Doctor Who

[Deborah54]

This will be my 12th Doctor. I’m a big Doctor Who fan. Happy memories of Sat with my dad watching cyber men and darleks.
But what the hell has happened? I’ve just finished, well I managed 25 mins, before I couldn’t take it anymore the 1st episode with the new Doctor and sidekick. Awful acting with a ludicrous plot (yes I know it’s fantasy) but it’s never been this stupid. Can’t help but think the BBC aren’t bothered and think they can put out anything and we’ll watch. Russell T Davies should have his pens taken off him and spare us anymore pain.

I can’t be the only Doctor Who fan who thinks like this. Absolutely Gutted 😞

I don't mind the unanswered questions because, to me, none of them matter to the story. I don't need every single little detail laid out for me - I can fill in the blanks with all manner of possibilities.

The Dot was basically a slave to the humans which is why I think it hated them.

Odd.

I kind of feel the Doctor isn't relevant in these stories - someone just wanted to write short Sci fi stories and this is how they got to do it.

Yes, Doctor Who and the doctor barely in it, was he filming Barbie?

All the questions were answered if you were paying attention. And it was a masterpiece of unlikeable protagonist writing!

No doubt the Doctor landed as he usually did, finding himself in a new situation. We just didn't see it.

The dot was a form of AI that grew to hate the group of very hateable people. It killed in alphabetical order because it is a machine making a machine-like decision, processing a dataset in a logical order. And it eliminated the more powerful home planet first.

Notice how Lindy followed Ricky slavishly and confidently ran around after him when she expected the black/low class Ruby to solve her problems with no effort from her...

I got a "told you so" to my husband for noticing all of Lindy's friends were white.

I quite liked this episode, thought it was a decent story. None of it feels Dr who though.

To me it seems like a different programme.Even the ones I hated in past eras, still didn't give me the jarring feeling. Idk just an odd vibe.

I was thinking this too, very simplified sadly, so poor stories.

I didn’t notice either. And irl I do notice when I’m the only poc in the room. Especially when I’m at conferences and I realise oh I’m the only one!

They had green blood, so weren't human. Whatever humanoid species they were didn't necessarily have different races by skin colour as humans do, and wouldn't have the same cultural history as us (though RTD said it was a deliberate race comment)
Two things baffled me:

1. Why did the AI kill everyone on home planet first? When September looked on the console it said "population 0" with a slug in shot. If the annoying people were all white, where were all the people who didn't annoy the AI (assuming the race theory is as RTD stated on Unleashed).
2. Why did the AI bother with slugs? The population were so dependent on the AI and had no direct control of the biome. It could have just reduced life support. Oxygen level zero would have killed everyone quickly and efficiently with much less mess.

@InMySpareTime

Ricky wasn't annoying though - he was thoughtful and intelligent. It was a genocide, the AI decided that extermination was better than picking and choosing.

And on the second point - well, I specialised in studying genocide at university, and mostly they're done pretty brutally when "efficiency" is possible. So I guess even an AI might get brutal, especially as it was driven by hate.

Ricky could have been the most annoying as far as the AI was concerned. He was followed by everyone and dumped loads of content once a day that everyone consumed all day.

That's true. But that's the point of genocide - the individuals are targeted by a unifying characteristic, not by their specific merits.

I really like that they've done a futuristic racism story, that sneaks up throughout. (This is the historian on me - people assume that society has gone from no racial mixing and extreme racism on a straight path of progress to tolerance, but it's really not like that.)

I noticed that all the bubble people were white, but I didn't notice that Lindy would speak to Ruby but not the Doctor.

I didn't twig the disgust that Ruby and the Doctor were in the same room. Or even that she was disgusted and shocked that the Doctor was even in the sewer.

It was obvious from the start of his appearance that the doctor wasn’t welcome, he was surrounded in red, it said something like unsolicited contact and an alarm sounded, this did not happen when Ruby contacted her. She also started to call the police, she wasn’t calling them from the slugs, she was calling them to report the doctor. She also struggled to listen to or follow instructions from him, but could follow them easily and clearly from Ruby and the influencer guy easily from the start. There were also only white followers on her screen and every person we physically saw was white.

It could also have been casual ageism, as everyone in the biome was 17-27 and The Doctor is older (far, far older but she wasn't to know that). There could have been several types of discrimination at play.

Reviewers seem to be raving about Ncuti Gatwa’s closing minutes - but I found it a touch over-theatrical and disproportionate. Which is hardly surprising if those were the first Doctor Who scenes he filmed. (Not quite sure if RTD said first ever or first of proper new season? Can’t be bothered to check.)

Since the AI could kill in any way it wanted, I’m assuming it created (oh hell - were the monsters actually from the wild forest outside or created by the AI?) or allowed the monsters for its own entertainment.

I’m also assuming that at the time the AI became a threat on the Home Planet a decision was made to send the healthy young to a distant, safe place to preserve and continue the human race. But that wasn’t actually an escape - and the young people sent were so very inept it’s doubtful they’d have been able to procreate and bring up children without the AI doing everything anyway.

Given that RTD first pitched this idea during Steven Moffatt’s show runner era, I’m wondering how the ending would have been written for a different Doctor. Or - was the ending tacked on to (thats too derogatory but can’t think of better) and then seeded through a ready made story, just for this Doctor? That seems likely.

But I was right - the man is so beautiful, and the photography / editing people are having so much fun playing with colours and lighting and tears rolling down his face - they’re going to make him cry in every possible episode.

There's a running theme of abandonment throughout every episode which is obviously going to climax at the end of the series, I think.

Really liked that episode, the whole show has a weird feel to it though. Looking forward to watching it all again after the finale.

At least one review has posited a connection between these young adults and the abandoned Space Babies.

I’m more and more convinced we’re going to find that Ruby herself belongs in a different timeline / in a parallel universe and was mistakenly / deliberately abandoned on Earth? Finding her real mother will mean making the decision to return to wherever she has come from.

I'n not convinced by the racism element. If you live in a totally white society and have never seen a person with the Drs colouring, why is your automatic reaction to call the police as if he's a Jamaican yardie? You haven't that context. He's odd, maybe an alien, but you need to have that reaction, not all that disgust and ignoring as if he's slave class.
Bring back Ricky, he'd be useful.

They never said that she'd never seen a black man. I missed when she came to the yoof planet, but it's perfectly possible that there was a slave class on the home planet.

(Though IRL, AI itself can exhibit racist behaviours picked up from scanning and copying human behaviour - a racist AI could have been an interesting story.)

@Treaclewell surely it’s perfectly clear that she comes from a society stratified or segregated by race? (She obviously wouldn’t have reacted like that to a being she perceived as an actual alien!)

a racist AI could have been an interesting story

Yes. That Barbican exhibition a few years ago was terrifying. (It’s the reason I don’t use face recognition on my phone - I’d be too worried about it locking me out.)

Also, she is from a very regulated society where everything is filtered, sanitised and spoon fed. There is no experience of "different" at all.

This discussion has been enlightening about a friend's vicissitudes. I have often wondered what is about him (think Ricky with PhD), a useful member of society, that means certain people treat him like dirt and expect him to do their bidding. I don't go round looking for class distinctions, unless they are forced on me. (Rural church where the local bigwigs cut my family so much we were invisible until they found Dad was a chartered accountant and they needed a treasurer). My friend is not tall, like those descended from families who came over with the Normans. He is short and dark haired, like Cornish or South Walian, short limbed, like a miner. He actually looks like the Charles Babbage mural on Imperial, and has him in the family tree, also like the Cornish mine Captain Morcom in a famous (in Cornwall) painting. In the leafy class ridden suburbs of London he is obviously spotted as NCO class, the sargents who carry out the officers' orders. But he doesn't because he hasn't signed up for it. Hence the dislike. Uppity.
I think the existence of a black slave class on Homeworld could have been flagged up better. Photo of family with attendant in background perhaps. Like the Camp coffee bottle before it got better.

I don't go round looking for class distinctions, unless they are forced on me.

An interesting further thought to this is that the Doctor was a bit blindsided by her reaction. It's possible that in their travels, he hasn't experienced overt racism yet. He's seen it happen to others, reassured Martha, defended Bill, but not had that moment of, "oh that's why they don't like me" yet.

In spite of his real age, this Doctor is more warm and naive a character than other Doctors. He was wracking his brain about what was different and completely missing the reason Lindy was reacting that way to him.

I can't speak highly enough about how the arc was written for Lindy - you think you're getting a story about a helpless airhead becoming capable, and actually you end up hoping she drowns in the river.

Disposing of Ricky September that quickly was a genius stroke too.

Was there anything to suggest a ‘slave class’ on the Home planet, rather than separation or segregation of one race from another? There was an implied distrust of the ‘other’ culture - hence the voodoo jibe. And Lindy spoke of the Doctor’s duty to her - but that could have been a general societal thing rather than an obligation of one race to another.