but I
• 1:43:14
  thought the robots were a nice design.
• 1:43:16
  I thought the location work was good, and I just quite enjoyed
• 1:43:19
  it. So just for a change, I'm going
• 1:43:21
  to be positive and put through this story so.
• 1:43:25
  Then jump in next. Please, because Smiley and Manny
• 1:43:28
  needs to come into this call. Go on then, Joe.
• 1:43:31
  You're mad. Oh my God, this.
• 1:43:35
  Is. So boring.
• 1:43:37
  You can't pace an episode. Yeah.
• 1:43:40
  Where you pause and investigate for 85% of the episode and then
• 1:43:44
  in the last 15%, you know, your narrative actually kicks in and,
• 1:43:49
  and things start happening. I mean, it's like a massive long
• 1:43:53
  joy and then a. Huge Sprint of.
• 1:43:56
  Events at the end that are so. Rushed that.
• 1:43:59
  None of it's, I mean. The fuck is the?
• 1:44:01
  Point of this story, I think the moral of it is turn your
• 1:44:04
  tamagotchi. Off and on again.
• 1:44:06
  That's it. That's what we really learn
• 1:44:08
  about the Vardy robots. Are you mad?
• 1:44:11
  A good. Piece of.
• 1:44:12
  Design. I mean, they should have been
• 1:44:15
  terrifying. Yeah.
• 1:44:16
  And it should have been a really pointed commentary on kids using
• 1:44:20
  emojis. Instead, they're these stupid
• 1:44:22
  little beady, beady, beady robots that sort of drunk walk
• 1:44:26
  around a bit drunk and awkward. A bit like the Quarks.
• 1:44:29
  Sorry Fraser exuding 0 menace whatsoever.
• 1:44:33
  You know. That's a problem when they owe
• 1:44:35
  your central threat, when they are so unthreatening, that's a
• 1:44:38
  real, real problem. I think.
• 1:44:40
  The dialogue as well in that first 85%, it speaks emoji
• 1:44:46
  cultural voice does not understand how Doctor Who ticks,
• 1:44:50
  I don't think, which means that he has the ability to create
• 1:44:54
  something unique and innovative. And I think this is, and I think
• 1:45:00
  in the forest of the night is. But they're both.
• 1:45:02
  Terrible episodes of Doctor Who, literally without suspense,
• 1:45:07
  without drama, without any of the things that we we expect in
• 1:45:10
  Doctor Who. It's slow, it's creaking, it's
• 1:45:14
  cerebral, it's unsuspenseful. It is just so boring this
• 1:45:19
  episode. And I disagree about the
• 1:45:21
  location as well. I'm so sorry.
• 1:45:22
  And David Gosby Pratt is going to come from me because he went
• 1:45:25
  here as well and said it was just the most beautiful place.
• 1:45:28
  But I think the arc in space, which is doing the same thing as
• 1:45:31
  this Arc in Space, Episode 1, landing in a location where
• 1:45:34
  something has occurred, It's just the regulars and they're
• 1:45:37
  investigating because that's a tight, confined, claustrophobic
• 1:45:42
  space. Yeah, it's still bright.
• 1:45:44
  It has, like, oodles of atmosphere to it.
• 1:45:48
  Whereas that here, it does just feel like a tourist board video
• 1:45:52
  with these huge, wide open visitors.
• 1:45:54
  I don't get the sense that they are in any sort of danger in the
• 1:45:58
  first half of this episode. And that's a problem.
• 1:46:00
  It's like the Doctor and Bill just go on holiday and walk
• 1:46:03
  through a load of fields. It's weird.
• 1:46:07
  It's such a weird, like, look at the second episodes that they
• 1:46:09
  normally do. Fires of Pompeii, of course.
• 1:46:13
  End of the world, end of the world, Yeah.
• 1:46:15
  You know, sort of big hitters. 2 for claw. 2 for claw we started
• 1:46:20
  off with the big hitter here, the pilot my God, let's get out
• 1:46:23
  into the universe and see what amazing magics out there Oh all
• 1:46:27
  right let's walk for a film for an hour fair enough there's that
• 1:46:32
  bit where I I I really thought he was gonna like split them up
• 1:46:35
  because they they go back to the tardis and he's like.
• 1:46:38
  I go watch some movies. Or something.
• 1:46:40
  I'd stay away from my browser history.
• 1:46:42
  And then, and then you think, oh, this is going to split them
• 1:46:46
  up and she's going to go off on her own and maybe come across
• 1:46:48
  the columnist herself. No, she goes right back and
• 1:46:51
  rejoins him. So it's like it just removes all
• 1:46:54
  the drama from that in from that moment.
• 1:46:56
  I think it is really very badly directed as well.
• 1:46:59
  Who directed this one? The guy who directed the pilot?
• 1:47:02
  Well, he he suddenly lost the ability to put things.
• 1:47:05
  On the screen. There's a scene at the end where
• 1:47:07
  they're all in this big white room, all the colonists and the
• 1:47:11
  Doctor and Bill and the Vardy robots, and it's just so badly
• 1:47:16
  staged. The scene.
• 1:47:18
  Yeah, this is not good. It is extremely boring.
• 1:47:23
  One thing Doctor Who should never be is boring.
• 1:47:25
  And yeah, this does nothing for me at all.
• 1:47:27
  I hated it then. It was a chore to come back to,
• 1:47:30
  if I'm honest. Beat it.
• 1:47:33
  Well, it's 2:00 to 1, so UK. Daniel, where are you going to
• 1:47:37
  fall with this one? Would it be a tense cliffhanger
• 1:47:39
  for Elliot or not? Just remember reading in Doctor
• 1:47:44
  Who magazine that Frank Cottrell boys was coming back to do this
• 1:47:48
  episode and I thought, you've got to be kidding.
• 1:47:54
  Forest of the Night Garden was just, I thought, no, just keep
• 1:47:58
  him away from the Doctor Who production office.
• 1:48:00
  Keep him away. Just lock him in the same
• 1:48:03
  cupboard that you can lock Basie Williams in so they don't come
• 1:48:05
  back. I mean, this is an improvement
• 1:48:08
  on that, but frankly, that's not really saying much.
• 1:48:13
  One of the things I don't like about the Moffat era is that he
• 1:48:16
  sometimes neglects guest characters in favour of the
• 1:48:20
  regulars. And as Joe said, there's a lot
• 1:48:23
  of the Doctrine bill wandering around now.
• 1:48:26
  Yeah, Capaldi and Mackie are wonderful together, but we need
• 1:48:31
  some jeopardy. We need some, Yeah, the, the
• 1:48:35
  plot needs to to develop. So wandering around and I have
• 1:48:40
  to say that the location is beautiful.
• 1:48:42
  But there are times when this could be filmed in a, in a
• 1:48:45
  shopping centre in Cardiff and it fails to get that sense of
• 1:48:51
  grandeur. Yeah, you've got that wonderful
• 1:48:52
  open space in the first scene with Mina Anwar, who is quickly
• 1:48:58
  dispatched and you think, oh, great meeting around.
• 1:49:00
  Well, you know, she was in Sarah Jane adventure.
• 1:49:02
  She was running smile, smile, smile, smile.
• 1:49:05
  And you think, oh, house is good.
• 1:49:06
  And then they kill her off and you and you know, you've looked
• 1:49:09
  in the Radio Times or what? And you say, oh, Ralph Little's
• 1:49:12
  in this or from the from the royal family.
• 1:49:15
  And he turns up about 5 minutes at the end and gets to do
• 1:49:19
  absolutely nothing apart from point of gun.
• 1:49:22
  You just think, you know, it was it would be.
• 1:49:26
  It's really, and they're not the only sort of fairly big name
• 1:49:30
  actors who get who get frankly shafted by Moffett in terms of
• 1:49:34
  who seems far more interested in focusing on on the Doctor and
• 1:49:39
  the companion, which, OK, they should do that, but give it a
• 1:49:42
  bit of variety. Yeah.
• 1:49:46
  The the the the robots. Yeah, they're too.
• 1:49:49
  It's they are tweaky from Buck Rogers.
• 1:49:52
  And I hated Buck Rogers as a kid.
• 1:49:53
  It was it was everything I didn't want Doctor to be.
• 1:49:56
  And even as a kid, I I as an adult now, I look at it and
• 1:49:59
  think it looks even more dated than than season 18, which I was
• 1:50:03
  watching. Yeah.
• 1:50:06
  I mean, it looks pretty. It looks expensive on the
• 1:50:09
  outside, but it's it's, you know, it's soulless and there's
• 1:50:12
  not much going on. It's the Melania Trump of Doctor
• 1:50:14
  Who episodes or, or the Kim Kardashian of episodes.
• 1:50:19
  So I'm sorry, I'm, I'm going to be mean and say, no, let's bin
• 1:50:23
  it and put a smile on everyone's face.
• 1:50:27
  Well, there's all these, there's all these borrowed ideas in it
• 1:50:29
  too, like the, the nanobots that kind of eat your flesh, like the
• 1:50:34
  Vashta Narada. The fact that they've, they're
• 1:50:38
  only attacking because that's what they believe they should
• 1:50:41
  do, which is kind of like the empty child, you know, the, the,
• 1:50:45
  the, you know, the they can't deal with grief and all that.
• 1:50:50
  Yeah, yeah. It's just it's alien tech gone
• 1:50:51
  wrong, which is is such a repeat heated memes throughout all of
• 1:50:55
  Moffitt's writing. I mean, it's it's the Happiness
• 1:50:58
  Patrol, but with insects. Despite appearances, they
• 1:51:02
  haven't been dead very long. What?
• 1:51:05
  Does it the colonists? The colonists aren't here yet.
• 1:51:09
  This is the setup team, the skeleton crew.
• 1:51:12
  Why did the robots feed them to the garden?
• 1:51:14
  I don't know, maybe they ran out of fertilizer.
• 1:51:15
  Let's not ask them. Hello.
• 1:51:21
  Yeah. We were just admiring your
• 1:51:22
  garden. Moving on now, because there's
• 1:51:25
  nothing of particular interest here, Cheerio.
• 1:51:34
  If he's chasing us, he's moving very slowly.
• 1:51:36
  Do you know what it means for himself?
• 1:51:37
  He chases you very slowly. It means there's a reason that
• 1:51:40
  they don't have to run. OK, there's slope.
• 1:51:51
  The city's far from, so they catch you in the end.
• 1:51:53
  What do we do? Question.
• 1:51:56
  We've been here for ages, why are they attacking us now?
• 1:51:58
  Does it matter? Only if we want to live.
• 1:52:03
  Smile for me. Smile.
• 1:52:06
  Use your whole face right now. Do it.
• 1:52:10
  What good smiling. Smiles aren't just smiles.
• 1:52:12
  Psychologically, they have a measurable effect on your mood
• 1:52:15
  states. Yes, these robots, they built
• 1:52:20
  this place that grew those trees.
• 1:52:22
  Something went wrong, but they were designed to make you happy.
• 1:52:25
  How would massacring hundreds of people make me happy?
• 1:52:28
  How would massacring hundreds of people make me happy :). :) and
• 1:52:37
  without the camp, which it really needs just to have a bit
• 1:52:41
  of life into life in it, yeah. OK, Well Elliot, what do you
• 1:52:46
  think of this? Well, if if you'll.
• 1:52:49
  Allow me just briefly at the start, I'd like to sort of do a,
• 1:52:52
  a 12th Doctor esque lecture. Just before I I I Segway fully,
• 1:52:59
  I just want you to think about how in occasionally in history
• 1:53:03
  you get these sort of repeating patterns when it comes to the
• 1:53:05
  entertainment industry. You get Dante's Peak and volcano
• 1:53:09
  releasing in the same year. You get A Bug's Life, You get
• 1:53:12
  Ants. You get Deep Impact.
• 1:53:14
  You get Armageddon in 2017. You got Smile and The Emoji
• 1:53:18
  Movie. Oh yeah, that's.
• 1:53:21
  Right, a dark, dark year for entertainment.
• 1:53:25
  I thought we were going to get to say about Remembrance of the
• 1:53:27
  Daleks and Silver Nemesis. In the same year.
• 1:53:31
  Good. Point.
• 1:53:32
  Probably a lot more on topic. So yeah, when I was when I was
• 1:53:38
  doing my my little degree and I was, you know, feeling very
• 1:53:41
  hoity and toity about art. I think this is one of the
• 1:53:43
  episodes where I looked at Doctor Who and I was like, what
• 1:53:45
  are they doing? What are they?
• 1:53:48
  Emoji robots? Emoji robots.
• 1:53:51
  So when I got to it in my initial watch through, I was
• 1:53:55
  pleasantly surprised. I didn't find the emoji robot as
• 1:54:00
  tringy and and stupid as the idea of emoji robot sounded.
• 1:54:03
  And I was pleasantly surprised. So I was looking forward to
• 1:54:08
  watching this back this time around because I thought, oh,
• 1:54:10
  maybe I might be the only person who's gunning for the emoji box.
• 1:54:13
  Because I remember finding the episode really fun.
• 1:54:16
  And I do think it sets out a good stall.
• 1:54:20
  I think it's weird. I do think the the trying to
• 1:54:23
  tell someone that yeah their their mother has died whilst
• 1:54:27
  having to keep a smile on your face is is an interesting set up
• 1:54:30
  and I love the the mystery of of the doctor and Bill exploring.
• 1:54:35
  It feels like we don't do that too much nowadays and I enjoy.
• 1:54:39
  The reason for that, Elliot, it's very.
• 1:54:41
  Boring. See, that's the thing I find I
• 1:54:44
  find it intriguing, especially when the actors have got such
• 1:54:46
  good chemistry as as as Peter Capeldy and Pearl Mackey do.
• 1:54:50
  And I like Doctor Who when it's got a little bit of a nasty
• 1:54:53
  streak in it as well. So finding out that the
• 1:54:54
  colonists are being used for fertilizer, I'm like, oh, this
• 1:54:57
  is the. Gold's falling out of the bottom
• 1:55:00
  of the machine is great. When Bill puts her hand under
• 1:55:03
  the and she's like, is this snow?
• 1:55:05
  He's like, no, it's it's the colonists.
• 1:55:07
  Is is horrible. And and I'm, I'm having a great
• 1:55:11
  time. And then, yeah, we get to about
• 1:55:13
  25 minutes and you're like, Blimey, there's there's 20
• 1:55:17
  minutes left of this episode. How are we doing?
• 1:55:19
  20 minutes And it's it's Ralph Little in jeans and a gun
• 1:55:23
  fighting emoji. Oh, it's so boring.
• 1:55:26
  The second-half of this episode really lost me any goodwill that
• 1:55:29
  it had built up, which was, you know, a bit really lost me.
• 1:55:34
  I think it doesn't stick the landing in any meaningful way
• 1:55:37
  whatsoever. It just kind of turns into a
• 1:55:39
  base under siege. But they're under siege by emoji
• 1:55:43
  bots dullness. And it really soured me on it.
• 1:55:48
  Yeah, I I think as well the the setting, I haven't seen it in
• 1:55:52
  real life. I'm sure, I'm sure the location
• 1:55:54
  is gorgeous. I think to go.
• 1:55:55
  I'm not too far from you. I should go.
• 1:55:57
  I've got no. Excuse me?
• 1:55:59
  But I think sci-fi when it does people in robes and stark white
• 1:56:04
  spaces, oh it's boring. It looks like the the Heaven
• 1:56:08
  ship from Red Dwarf. When they clone Red Dwarf, you
• 1:56:10
  get the hell ship and the Heaven ship it.
• 1:56:11
  You know, I was expecting people to be skipping around playing
• 1:56:14
  harps and doing interpretive dance.
• 1:56:16
  Numbers massacred though earlier.
• 1:56:17
  That's wonderful. So, yeah, I don't really have
• 1:56:22
  anything profound to say about this other than I thought I was
• 1:56:25
  going to enjoy it a lot more than I did.
• 1:56:27
  And I think in in the second-half, it really loses any
• 1:56:30
  of its kind of minor grace that it sets up.
• 1:56:33
  And I I would stick it in the bin, but it's it's better than
• 1:56:36
  in the forest of the night in. The forest of the night.
• 1:56:39
  He forgets to like, give you a climax.
• 1:56:41
  Doesn't he just have to stand around and let it happen, right?
• 1:56:45
  And this is like, right, Well, that's it.
• 1:56:46
  You were complaining so much. You're going to get so much in
• 1:56:48
  10 minutes. It doesn't work or whatever it's
• 1:56:51
  it's very hard. There is there is one line that
• 1:56:55
  I do like from Capaldi when I think it's when they're testing
• 1:56:58
  out the, the sort of the, the blue food or whatever it is.
• 1:57:02
  And he goes, I, I, I knew a, a king of algae once he fancied
• 1:57:07
  me. And it's just such a non
• 1:57:08
  sequitur that even Bill looks at him like.
• 1:57:11
  What? And please, everybody, remember
• 1:57:14
  what I said earlier about Capaldi and Mackie.
• 1:57:17
  There's a reason why she was bumped into that tardy.
• 1:57:19
  So they didn't have to spend too much of this together.
• 1:57:22
  There was a real thing in the first half of this season that
• 1:57:25
  they were trying to and knock, knock there's if you go look in,
• 1:57:29
  there's a lot of it there. And Ralph Little is a really
• 1:57:31
  capable actor. Man, yeah.
• 1:57:33
  Absolutely, yeah. Given him this.
• 1:57:35
  Waste role is, yeah, the Moffat era.
• 1:57:40
  He does it all the time. He's brilliant.
• 1:57:42
  Actors come in and they're given nothing to do.
• 1:57:45
  I'm looking at you, Arabella Weir.
• 1:57:46
  All right. Did you say?
• 1:57:50
  Brilliant, I think. Yeah, I think she's in the Bill
• 1:57:54
  Bailey. I mean, come on.
• 1:57:56
  Yeah. Coleman.
• 1:57:57
  What's the winner in the wardrobe?
• 1:57:58
  Net Badland. No, not net.
• 1:58:00
  No. Net Crosby.
• 1:58:01
  Net Crosby. Yeah, boy.
• 1:58:03
  Yeah, boy. Anyway.
• 1:58:05
  Well, there we go. Smile has fallen.
• 1:58:08
  Laughing emoji. It really is a proper sense of
• 1:58:14
  old man trying to be hip though, isn't it?
• 1:58:18
  It reminds me of Cartmel bringing in, you know, Sophie
• 1:58:20
  Aldridge and trying to give her a hip dialogue.
• 1:58:22
  Here we go. Free.
• 1:58:24
  Every episode. So yes, as as we said, three
• 1:58:30
  down to to go and we go over to Joe for the next choice.
• 1:58:35
  Yes. Hello.
• 1:58:35
  Can we do thin ice please? Of course we can.
• 1:58:39
  It contains my least favorite moment in all of New Who, and it
• 1:58:44
  appalls me, frankly. And that is when Doctor Who
• 1:58:48
  punches a racist in the face. Now, that's not, it's not
• 1:58:51
  because he punches a racist in the face, because they probably
• 1:58:53
  all deserve it. But I really, really hate that
• 1:58:57
  that is his reaction in that scene because it almost feels
• 1:59:01
  like an education to the children watching at home.
• 1:59:04
  But if you don't agree with someone, hit it in the face.
• 1:59:08
  Always remember Bill, passion fights but reason wins.
• 1:59:16
  Doctor Disco from the Fairford club obviously one aspires to
• 1:59:21
  membership, but to actually be considered for.
• 1:59:26
  Who? Who let this?
• 1:59:27
  Creature in here on your feet, girl, in the presence of your
• 1:59:30
  betters. He's human, 31 years of age, low
• 1:59:41
  and iron. Yeah.
• 1:59:43
  And I really hate that. I think there's a more
• 1:59:45
  considered and more interest, and people think that seems
• 1:59:48
  very, very funny. And much like many moments in
• 1:59:53
  the Moffat era, I think it's pretty irresponsible, that
• 1:59:56
  scene. That's the only thing I don't
• 1:59:59
  like about Thin Ice. The rest of it, I think is gold
• 2:00:03
  from beginning to end. I think Sarah Dollard did an OK
• 2:00:07
  script with, what was it called, Face the Raven.
• 2:00:10
  Face the Raven. This is a banger of a script,
• 2:00:13
  man. She has got Kapoli's voice and
• 2:00:15
  then some. I think this might be his best
• 2:00:17
  performance in his entire run. So I certainly think it's his
• 2:00:20
  best characterization. Watch him.
• 2:00:24
  Watch him with the kids telling the stories man.
• 2:00:27
  A far cry from who he was in the Series A watch how morally
• 2:00:31
  upright he is in parts of this episode, how he's protecting the
• 2:00:34
  victims here the the the creature under the ice, you
• 2:00:37
  know, trying to save as many lives as possible, being just
• 2:00:41
  wonderful with children showing Bill a brilliant time at the
• 2:00:45
  frost fair, you know, fabulous in the top hat.
• 2:00:48
  He's having the best time of his life.
• 2:00:50
  And yet in the same breath, there's space for that truly
• 2:00:53
  extraordinary moment when the kid dies.
• 2:00:57
  I've been a bit mean about that poor child that expires in this
• 2:01:00
  episode today. It is chilling that moment.
• 2:01:04
  We don't kill children like this and Doctor Who for a reason.
• 2:01:08
  Well, Dark Water, maybe we do. Well, I think Bill's reaction to
• 2:01:15
  it, her horrified reaction, and then and then forcing him to
• 2:01:20
  answer the question, have you killed anyone?
• 2:01:23
  It's one of the single best dramatic moments in Doctor
• 2:01:25
  Whoever. All the better because they're
• 2:01:27
  both so restrained. Nobody is going over the top in
• 2:01:31
  that. Nobody's pushing it too far.
• 2:01:33
  It's just amazing. I, I love the atmosphere of the
• 2:01:38
  frost fair as well. I think the first sort of 10
• 2:01:41
  minutes where they're just exploring the frost fair.
• 2:01:43
  They pumped a good amount of money in this, right?
• 2:01:46
  It's full of extras. I'm utterly convinced they are
• 2:01:49
  standing on ice and they're missed about and there's
• 2:01:52
  wonderful carnival people and he's eating crazy foods and
• 2:01:55
  things like that. This is what we were promised in
• 2:01:58
  the pilot is going out and seeing, you know, the wonder of
• 2:02:01
  the universe and this is stepping back into a really
• 2:02:03
  interesting period of history. So interesting.
• 2:02:06
  I think big have been there three times already.
• 2:02:10
  But you know, it's some of that's worth going.
• 2:02:12
  But I think this is gorgeous. I think it would be easier to
• 2:02:15
  just say, yeah, this is the one where he's trying to protect us,
• 2:02:20
  a whale under the ice. And not really much happens in
• 2:02:23
  it. But as a piece of atmospheric
• 2:02:27
  history with the Doctor and the companion at their absolute
• 2:02:33
  best, just riveting to watch. It's everything that wasn't
• 2:02:36
  happening in Smile for me. This.
• 2:02:38
  I can't take my eyes off the pair of them.
• 2:02:41
  Yeah, please. Thin ice is amazing.
• 2:02:43
  But for Capaldi and for his Doctor, this is amazingly good.
• 2:02:49
  He's terrific in this. This is the this is the 12th
• 2:02:52
  Doctor I would have loved from the start.
• 2:02:55
  I like that cunt in series 8. I do like I like Colin being a
• 2:02:59
  total cunt as well. But.
• 2:03:02
  But nobody else did and people switched off in droves.
• 2:03:05
  But if we'd have started here, imagine if we'd It's all he
• 2:03:08
  said. Sorry about Colin and terror the
• 2:03:10
  vervoids. If we'd started there, my God
• 2:03:13
  almighty, where would he have been by the end?
• 2:03:15
  Yeah, just magic. Magical 12th Doctor.
• 2:03:18
  This, please. Let's put thin ice through.
• 2:03:22
  Elliot. What do you think?
• 2:03:26
  I really enjoy the Doctor Who historicals and I like the pure
• 2:03:33
  historicals the best. Now, of course, I've got to get
• 2:03:36
  over it because they ended, you know, 60 odd years ago.
• 2:03:42
  So, you know, I'm hanging, I'm hanging on to that a little bit
• 2:03:44
  too much. But I really like Doctor Who.
• 2:03:47
  When it goes into the past, I always find it tends to be more
• 2:03:49
  interesting than when they go into the future.
• 2:03:53
  And I just really enjoyed this episode, if for nothing else,
• 2:03:56
  seeing a slice of history that I, I wasn't familiar with it
• 2:04:02
  actually, I think that's the mark of a good episode for me.
• 2:04:05
  It had me Googling the frost fairs because this was something
• 2:04:09
  that I had, I had never really heard of before.
• 2:04:13
  And I, I love always seeing the regulars in Regency costume and
• 2:04:17
  the sort of just immersiveness of, of seeing all, I mean, all
• 2:04:21
  of the fun Regency activities, you've got carnival performers
• 2:04:24
  and elephants because yeah, that's all a big novelty.
• 2:04:27
  And, and people selling pies and St. urchins.
• 2:04:29
  It's so Dickens I. Am.
• 2:04:32
  Yeah, Yeah. Yeah, I I like feeling like I'm
• 2:04:36
  learning, but not being sort of forced to learn.
• 2:04:39
  I'm kind of passively taking your board knowledge and
• 2:04:42
  information as I'm watching this.
• 2:04:43
  They try to do Dickens right in the next stocks.
• 2:04:45
  I remember when he lands and he's in that sort of
• 2:04:47
  marketplace, and this is Dickens in a way that flops completely.
• 2:04:53
  I can't even put my finger on what they get so right here, but
• 2:04:56
  they do. I think I know.
• 2:04:58
  I feel like sometimes there's a tendency to, to say something
• 2:05:01
  like the next doctor where they're, they're saying, oh,
• 2:05:05
  we're, we're doing, we're doing Dickens.
• 2:05:08
  It's, it's going to be set at Christmas.
• 2:05:09
  It's going to be homages to A Christmas Carol, which means
• 2:05:11
  sometimes it becomes kind of hyper aware of that.
• 2:05:13
  And it's almost got to get the the tropes in.
• 2:05:15
  Where do there boy, what what year is this?
• 2:05:18
  Yeah, it's a bit grubby of this, isn't it?
• 2:05:20
  It's a bit more down in the dirt.
• 2:05:22
  It's let's pick, let's sort, picture postcards the next
• 2:05:26
  doctor. So, yeah, I, I, I think, I think
• 2:05:29
  that whole, that whole side of it is, is great.
• 2:05:33
  I do, I do worry about the, I mean, you talked about the
• 2:05:35
  punching, the punching the racist in the in the face.
• 2:05:40
  I do, yeah. I suppose it's not really my
• 2:05:42
  place to to speak on. I find it's it's touching on
• 2:05:45
  sort of like racial politics quite interesting where Bill's
• 2:05:48
  obviously very hesitant to be wandering around in this time
• 2:05:52
  period, but they kind of shrug it off a little.
• 2:05:57
  There's a sort of, no, I just don't.
• 2:06:00
  Sometimes there's a bit of a dismissiveness about it where
• 2:06:02
  like, you know, Bills sort of says that it's more diverse than
• 2:06:06
  than the movies. And I like the sentiment behind
• 2:06:09
  that because of course, it's kind of grappling with that idea
• 2:06:12
  of, you know, you get racist now who see a black person in a
• 2:06:16
  historical film and they're like, well, you know, there were
• 2:06:17
  no black people alive in Victorian England of such as a.
• 2:06:21
  Regional Steven Moffat kind of put his foot in it in an
• 2:06:25
  interview once where he sort of said, oh, well, we kind of have
• 2:06:28
  to tell a lie and say that there there were more black people
• 2:06:32
  back then when they weren't. And actually, you know, you do
• 2:06:34
  your research and actually there were it just they just they just
• 2:06:37
  not talked about and. I think they, they conflate, I
• 2:06:40
  think like people of people of colour and people from different
• 2:06:43
  backgrounds existing with sort of like an absence of perhaps
• 2:06:47
  racist attitudes, sometimes a little bit.
• 2:06:49
  And I guess it's Doctor Who and sometimes it'd be hard to
• 2:06:51
  confront that stuff. So I just think it kind of makes
• 2:06:53
  it feel a bit like, I mean, not really sure where to go, which
• 2:06:56
  is why I like the scene with it. Was the racist in series 8?
• 2:07:00
  I mean, he was a. Treasure racist towards.
• 2:07:02
  Danny Pink. Now he's punching him in the
• 2:07:05
  face. But it's the whole, I think it's
• 2:07:07
  like the whole or the whole arcs of Morphite is what it does
• 2:07:09
  because it feels like it's trying to take it seriously
• 2:07:11
  here. In the next episode, Bill's
• 2:07:12
  accused of being a racist because she's shocked at seeing
• 2:07:14
  a Blue Man. It just it feels.
• 2:07:16
  It's a different writer, though. Isn't it peculiar?
• 2:07:19
  Yeah, but it it just sometimes it doesn't make for coherence,
• 2:07:22
  But I'm I'm trying to enjoy the story.
• 2:07:23
  Sorry, I'm getting I'm getting downloaded now, but it's if you
• 2:07:26
  start me about Moffat and series arcs anyway.
• 2:07:30
  And I like the monster a lot. Like it's it's it feels
• 2:07:37
  genuinely weird and and creepy. The idea of something lurking
• 2:07:40
  under the Thames. I mean, again, it's something
• 2:07:41
  that I said why like the pilot, it feels grounded.
• 2:07:43
  There is something in an, an iconic landmark, but I also
• 2:07:51
  enjoy that it's, it's, it's not a monster, it's being exploited
• 2:07:56
  monstrously by human beings. And I, I just really like that.
• 2:08:01
  I think it's a it's an episode that just oozes atmosphere and
• 2:08:06
  good intentions and sometimes really landing those good
• 2:08:09
  intentions and sometimes not so much.
• 2:08:12
  But I don't mind. I'm having fun while I'm
• 2:08:14
  watching it. That shot of Peter Capaldi
• 2:08:15
  getting kicked out of the tent as he skates across the ice.
• 2:08:19
  Just show me the trick. Just show me how it works.
• 2:08:22
  It's like hypothetic. Hypothetically.
• 2:08:24
  I meant hypothetically. And then he's stolen a pie.
• 2:08:26
  He's very funny. Same with when they're skulking
• 2:08:28
  around the docks. He's asking if anybody's seen a
• 2:08:30
  man with a tattoo of a ship hanging around the docks.
• 2:08:34
  Everybody's got tattoos of ships.
• 2:08:36
  Yeah, it's it's. When he's telling the story and
• 2:08:39
  he's grinning and he looks more terrifying than anybody, he's
• 2:08:43
  want to tell his story. Stop smiling, Peak and booting.
• 2:08:47
  You're terrifying. And my, I guess like my last
• 2:08:51
  little top rod as well as I think that the, the sort of
• 2:08:54
  rescuing of the of the urchins is very, very nice, very heart
• 2:08:59
  warming. Again, that feels spiritually so
• 2:09:01
  much more kind of Christmas Carol Dickensian.
• 2:09:03
  It fills me with with joy and happiness that that all all
• 2:09:06
  works out for them. And you're not going to pretend
• 2:09:08
  that they're particularly rich or or complex characters.
• 2:09:11
  Yeah, this is no like Nancy from The Empty Child.
• 2:09:14
  Yeah, but it's a it's a nice little, it kind of fills me with
• 2:09:18
  joy. And I might start watching this
• 2:09:19
  as a, as a sort of Christmas episode, I think around.
• 2:09:22
  Christmas time, didn't you find that cyber sweatshop pleasingly
• 2:09:26
  to Kenzie and Elliot? We're back there again.
• 2:09:32
  Oh, that episode is. Sorry.
• 2:09:34
  I'm sorry. I love how you keep me on track,
• 2:09:38
  Daniel. Thank you.
• 2:09:41
  I also don't I also don't like the one where they meet Charles
• 2:09:43
  Dickens either. So you know this is the.
• 2:09:45
  This is the only one that feels with.
• 2:09:48
  Ghosts at Christmas. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 2:09:53
  Don't you start. Yeah, don't get me started.
• 2:09:56
  To be fair, I think you know, I can, I can sum up my attitudes
• 2:09:59
  towards that with just two words, which is Mark Gatus.
• 2:10:01
  Anyway, that's that's all I've got to say about thin ice.
• 2:10:05
  I think it's going through. Are you going?
• 2:10:07
  Through not basically fine. It yeah, it's better.
• 2:10:11
  Than fine. It's better than fine.
• 2:10:13
  It's pretty good. Broadly good.
• 2:10:16
  Broadly good also. Magnificent.
• 2:10:21
  There is nothing. OK.
• 2:10:21
  Daniel, is this basically fine for you all?
• 2:10:26
  Magnificent or pretty? I I mean, let by this time
• 2:10:30
  Doctor Who's turned up in Victorian London almost as much
• 2:10:33
  as he's turned up in Cardiff. But it yeah, it it as you say,
• 2:10:39
  it's there is something about the cinematography in this
• 2:10:43
  episode. It looks and I think because it
• 2:10:46
  isn't sort of traditional, because it's kept mostly on the
• 2:10:50
  ice and it's sort of it does something new with the Victorian
• 2:10:53
  period rather than just brings it back with, you know, like the
• 2:10:57
  Peyton Nosta gang or anything like that.
• 2:11:02
  So, you know, initially I was thinking, oh, great, no, another
• 2:11:04
  one. But then the Frost Fair is so
• 2:11:07
  well designed and it's sort of deliberately misty to keep,
• 2:11:10
  maybe to keep the costs down. I don't know.
• 2:11:14
  Is is this a pure historical? Because apart from the creature,
• 2:11:19
  I don't know. Because it is there is sort of a
• 2:11:21
  hint that the, the, the, the, the Lord, whatever his name is
• 2:11:26
  Lord Sutcliffe. Lord Sutcliffe is possibly an
• 2:11:29
  alien. He the doctor says, oh, I think
• 2:11:30
  I preferred you when you're an alien.
• 2:11:32
  What? Yeah, like you, Joe.
• 2:11:35
  I'm not particularly keen on the on the on the punching because
• 2:11:40
  it is very irresponsible, but it is actually quite, I don't know
• 2:11:46
  if you can take it as a, as a piece of fun, but then you get
• 2:11:50
  that wonderful moment when Capaldi does do that speech
• 2:11:53
  about, you know, you, you, you value.
• 2:11:57
  Oh, I've got it here because I can never imagine this.
• 2:12:00
  It is just beautiful. I mean, you said, you know what,
• 2:12:06
  human progress isn't measured by industry.
• 2:12:08
  It's measured by the value you place on a life, an unimportant
• 2:12:11
  life, a life without privilege. The boy who died on the river,
• 2:12:15
  that's that boy's value is your value.
• 2:12:17
  That's what defines an age. That's what defines a species.
• 2:12:21
  And then you see Bill looking at him was just such awe.
• 2:12:27
  And and she it's almost like after the sort of the tension
• 2:12:31
  between them about, you know, have you killed anyone?
• 2:12:33
  And she's really not sure about where she is with this guy.
• 2:12:38
  Suddenly she realises actually, no, he's if he has had to kill
• 2:12:42
  someone, it's not really something that he's been keen to
• 2:12:45
  do or, or, or has been reluctant, has been reluctant to
• 2:12:48
  do. And it just, it's just a what
• 2:12:51
  it's a really, really good moment.
• 2:12:52
  And the guy who plays Lord Sutcliffe is he's he's, he's
• 2:12:57
  read the script. He knows there's no subtlety
• 2:12:59
  here. He's that nasty.
• 2:13:01
  And for once, actually that works.
• 2:13:04
  And again, something that the new series doesn't do is sort of
• 2:13:07
  out and out nasty characters. You know, they're all sort of
• 2:13:12
  slightly, you know, there's a reason why they're nasty or
• 2:13:16
  they're sort of, you know, mother didn't likeable things
• 2:13:19
  like that. So he's a bit not quite on the
• 2:13:22
  same power of power as Diana Riggin, the Crimson Horror, who
• 2:13:27
  I just absolutely glorious. But yeah, it's it's it's really
• 2:13:31
  good. So yeah.
• 2:13:32
  It's. Interesting that in the next
• 2:13:34
  season, in this exact slot, it is Rosa and we see that punch
• 2:13:40
  from the completely the other angle, racist punching a black
• 2:13:45
  man. Now that is.
• 2:13:47
  I hate seeing that. It's a so much more powerful
• 2:13:51
  moment because we're supposed to think that the punch is
• 2:13:55
  unacceptable. Clearly one is is the the
• 2:13:59
  punching thin ice is done for laughs, you could argue.
• 2:14:02
  Because it's after that whole speakers of the Doctor saying,
• 2:14:04
  oh, it's all about diplomacy. Yeah, it's clearly done for.
• 2:14:07
  Laughs convince them, and yeah. Apart from, Apart from the
• 2:14:13
  doctor saying she might be Banksy or is she Banksy or
• 2:14:17
  there's very, very little humour in, in Rosa.
• 2:14:20
  And probably that's, that's, that's, that's, that's a good
• 2:14:24
  thing really. Well, and cause Rosa is Rosa is
• 2:14:27
  all about racism, isn't it? Whereas this touches on many
• 2:14:31
  different subjects, doesn't it? This again talks about
• 2:14:33
  capitalism as well, really, doesn't it?
• 2:14:35
  And how you and later on when that thing is as we see in in
• 2:14:40
  Oxygen, where this company, this, you know, nameless company
• 2:14:44
  places absolutely no value on, on anyone on life at all.
• 2:14:49
  Yeah. It feels like it's endorsing a
• 2:14:52
  physically violent reaction. And I just don't think we should
• 2:14:56
  ever go there, nor with the doctor.
• 2:14:58
  No. But then you could also argue
• 2:15:01
  there's so many times when the doctors punched people.
• 2:15:04
  I got a list. Yeah.
• 2:15:05
  Karate, you know, Venusian, IKEA, Victory of the Daleks.
• 2:15:10
  So when Colin L bench shooting people in shooting, shooting
• 2:15:14
  Ogrons, He doesn't he doesn't throw the person in the house.
• 2:15:18
  He would. He could have done, though.
• 2:15:19
  Yes, but he doesn't. And that's what that's what
• 2:15:21
  really annoys me that he doesn't do that.
• 2:15:23
  He does make a joke, though. You'll forgive me if I don't
• 2:15:26
  join. Yes.
• 2:15:27
  Yeah. Oh, sorry.
• 2:15:28
  We've gone to a completely enough era now.
• 2:15:30
  He's tortured to a genocide victim this year, so I think
• 2:15:33
  that takes the biscuit on all all of it.
• 2:15:35
  And we had much fun discussing. That, I mean, he's always been a
• 2:15:37
  hypocrite, hasn't. He.
• 2:15:39
  Oh yeah. Basically, yes, absolutely yes.
• 2:15:41
  But basically it's like, you know, like Colin tried to.
• 2:15:43
  Strike. Perry And that's not acceptable,
• 2:15:45
  no. And definitely punches this man
• 2:15:48
  in the face. And that's all right because
• 2:15:50
  they've got a difference of opinion.
• 2:15:51
  It's muddy. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 2:15:56
  So yes, I'm going to put it through as well.
• 2:15:58
  OK, so it's going through. So yeah, I'm there's lots of
• 2:16:05
  things that I really, really like in this episode.
• 2:16:08
  Just that really simple effect of the lights under the ice
• 2:16:13
  chasing you and they're coming. And it's so simple and it's so
• 2:16:18
  cheap, but it is really effective and it is really
• 2:16:22
  chilling because we see what happens with that.
• 2:16:26
  And just that effect of the ice opening up, swallowing the
• 2:16:30
  person down and then closing back up afterwards is so alien
• 2:16:35
  and weird on the Thames that that that works really
• 2:16:39
  effectively. And then you've got the
• 2:16:41
  brilliant scene of the Doctor and Bill in the diving suits
• 2:16:46
  under the water, stomping through the water in those old
• 2:16:51
  fashioned diving suits. It reminds me of the cover of
• 2:16:53
  that BBC book with Peter Davison's face.
• 2:16:56
  Yeah, interesting. And you can.
• 2:16:58
  See all of London in silhouette. Yeah, it's beautifully done.
• 2:17:03
  And that's the design of those suits is so atmospheric and
• 2:17:08
  strange anyway. And then to have that sort of on
• 2:17:11
  top of this is really good. And then just the little nod to
• 2:17:14
  the Marconi scope in the in the timer for the explosives when
• 2:17:22
  they're going on. So the bit from Pyramids of Mars
• 2:17:24
  and you can see the dial going round and it's just the design
• 2:17:28
  of it is so beautiful. And just the image of the
• 2:17:31
  elephant coming towards you as the at the end of the precrit
• 2:17:35
  teaser, like it's going to be a big alien reveal and then it's a
• 2:17:39
  bloody elephant. That's really, really cool.
• 2:17:42
  Don't you think the elephant scream to start the episode is
• 2:17:45
  genius? Yeah.
• 2:17:46
  Yeah. Because you're in it.
• 2:17:48
  And from that point, from that second, you're in it in the
• 2:17:51
  atmosphere. Yeah.
• 2:17:53
  You know, and like everyone said, the frost fair is so
• 2:17:56
  beautifully done. I don't know how they did that
• 2:17:58
  to make that look like they're on the top of the ice, but it
• 2:18:02
  works brilliantly. It's got to be a set.
• 2:18:04
  It's a set with a mixture of kind of effects in it a little
• 2:18:07
  bit. So they use I think for the fog
• 2:18:09
  and the backgrounds. It's CGI, but the yeah, the
• 2:18:13
  frost fair itself is a set. You're completely convinced
• 2:18:15
  they're outside when? I'm me too.
• 2:18:17
  And and we know we're going to have that jeopardy right at the
• 2:18:21
  end where they're running across the ice and the ice is breaking
• 2:18:24
  and it works every time. It is so tense and so brilliant.
• 2:18:29
  And the doctor is really struggling to haul Bill up with
• 2:18:32
  one hand and pull her off the ice because the the she he's
• 2:18:39
  going to lose her otherwise. And those seems to play so well.
• 2:18:43
  And then just, I really love the fact that you don't get a
• 2:18:46
  glimpse of the whole of the creature.
• 2:18:50
  It's there, but it's just enough to suggest what it looks like.
• 2:18:54
  So if you're a child, you've got the chance to draw that because
• 2:18:57
  you've seen a fin, you've seen its mouth, you've seen this, but
• 2:19:00
  you don't know what the whole of the creature looks like.
• 2:19:03
  And that's the best way to do a monster is to not show the whole
• 2:19:07
  lot. Douglas Canfield approach, isn't
• 2:19:09
  it? Yeah, particularly something big
• 2:19:11
  in the Thames, if you've got the hand coming out and just going,
• 2:19:15
  he's going to ruin it, you know. So that's the way to do it.
• 2:19:21
  And it's just that that tidal wave of water under the bridge
• 2:19:25
  at the end as it dives down to give the sense of scale really
• 2:19:28
  works. So all of that is great.
• 2:19:31
  It's a shame Lord Sutcliffe is so one note and there's not much
• 2:19:35
  development in his character. And I think he's played very
• 2:19:38
  much like that because there's not a lot for him to to get off
• 2:19:42
  sort of as the big villain. He's bit literally the big
• 2:19:45
  capitalist Lord villain and there's not much subtlety there.
• 2:19:50
  I don't think he's played particularly well either.
• 2:19:54
  But that's not, and that just might be because it's a youngish
• 2:19:58
  actor who hasn't got the I think maybe it might also be my fault
• 2:20:03
  that I was expecting someone a lot older, because that's the
• 2:20:08
  image of the Lords that you tend to get.
• 2:20:11
  And so I was thinking maybe of someone like Lord Ravensworth,
• 2:20:14
  but a racist from he. Does look a bit like a sort of
• 2:20:17
  discount Hugh Grant. But a?
• 2:20:20
  Lot younger, you know. Yeah, he was in the sitcom
• 2:20:22
  Benidorm for years. Like the actor's name escapes
• 2:20:24
  me, but that's. That's sort of that's right.
• 2:20:28
  Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, so he's got comedy chops
• 2:20:30
  behind him. So, you know, maybe that that's
• 2:20:33
  is sort of played a bit broader than it it might have been.
• 2:20:36
  And with his comedy hench men and and things as well.
• 2:20:40
  Look at Face the Raven. Dollard couldn't really
• 2:20:43
  characterize her guest characters in that either, so.
• 2:20:47
  No. So maybe that's just just her
• 2:20:49
  So. And also, like, those people are
• 2:20:51
  kind of so cartoonishly evil in real life that it kind of rings
• 2:20:56
  quite true to me. And so, yeah, maybe that's a
• 2:20:58
  good point. Yeah.
• 2:20:59
  Look around you now. Politically.
• 2:21:01
  Well, yeah, Quite, yeah. So you know.
• 2:21:05
  It's Nicholas Burns. Nicholas Burns.
• 2:21:08
  That's right. Yes, yes, yes.
• 2:21:10
  So yeah, you know what? It's a really good episode.
• 2:21:13
  It's nice and strong. It's full of memorable imagery.
• 2:21:16
  Of course, I'm going to put it through.
• 2:21:18
  Yes. So, Daniel, over to you.
• 2:21:24
  OK, I love this. I, I just, I just adore this.
• 2:21:29
  This is my absolute favorite kind of Doctor Who story because
• 2:21:33
  at first glance, it's your completely run-of-the-mill,
• 2:21:36
  formulaic, lightweight bit of fluff which has actually got a
• 2:21:40
  lot on its mind. So what Sarah Dollard, I think,
• 2:21:43
  what I think she's doing here, is she takes the framework of a
• 2:21:46
  very traditional Doctor Who adventure, the Regency
• 2:21:49
  historical setting, the monster beneath the eyes, the Dickensian
• 2:21:52
  stock characters, a hissable villain.
• 2:21:55
  And she uses it to sneak in all these very short but very open
• 2:22:01
  discussions about racism, about morality, about slavery, about
• 2:22:05
  the whitewashing of history, about privilege and human greed
• 2:22:09
  and protecting endangered species.
• 2:22:11
  I mean, this is a Doctor Who episode where, you know, the
• 2:22:14
  university intellectual and a queer black woman violently
• 2:22:18
  overthrow a member of the ruling class.
• 2:22:21
  And then once he's dead, they redistribute his wealth to the
• 2:22:24
  very people that he hated so much, which is not subtle at
• 2:22:27
  all, but I just love that. That's great.
• 2:22:31
  Yeah. So, you know, there's a.
• 2:22:33
  Yes, we mentioned some of the things that are wrong with it.
• 2:22:35
  It's very trad. It's very basic.
• 2:22:37
  The kids, you know, but they're a lot better than the kids in
• 2:22:42
  the last time Capaldi had to act against kids with, you know, the
• 2:22:45
  Peppa Pig child from for In the Forest of the Night.
• 2:22:50
  The villain has a bit of the planet of EU problem of only
• 2:22:52
  having a handful of scenes and then he only meets the Doctor
• 2:22:55
  and the companion towards the end.
• 2:22:58
  But I don't care. I don't care.
• 2:23:00
  I mean you, you can keep your heaven sense and your how many
• 2:23:04
  seconds in eternity speeches. This this has except for the
• 2:23:07
  finale. This has my absolute favorite
• 2:23:10
  Peter Capaldi performance because he gets the balance
• 2:23:13
  exactly right here, the way the Doctor kind of teases Bill at
• 2:23:17
  the beginning with a twinkle in his eye, you know, where's Pete?
• 2:23:19
  Oh, well, that's what happened to Pete.
• 2:23:21
  Who's Pete? Oh, exactly.
• 2:23:23
  You know, he the way he kind of plays around.
• 2:23:26
  He, he, he, he gets done with the kids as he says.
• 2:23:29
  He the way he's so condescending to the foreman saying, oh, you
• 2:23:33
  must know what's going on here. Oh, yes, I do.
• 2:23:35
  Yes, I do. And he and Mackie are just
• 2:23:38
  wonderful here because it's just the perfect crystallization of
• 2:23:41
  their teacher student dynamic. You know, the kind of time
• 2:23:45
  travelling Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle.
• 2:23:48
  And Bill's first line in this story is, OK, I have questions,
• 2:23:53
  and you can play a little drinking game of how many
• 2:23:55
  questions does Bill ask in the episode?
• 2:23:58
  And I, I can't, I didn't play the drinking game, but I did
• 2:24:00
  count. And it's about 1:00 every 45
• 2:24:03
  seconds. So she's fulfilling the kind of
• 2:24:06
  the role of the inquisitive companion, which is so codified.
• 2:24:09
  No, you know, we know what the Sonic screwdriver is.
• 2:24:12
  We know that the Doctor lives his life in darker hues.
• 2:24:15
  And but it goes beyond that because Bill doesn't treat the
• 2:24:18
  Doctor as a rock star or a superhero or her boyfriend.
• 2:24:23
  She treats him like a teacher. So, you know, she asks him
• 2:24:26
  questions. She's open to new things.
• 2:24:28
  But if he talks some rubbish, she'll challenge him on it and
• 2:24:33
  he'll give her some answers. But other answers she has to
• 2:24:35
  find out on her own. So it's this sort of love letter
• 2:24:38
  to curiosity where there's this constant back and forth between
• 2:24:42
  these two people who are asking each other questions and
• 2:24:45
  eventually that kind of brings about change.
• 2:24:49
  The most important one, Daniel, have you ever killed anybody?
• 2:24:53
  Have you? And he tries to evade that.
• 2:24:55
  And she says that's not what I asked.
• 2:24:57
  Yeah, No, I'll, I'll get there. I'll get there.
• 2:25:02
  Just briefly about the punch. So we have discussed it.
• 2:25:04
  Yes. The doctor hit someone.
• 2:25:06
  It's not the first time he's done it.
• 2:25:08
  I do think it is carefully framed though, because yes, it
• 2:25:11
  is a comedy, you know, set up guy.
• 2:25:13
  Oh, we must be diplomatic and needs to use charm, you know.
• 2:25:17
  But he does say, always remember Bill, passion fights, but reason
• 2:25:21
  wins. And then, yes, you know,
• 2:25:22
  Slutcliffe comes in, makes the horrible racist remark and he
• 2:25:26
  decks him across the face. Very, very, very funny.
• 2:25:28
  But those words, passion fights, but reason wins.
• 2:25:32
  I do hear those words a lot nowadays because I live in
• 2:25:35
  France. And in terms of activism and
• 2:25:38
  protests and campaigning for human rights or environmental
• 2:25:42
  rights or whatever, you hear these, this kind of attitude
• 2:25:45
  that if you're aggressive, you don't win battles.
• 2:25:48
  You only win people over if you're logical and calm and
• 2:25:51
  reasonable, because that's the only kind of appropriate way of
• 2:25:55
  fighting injustice. Don't get emotional because
• 2:25:57
  you'll hurt your cause. And you know, in France, it's a
• 2:26:01
  nation that's kind of founded on protest.
• 2:26:03
  And if we don't like something, we'll get angry about it.
• 2:26:08
  And I think that the punch is, is it's, it's not exactly, it
• 2:26:14
  doesn't exactly portray the Doctor as being right in the
• 2:26:18
  right because it is kind of a teachable moment for him as
• 2:26:21
  well, not just Bill, because when he punches Sutcliffe, it
• 2:26:24
  doesn't save the day. You know, it makes things worse.
• 2:26:27
  They get captured, they get tied up, they almost get blown up.
• 2:26:31
  And that's not what saves the day.
• 2:26:33
  What saves the day is him and Bill and the kids sort of
• 2:26:36
  working together to set the creature free.
• 2:26:40
  And it even then does one better.
• 2:26:42
  Where Capaldi as, as we said, you know, that speech that
• 2:26:45
  Daniel just read out beautifully, it's his best
• 2:26:49
  speech in Doctor Who because it's short, it's understated.
• 2:26:53
  And Capaldi has this very slightly astounded look on his
• 2:26:56
  face, like he can't quite believe that he has to explain
• 2:26:59
  this to something to someone so horrible.
• 2:27:03
  But also because it feels like it it, it sums up the entire
• 2:27:08
  kind of guiding principle of this era of Doctor Who and
• 2:27:12
  Doctor Who itself. I think, you know, that the
• 2:27:14
  Doctor Who is asking us the viewer the same question, the
• 2:27:18
  same choice that the Doctor then gives Bill at the climax, which
• 2:27:22
  is what is the value that you place on life?
• 2:27:25
  If your suffering is built on the suffering of that, if your
• 2:27:27
  future is built on the suffering of that creature, what is your
• 2:27:31
  future worth? So, and it's in that sense,
• 2:27:35
  there is a slight element of correction in this sort of story
• 2:27:38
  about how you represent history. So so Elliot mentioned, you
• 2:27:43
  know, it's a bit more black than they show in the movies and but
• 2:27:46
  also recent Doctor Who history as well.
• 2:27:49
  So in many ways it's kind of the anti Shakespeare code where you
• 2:27:52
  don't have tenant going. Oh, don't worry, Martha, just
• 2:27:55
  walk around like you're in the place because because she
• 2:27:59
  mentioned slavery and and Capaldi immediately kind of
• 2:28:02
  acknowledged that. He acknowledges that and he
• 2:28:04
  says, yes, yes, that's true. You know, there's a sort of
• 2:28:08
  gentle tweak to The Unquiet Dead as well, where Bill steps onto
• 2:28:13
  the ice and it's still a very similar shot to when Rose first
• 2:28:16
  steps out onto the snow in The Unquiet Dead, only this time
• 2:28:20
  it's a woman of color doing it in a much bigger sort of
• 2:28:23
  setting. It's not just her and
• 2:28:25
  Christopher Eccleston in an alleyway going here We Go
• 2:28:28
  history. It's kind of the anti Kill the
• 2:28:31
  Moon as well because the Doctor gives Bill the decision at the
• 2:28:35
  end to speak for her planet, but he doesn't clear off afterwards.
• 2:28:39
  He sticks around to help because, as he says, I serve at
• 2:28:44
  the pleasure of the human race. So I'm not just going to put
• 2:28:47
  this through because it agrees with my personal politics,
• 2:28:50
  because if I did that, then it wouldn't be a lot of Doctor Who
• 2:28:53
  for me to talk about. But it does strike a personal
• 2:28:57
  chord with me as well, because it's Doctor Who directly
• 2:29:01
  engaging with the nature of death when the, as we've talked
• 2:29:05
  about, the kid spider falls through the ice and drowns.
• 2:29:10
  And it's a very extraordinary scene because it's the first
• 2:29:14
  time Bill see someone die. And bit of a trigger warning
• 2:29:19
  here, but we're coming up a year now from the day where something
• 2:29:23
  quite similar happened to me, where I did see someone die in
• 2:29:26
  front of me. And I'll spare you the details,
• 2:29:29
  but it was just as sudden and horrific as you can imagine.
• 2:29:33
  And Pearl Mackie's reaction after that, I think she plays it
• 2:29:37
  exactly right. I think she gets that complete
• 2:29:40
  sense of shock, like you feel a bombs kind of gone off in your
• 2:29:43
  head. But if anything, she she handles
• 2:29:46
  it a lot better than I did because she actually gets angry
• 2:29:49
  after that. And she takes the doctor to task
• 2:29:52
  and you get that absolutely brilliant close up as it creeps
• 2:29:55
  in on Capaldi's face as he stares at her.
• 2:29:57
  And she says, have you ever killed anyone?
• 2:29:59
  And how many people have you killed?
• 2:30:02
  And she doesn't get a reply. And you get that brooding kind
• 2:30:04
  of 12 Doctor theme simmer Roy on the soundtrack like that very
• 2:30:08
  eerie kind. Of.
• 2:30:11
  In the distance. And it poses, yes, that very
• 2:30:13
  difficult question of how do you cope with death?
• 2:30:17
  How do you face it? You move on.
• 2:30:20
  And that. And some people don't and some
• 2:30:22
  people can't. But I think it's the perfect
• 2:30:25
  kind of summation of the characters, very complicated
• 2:30:27
  kind of morality of the doctor being steeped in death.
• 2:30:31
  And he just kind of stands there and very calmly and
• 2:30:35
  pragmatically, but also humanly explains to Bill, I care, Bill,
• 2:30:39
  but I move on. I'm 2000 years old, and I've
• 2:30:43
  never had the time for the luxury of outrage.
• 2:30:45
  And as we discover in the episode, you know, he will get
• 2:30:49
  angry on our behalf. He will find out what's going
• 2:30:51
  on. He will take a racist across the
• 2:30:54
  face because even though that's a rash and very impulsive
• 2:30:58
  decision, he then will tell that racist, just because you have
• 2:31:01
  more, you have more. Just because you have more
• 2:31:04
  doesn't mean you're worth more. And so, yeah.
• 2:31:07
  And by the end of the story, he and Bill don't.
• 2:31:09
  They don't solve racism. They don't destroy the
• 2:31:12
  patriarchy or whatever. They're, you know, there's the
• 2:31:14
  systems, the capitalist systems are very, very much still in
• 2:31:17
  place. And there's still cruelty and
• 2:31:20
  there's still oppression. And you get that very kind of
• 2:31:23
  bittersweet reminder that there still has to be a sort of a
• 2:31:26
  compromise where the doctor leaves Sutcliffe's estate to the
• 2:31:30
  kids, but it has to go to the one white boy in the group
• 2:31:34
  because the inheritance laws are still incredibly sexist and
• 2:31:37
  racist. And but as the epilogue reminds
• 2:31:41
  us, you know, they did change something.
• 2:31:44
  They did do some good. And that's what Doctor Who is
• 2:31:47
  asking us to remember that, you know, if you ask questions, if
• 2:31:50
  you are curious, and if you value life more than power or
• 2:31:56
  subjugation or class or whatever, then the world can get
• 2:32:00
  better. And then right now, I think I
• 2:32:03
  can't think of anything more Doctor Who than that.
• 2:32:07
  So put it through. I think that's a really
• 2:32:10
  beautiful summation of the Doctor's stance on losing
• 2:32:15
  people. But it does expose how the
• 2:32:19
  Moffett era makes up this stuff as it goes along.
• 2:32:22
  Because two years ago, somebody died and he's just cracking
• 2:32:25
  jokes going, yeah, that top layer over there.
• 2:32:28
  And last year, he spent a billion years getting over the
• 2:32:32
  death of Clara, and now he's taking this stance.
• 2:32:35
  And that's three very different reactions to losing people.
• 2:32:38
  Now this is a. Lie because the character's
• 2:32:40
  grown over that time and. Oh, he's had a billion years to
• 2:32:44
  grow, so I yeah, let's hope. So.
• 2:32:47
  But that is my issue with the mafia.
• 2:32:48
  There is no internal consistency with the people.
• 2:32:51
  And this is absolutely the best approach, the most poetic, the
• 2:32:55
  most profound. But I've got a long memory, you
• 2:32:59
  know. I've lived for.
• 2:33:02
  Thousands of years, and not all of them are good.
• 2:33:05
  Yeah. He can't really move on at the
• 2:33:07
  end of the year either, after she's got that old blown in
• 2:33:09
  there. Sorry about that.
• 2:33:11
  We'll get there. And.
• 2:33:13
  He's right. Jesus wasn't white.
• 2:33:15
  Yes. Absolutely true, yes.
• 2:33:17
  A much better speech than that dreadful one in twice upon a
• 2:33:20
  time as well about avocado pears or whatever nonsense he was
• 2:33:23
  going on about there. Oh, and not to put a not to put
• 2:33:26
  a down on the whole thing, but if if you are kind of
• 2:33:30
  pessimistic kind of person, you could see that the ending where
• 2:33:33
  the creatures kind of set free and Bill says, Oh well, what
• 2:33:36
  about Greenland? Have we doomed Greenland?
• 2:33:38
  And the doctor says, oh, don't worry, I'll check in on
• 2:33:40
  Greenland. What if the the the sea creature
• 2:33:43
  then escapes and then it goes through a rift in time and it
• 2:33:47
  turns up in Torchwood in the episode meet the very same
• 2:33:51
  creature, isn't it, that gets euthanized at the end of that
• 2:33:55
  story? It's so depressing.
• 2:33:56
  So I think it's the same CGI, you know, Daniel, they used.
• 2:34:01
  It's. The same eye shot of the whale
• 2:34:03
  creature. Are you right about compromise
• 2:34:06
  as well? Because I think people think
• 2:34:08
  that the Shakespeare coach take on racism is too like smug and
• 2:34:13
  skipped over and the roads to take on racism is is too intense
• 2:34:18
  and dwell upon. So here the compromise of of
• 2:34:21
  sort of going, yeah, this is not right and we can't really do
• 2:34:24
  anything about it, but we've got something to say.
• 2:34:27
  That's quite a fair. I mean, I'm, you know, I'm not
• 2:34:29
  saying this is the only way to tackle a subject like racism.
• 2:34:33
  I do like, I like the way it's tackled elsewhere as well.
• 2:34:36
  But yeah, this, this is a very different way of doing it, you
• 2:34:39
  know? Which I like.
• 2:34:41
  Yeah, I'm going to tell you all a joke.
• 2:34:42
  Especially you, Psy. OK, knock, knock.
• 2:34:45
  Who's there? David Sushi.
• 2:34:47
  David Sushi who? Oh, I didn't think that far off.
• 2:34:50
  You go. Off you go then.
• 2:34:54
  Well, here we are, last episode of the night and it's knock
• 2:35:00
  knock. This is an interesting episode.
• 2:35:03
  This is a. You sure?
• 2:35:07
  Well. Exactly, this is an episode with
• 2:35:14
  really effective sound design more than anything.
• 2:35:19
  The sound design is beautifully done and it will had a special
• 2:35:24
  version on the iPlayer that you could listen with your
• 2:35:26
  headphones to make it extra scary.
• 2:35:29
  And the sound design throughout the creaking of the woods, the
• 2:35:32
  knocking, the the way the house makes noise, the constant
• 2:35:38
  Thunder, because this is a scary and spooky story.
• 2:35:42
  So you've got to have a great big thunderstorm going on in the
• 2:35:46
  background. Yeah, that's the best thing
• 2:35:51
  about this episode. I think this is.
• 2:35:54
  No, it's not actually the best thing because the other best
• 2:35:57
  thing is David Suchet. Who obviously comes in after 20
• 2:36:03
  odd years of playing Poirot and not a lot else on TV and is
• 2:36:08
  magnificent. He gets the creepiness of this
• 2:36:10
  character. He's creepy, he's weird.
• 2:36:13
  He turns up unexpectedly behind characters because again, this
• 2:36:17
  is a scary story so you've got to have him suddenly appearing
• 2:36:21
  in a room when you don't expect him to be theirs, creeping in
• 2:36:24
  quietly. But something about this that
• 2:36:28
  doesn't all quite come together. We've got another companion
• 2:36:32
  story where living outside the Doctor's life is far more
• 2:36:39
  important than being with the Doctor, which, if you were a
• 2:36:42
  Doctor Who companion, you wouldn't want to be worrying
• 2:36:45
  about where you're going to live.
• 2:36:47
  You live in the TARDIS. Like, look at the TARDIS for
• 2:36:49
  God's sake. All of time and space I promised
• 2:36:52
  you. Exactly.
• 2:36:53
  And here we are in Cardiff getting yeah, or some Bristol,
• 2:36:57
  finding a place to live, you know, and have friends who come
• 2:37:00
  out of nowhere and they've all got, they've all got interesting
• 2:37:04
  things that they have have to deal with.
• 2:37:07
  So we're we're there's lots of issues.
• 2:37:09
  There's a bit of anxiety, there's a bit of claustrophobia,
• 2:37:13
  there's a bit of neediness that they need other people, even
• 2:37:17
  from Bill in this episode. Fortunately, they're all locked
• 2:37:20
  in a house where all of those things happen to come to pass.
• 2:37:23
  Absolutely. You know, what are the chances
• 2:37:26
  of them getting this really spooky house that is going to
• 2:37:30
  turn against them? You know, have they not?
• 2:37:33
  Bill says. She's a movie fan.
• 2:37:35
  Has she not seen movies? Does she not know these things?
• 2:37:38
  The House on Haunted Hill, Yeah. You know, so yeah, and sort of
• 2:37:44
  that whole opening montage of seeing the crappy student houses
• 2:37:49
  is exactly what you'd expect from a story like this.
• 2:37:53
  And I know it's setting up the. Scariest part of the episode?
• 2:37:56
  Sigh. Yeah, horrors of student
• 2:37:58
  accommodation. You know, yeah, it's moved on so
• 2:38:01
  far from when I was a student when my mine was basic, but at
• 2:38:05
  least it was big. So the tiny little but you know,
• 2:38:09
  this is this is setting up that this house is too good to be
• 2:38:12
  true and they take it because it is too good to be true, you
• 2:38:16
  know, so good. To be true, it is straight out
• 2:38:18
  of a horror movie. What are you doing?
• 2:38:20
  Exactly. I know.
• 2:38:21
  So, yeah. So these are people who don't
• 2:38:24
  know anything. But.
• 2:38:26
  You know. They're all quite kind of like
• 2:38:28
  what I really like Harry. I think Harry is is quite a
• 2:38:31
  lovely character and he's got a nice nice.
• 2:38:33
  Lots of one with the eyes. Eyes like Oh yeah from Brain and
• 2:38:37
  Morbius. Wasn't he supposed to be like
• 2:38:40
  they had? Harry Sullivan.
• 2:38:41
  'S yes, his. Grandson.
• 2:38:43
  Yeah. I'm glad they got that out.
• 2:38:46
  Yeah, I think that would have been a step too far.
• 2:38:48
  But he plays nicely with Peter Capaldi all the way through his
• 2:38:51
  scenes. The scenes where they're sort of
• 2:38:55
  eaten by the dryads are quite nicely done and they sort of
• 2:38:58
  disappear or they're absorbed into the woods.
• 2:39:01
  That's all quite nicely done. It lies at the end as the wooden
• 2:39:05
  doll come to life is a really creepy and sort of effective
• 2:39:10
  image. But I don't know, there is
• 2:39:11
  something about this that I, I like it, but it doesn't all
• 2:39:15
  quite come together quite enough.
• 2:39:18
  And I think maybe it's because perhaps it's just because Bill's
• 2:39:23
  friends have been thrown together in the way she's been
• 2:39:26
  thrown with them that we haven't had a chance to get to know them
• 2:39:29
  before this, that it all just feels like an excuse to tell
• 2:39:33
  this story rather than coming sort of organically sort of out
• 2:39:37
  of it, you know? And so yeah, I'm, I'm really on
• 2:39:41
  the fence with this story and I don't quite know which way to go
• 2:39:45
  so. You should see what happens and
• 2:39:47
  then do a vote at the end. Yeah, sway it one way.
• 2:39:51
  Yeah. There, you see that might be
• 2:39:53
  interesting. So yeah, I think I'm going to
• 2:39:55
  going to go with that and and see if you can tip me either
• 2:39:58
  way. So French Daniel, are you going
• 2:40:04
  to tip me one way or the other? Let's see, yeah.
• 2:40:07
  It's all right. Probably fine.
• 2:40:13
  So I mean, yes, you said, you said a lot of things.
• 2:40:15
  Spooky atmosphere, haunted house, kind of knock off.
• 2:40:18
  Knock off. Yeah.
• 2:40:22
  The I don't want to knock David Touche's performance as the
• 2:40:25
  landlord Knock because he's a great actor.
• 2:40:28
  He's very good. I mean, you know, how do you get
• 2:40:30
  into the tower? You don't.
• 2:40:33
  It's very much kind of Norman Bates, you know, a boy's friend.
• 2:40:35
  A boy's best friend is his mother from Psycho, you know.
• 2:40:40
  But yeah, you get to the end where the kids survive.
• 2:40:42
  They all get out at they, you know, they all get out fine.
• 2:40:45
  You know, no nasty Knox. Knox.
• 2:40:48
  I mean, call me blood thirsty if you want, but I think they
• 2:40:52
  should have bucked the trend. I think they should have done
• 2:40:54
  and Eric say would and stuck to their horror movie guns and just
• 2:40:58
  have all the kids stay dead at the end of the story for there
• 2:41:01
  to be bit more impact towards the end and, you know, maybe let
• 2:41:05
  Bill's busy mate survive. You know who we don't really get
• 2:41:08
  to know and we've never met before until now.
• 2:41:10
  I mean, all these people, they could have been set up in the
• 2:41:13
  pilot or something. But I mean, who are all these
• 2:41:15
  kids anyway? You know, they're they're all
• 2:41:17
  very well behaved. You know, they eat Chinese and
• 2:41:20
  they listen to Mozart records. And I know this is Doctor Who
• 2:41:23
  we're talking about. So we don't, we can't go too
• 2:41:25
  far. But, you know, no one's drinking
• 2:41:28
  beer, no one's kind of sneaking out for a smoke, no one's
• 2:41:31
  getting high or feeling depressed or feeling horny.
• 2:41:34
  Well, apart from that, yeah, apart from that one Scottish guy
• 2:41:37
  who tries to put the the moves on Bill.
• 2:41:39
  What's his name? Paul, I think, and again,
• 2:41:42
  Stephen, wasn't it put him straight in the episode?
• 2:41:46
  Yeah, yeah. So he tries to, you know, he
• 2:41:48
  tries to get close to her and then he gets knocked back.
• 2:41:51
  None of them are bitchy either, you know, bitchy about each
• 2:41:55
  other. Yes.
• 2:41:55
  No, no, no. One of them is really kind of
• 2:41:57
  sulky or scandal. No, no, I was expecting what's
• 2:42:00
  her name? I can't remember them, but who's
• 2:42:04
  really claustrophobic. And yeah, I was expecting her to
• 2:42:07
  be a bit more. I'll tempered, but, but guess
• 2:42:09
  not. The doctrine Bill relationship
• 2:42:12
  takes a bit of a knock. A knock.
• 2:42:16
  Yeah. It just feels a very weird kind
• 2:42:19
  of step backward for their characters because they mention
• 2:42:22
  all the stories that they've been in before, you know, the
• 2:42:24
  pilot smile, the thin ice. And in Thin Ice especially, you
• 2:42:28
  know, you really felt like something really solidified
• 2:42:31
  between them there. And this could be kind of a
• 2:42:34
  story from Series 9 because, you know, it's back to punk rock
• 2:42:39
  hoodie man Granddad Capaldi, you know, butts and around in the
• 2:42:42
  cupboard. And he's tries to be hip because
• 2:42:46
  he listens to, you know, trendy pop music and he pretends to
• 2:42:49
  know what it is. And, you know, he doesn't know.
• 2:42:51
  I don't mind that in small doses.
• 2:42:53
  But if we're talking like great character development, this
• 2:42:56
  isn't the wrong season. You know, we I mean, and like
• 2:42:59
  you said, so we want to see them kind of knocking about the
• 2:43:01
  universe together. Knock.
• 2:43:05
  And why is Bill kind of suddenly embarrassed to have him around?
• 2:43:09
  She kind of says, oh, well, can't you go home?
• 2:43:11
  Can't you go to the TARDIS or something?
• 2:43:13
  And you know, this is the man who who you've seen a big fish
• 2:43:16
  with. This is the man you've seen
• 2:43:18
  smiley robots with, you know, and it's also very strange that
• 2:43:23
  after that lovely coda you have in thin ice where the doctor
• 2:43:26
  forges Lord Sutcliffe's will so that the street kids kind of
• 2:43:30
  inherit his mansion is a very heart warming Christmas Carol
• 2:43:33
  thing. Like you said, Elliot, and here
• 2:43:36
  he's like right, you lot back to the estate agents.
• 2:43:39
  Fair luck next time. And you're like, what?
• 2:43:42
  What was the point of all that? Yeah.
• 2:43:45
  I mean, I suppose it's one of those Doctor Who stories where
• 2:43:48
  you shouldn't look at the plot too closely.
• 2:43:50
  But it is a bit of a larger problem with this series though
• 2:43:54
  sometimes. Because, you know, all the
• 2:43:56
  supporting characters are just, they're kind of more like
• 2:43:59
  archetypes than characters. And, you know, sometimes that
• 2:44:02
  can work in a story's favour, but it just doesn't mean that
• 2:44:06
  just means there's not a lot for you to grab onto.
• 2:44:08
  So, yeah, I mean, I don't mind it that much, but it just, it
• 2:44:12
  doesn't exactly knock it out of the park.
• 2:44:15
  What were we saying about being on thin ice earlier?
• 2:44:21
  It should have been Nardo, right?
• 2:44:23
  It shouldn't have been Bill. It should have been Nardo.
• 2:44:25
  Who said I've had enough of him patronising me and that fucking
• 2:44:28
  TARDIS. I'm moving out now.
• 2:44:30
  That would have been interesting.
• 2:44:31
  Oh, hilarious. Imagine the quirky eccentrics he
• 2:44:34
  would have gathered around the Doctor and Nardo, the Nardo
• 2:44:37
  trying to share a flat and, you know.
• 2:44:39
  Yeah, I mean, I've started so I can I keep going.
• 2:44:42
  Yeah, go. Yeah, go, go, go.
• 2:44:44
  I feel as. If they've sort of lost their
• 2:44:48
  nerve a bit with horrors as the show's gone on, like they they
• 2:44:53
  will lean into real world horror and I think they go too far.
• 2:44:56
  But when they try and do a horror, they don't go far
• 2:45:00
  enough. I don't think any of this is
• 2:45:02
  particularly scary. Yeah, you're right.
• 2:45:03
  The soundscape is great. And what do they call it?
• 2:45:06
  They do binaural sound. Yeah.
• 2:45:09
  Like it is incredible. But, you know, bugs going up
• 2:45:12
  into people, people to going into walls and things like that.
• 2:45:15
  It's not, it's not exactly the stuff of nightmares, is it?
• 2:45:18
  And sometimes, you know, you should have people peeling open
• 2:45:21
  their skulls like in Planet of the Huge, you know, or horrible
• 2:45:26
  gunk coming out of blistered lips in Waters of Mars and
• 2:45:29
  things like this. But none of the horror here
• 2:45:31
  really landed. They have like a Evil Dead
• 2:45:35
  moment, don't they, where she goes outside and she kind of
• 2:45:38
  gets eaten by the tree. And obviously it's very toned
• 2:45:40
  down because it's Doctor Who. But but yeah, you think, well,
• 2:45:43
  why are you referencing Evil Dead if you're not there?
• 2:45:45
  You know, I would have gone full on Kevin Williamson with this,
• 2:45:48
  which I think is what they're trying to do in the first half
• 2:45:50
  of the episode is bring together all these kids in Murder House
• 2:45:54
  and then watch it all play out. And then as.
• 2:45:56
  Usual the Moffat era these horror stories go off in very
• 2:45:59
  bizarre love conquers all directions.
• 2:46:02
  Do you remember hide yeah scary house this no and then those two
• 2:46:07
  weird mutants at the end went off in love together like what
• 2:46:10
  the fuck has happened to this episode?
• 2:46:12
  I felt very similar in this because I think you're right,
• 2:46:15
  Suchet is great as the scary landlord and he gets that
• 2:46:18
  perfect. I'm a bit embarrassed for him
• 2:46:20
  when he plays the the guy with mummy issues at the end he's.
• 2:46:24
  Going. Oh please.
• 2:46:26
  You know, talk to me. Oh dear.
• 2:46:28
  God, is anyone like that with their mother?
• 2:46:30
  I certainly never was, and it does spoil I think what could
• 2:46:34
  have been a really. I don't really remember David
• 2:46:37
  Suchet being in Doctor Who, despite the fact this had a huge
• 2:46:41
  marketing push on it. He was on sofas, you know, on
• 2:46:44
  breakfast TV pushing this episode.
• 2:46:46
  Well, one they saying, like, you know, oh Lord, the fan theory
• 2:46:49
  was, oh, he's the landlord and he talks about regeneration in
• 2:46:52
  the beginning and you say, oh, is he another Time Lord sort of
• 2:46:55
  thing? But if you're.
• 2:46:56
  Going to do a horror, Yeah, just go for broke or just don't do it
• 2:47:00
  at all. Yeah, I think Village of the
• 2:47:02
  Angels does a great horror, you know, and it just keeps up in
• 2:47:05
  the stakes until those horrible hands are coming out the walls.
• 2:47:09
  Oh, sorry, I've gone to another era again.
• 2:47:11
  I'm making a comparison. And you're right, Daniel, or
• 2:47:15
  whoever said it, I think it was you, Daniel.
• 2:47:17
  The doctor does come across as this weird middle-aged, creepy
• 2:47:20
  old man hanging about with all these kids again.
• 2:47:23
  It's it's very much on the tank with the electric guitar all
• 2:47:27
  over again. I'm like, no, we stopped doing
• 2:47:29
  this, you know? It's a university lecturer
• 2:47:33
  hanging out with his students. It's a bad thing.
• 2:47:37
  It's an odd look, isn't it? It's an after school moment.
• 2:47:41
  Yeah. So I think like 1/3 of this is
• 2:47:43
  watchable and looks like it's going to be scary as hell.
• 2:47:47
  And then somewhere in the middle, they just chicken out of
• 2:47:50
  it being as scary as it could be.
• 2:47:51
  And then at the end, it just goes off a Cliff into this
• 2:47:54
  emotional dirge. So disappointing overall.
• 2:47:58
  I've just got to say, Mark Mike Bartlett, Is that who wrote
• 2:48:01
  this? Yeah.
• 2:48:02
  He should stick to cock, frankly, and forget about knock
• 2:48:06
  knock. OK, so that's two bins UK,
• 2:48:13
  Daniel, what do you think? You know, I watch this and I
• 2:48:19
  can't remember much about it, to be honest.
• 2:48:21
  And I think that's probably the says it all.
• 2:48:23
  It's, I mean, yeah, you've got David Suchet, who plays like,
• 2:48:28
  like like Joe said, when he's playing the landlord, he's quite
• 2:48:32
  creepy and and very softly spoken.
• 2:48:36
  But then when, when he has to sort, you know, the boy would.
• 2:48:39
  Yeah, it is slightly creepy in a different way.
• 2:48:43
  And it doesn't. Yeah.
• 2:48:46
  And it's another Love Conquers all ending for for Moffett.
• 2:48:50
  It feels very Scooby-doo rather than rather than, you know?
• 2:48:55
  Sort. Of proper horror movie.
• 2:48:57
  I mean, I'm not a big horror fan anyway, but it's.
• 2:49:02
  It's. He would have gotten away with
• 2:49:04
  it. He wouldn't have gotten away
• 2:49:05
  with it, Yeah. As in kids.
• 2:49:07
  But it's it's scooby-doo meets Scream meets Buffy meets Mind
• 2:49:13
  your language. It's just really weird.
• 2:49:15
  Mind your language. Yeah.
• 2:49:16
  Mind your language. Not quite as good as any of
• 2:49:19
  them, though, is it? But no.
• 2:49:20
  And just fools. I can't quite put my finger on
• 2:49:24
  it. I should like this.
• 2:49:25
  I mean, David Suchet, as you say, he's a brilliant actor and
• 2:49:29
  got a great voice. He does the voice.
• 2:49:31
  He's there's a Bible app where he does all the readings of all
• 2:49:34
  the whole all the Bible. And it's really good.
• 2:49:38
  But I just don't get, I couldn't help feeling a little bit
• 2:49:43
  disappointed with his performance.
• 2:49:45
  So. It's hard to sleep.
• 2:49:53
  Hybrid sound. You leave your daughter alone
• 2:49:58
  for the night, or so you believe.
• 2:50:01
  The music wakes them. They set to work, and in the
• 2:50:05
  morning you find her revitalized, just slightly.
• 2:50:09
  Wouldn't you realize that's a way she can survive?
• 2:50:15
  Enough. No.
• 2:50:16
  Wait, Doctor, that doesn't make sense.
• 2:50:21
  I'm not interrupt, I'm doing my thing here.
• 2:50:23
  Why would he pick up insects in the garden and bring them in to
• 2:50:26
  see his ill daughter? Everyone loves insects.
• 2:50:28
  I don't. They're fascinating.
• 2:50:31
  OK. Secondly, he's not wood.
• 2:50:35
  He's just like us. He's yes.
• 2:50:39
  So if he's her father and she was preserved 70 years ago.
• 2:50:49
  No flies in you, Brill. No bugs in you.
• 2:50:53
  I do not understand. I forget you see your human
• 2:50:57
  lifespan. It's it's not long, is it?
• 2:51:00
  Do not let them trouble you. What do you remember of the
• 2:51:03
  past, Eliza? My father, he knows what's best.
• 2:51:11
  Yes, the lice preserve their appearance and their voice, but
• 2:51:13
  not so much the memories. He's not your father, am I
• 2:51:16
  right? No.
• 2:51:18
  Stop talking. Father, what's the matter?
• 2:51:22
  I don't understand. Your father would have had
• 2:51:25
  better things to do than playing with insects in the garden.
• 2:51:30
  But he isn't your father. When you were I'll he was sent
• 2:51:34
  out of the house by the doctors who are failing to save his
• 2:51:38
  mother. His.
• 2:51:41
  Mother. And I don't know whether it's
• 2:51:44
  his performance or whether it's just the story as a whole.
• 2:51:48
  It's yeah, there's, there's it's like Big Brother as well.
• 2:51:50
  So like squabbling teenagers who I don't really.
• 2:51:54
  Well, he's there's only one night, though.
• 2:51:56
  I know it is only one night, but I don't, not in this house.
• 2:51:59
  Now they all. Get caught.
• 2:52:00
  Watch all of. It so it should be the fact that
• 2:52:06
  I I can't really remember much about it and I can't really say
• 2:52:10
  much more about it than than other people have done with with
• 2:52:13
  yeah, it's a bit of a throwback to Capaldi being, you know, the
• 2:52:17
  the trying to be hip middle-aged man.
• 2:52:22
  So yeah, I think midlife crisis, midlife crisis Capaldi.
• 2:52:27
  I'm not sure I should be 1 to talk, but there we go yes.
• 2:52:33
  So young, young people I'm hanging out with tonight look.
• 2:52:36
  Let's pin it. Oh, that's three, three knocks.
• 2:52:42
  33 knocks. Will there be 4 knocks?
• 2:52:49
  He will knock four times. Will he?
• 2:52:52
  How much mileage are you going to count this joke?
• 2:52:55
  Honest. To go.
• 2:52:57
  Don't knock it. Oh boy, it's funny that.
• 2:53:05
  Yeah, Dad, you should register scooby-doo because when we were
• 2:53:08
  talking about it and thinking about seeing the house, the
• 2:53:10
  first thing that came to I-1 was that bit in, in, in Blink where
• 2:53:13
  they say to Carey Mulligan's county.
• 2:53:14
  Yeah, you live in Scooby Doo's house when they turn up at West
• 2:53:17
  of Drumlands. Yeah.
• 2:53:19
  Again, this is this is what I was referencing earlier when I
• 2:53:22
  was saying that it's a real story of of two halves.
• 2:53:24
  Not that I find the first half, you know, particularly scary as
• 2:53:28
  a horror fan, but I think, again, it's something that just
• 2:53:33
  frustrates me a lot with some of this stuff where there's a
• 2:53:35
  there's a thread being threaded through it that I find
• 2:53:40
  interesting. Kids move into a house.
• 2:53:42
  OK, they're not particularly well defined, but kids move into
• 2:53:44
  a house, there's spooky noises happening, it's creaking, it's
• 2:53:48
  old. They go to investigate, they're
• 2:53:50
  told not to look in the tower. What do they find at the top of
• 2:53:52
  the tower? It's a woman made out of wood.
• 2:53:54
  Good, solid premise for something very, very weird.
• 2:53:58
  This has got the opposite problem of ghost light where
• 2:54:04
  nothing is explained and you're just kind of skating by on pure
• 2:54:07
  vibes where it needs to over explain every every aspect of
• 2:54:13
  everything that's happening. And horror is at it's absolute
• 2:54:16
  worst when you're having the horror explained to you because
• 2:54:18
  it immediately defends it the second you.
• 2:54:21
  Define a horror and a horror movie after I just find that's
• 2:54:24
  it. I'm.
• 2:54:25
  Yeah, I watched. Jeepers Creepers this week,
• 2:54:27
  right The first half where I was chucking things down that hole
• 2:54:31
  and there was all those bodies stuck.
• 2:54:32
  Up on the wall. What the fuck?
• 2:54:33
  'S going on here. The second-half when it was some
• 2:54:35
  weird bat monster, I was like, oh, how boring.
• 2:54:38
  Why the first bit of oh you 2 expect referred by the first bit
• 2:54:41
  of Wildly Yonder is so amazing? Because it's terrifying in its
• 2:54:44
  setup and then not so much in its monster and execution.
• 2:54:48
  Yeah, I think it would have I think it already does enough
• 2:54:51
  subversions by having it be a woman made out of of wood or
• 2:54:55
  turned into wood in the in the loft.
• 2:54:58
  I I don't think it needs. No, it's she's she's she's his
• 2:55:02
  wife. The, you know, the daughter
• 2:55:05
  isn't it originally it's his daughter that's been kept alive,
• 2:55:07
  although, but actually it's she's his mother and it's his
• 2:55:10
  son. It just gets so complex.
• 2:55:12
  A bit wooden isn't? It OH.
• 2:55:16
  Don't need no explanation, sorry.
• 2:55:20
  OK. But wouldn't that be, like,
• 2:55:22
  interesting if like the. Yeah, the creaking in the house,
• 2:55:24
  it's not old floorboards, it's not the house settling.
• 2:55:26
  It's a bloody woman shuffling around upstairs and sometimes
• 2:55:29
  she wants to move her hand to do something.
• 2:55:33
  Yeah, I just. I've been really.
• 2:55:37
  I mean, I've been, you know, personally and not to, you know,
• 2:55:40
  not that it really matters, but personally I'm, I'm not, you
• 2:55:42
  know, someone who believes in in ghosts, but I find ghost tales
• 2:55:47
  fascinating and I find haunted houses fascinating.
• 2:55:49
  I've been listening to uncanny, which is ABBC production, like
• 2:55:53
  it's people recounting like ghost stories and haunted
• 2:55:56
  houses, and it's just remind me there's so many interesting
• 2:55:58
  things that you can do without necessarily terrifying children
• 2:56:02
  at home. And it just really, really pulls
• 2:56:05
  its punctures the the what they called the, the, the the mites,
• 2:56:10
  the, the grub things, the. The lice.
• 2:56:12
  The wood lice, yeah. They look exactly like the
• 2:56:15
  scarab beetles in the 1999 Mummy film, and that kind of takes you
• 2:56:21
  out of it a little. Bit has not come on much as it
• 2:56:24
  on no. Budget.
• 2:56:25
  I will say that to slightly dissent from everybody, I
• 2:56:27
  actually find I find the Peter Capaldi shenanigans in this
• 2:56:31
  episode very funny, quite charming.
• 2:56:33
  I think bills continue sort of like, oh, Oh my God, you're so
• 2:56:36
  lame. Is it a bit trite?
• 2:56:39
  But I think yeah. Having a teenager.
• 2:56:41
  Yeah. There's like, there is a great
• 2:56:44
  bit. Where was it?
• 2:56:45
  David Touché is coming, giving his speech, and then Capaldi's
• 2:56:48
  just munching on a prawn and. Things snap.
• 2:56:51
  A prawn cracker. Yeah, Prawn Cracker in the
• 2:56:53
  background. Yeah.
• 2:56:54
  Oh, sorry, I love Chinese food. Yeah, and that Foley man is on
• 2:56:58
  point at that point, isn't he? Yeah, and I quite, I don't know,
• 2:57:01
  I quite enjoyed him listening to, I mean, I interminable song,
• 2:57:05
  but I quite like him listening to Secret Potion by Little Mix.
• 2:57:07
  I thought that's a very fun moment.
• 2:57:08
  I don't know, I quite like him having this brief moment where
• 2:57:11
  he he knows those tunes. Oh yeah, I'd like the the
• 2:57:16
  writing again. I, I was thinking, guys, this,
• 2:57:18
  you know, because there are some moments from some of the early
• 2:57:21
  2010 stuff of the show that's not aged well in terms of sort
• 2:57:24
  of it's how it's tried to portray cultural references.
• 2:57:27
  And I thought, Blimey, is this kind of like what people thought
• 2:57:29
  student life was like in 2017? Then remembered I was at Buddy
• 2:57:31
  University while I was watching it.
• 2:57:32
  I thought, no, this is not what it was like.
• 2:57:36
  Yeah, it's a disappointment because I, I do enjoy the first
• 2:57:40
  half of it and it just goes nowhere.
• 2:57:41
  Interesting. So I am going to take an axe to
• 2:57:45
  it and chop it up for the for the fireplace.
• 2:57:48
  It'd been better if it was ghosts.
• 2:57:49
  That would have been so much more interesting.
• 2:57:51
  You know, I, I used to mock my mum relentlessly because she was
• 2:57:54
  a massive, she was a spiritualist.
• 2:57:55
  She used to have a spiritual circle that came round and
• 2:57:58
  they'd contact the dead. I'd come home from bloody
• 2:58:00
  school. They'd be there in the dark
• 2:58:02
  contacting the dead. I'd be like, you're a fun mum.
• 2:58:05
  And I mocked her relentlessly. She goes, no, we're going to
• 2:58:07
  Edinburgh. We're going to go on the ghost
• 2:58:09
  tours of Edinburgh. I was like, all right, fine.
• 2:58:13
  I'll RIP the piss out of her all day about it.
• 2:58:16
  And then we went down underneath Edinburgh.
• 2:58:18
  Yeah. And he's telling stories about
• 2:58:20
  the serial killer that got murdered down there horribly.
• 2:58:23
  The angry, angry spirit of the serial killer.
• 2:58:26
  I'm sort of going. And then I fainted in front of
• 2:58:29
  everybody. I felt really sick and I had a
• 2:58:32
  cold sweat come over me. And then I just fainted in front
• 2:58:35
  of everyone. I said, Mum, I want to go home.
• 2:58:37
  I believe, I believe so, yeah. I have the spirit of a serial
• 2:58:41
  killer in there. I said don't you guys piss me
• 2:58:43
  off. He's still.
• 2:58:45
  There, the doctor instead of you know, even though I enjoy it,
• 2:58:48
  instead of listening to Little Mix and eating Chinese, he
• 2:58:50
  should have told them all a ghost story.
• 2:58:52
  Yeah, that was what was missing, was that moment where you tell
• 2:58:55
  the spooky story and then the Thunder crashes and the lights
• 2:58:58
  go out. You know the party can give it
• 2:59:01
  that gravitas. Absolutely.
• 2:59:03
  We've seen him telling the story when he was being nice to kids
• 2:59:06
  and he was scary. So you think?
• 2:59:09
  Of Well, You've Covered me, Discordance and Peter Capaldi
• 2:59:12
  listening to Little Mix. Yeah.
• 2:59:15
  It's not the. Song of He was awesome at
• 2:59:17
  Glastonbury. Oh, here he was.
• 2:59:23
  Well, you've convinced me to knock this one out too, so
• 2:59:26
  there. We go.
• 2:59:31
  So that's it. We've done well, two stories
• 2:59:35
  down, 3 going through. So we have the pilot fin, ice
• 2:59:40
  and oxygen. So are we ready to kind out
• 2:59:45
  what? Music.
• 2:59:46
  And music. Come on Joe, pipe it in.
• 2:59:49
  Are we ready for our first choice?
• 2:59:52
  And it is from my random bits of paper on my desk that I am
• 2:59:56
  mixing up right now. It is the pilot versus oxygen.
• 3:00:05
  Oh, that's a, that's a, that's a tough one.
• 3:00:09
  Who's going to go first on? The pilot, I think because I'm
• 3:00:13
  getting perfect sort of distilled Doctor Who, I was
• 3:00:16
  going to, I'm going to go for the pilot as well because it's
• 3:00:19
  just such fun and A and a wonderful soft reboot, yeah.
• 3:00:23
  I'm going for the pilot. OK.
• 3:00:27
  Yeah, the pilot. The pilot for me as well.
• 3:00:30
  Yeah, and I did say oxygen was my favorite, but actually I
• 3:00:34
  really, really enjoyed watching the pilot this time.
• 3:00:37
  So I'm not even going to stick to my guns.
• 3:00:39
  I'm going with the flow. Wonderful.
• 3:00:41
  I'm. Talking about that, didn't we?
• 3:00:43
  We did. We had a good time.
• 3:00:45
  So our final choice is the pilot versus Finn Ice.
• 3:00:53
  No, it's. An easy one for me.
• 3:00:54
  Finn Ice, it's just the best. He's a couple he ever was.
• 3:00:59
  But even with the punch. Even with the punch, Yeah, OK.
• 3:01:03
  The characterization, that is. I'm sticking with the pilot.
• 3:01:08
  Like Daniel, I'm sticking with the pilot because we always have
• 3:01:11
  the same opinions why it comes down to it so.
• 3:01:14
  Rob's Daniel, don't let me down. And then we can't punch it
• 3:01:19
  through. Elliot, this, the crux of this
• 3:01:22
  whole episode lands with you. Where are you going to take us
• 3:01:26
  that? Time.
• 3:01:26
  Remember, Elliot, invitations can be revoked, all right.
• 3:01:31
  Last time I had so much responsibility, I made Robot win
• 3:01:34
  Series 12, much to the chagrin of the entire listener base.
• 3:01:38
  That's what the fucking need to. Do.
• 3:01:41
  I didn't mind whatever one That, that, that one, Yeah.
• 3:01:45
  You know, I, I've had my criticisms of both.
• 3:01:47
  I don't think anything is is an immutable masterpiece this year
• 3:01:51
  and I I get a same amount of enjoyment out of both.
• 3:01:54
  But I didn't touch on it at the time.
• 3:01:55
  But you know, in the pilot I do hate the direction, the
• 3:01:58
  Sherlocky whipping the camera around hyper edited to music.
• 3:02:02
  So on that pure irritation alone, I'm going to say thin
• 3:02:06
  ice. And we have our winner.
• 3:02:11
  Ice has triumphed. The elephant screaming.
• 3:02:17
  Best use of an elephant since the Ark.
• 3:02:19
  Yes, yes, absolutely. In fact.
• 3:02:22
  The only use of an elephant. Spoiler though in this five
• 3:02:28
  episode half season I think there's more good episodes than
• 3:02:32
  there is in the much larger half of the season seems to come.
• 3:02:37
  Well, we'll be covering that shortly.
• 3:02:41
  We will. Interesting.
• 3:02:44
  So yes, a fantastic winner and you know, a basically fine
• 3:02:50
  episode of Strictly Come Hamster tonight, so.
• 3:02:53
  Broadly fine. Yeah.
• 3:02:54
  Broadly fine. Absolutely.
• 3:02:57
  It'll do. Well done guys.
• 3:03:01
  What are Kevin Bianco's like? 7 out of 10, yeah.
• 3:03:07
  So yes, so thank you very much, everyone.
• 3:03:09
  And do you have things that you want to publicize, Elliot?
• 3:03:15
  Yes, I make up 1/2 of Come Along Pond.
• 3:03:19
  It's a Doctor Who discussion podcast.
• 3:03:21
  We're making our way through new who started at series one with
• 3:03:26
  getting towards series 5 at the moment something or.
• 3:03:31
  More more talk about Moffett coming up.
• 3:03:34
  I think I say this a lot on the show, which is because I, I, I
• 3:03:37
  kick a lot of his individual episodes in the RTD era.
• 3:03:41
  I think once you sort of slip into the into the groove of, of
• 3:03:45
  watching Moffat, Doctor Who, a lot of it, a lot of the
• 3:03:48
  individual criticisms I have just kind of end up washing over
• 3:03:50
  me and we just kind of take it in its stride for what it is,
• 3:03:53
  but it is going to be. Contentious because I'll tell
• 3:03:55
  you where you're going bro. What you're saying is it's it's
• 3:03:58
  broadly fine. It ends up being broadly fine
• 3:04:00
  and Damela Damela loves especially Series 5.
• 3:04:02
  So it's going to be a fun, maybe argumentative year.
• 3:04:06
  But yeah, we've got that coming up and a little sort of, well,
• 3:04:09
  at the time it was going to be a final goodbye for Russell T
• 3:04:12
  Davies, and then he came back to the show.
• 3:04:13
  But yeah, we had a goodbye for the RTD era.
• 3:04:16
  Victory of the Daleks Alia, does she like that and.
• 3:04:18
  Cold. Blood and hungry Earth.
• 3:04:21
  You know, I think, I think so. You might have to message her to
• 3:04:24
  find out, but I'm pretty sure. Darling, I mean you're just
• 3:04:27
  wonderful, but please reconsider before you go into those.
• 3:04:31
  So that's just fun chaotic dissections, discussions, mostly
• 3:04:35
  me getting annoyed about Doctor Who for no reason.
• 3:04:38
  But we also, running concurrently with that, have a
• 3:04:41
  cinema podcast as well where we take a slightly more restrained
• 3:04:45
  and analytical look at some of our favorite movies of all time.
• 3:04:48
  That's called Serving Cinema. So either one of those two
• 3:04:51
  podcast is where you can find me.
• 3:04:52
  Fantastic. Thanks Elliot and UK Daniel.
• 3:04:57
  I'm just on blue sky posting silly pictures of action figures
• 3:05:01
  and they're. Very good, I've been enjoying
• 3:05:04
  them. Immediately you've been
• 3:05:06
  reenacting the Peter Capaldi era, but with different,
• 3:05:09
  different monsters. Or yeah, Oh, it's the idea of
• 3:05:11
  doing doing famous publicity shots from Doctor Hoover because
• 3:05:15
  he's such a fan. I thought I'd put Peter Capaldi
• 3:05:17
  in there instead. The Death of Daleks one was
• 3:05:20
  brilliant. It was it's just a little bit of
• 3:05:23
  fun. So yeah, I'm there.
• 3:05:25
  Sky, though, you know, you've also done a wealth of fabulous.
• 3:05:29
  I've done a lot of Yeah, I've done some wonderful
• 3:05:31
  commentaries. And with Ohio, I did Destiny,
• 3:05:37
  the Daleks first. We did Rosa.
• 3:05:39
  We did Rosa New Earth, which got me a bit of a reputation because
• 3:05:43
  I'm. Here.
• 3:05:44
  In space. Thank you.
• 3:05:48
  We've done. And then with our friends Dave,
• 3:05:51
  Rennie and Lucy call, we've done.
• 3:05:53
  Planet. Planet.
• 3:05:54
  Planet of not so wretched evil planets of fire and fire.
• 3:06:00
  Yeah. Enemy of the world.
• 3:06:01
  Enemy of the world. All the planets.
• 3:06:03
  Not all the planets, because we haven't done Planet of the
• 3:06:07
  Daleks yet. Spiders.
• 3:06:08
  We are going to do Planet or Planet of Giants, aren't we?
• 3:06:12
  Yes, I think so. Yeah.
• 3:06:13
  Although next spoiler, everybody, the three of us are
• 3:06:16
  going to be taking on all 10 episodes of the War Games.
• 3:06:20
  Wish us luck. Wow.
• 3:06:23
  We're not going to do it all in one go a day, I think.
• 3:06:26
  I hope this has been wrong enough.
• 3:06:29
  It is. I think you might kill Lucy if
• 3:06:34
  you do that, and French Daniel. Well, Speaking of New Earth, I
• 3:06:40
  wrote a target style novelization of Doctor Who's
• 3:06:44
  second series opener and it's now being released as a series
• 3:06:48
  of audio books type episodes chapter by chapter, so by the
• 3:06:54
  time this comes out I'll be halfway through it, so I'm
• 3:06:57
  probably mad. But anyway, go and check that.
• 3:06:59
  Out. You are mad.
• 3:07:01
  It's fabulous. Joe Ford, do you do anything?
• 3:07:08
  Sort of blood pen knife is coming up for his one thousandth
• 3:07:11
  episode. We are this.
• 3:07:13
  This will be roughly about 9 on nine.
• 3:07:16
  Oh my God, 997 or something. We're like 300.
• 3:07:20
  And 96 of those you. Are.
• 3:07:24
  You are. So I'll just say that.
• 3:07:28
  My God, look at the people on this call.
• 3:07:30
  We look at the people on all these calls for certainly come
• 3:07:32
  hamsters. What a truly wonderful
• 3:07:35
  assemblance of smart, clever, wonderful people.
• 3:07:40
  Just check out the podcast I Don't Shut Up, and that's really
• 3:07:44
  annoying, but everybody else is just incredible.
• 3:07:48
  You know what we are? Yeah, and so are you.
• 3:07:54
  Without you jokes. Well, for me I am.
• 3:08:01
  Is there anywhere you're not signed?
• 3:08:03
  Taking your first podcasting, aren't you?
• 3:08:05
  Yeah. Just yeah, isn't so funny.
• 3:08:07
  It's a podcasting, you know he's.
• 3:08:10
  Done. You've done all right.
• 3:08:11
  Actually, well done. Yeah.
• 3:08:12
  Come on everyone, give him the review.
• 3:08:14
  He's done, really. Well, thank you. 7 out of 10
• 3:08:15
  broadly. Well, I am currently releasing
• 3:08:24
  the third series of the Library of Impossible Things, which is
• 3:08:28
  going very well and it's been a delight to hear everyone's
• 3:08:32
  stories. Both Daniels and Joe have come
• 3:08:34
  to do it. We've got 2 parters now.
• 3:08:37
  I kept talking for 4 1/2 hours, so it's like a Strictly episode.
• 3:08:42
  It was 12:30 by the time we'd finished.
• 3:08:45
  You can hear the fatigue in my voice at the end of that one.
• 3:08:49
  It was lovely. Yeah.
• 3:08:50
  And that was such a good story that I couldn't cut anything out
• 3:08:52
  so. You ever get, you know,
• 3:08:54
  encouraged to go, just skip to the end.
• 3:08:56
  It's fine. He just didn't want to get to
• 3:09:00
  the end to talk about the object because it meant so much to him.
• 3:09:04
  So for good reasons. So.
• 3:09:06
  So. Yeah.
• 3:09:07
  So more episodes of that are being recorded.
• 3:09:09
  This is going to be a bumper season, so I don't feel like I'm
• 3:09:13
  anywhere near finished yet. So that's good.
• 3:09:15
  And Elliot, I will send an invite at some point to come and
• 3:09:18
  talk as a new series fan because we need more of those.
• 3:09:22
  There's lots of Tom Baker. Oh.
• 3:09:26
  Yeah. To be to be fair, I am a I'm a
• 3:09:29
  I'm now I'm now more in on my on my classic.
• 3:09:31
  We do. We do new on the podcast and to
• 3:09:33
  keep me sane, I just kind of watch William Hartnall on repeat
• 3:09:36
  at the moment. That's my that's that's you're
• 3:09:38
  in me both house, I thought. I did just do a commentary and
• 3:09:41
  he went, yes, please, can we do the gunfire?
• 3:09:43
  I was like, Oh yes, well how do we out this thing in our series
• 3:09:51
  10B sort of a way. Well.
• 3:09:55
  You know, some kind of fine way. Broadly fine, yeah.
• 3:09:59
  Fine, jump on for. Impressions.
• 3:10:01
  Smile. We've all gone blind.
• 3:10:04
  Can we get one last Daniel Rosly joking here?
• 3:10:08
  Let's close the knocking shop. Yes, let's knock up and knock up
• 3:10:13
  somewhere else. I suppose we could end,
• 3:10:16
  obviously on the usual, you know, keep, keep, keep smiling,
• 3:10:22
  keep breathing. Keep.
• 3:10:23
  No, that's what I'll say. Keep knocking.
• 3:10:25
  Keep knocking. OK.
• 3:10:27
  Ready. OK. 21 Keep knocking.
• 3:11:31
  The.