Very cool social commentary, I think better than the Orville episode with the Up and Downvote society.
Though, at the end, I did hate everybody and wanted them to be eaten.
I do question having two “doctor lite” episodes back to back.
Imteresting music choices too… Didn’t we just have the Flying Purple People Eater? Now we have Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini…
Edit My bad, Flying Purple People Eater was in X-Men '97, which I also just watched. Easy mistake to make!
If next episode is Everybody’s Heard About the Bird…
Someone saw Black Mirror’s Nosedive and thought “let’s do this but do it right”
You know, I’ve been wondering why everyone is talking about all these new Doctor Who episodes and yet I couldn’t find it in any of my lists. Today I did a search for just “Doctor Who” without the year (2005) or season number (14)… and WTF is “Doctor Who 2023”??? This is still the 2005 series, and still season 14, so why is it now being listed under 2023 season 01 which isn’t even when the current season began? None of this makes any sense.
Picked up by Disney+.
They ran a series of specials between 11/25 and 12/9 2023, ending with the new regeneration.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_specials_(2023)
Then they re-numbered the current season as “Season 1” starting with “The Church on Ruby Road”, which was the 2023 Christmas episode.
I really liked this episode, which feels nice because I haven’t been able to be honestly positive about an episode of Doctor Who for quite a long time. Maybe since Resolution? And in that one I had to ignore the fact that the Doctor could sonic a Dalek’s gun. So a swing and a hit is refreshing. Here’s to more.
this episode suddenly got really dark towards the end
Miscellaneous thoughts:
The social media society is a trope that has been done before, and I don’t feel like this episode did anything interesting with it. The character of Pepper-Bean did not have an arc, she began as a vapid mole, and ended as a vapid mole who killed a guy. Not engaging, and felt like a bit of a waste of an episode.
I did not feel any of the tension they seemed to have intended, because the characters were so insufferable that their death would have been a relief.
Ruby and the Doctor needed Pepper-Bean to turn off her Dot because they could not see into the Dome. How then did they switch to an external camera to have a chat with the pop star towards the end?
Feels like an episode written by a Boomer just to take the same old digs at the younger generations. “Kids these days can’t find their way without a gps”, “Gen Z literally can’t see past their phone screens”.
I don’t know if it was intended, but the conclusion felt like a commentary on racism, considering that a majority of the finetime characters that got screen time were white, and talked about their “God given duty” to “maintain standards”. And calling The TARDIS “voodoo”. I dunno, it could definitely just be more commentary on vapid millennials, but it felt more pointed, especially considering the Doctors reaction.
I had problems with 73 Yards, but at least it was an engaging watch and felt like it was trying to do… something?
No the episode is definitely a commentary on racism. The inhabitants of Finetime are not just gen z, they are explicitly upper class gen z. They have literally blue blood. They are very Tory-coded.
The whole episode is riddled with micro aggressions from Lindy towards the doctor. Here is a possibly incomplete list of them:
- declining the Doctors call in the cold open. but taking Ruby’s later on
- suspecting the Doctor is responsible for the situation
- being disgusted by Ruby and the Doctor being in the same room
- not noticing the Doctor and the person calling her in the morning where one and the same, saying she just thought they “looked the same”
- Introducing the Doctor to her friends with the words “he is not as stupid as he looks” and suggesting he would be punished later on
There is also the mention of a cleanse, which takes on a very different meaning after the twist especially since not just the majority of the Finetime characters but all of them are white.
The whole episode is designed to make you question your own perceptiveness of racism. After the twist you are supposed to go “how could I have been so blind?”. I recommend a rewatch. And no, I didn’t pick up on it at first. I did notice some of them as weird, but noticed what all of them have in common only at the end.
