7 Comments

“Stream of incident” is perfect, the phrase I’ve been searching for since The Ghost Monument.

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It won't be people of my age or yours who do most of the scribbling in the margins, but it's fascinating how this very flawed period of Doctor Who has inspired some of the most passionately loyal and creative fans - and they already are writing and publishing the fictions which pull so much together, albeit largely relationship glosses at the moment. (The companion-Doctor hating gets transferred onto Ace and Tegan in Power to an extent, doesn't it?)

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This was perhaps the most depressed I have ever felt watching a Doctor Who episode. When people tell you they don’t like Doctor Who this is the episode that has been existing in their heads for years before it actually materialised on screen. Just stuff happening that can’t give us a reason to give a shit. If I hadn’t already known that Chibnall was leaving I wouldn’t have bothered watching the rest of this era.

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I honestly find Survivors more aggravating than this one, but there's a hair's breadth between them.

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You remind me how angry the throwaway genocide made me. Just such a tonal mess.

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It had already fallen apart!

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What frustrates me more is that both this and Timeless Children skate around some genuinely interesting ideas (especially the "Time" and "Space" stuff which was very Sapphire & Steel in a way) that haven't been done to death in related media over the years, with stuff that really could only be done by a 'show-runner', and then they just dribble away into nothingness. I realise that some of this was due to Flux production being somewhat wrecked by Covid (amongst other reasons) but even Power of the Doctor largely shied away from any of the implications here.

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