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@mudlark my friend’s mother’s family moved from India to Kenya after partition, they were Muslim but chose not to go to Pakistan. The women in the family who are muslims don’t wear full head coverings. (Her mother actually does wear a kind of headscarf when she goes out, but she’s a Christian and I think wearing it is more of an old fashioned welsh thing  (she lives in Wales) – my mother’s mother used to do that and she’s CoE). I noticed that Umbreen’s didn’t cover her hair and as for Yaz, they were always pretty skeptical that she was a relative from somewhere in India, possibly concluded she was from England, like her friends.

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@nerys there was a breif mention, of Hindus, Muslims, and Sikh people living and working side by side, can’t remember who said it, maybe Umbreen?

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@notime problem is, if she saved him, Yaz wouldn’t exist. Which also means they wouldn’t have travelled back there. Too much paradox. Besides, the Doctor’s words were ‘when people ask for help, I never say no’. She wasn’t asked to save him.

I think it makes a point as well, you can’t just run around taking away all the bad things that happen. Other things, including good things, happen in part because of them.  It would also be incredibly selective, this one individual survives because the Doctor met and liked him. All those other millions still die?

The impression I get from Who is that there is a general timeline the Doctor can’t, or shouldn’t change. The Doctor can intervene to re-establish it if someone else interferes. Time is relatively robust and deals with minor alterations, so the Doctor’s response to the ‘don’t step on a Butterly’ trope is fairly dismissive.

I don’t know if the grandmother remembers her. It would be strange to have a granddaughter born and given a name/nickname that seems oddly familiar. Then see this granddaughter grow up and look more and more familiar. Then remember how strange that time was. Would you be more likely to think this was a weird co-incidence (given that Yaz claimed to be related after all) or that time travel exists and this is actually the same person? We know she’s in a science fiction series, she doesn’t. A lot of time passed, and Yaz would have grown slowly into the resemblance. But it is possible she came to make the connection, especially if she was told her granddaughter has started hanging around with a blond woman, a middle aged man, a young black man, given that this is a world which has seen something of aliens etc.

I think what the witnesses said was ‘leave now or we’ll stand over your corpse’. Which sounded understandably like a threat, I think their language and vocabulary was after all built up as a culture of assassins, and takes a while to evolve. What they literally meant was ‘if you don’t get out of here you’ll probably die, and we’ll act as witnesses to you’. Understandable confusion due to their reputation, and maybe a quick lesson about the importance of really listening and not being so quick to judge. And in the context of the extremist brother, a counter balance: people can change in bad ways, but in good ways as well.

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Main takeaway from this episode: Chibnall has excellent taste in writers. And the focus of this series is the importance of people.

For a while I was a little excited there, arch wise, it felt as though we had our third episode of people being targeted by aliens or people from the future. Instead we got something very interesting, Aliens, the last of their kind (the Doctor knows how that feels for all the time her previous incarnations thought they were exactly that) who have changed, from assassins, to altruistic witnesses of deaths with an attitude that chimes with 11 saying that he’d never met a person who didn’t matter.

I’m fully expecting outrage about ‘white people bad, PC gone mad’ (though I thought Yaz kept her cool rather well 😉 )from some quarters (the Other Place has closed down comments within a couple of hours). But this was very well done, the culpability of the English in Partition was made perfectly clear, exacerbating and encouraging cultural tensions, but once again the big bad was prejudice between people who no longer shared a nationality. So no, Doctor Who isn’t simply about ‘white men bad, everyone else good’.

Speaking of good, I smiled when Graham was talking about how all you can do is try to be a good man. Sadly, though, because especially after his comment last week about the brother complaining about the sister lying to him about her health, his response to Yaz feeling lied to by her grandmother – before he got to the point that this young woman isn’t her grandmother yet definitely makes me think his cancer isn’t in remission, or at lest, he’s pretty sure he’s dealing with a limited time frame. Which is a shame, because I love him as a companion but I’m convinced he’s only here for the one series. (Actually, I have mixed feelings because, as a guilty pleasure, I do enjoy The Chase.)

If we want an arch, though – who was it who destroyed their planet? Who decided to wipe out a race of assassins?

Re: the wedding, it was quite sweet, a little too sweet, though that was undercut by the fact we knew she knew the husband would be dead within hours. I know this is a fresh start and all that, but I did think their could have been some extra poignancy from the fact that the Doctor’s wife died still quite recently in her timeline, especially with the hand binding. It’s not as though River was only really married to Eleven.

There will be complaints about not enough Sci-Fi, that the aliens didn’t really contribute all that much to the plot. But I like this return to the original concept of historical, educative episodes. And this was a wonderful episode for remembrance day, firstly for the theme of remembering the dead – in this case as individuals, which gets lost, inevitably, with mass deaths. Secondly for reminding us that it wasn’t just European soldiers who died in the World Wars (clue is in the name, but some people need reminding). And Thirdly for reminding us of the impact on the people who didn’t go and fight, the impact of the people who stayed at home. Interestingly, no one was wearing poppies, but there were poppies growing on the ground.

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Assuming you mean Rose, there is a bit of a pattern to that… I’m not slamming Chibnall, but I do think he’ll be all the better as a show runner the more he lets other people write episodes.

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@sontaran2589 To be fair she’s got an Indian accent when she’s speaking English, but she wasn’t speaking English in India/Pakistan. The Tardis translation unit has given people in Pompi welsh accents in the past.

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@lionheart564 Doula was the word I was looking for. Google searches work much better when you have the foggiest idea how a word is spelt, it took me longer than I’m proud of to find it.

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@lionheart564 I was actually thinking of you when I pointed out this episode had a black person (a woman too!) owning an android designed to look like a white man, in the context of what we were talking about before.Robot ownership is linked to slave ownership, the word robot even comes from a word for slave.

The medic who died was not presenting as stupid or weak. He was clever, kind, compassionate, and brave. The (white) pregnant male was understandably freaking out, feeling unprepared for childbirth anyway, let alone on a ship that was literally about to be blown up because a space critter was eating it up, and did very well in the circumstances. Graham made an excellent Dhula (is that how you spell it?) in the end, and the android was brave, loyal, and throughly deserving of some kind of decent retirement rather than the decommissioning he so stoically accepted was his fate.

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@bluesqueakpip oh I completely understand the logic. And even the fact that there isn’t any direct communication, meaning that the ship can’t be hijacked and the crew forced at gunpoint to make up a plausible story, and the crew can’t play on the pity and compassion of the people down on the planet. It is very logical and utilitarian, it’s more important to protect the planet than to saye the people in the ship, because one way, you will save and help more people. But it is interesting to think how they got to this stage. Morally it’s the difference between Buffy before and after her death (after her death she acknowledges to Giles that she would probably have made different choices regarding Dawn and the end of the world, and Whedon’s own feelings are made fairly clear by the ending of The Cabin in the Woods (though that scenario had added sadism). It’s the trolley thought experiment on a massive scale.

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OK this episode. Other than I’m pretty sure Graham isn’t in remission (or at least has no intention of telling people when he ceases to be)…

The Graham-Ryan parts remain strong. Men evolving to give birth but only through (albeit nerve free) cesarian, odd, admittedly, but this is far in the future. Could be a deliberate genetic modification. Full gestation in a week, also unlikely from an evolutionary point of view, but possibly supports the idea of a deliberate genetic modification. I do wonder about the social ramifications of men birthing boys and women birthing girls, and it made the episode shift disconcertingly from apparently a very non binary (trans men do give birth) to a very very binary (literarily two kinds of wombs and two kinds of babies) ethos. Ryan suddenly thinking how old his father was when he was born was well done, with the added insight that his father, unlike his mother, didn’t carry the baby in his body which was interesting. I imagine that part could have been rather unpleasant for anyone who has given birth and given the child up for adoption.

So, found the subplot interesting. Main plot? The PTing was rather sweet and I want one. I felt quite happy when it enjoyed the bomb exploding in it’s stomach and was sent off to space feeling unusually well fed. I agree with @bluesqueakpip that it’s probably a genetically modified weapon. I think this might have been a better episode with a more sinister danger – this creates was very dangerous, of course, about as dangerous as a creature can be. But it’s also very much designed for the Christmas Shopping market.

No white people, I feel the need to point out, being anything but thoroughly good and decent (albeit one of them rather overwhelmed with the sudden onset of fatherhood). We also had a white presenting android serving a black owner who appears sentient but destined for decommission after her death. It’s not quite black racism towards white people, but the visuals of it are something of an inversion. (None of these are particular concerns of mine, just bring to mind some conversations on Rosa and AITUK). What was most interesting to me was that the ship could so easily be blown up remotely, and would be, to protect the main world. This hospital ship is controlled remotely, with no on board crew, no on board defence, but traveling through space dangerous enough that these kinds of failsafes are considered necessary. This seems a combination of altruism and pragmatism that is slightly chilling. This damned ‘do gooder’ future that the villein in Rosa wanted to dismantle, is it rather utilitarian? Isn’t the time in this episode somewhat close (compared to the 20th century) to the time of the character in Rosa? And hasn’t the Doctor admitted here to being slightly less well read in this century (so maybe this millennium) than she could be?

Overall – I don’t know. It looked fantastic. Quite enjoyed it. Chibinal is very good at writing people, I think. His characterisation is great so far. And he’s far from bad at a situation set up. I take @bluesqueakpip‘s point about the show runner writing the biggest block of episodes in their first season (though I note that Moffat, at the time lauded almost universally as the greatest current Who writer took a smaller block than his predecessor). It still seems audacious given that so many people were so very vocal about their concern at his credentials as a Who writer, and in my opinion he’s done some of his best work in Who over this series. But I’m looking forward to the next four episodes, which are by different writers, and noting that Rosa, which he co-wrote, is the best of the bunch so far, and I include in that the parts that were clearly his contribution.

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@jrant I think it feels that way because this run is being presented (and conceived) as a kind of fresh start. The original relaunch seemed very disconnected to the original Who to a lot of watchers, but since that start, much of new Who has been building on RTD’s original concept, especially the Time War and the idea that the Doctor was the last of his kind. And there were a lot of complaints that you had to know too much old and new who to understand any episode (I don’t know if that’s true because I’d watched all the new stuff and some of the old, and had this site by the time things got more complicated). And while I loved Capaldi’s tenure, rating did go down.

But no, the franchise wasn’t sold. It regenerated like it always does with a new show runner. This is why I like an overlap of companions when the Doctor regenerates, their confusion and dismay reflects the way we viewers often feel when a new show runner takes control. And we have to learn, like the companions do, that it’s still Doctor Who, just this different version.

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@jrant I think it feels that way because this run is being presented (and conceived) as a kind of fresh start. The original relaunch seemed very disconnected to the original Who to a lot of watchers, but since that start, much of new Who has been building on RTD’s original concept, especially the Time War and the idea that the Doctor was the last of his kind. And there were a lot of complaints that you had to know too much old and new who to understand any episode (I don’t know if that’s true because I’d watched all the new stuff and some of the old, and had this site by the time things got more complicated). And while I loved Capaldi’s tenure, rating did go down.

But no, the franchise wasn’t sold. It regenerated like it always does with a new show runner. This is why I like an overlap of companions when the Doctor regenerates, their confusion and dismay reflects the way we viewers often feel when a new show runner takes control. And we have to learn, like the companions do, that it’s still Doctor Who, just this different version.

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@craig, yes I have noticed he’s writing a lot of these…

Graham talking to the pilot brother about her lying about her health ‘well she might have a good reason for that’. Hmmmm.

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@lionheart564 trying to formulate a comment along the lines of ‘so we all look the same to you?’ that makes it clear I’m making a joke 😉 … sometimes europeans are bad at telling the difference between facial characteristics of, say, Korean and Chinese people in a similar way. The racial difference in that episode would be registered by europeans and people from the Indian sub-contenent.

 

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@lionheart564 yes I keep double posting, though my links seem to be working.

 

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@lionheart564 yes Chinese civilisation, and Japanese, were more comprehendible to Europeans than African, the kind of literary and artistic culture was more recognisable. (To the extent than when, say, the Benin Bronzes were found in Benin, europeans were convinced they derived from a different culture.)

The concept of different races did exist in the 12th century, though. The Moorish occupation of Spain and subsequent reconquest and the crusades fall into this time. I agree that this would mostly have concerned the upper classes. This was also a time when the upper classes spoke a different language to the lower classes in England. As well as (often exaggerated) tensions between the Normans and the Anglo-Saxons, we had tensions between England and the parts of the British Isles where the Celts had been driven. We also had institutionalised discrimination against Jewish people.

Of course this same culture that denounced the infidel muslims also rediscovered a lot of the classical literature of Europe through the work of islamic scholars and absorbed a lot of of the scientific work of the Islamic empire , often by Latinising the names of Arab scholars and absorbing them into the cannon.

It’s true that throughout history England specifically absorbed waves of invaders – the Angels, Saxons, and Jutes, Scandinavians, Normans, and that makes up who we are now, and the language we’re typing in. Race did make this more complicated. There has been extreme bigotry towards the Irish, for example, but it hasn’t lingered in the war racism towards people of African decent. The visible difference seems key. (Which is why anti-Semitic propaganda so often uses cartoons of hooked noses). We remain very good at absorbing other cultures (our most popular dish is a bastardisation of an Indian dish, our national drink is tea, we drink it out of china, we’re obsessed with paper, bombfire night is coming up and we’ll celebrate it with fireworks).

Our specific and greatest problems with racism come with the fact that many of our black and asian population come from former slave populations and the occupation of India respectively, from countries we tried to justify our treatment of with ideas of basic inferiority. That isn’t to say that within communities and individuals of these ethnic groups you won’t find bigoted views, as you say, it’s human nature. But yes, green and blue people, for now, might be best. Though it does bare repeating, the second episode did feature someone of asian decent using two white people as his own personal, disposable, real life video game characters.

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@lionheart564 yes scale makes a difference. Not that I think it’s impossible, but the initial circumstances were so different.

And thank you. To be honest, he won’t, but he copes. I’m sorry about your family member, cancer on its own is bad enough luck.

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@lionheart564 yes I had a quick look at what healthcare in China consists of, because I realised we might be coming from very different perspectives there. I honestly don’t know what would have become of my boyfriend by now under your system, or any system other than the kind we live under. Which makes me somewhat partial. But I grew up with my father undergoing two years of cancer treatment, and it came as a shock to me to consider how someone would manage if they had to find money for the treatments.

The UK is a much smaller entity than China, and I can see how it would have been easier for nationalised healthcare to work here than there.

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@lionheart564 yes I had a quick look at what healthcare in China consists of, because I realised we might be coming from very different perspectives there. I honestly don’t know what would have become of my boyfriend by now under your system, or any system other than the kind we live under. Which makes me somewhat partial. But I grew up with my father undergoing two years of cancer treatment, and it came as a shock to me to consider how someone would manage if they had to find money for the treatments.

The UK is a much smaller entity than China, and I can see how it would have been easier for nationalised healthcare to work here than there.

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@lionheart564 it is a fact that ‘communism’ and ‘socialism’ mean different things to different people. I don’t feel that what Marx was getting at was the kind of ‘communism’ that occurred in China and the USSR.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who lived under the USSR suggested in one of his works that part of the problem there was that people were not ready, at the time of revolution, to seize control. So control was seized for them, supposedly on their behalf, and they ended up under a totalitarian regime (see also China, see also, for that matter, Nepolionic France).

The UK is a socialistic state. We have socialised healthcare, socialised education, a benefits system. All three are breaking down, not because of a general lack of money (these were established during a time of post-war austerity) but because of an ideological resistance to the persistence of socialistic systems in a capitalist economy. The last Labour government attempted (and I’d argue, to an extent, succeeded) to make capitalism pay for socialism. The problem with that lay in the insecurity of that capitalist system.

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@lionheart564 I have a different experience in the UK- train services, Water companies, both have become less efficient while being profit driven. Admittedly, those are not in direct competition, but also, different energy providers, different internet providers, no good experiences there. This might in part be because ‘government controlled’ means something different in our respective countries, a don’t think a government over here has ever had as much control as the Chinese government does.

And the idea of ‘being able to afford healthcare’ is slightly alien to me (though for how much longer I couldn’t say.) The healthcare I mentioned, for example, for my boyfriend, is paid through tax. In Wales, even the prescriptions are free at the point of use. Chronic illness costs nothing, other than inevitable loss of income through not being able to work, this loss of income (and resultant inability to pay tax on income) doesn’t affect access to healthcare.

Competition between healthcare companies where patients have to pay could well keep costs down while giving an incentive to provide a good service. In the UK, competition with the NHS actually keeps the cost of private healthcare down and creates incentive to provide a good service (they are competing with a service that is free/already and will continue to be paid for by people who use the private company). It also lures healthcare professionals away from the NHS who have trained them, unfortunately, but that’s another story about government driven cuts to real terms pay and slashing of pensions – a story, however, that makes ‘government control’ seem unappealing to me.

We can’t really have competing, profit driven medical companies paid out of the public purse, the only profit could be money saved out of the budget. And an unconditional basic income that could cover long term chronic illness doesn’t sound like a viable option. Both the income, and the subsidies for healthcare would be impractically high. I’m talking about years of therapies, operations, medications, related conditions occurring. we can barely afford our vet fees and our dog is very small.

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@lionheart564 the book sounds very interesting, but I’m also interested at how you watch a television program that discusses the evils of post-slavery racism towards black people and think, so emphatically, ‘what I really want to watch is an episode full of black people being racist towards whites.’

In terms of Doctor Who, the Silerian two-parter in Moffat’s first series showed a human, of asian ethnicity, making what were essentially anti-immigration arguments against the integration of a non-human earth race. The casting made it all the more thought provoking.

One thing we both have in common is belonging to the dominant, majority ethnicity of our respective societies. I think publishing a book along those lines is one thing, an interesting thought-experiment and a clever inversion. The Rosa episode will hopefully boost sales of her books, and also provide a powerful context for what she is writing.

But Doctor Who is (or was, and appears it is again) a mixture of sci-fi, social commentary, and history. Now in the sci-fi aspect, the social commentary can involve what can read as racist behaviour from non white characters, as in the Silurian episode. In the historical aspect, it can only do that,  as @pedant points out, by delving outside of it’s primary markets and cultural reference points. That could include China, but could still leave a bad taste in the mouth (Opium wars, for example, and Hong Kong as a British Protectorate.) And naturally the BBC is going to care more about ethnically Chinese people living in the UK, than people living in China. Who pay the licence fee.

It’s also going to go for more straightforward approaches. Bill offending the Blue Person, humans anxious about the arrival of rival earthlings. And it has, I repeat, featured a villein of asian ethnicity, already, in this run.

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Double posted so got rid of one.

 

 

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@thane16 I’ve recommended this book to someone else on here, but do see if you get can hold of David Graeber’s ‘Debt: the first 5,000 years’. It’s not objective (no book is in my opinion) but throughly researched and well argued, and very interesting on this history of the idea of ‘The Great God Market’ (and why this is such a good way of putting it) and how many economic theories are at complete variance with the experience of anthropologists.

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@lionheart564 when a company is profit driven it will tend to start to prioritise profits. The NHS, struggling with budgets, will extensively treat elderly people suffering from cancer as well as other medical conditions, spend a lot of money on treatment for people who don’t, for other reasons, have much time left.

I also fear that a company motivated by profit would find people like my boyfriend an utter drain on the system. Giving someone spinal surgery when they already suffer from chronic pain from other conditions, prescribing a very expensive list of medication long term. I have concerned about the quality of care such people would receive if you introduce market forces to the equation.

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@lionheart564 how would publicly owned and regulated education and health service companies be in competition with each other, though? If they’re not profit driven, their main order of business is to do as much as they can do with the available budget.

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@jimthefish then again Capaldi seems immensely Socttish, and his parents are Irish and Italian…

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@lionheart564 the only thing with that argument is that the originals made a lot of social commentary. The Empire is facist, it’s clearly singled as facist, down to the designs of the uniforms. Princess Leia is an important political figure who strangled Jabba the Hutt to death with his own chains. I agree that sub plot, at present, looks as though it could be removed from the film without violence, but it introduces a great character, reinforces the message that the superstar maverick would do better occasionally listening to his generals, and the resistance are a rebellian terrorist organisation, in the style of the French resistance during world war II, that’s what they’ve always been modelled on because, as I said, politics and social commentary have always been part of the films. Remember, these films are set long before our time.

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@lionheart564 that’s an interesting point and thanks for your perspective. It does leave the fact that British people of Chinese ethnicity would have a different emotional response to ‘yellow face’, and are sometimes on the receiving end of racism within this country. So an episode focusing on racism within China would still be problematic and not without consiquences for British people who’s family came from China and recent Chinese immigrants, and they are the people I’d expect the series to be more concerned with.

Setting an episode in the USA about post-slavery relations between black and white people is another thing entirely – one thing that the USA and the UK have in common is a substantial population of black people who’s ancestors were slaves (for example, in the UK, the Windrush generation and their children, who are being treated appallingly right now). We both have a persistence of racist attitudes that were basically once used to justify slavery or at least the treatment of slaves. Being Christian nations there was a passage in the bible about how while the law gives you rights over slaves, God values their souls equality to your own, so… think about that. Europeans and USA citizens of European descent thought about that, and came up with loads of ideas about intellectual inferiority, brutish nature, and sub humanity. We’re still dealing with the remains of this justification, so it’s topical for British citizens. There are in fact, still, British people in South Africa with these views.

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I’m wondering if this episode, despite appearances, really is part of the arch.

I’m very disturbed by the way the Chris North character was declaring ‘this is how I become president’ while shooting the spider. We’ve moved from 50’s USA, to a 2018 businessman from the States with ambitions for the presidency. We have a Doctor absolutely and repeatedly speaking out against the use of guns, a mass murderer from the future physically prevented from carrying out acts of violence, (who seems to blame the USA civil rights movement for all this) and a race of aliens using different planets (including Earth, which is supposed to be under protected status) for trophy hunting. I think it all links up.

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@nekrosys this current series has been designed as something of a new starting point, not particularly weighed down by history, so it might not be a bad place to start. Alternatively, the beginning of the reboot was the beginning of Who for a lot of people.

The thing about Doctor Who is that it changes with each regeneration, and changes particularly with every show runner. Your favourite doctor might be the first one you watch, or it might be any one of the 13. I think youtube has quite a lot of older episodes, there are a few linked onto this site, with discussions if you want to browse.

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@geoffers the sad thing is that so many people do think masculinity is that fragile… or I could say that some people’s masculinity is so fragile – or even that the nature of masculinity in a patriarchal society is by definition fragile, since a lot of people (including a lot of writers in the early modern period) were dependent on the support of patrons (who could be female, but were female patrons or patronesses, never ‘matrons’). When we define masculinity as being the protector and provider, we exclude a lot of men from it

@nerys – he is a fantastic role model isn’t he. While grieving for the death of his wife, he focuses on trying to help her grandson. While in the segregated American south, he unquestionably declares Ryan to be his grandson. When Ryan tells him the contents of his father’s letter he is (outwardly) calm and stoical, and when Ryan tells him that he personally didn’t like his father saying that and hints that he is coming to see Graham as his ‘proper family’ he doesn’t leap at the chance to put the knife in to Ryan’s dad. This last partly because he just realised it was possible that there were giant spiders on the ceiling, but I’m still counting it. A lot of people have quite complicated family relationships, and this makes Graham a much needed example of a good man. (I’m expecting there is more to Ryan’s father than appears so far, and I can imagine someone making the point at some point that Graham came into this family just three years ago and didn’t experience what happened before that.)

 

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@lionheart564 as I pointed out to @hobbyco, Rosa showed female racists, even one he referred to while trying to make a point about portrayal of heterosexuals.

As for racism from people who aren’t white, the last series showed Bill, encountering a blue person for the first time, and inadvertently coming across as, well, a little racist.

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@hobbyco wow, that’s quite a stretch.

First episode, bad guy was an alien.

Second episode – yes, I think Art Malik was playing a bad guy. He engineered a death race. So the bad guy was Asian.

Third episode, the bad guy was a white male. The time traveller. It’s interesting that you’ll reference the wife of one of the other characters to make a point, I don’t know, about how unfair television is these days towards heterosexual people, but you don’t feel her presence and attitudes undermines your argument about men being targeted.  And just skip over the woman in the bar who threw them out.

Forth episode, the Chris North character was a terrible human being, but he bought about the spiders through stupidity and inattention. You could argue the scientist was almost as responsible as he was (I’m sure a university should pay more attention to how their waste is disposed of.) she’s neither white nor male.

So no, your theory doesn’t hold up.

 

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@emmakay: that’s always been a part of the show.

Except For That Time: Political and Social Awareness in Doctor Who

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@mrswho was it really mentioned more than in passing?

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I love certain parts of this, little things ‘do you know how annoying it is when my husband’s right?’ The Doctor trying to do smalltalk. Ryan’s shadow puppets. Graham, throughout this episode, was fantastic, and Ryan inching a little closer to that covered ‘grandad’ saying he didn’t like his father retiring to himself as Ryan’s ‘proper family’.

The spiders were brilliantly well done. And the plot was fine, but, not really concluded. I suppose the spider in the flat next to Yaz’s will eventually starve to death behind that barrier, and the others eventually die in the panic room. I’m not going to preach, I’ve had recourse to the vacuum cleaner too many times to be entitled to an opinion on that – but the fact is that shooting the mother spider was something of a merciful death, it’s the motives of Trump: the sequel that made that wrong thing to do. It felt like a good set up suddenly easily resolved by playing some music to lure them into a space and then leaving them. I liked it when she spoke to the first spider, said she was going to try and sort things out. Just doesn’t feel as though she did.

And what about the spider in Graham’s house? We established that the one next to Yaz’s probably got there because of the woman who lived there. But what about Grahams? What about the ones out there causing the normal spider population to act weird?

Additionally, though I did sympathise with the mutated spiders, when they were talking of them as living beings etc it seemed like the kind of argument only vegans who grow all their own food can reasonably make.

 

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@pedant loved the shadow puppets! Nicely done too, just there, in the background, easy to miss. Wish he’d done deformed rabbit, though, that’s my favourite.

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@rob I agree with @bluesqueakpip that this is character development rather than a gender shift. I have always been a little concerned that certain changes to the character coming with the change of sex could seem to Say Things about differences between the sexes which I don’t personally think are true. And it’s hard to watch TV without a certain amount of baggage. In the opening scene, despite Who’s long history of the Tardis taking people not where they want, but where they need to go, I kept seeing ‘woman drivers’ jokes.

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@the25thdoctor I agree with @missy – and that’s kind of the point of the name.

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@msrbahar did you read the second part of my comment? I’ll paste it here:

White people are the majority in the UK. But we have a lot of people, we have a lot of people who are not white, many of them are actors. This means that it is possible to chose an ethnicity for a part, and still chose the actor on the basis of their acting skills. The fact that they deliberately cast people of a particular ethnicity seems to some people to translate as ‘they put out a standard casting call, and the first candidate of the ‘right’ ethnicity got the job’. Or, ‘they put out a casting call for a particular ethnicity, no one turned up who was any good, so this joker got the job’. No, not how it works.

Does any of that suggest I think the ethnicity of the actors had ‘nothing to do with it’? I’m merely pointing out that they still ran auditions, they still required actors of sufficient skill for what they had in mind. When someone is in their 60’s is cast in a role, people don’t seem to assume they got the part simply because of their age.

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@msrbahar First of all, Cole isn’t of African-American ethnicity, as far as I know the actor has no links with the USA whatsoever. And Gill’s character we’d usually say of asian ethnicity if we felt the need.

Secondly, thing is, those white doctors and companions, that people didn’t like, did people criticise their casting for being based on their ethnicity? White people are the majority in the UK. But we have a lot of people, we have a lot of people who are not white, many of them are actors. This means that it is possible to chose an ethnicity for a part, and still chose the actor on the basis of their acting skills. The fact that they deliberately cast people of a particular ethnicity seems to some people to translate as ‘they put out a standard casting call, and the first candidate of the ‘right’ ethnicity got the job’. Or, ‘they put out a casting call for a particular ethnicity, no one turned up who was any good, so this joker got the job’. No, not how it works.

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@lisa ‘You have a European union made up of countries that mostly don’t trust each other.’ well, yes, that’s rather the point. You realise how unusual it is for us, historically, not to be at war with France? One of the factors for the First World War was a network of alliances between European countries. Historically, attempts to maintain friendly relations hinged on marriages between royal houses (which didn’t really work, and has completely broken down now for obvious reasons) a political union did and does make sense. European countries have considerably more autonomy and sovereignty than USA states, it’s mostly a matter of how they chose to use it (for example, UK and EU migration law, which is ironic since migration was one of the battle cries of the pro leave group.)

There are real problems with the EU. I just think that leaving it, and giving up our veto and our voice in the European Parliament is a crazy response to these problems.

Re: Toxic debt, have you read David Graeber’s ‘Debt, the first 5,000 years’? It’s a fantastic anarchist anthropologist analysis of the history of debt.

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@msrbahar: ‘you think they don’t discuss such matters in casting and production?’ we already know they do. We know this because they were very open about the fact they wanted to cast a BAME actor for Bill (which to some people translated as ‘she only got the role because she’s black’ as though this requirement cancelled out every other part of the selection process). We also knew they wanted a female Doctor at this point (and again, despite women making up as much of the population as men, this was taken to mean they lowered the standard of performance to shoehorn her in).

Given this, if they’d decided they wanted someone from an ethnic minority to write the music, they probably would have mentioned the fact. By leaping from ‘I don’t like the music’ to ‘the person who wrote the music wasn’t white’ just to get to ‘it seems as though that’s why they chose him’ you’re making an assumption that isn’t backed up by what we know about the current Who team and their quite openly discussed interest in diversity.

as for the Phd: the amount of study and experience that goes into getting one of those does, legitimately, make someone an authority. Doesn’t mean you have to like the music. But something you don’t like isn’t automatically crap. I don’t like Dickens. I wouldn’t for a second suggest he wasn’t a brilliant writer, it’s not a style of writing I like. I know enough about literature to see how and why he’s good. Like @troygorsline, I have a ‘meh’ response to the Mona Lisa. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a good painting.

Regarding the name of the doctor: there’s been a great discussion on this site about the tendency to call the previous Doctor’s by their surname, and this one by her first name and what that implies. For all I know you always said ‘Chris’ ‘David’ ‘Matt’ ‘Peter’ when talking about previous Doctors, but over all, this actor has been referred to by her first name far more than her predecessors, so it’s something to be aware off.

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@lisa we don’t elect our own civil servants.

When it comes to austerity, I’m much more concerned by the actions of the IMF than the EU…

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@swordwhale ‘what is Puro?’ not what – who (appropriately!) thane16 is two people, mother and son. Puro is the mother. So if it ever seems as though @thane16 has two personalities, they are two separate people.

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@ichabod: quite. ‘The road to the holocaust was paved, not with good intentions but indifference’ (I’m not sure who the quote is from but I have a feeling Sasaha Baron Cohen wrote his dissertation on it, or maybe coined it himself).

In fact the episode showed fairly few white people close up, and only four, I think, with speaking roles. So we don’t know, for example, that everyone sitting in silence in the bar personally supported the bigotry ideologically, we just know that they were uncomfortable when the group walked in and sat down, and didn’t make a fuss when the staff exerted their legal right to throw them out.

You can always look back in time and find people who went against the grain in society regarding racism, sexism, homophobia etc, but these are always the exceptions. And it’s tempting and more pleasant to sit here in the 21st century and believe we’d be one of these people if we’d been born and brought up in the past, but it’s statistically unlikely. We are products of our environment. Increasingly, in the modern world, these kinds of opinions are a matter of choice, so much information is out there and available. And still people chose to be racist, either chose not to question it, or wholeheartedly subscribe to the ideology.

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@swordwhale  ‘Duct tape, bungee cords and fence wire… oh yeah, and cable ties…’

took me a while to work out what you were responding to here…

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@kevinwho I do think as a rule, it’s best to keep alternative scripts to the fanfic area. But regarding what you wrote, the fact you feel something like this is needed reminds me of times in writers workshops when people discussed the opening chapter of a novel by, every time a question was raised within it, asking what it was referring to, what it meant.

I’m convinced this character will return, and we will learn more about his motivations, and limiting his comment to ‘your kind’ isn’t sloppiness or bad writing, but a deliberate dramatic choice. It’s a bit like demanding to know who Missy was in the first episode she appeared in. I think we’re supposed to wonder and think about it a bit.

This site being this site there is a possibility, as we’re all aware, that we might be speculating more than is intended. We’ve all been told ‘no arc’, but we’ve been told a lot of things by Who show runners. But even if there really is no arc, if none of the big bads we’ve encountered so far link up into an overall story, I still don’t think the exact motivation here is entirely necessary. There might be no justification, even an unreasonable one, for his racism/actions.  There is no reasonable justification for racism.

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@mudlark I accidentally made ginger snaps once by not putting enough flour in the gingernuts. Blew my mind. (This was before Doctor Who was revived, to be fair).

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