Spoilers Doctor Who 2024 (spoilers)

[Paul Farquhar]

Wasn't that just The Doctor speculating?

They looked like horrible people to me!

 

[Necropolitan]

They looked like horrible people to me!

I don't disagree that they were horrible, my point is the AI becoming self-aware enough to come to that conclusion, decide to kill them all, and then make the slug monsters.

In Smile the AI thought unhappiness was a communicable disease.
In The Green Death the AI was completely business-orientated and would do anything to make it's company succeed, including brainwashing and murder.
In Oxygen the AI were programmed to murder the employees to save money.
In The Robots of Death the robots were reprogrammed to kill humans other than their controller.
In Mummy on the Orient Express the AI Gus was programmed to find out the secret of The Foretold.
The AI in Space Babies decided to make a monster because it was malfunctioning and acting according to a story.

There's always a logical line of thought (even if it's flawed) in Doctor Who AI. But in this episode the Dot just became disgusted with the Finetimers and decided to kill everyone and decided to use slug monsters it somehow created to do so and nothing else is said or shown.

One of the things I like about Doctor Who is that unless a villain is meant to be enigmatic you get at least some idea of what they want and what they're doing. Money, power, control, ideals, food, etc.

Heck, the previous explanation I gave could be completely wrong. The slugs might be the actual villains who hacked the Dot to serve them and them going after people according to their names is some sort of cultural ritual they have when attacking a planet.

I know I complained about this season relying on telling over showing, but at least those episodes explained what was happening and why in some way as opposed to hand-waving where the threat came from.

I want to be clear that I thought the episode was great otherwise.

 

[Ryujin]

I don't disagree that they were horrible, my point is the AI becoming self-aware enough to come to that conclusion, decide to kill them all, and then make the slug monsters.

In Smile the AI thought unhappiness was a communicable disease.
In The Green Death the AI was completely business-orientated and would do anything to make it's company succeed, including brainwashing and murder.
In Oxygen the AI were programmed to murder the employees to save money.
In The Robots of Death the robots were reprogrammed to kill humans other than their controller.
In Mummy on the Orient Express the AI Gus was programmed to find out the secret of The Foretold.
The AI in Space Babies decided to make a monster because it was malfunctioning and acting according to a story.

There's always a logical line of thought (even if it's flawed) in Doctor Who AI. But in this episode the Dot just became disgusted with the Finetimers and decided to kill everyone and decided to use slug monsters it somehow created to do so and nothing else is said or shown.

One of the things I like about Doctor Who is that unless a villain is meant to be enigmatic you get at least some idea of what they want and what they're doing. Money, power, control, ideals, food, etc.

Heck, the previous explanation I gave could be completely wrong. The slugs might be the actual villains who hacked the Dot to serve them and them going after people according to their names is some sort of cultural ritual they have when attacking a planet.

I know I complained about this season relying on telling over showing, but at least those episodes explained what was happening and why in some way as opposed to hand-waving where the threat came from.

I want to be clear that I thought the episode was great otherwise.

I'd say that FineTime was meant to be a perfect place, but the people in it were far from perfect.

 

[Necropolitan]

If the slugs were originally created as a waste-disposal method and the AI hijacked them that would at least answer where the slugs came from. It would have been a nice callback to Paradise Towers (which this episode reminded me of) where the villain seized control of the cleaning robots to use as minions to get rid of all the people.

As someone who's a big fan of monsters I REALLY love the design of the slugs. Top-tier monster design, zero complaints, I love everything about them right down to the shade of orange they are.

 

[Staffan]

I just realised, maybe The Gunfighters is to blame for musical episodes, not Buffy?!

Xena had a musical episode three years before Buffy. A pretty good one, too, and leaning heavily on the talents of Lucy Lawless and Kevin Smith (no, not that one).

Because they were all horrible people.

When they mentioned that they had been sent off by their rich parents, I got really strong Ark B vibes. Didn't turn out to be correct in the end, but still.

 

[MarkB]

Hey, I will die on the hill of the Buffy musical episode. That was awesome. Don't you be disrespecting the Buffy.

That's kind of the point, though. Its awesomeness is why it inspired so many others.

 

[Necropolitan]

When they mentioned that they had been sent off by their rich parents, I got really strong Ark B vibes. Didn't turn out to be correct in the end, but still.

I thought that was the situation when I saw the slugs had taken over the homeworld too. That the inhabitants were meant to repopulate in a new colony to escape the slugs but were too blinded by social media to know that or see the slugs had followed them.

It feels like this episode went through a bunch of rewrites and had leftover plot pieces still in it.

 

[MarkB]

I thought that was the situation when I saw the slugs had taken over the homeworld too. That the inhabitants were meant to repopulate in a new colony to escape the slugs but were too blinded by social media to know that or see the slugs had followed them.

I thought that part was pretty straightforward - that this wasn't just a localised incident, it was happening across their whole civilisation.

 

[Necropolitan]

I thought that part was pretty straightforward - that this wasn't just a localised incident, it was happening across their whole civilisation.

But where did the slugs come from? It's kind of confusing that they couldn't have added a single line about them being repurposed bio-engineered waste disposal creatures the AI took control of or something.

Honestly if they'd just cut out the AI uprising part of it and just had the slugs be native lifeforms who'd gotten in and were eating people it'd have made more sense. And it would work better as a satire of social media since the locals would be dooming themselves entirely by themselves instead of being victims of an AI. You could have Lindy push Ricky to a slug to save herself and get the same reveal of her being horrible.

 

[MarkB]

But where did the slugs come from? It's kind of confusing that they couldn't have added a single line about them being repurposed bio-engineered waste disposal creatures the AI took control of or something.

I'm pretty sure they were deliberately engineered for maximum irony and agony. As mentioned and demonstrated, the Dots were perfectly capable of killing their users themselves. I think they deliberately built creatures that were so slow and cumbersome that anyone who wasn't constantly stuck in their own bubble could have easily outrun them, and whose ingestion process was intentionally drawn-out and painful.

Honestly if they'd just cut out the AI uprising part of it and just had the slugs be native lifeforms who'd gotten in and were eating people it'd have made more sense. And it would work better as a satire of social media since the locals would be dooming themselves entirely by themselves instead of being victims of an AI. You could have Lindy push Ricky to a slug to save herself and get the same reveal of her being horrible.

Being so horrible that your own technology hates you is pretty much dooming yourself.