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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9365334" data-attributes="member: 18">Slowly catching up:Christmas Special - I mean I guess?I'm unmoved by this episode. Introduces some mysteries, but do we really need another Mysterious Magic/Special White Total Babe In Her early 20s. We've had three now. I'm longing for the days of Martha, who felt like an actual adult, despite Ruby's actor being excellent. The goblins were unexciting and just looked and moved like slightly bored or tired children, which I assume they were under the CGI. What a waste of goblins, a truly classic monster. Also they behaved exactly like gremlins (causing accidents), not goblins, why call them goblins when they both look and act like gremlins? You could even have had movie-ref jokes in it that way! The song was try-hard, and made no diegetic sense (which I get to criticise because they bring up music being diegetic in a later episode!), and worse - it was a bad song! Just lazy rhyming, and not even funny in a pantomime way! I confess I skipped through a couple of bits of this episode - it was that dull. I liked the grandma at least! Also I don't feel great that initially they just abandoned the goblins to continue, er... stealing and eating babies. I know the Doctor doesn't have a duty to stop that - but it feels like he should. It's genuinely like, say, letting Jack the Ripper go, except worse because how many babies they gonna eat? How many people are going to lead horrible lives because their kid got stolen? At least with serial killers you might know there's a limit. I feel like it's one thing to be "The Doctor isn't a killer", and quite another to be like "The Doctor just lets baby-eaters do what they want!". I guess he stopped them later in a bit I skipped maybe? But that was luck if so. Also talking of luck, none of that was luck, Doctor, none of that was "luck". None of that was "coincidence". That was just malicious little beasts intentionally causing harm! So the whole "luck" tangent was just dumb. Don't show them setting up accidents and claim it's "luck"!Space Babies - Absolutely terrible.Just no redeeming features whatsoever. Half the babies weren't even cute, particularly not Eric (sorry Eric). How do you even find babies that aren't cute? That takes effort - almost all babies are cute! The plot didn't make sense, the heavy-handed "forced birth" stuff didn't make sense when you introduce a wealthy corporation as the evil-doer, not a government, and the "forced birth" stuff became actively MESSED UP IN A REAL BAD WAY when them seemed to be suggesting the refugee-friendly planet was going to have to take all these babies and presumably still not turn the machine off? I think it's just thoughtlessness but I also feel like this is what happens when British people with shallow thinking try and take on what is very much a real issue but not an issue they've really considered properly. I feel like an American writer would probably have done a much better job here. Absolutely classic RTD in a bad way, sadly - Years and Years was absolutely full of "OMG HAVE U HEARED ABOUT THIS ISSUE?!!?!?" from RTD, where he'd like, read one article about something, years ago, barely half-remembered it, but knew it was "bad", so without doing any y'know, "research", or "thinking" (who needs such petty things!), he just wrote in into the story in increasingly inept ways (that ended up undermining a lot of what he was trying to say).Also just in line-delivery terms, the line re: refugees having to get to where they were going themselves was really mishandled by whoever said it, and instead of expressing it like a sad fact of life through all of history, they expressed it like it was a weird-ass rule of future-law or something. Bad direction. Should have done another few takes.And the "We must save the monster!" didn't really make sense, because the monster had no redeeming characteristics and didn't even appear to be sentient, and the idea that babies "need" a terrifying snot monster is, frankly, completely demented. No they don't man, they really don't. It's going to end up locked in one room for literally the rest of history or until it dries out - great future you've got for it there! They could have at least had it show some shred of decency or at least intelligence, show it was playing a role, not serious. But nope. Confused ideas from RTD again.The Devil's Chord - Surprisingly decent.The flow of the episode works, the performances are strong (even from the very un-Beatles-looking faux-Beatles), especially from Jinkx, the concept is surprisingly strong, and I only have a bunch of nitpicks and personal complaints. Which I will supply regardless but with the caveat that none of these are serious and need answering:1) Why in god's name was there a Routemaster 77 bus in 2023/4? Was this some kind of reference to an earlier episode? Lazy re-use of a set? Or what? I'd have thought it was tech stopped developing because music did, except the flipped van nearby was modern.2) So banishing Maestro backdates their ever having been in the universe? They appear in 1925 and have been eating more and more music since then, but deleting them in 1963 back-fixes that? This is never how Dr Who has worked previously. Is it a general principle with these Toymaker types that it back-fixes stuff? I don't think it is. I was surprised they didn't need to go back to 1925 to sort it out before it stopped.3) The musical notation was Looney Tunes-ass and tacky and exactly the kind of Western-centric Imperial thinking that Space Babies took an inept pot-shot at (if they world speaks one language, it might be a form of Chinese, but it sure as hell won't use Chinese characters, because they're an objectively inefficient and limited form of writing). Once the decision had been made they made good use of it, but it was lazy and kind of lame. It would have been cooler, even if using musical notation, if some non-Western notation had been used.4) Ugh the Beatles ugh.5) They nearly saved the Beatles thing by having Lennon play the piano instead of the expected, but then bloody Paul bloody McCartney, that narcissistic git, turned up. At least it was an actor, not an actual cameo. I was dreading a cameo from the man himself.6) We've had two episodes in a row of The Doctor saying "Omg I'm scared, but I never get scared! This must be serious!", and like, there have only been three episodes! That doesn't work. That's bad writing. Normally I'd say whoever wrote episode 2 didn't coordinate with episode 3, but RTD wrote both and is showrunner so he literally has no excuse.7) Maestro just directly means Master so maybe you could have chosen a different name? Come on.There was still a lot I loved about this episode, particularly, for reasons I don't really understand, the getting in and out of musical instruments. Also you make up a tune this time and it's perfectly good, after the bloody terrible song in the Xmas ep? Okay no more writing lyrics for you, Russell! It seems like freed of the need for fitting your awful lyrics your show can produce perfectly good music.So far overall I'd say the performances are generally good, the dialogue usually pretty strong, as shows go, but I do feel like the ideas are messier, so far, than previous RTD seasons, and not in a good way. Also am misremembering, or is the whole "you can change the past and it'll change you and the future" thing an actual change from previous seasons of the show? The Doctor being really concerned about paradoxes seems like something from oldWho, even. But maybe he's intentionally lying, I did get that vibe and it's well within RTD's wheelhouse. Sad but unsurprised to see RTD is picking up the terrible threads Chibnall left, where the Doctor isn't a Gallifreyan and also doubling down very very clearly on the yawnsome Lonely God stuff - my only hope is he's doubling down on it so hard that maybe he's going to rugpull himself somehow. One thing I can respect with RTD is the man knows how to do misdirection.</blockquote>

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