"The idea of a race of child-sized Furbies driven to murder by a psychedelic sun is a perfectly bonkers touch from the man who gave us a piece of sentient skin blasting Britney Spears and a human/cat-man marriage that produced literal kittens."
I read the original comic and listened to the 2019 Big Finish audio adaptation starring Tom Baker before I watched this episode, because I'm a maniac. It was fun to see how RTD kept the core of the story intact while making it all about Donna's family.
While I'm very, very happy to have RTD back running things, I can't help but hope that sometime over the course of the next few years (maybe when they need a Doctor light episode, or maybe a big, weepy two-parter), they give Moffat a call. I liked a lot of Moffat's run, but the show was never better than when RTD did the season-long heavy lifting, and Moffat got an episode or two per year.
I spent the last few months rewatching the first few seasons and the last two weeks watched Series 4 and the specials, for the first time since 2009-10. The end of Davies and Tennant’s run is incredible, and I’m so giddy they’re back at it again.
I’ve also been saddened by how much the last few seasons have been underwhelming; I loved Jodie Whittaker as the Doctor, but frequently felt that she was short changed by the writing.
This episode felt like an absolute return to form, and I agree with Caroline that it feels like there’s been no time at all since ‘The End of Time’. For the show to be funny and heartfelt and to feel like the show I grew up with again is truly joyful!
It definitely felt like a return to form. I really have soured on the Whittaker era, though I agree that it wasn't her performance so much as the writing and everything else were mostly bad
What a fantastic return to form for Doctor Who. The Chibnall era had its ups and downs (more downs) but even when it was up it was rarely this fun. Assuming RTD has a nice long second tenure with the show I assume at some point I might start to find these big goofy stories exhausting, but for now I'm just excited to watch a version of the show that wants to celebrate its history rather than reinvent it.
Just about the only thing I tripped over was Donna and Rose just "letting go" of their metacrisis power to resolve that plot. It felt pretty hand-wavy, especially with the rather glib gender essentialism that came with it.
Tenant's always had problems with attachment "I don't want to go" (End of Time, Part II). Agree though it's mostly a stretch just to get Tenant and Donna back.
Fully agreed with all your points Caroline! I felt the need to drop in a comment to note how, as a man in his late 30s who has to work a *lot* harder than he used to to look good in tight clothes, Donna's line about Fourteen's suit cut me straight to the bone 😭😂 Welcome back, Catherine and RTD! Now please stop attacking me personally.
Let's be real here: David Tennant can wear a suit that tight for *as long as he damn well pleases*.
Wonderful return to form for the show. All hail RTD! I have always enjoyed the bonkers he brings to the show and he is by far my favorite writer of New Who. (There are flashier episodes, but for my money "Midnight" is a wildly impressive bit of writing. It is damn hard to do a locked-room style episode and make it gripping, but wow, does he succeed.) His writing may not always make logical sense, but it makes *emotional* sense, and that can be very powerful.
After the Doctor forcibly took Donna's memories despite her protests - after he made the choice *for* her - I think it was really important that this episode gave her the ultimate choice about her fate. She's Donna, so of course she would sacrifice herself to save everyone, but it was vital that she have agency here, that she make that informed choice herself and that the Doctor respect it. Really appreciated that fix-it for a tough moment from RTD's first run.
I do so love Doctor Who in all it's wonderful and messy incarnations but, despite it being Davies who got Nu-Who launched, I have always been much more of a Moffat fan than a Davies one. His willingness to hand-wave away continuity and to always opt for a joke or a lovely emotional beat seemed to me to undermine the stakes of a story - a trait I found frustrating.
On another note, I found this a bizarre way to re-launch Who in the Disney+ era. Viewers who may be tempted to try it out will surely be immediately put off by the sense that this is a show which is 13 seasons deep.
That info dump at the outset was likely needed but it was clumsy and ugly.
But what do I know?
I am delighted to have the Doctor back on our screens and I am looking forward to the next few episodes and to reading about them here.
I'm hoping Disney will give the show a bigger push when Ncuti Gatwa's era kicks off, as I suspect that will be a way more natural jumping on point. I've been thinking of these three specials as something designed specifically to win back fans who fell off during the Capaldi or Whittaker eras. And then the start of Ncuti's run will hopefully be the big push to get new viewers onboard too.
Either way, however, the weird opening recap absolutely reeks of something Disney forced them to do as a weird sort of compromise, even though it seems equally off-putting for old fans and new.
I do wonder though if it's a good idea to have the headliner for the next Doctor be the one of the most acclaimed pairing in the series run. Unlike most doctors, 15 wouldn't have to deal with everyone still grieving over 13.
The INSANE chemistry between Tennant and Tate is no joke. I would watch as many seasons of ANY show they'd do together. In fact, I wonder if she's interested in joining him on S3 of Good Omens if that happens (the combined chemistry of Tennant/Sheen/Tate? I want to know.)
This was honestly so incredibly wonderful (even with some slightly dodgy and classically goofy Who storyline shenanigans) that it took me way more than an hour to watch because I kept going back and rewatching bits. 14 handing Donna the sonic and her just taking it automatically. The bit with the coffee. Talking about Wilf. The conversation between Donna and Sylvia, further proof that sometimes even not great mums can be great grandmothers (and get better as mothers in the process).
I really can't get over what an unexpectedly great arc Sylvia has now gotten over these 17 years. Especially for a character who started off so one-note and off-putting.
As someone who fell off in the Tennant years and came back for Capaldi, I appreciated the bizarrely-shot recap at the top of the episode!
I had a good time with this! For an anniversary special, I admired how pleasingly low-stakes it seemed (before the eleventh-hour destruction of London). Running about, riffing on Spielberg, bug-men chasing a Furby: it’s that slightly naff type of wonderful that RTD does so well.
Watching Tennant and Tate reunite was such a joy it solidified in retrospect for me that, yes, they are my favorite Doctor/Companion pairing.
But: the binary/nonbinary celebration of being trans saves the universe stuff was just so cheesy, and so over the top that it pulled me right out after what was a very emotional scene leading to Donna's purported sacrifice.
Also, and I'm not the guy to parse this really, I guess, but it ... makes no sense? Donna's child is a transwoman, who presents as a woman, identifies as a woman, and uses she/her pronouns. So how is that "non-binary" exactly? It's literally adopting the binary gender framework. No "they/theirs" going on. It's like Davies wanted to make some big statement, maybe as a planting-the-flag moment to drive off bigots for good, but...it doesn't really work narratively or dramatically at all. Nor does the "You wouldn't get it because you're a dude again, but us ladies can let stuff go." Like, what??
75% of this was great, I thought, but that climax was just goofy.
I'm hesitant to mount the strongest defense here, because there's equally a chance that a lot of this was just RTD being well-intentioned but still limited to his own Boomer perspective. But I do think some people use the term "non-binary" fairly fluidly, to denote an experience that's not just tied specifically to what pronouns they use. Or even just to encompass the entire non-cisgender experience as a whole. So, for instance, even if Rose has ultimately ended up on one side of the binary in some ways, she might still want to claim the word to describe herself or embrace the sort of "crossing-the-binary" experience she had to get there?
IDK, as with my concern about the idea that Donna "needed" to have a child to fix herself, it's hard to figure out how much "agency" or whatever to grant these characters who are ultimately all the brainchild of a 60-year-old Welsh man with a very different lived experience. Obviously if Rose were a real person, it'd be easy to support whatever words she wants to use to describe herself. But here it's hard to parse where it makes sense to accept that she's got a fluid sense of self-identity vs. where it makes sense to call out RTD for mixing up a couple different ideas.
As for the big "let it go" moment, I liked that as an acknowledgement that women so often have to learn to let things roll off their backs as a survival tactic or just to stay sane. And Donna being rude to The Doctor about it even felt true to her character. But I agree it was weird to really emphasize the "you're a man, you wouldn't get it" element, right after acknowledging that the Doctor used to be a woman and has a deeply gender-fluid experience of his own. Probably would've been better (and funnier) if Rose had called out her mom's gender essentialism there, rather than leaning into it too.
All well said, and I would have absolutely loved if Donna had been called out on that last point. If nothing else, it would reinforce the point the episode made early on with Donna's mother - most of us have no clue what we're doing, but we're trying!
Certainly a mixed bag of using the essentialism that's convenient and tossing the complexity when it's not, but to add an extra degree of "what he missed" -- the "you're a man, you wouldn't get it" would have been a fine way to acknowledge and engage with the question of if/how much 14 IDs as a man *if* it was "you're a man, you wouldn't get it, but you should know better, since you've been more than that." Take the Boomer/cheesy on-the-nose commentary elements, and use the moment to more pointedly critique the misogynistic, macho, or simply patriarchal notions often present in trans and/or queer male perspectives (such as RTD's), or hell, awkwardly poke at the "transmisogyny-exempt/affected" discourse.
Also, agreed that Donna, especially this new MommaDonna, could use a moment of external deflation to update the regular mode of self-loving self-deprecation, and it'd be tough for Rose to hit that note without betraying the trust and loyalty to her protector, but thus would've been all the more effective if they had managed it.
I wasn't the biggest fan of Tennant's Doctor but it was lovely to have him back again even though it's only temporary and seeing Donna again was awesome.
I love the Nobles/Temples! They've got such wonderful chemistry together. I was really tickled that Donna's husband is played by Karl Collins who starred in The Bill for a number of years around the turn of the Millenium.
Rose is wonderful! She brings such a fabulous presence in her scenes. I also really dug Ruth Madeley as Shirley Bingham! She and her rocket-firing wheelchair were brilliant.
Really looking forward to seeing the the rest of theses specials!
That's exactly how I felt. This was just so much fun. Probably the most pure fun I can remember Doctor Who being in years, maybe since before the Chibnall/Whittaker era
I'm really curious how the Chibnall/Whittaker era is going to be seen in decades to come. I really liked her as the Doctor, she has tonnes of charisma and presence but I felt the writing was really lacking for much of her run.
You know, I'm actually wondering if time is going to soften people's frustrations with it. I was never the biggest fan of her era, but I rewatched a bit of it to prep for these specials and I think it plays better when it's freed from the weight of being THE iteration of the show and it's just low-stakes sci-fi that you can easily/quickly binge.
It certainly could! The McCoy era got a bit of that kind of reassessment in the years after it went off the air.
On a similar note, I'm curious to see whether time and circumstance softens to view of Star Trek Nemesis now that it's no longer the final journey of the TNG cast. Part of the frustration towards it was that it was such a weak ending to their saga. The Picard series built heavily on Nemesis, while its final season gave us the last TNG adventure and a happy ending.
I live for Catherine Tate's line deliveries. My suspicion is that next week's mystery involves the episode.being between 80-100% a two-handed, and, like, if you had these two on your call sheet, why wouldn't you?
One moment here really crystallized the difference in showrunners for me. Chibnall would have had a big shout-out scene but avoid having anyone die because he wants it to be a family show. RTD makes the fact nobody is dying an integral part of the plot.
Glorious to have this back - I too would have run around the new TARDIS like a giddy child. Imagine the right-wing critics will be screaming about the show forcing trans ideology on people so credit to RTD for doing what all good sci-fi does by taking the issues which matter most to him personally and using the genre to analyze them.
Yeah, his intentions are so pure and the country he's writing in so hostile (especially when you factor in how JK Rowling has tainted her own family-friendly British genre world) that I was way more inclined to forgive some of the uneven or cheesy writing. The spirit feels right, at least.
Non-binary people fall under the trans umbrella (I'm queer and know people IRL who ID as both non-binary and trans). That said, I don't think the use of the word non-binary was meant to indicate that Rose herself is non-binary — it was more that the DoctorDonna was a binary and that by adding Rose the meta-crisis was able to be diffused or whatever. But as a trans teen, Rose likely has enby friends and it makes sense that she reaches for that word in that moment — the knowledge she already has, that gender is not just a binary, makes grasping what's happening in that moment intuitive for her. It was cheesy but also lovely (which is classic RTD).
yes, but it should be pointed out, as someone does below, that being non-binary and being trans are not the same thing. So he kind of messed that part up
I would say at worst it was as Caroline puts it, a square peg in a rectangular hole, but as with many other (especially during Specials) elisions and partly implied/patly explained details, I simply took that as Rose telling us that non-binary gender is part of her experience as explicitly other things told us being trans is part of her experience.
At the risk of philosophical woo-woo, I'll add an extra wrinkle since it elucidates some gender theory while matching up with plot resolution. Yes, Rose can be two things: trans as well as non-binary. But also, non-binary can mean two things. It can be someone who doesn't identify with any binary gender, uses they/them pronouns, exhibits some degree of neither/both/beyond-the-binary presentation; this may be what some viewers expected to see from Rose if she was "non-binary" and not "simply trans". However, non-binary can also, as Helen and Caroline and others have alluded to, refer to an element of the trans experience, in that the movement outside of one's assigned binary gender is itself non-binary, even if your destination is towards "the other binary". In this way, Donna+Rose more resembles the 14th Doctor's experience of gender, encompassing trans, binary, and non-binary existence across time and in the present.
Well, that was absolutely fantastic! I was cautiously optimistic about RTD, Tennant and Tate all returning to usher in a new era, but they pulled it off like nothing had changed. As someone who fell off near the end of the Capaldi run, it was refreshing to see Doctor Who be this fun and light. Will it get tiresome if every episode is like this? Absolutely. Was it exactly what we needed to recharge the show? Also, absolutely!
Some highlights from my recent DW viewing for you all:
A mini behind-the-scenes doc about making this episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWnPxke0row
This truly delight S4 recap from Tennant and Tate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8A1BMr310dg
This maybe even more delightful behind-the-scenes vlog from Georgia Tennant: https://www.instagram.com/reel/C0CSCPtiySD/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
"The idea of a race of child-sized Furbies driven to murder by a psychedelic sun is a perfectly bonkers touch from the man who gave us a piece of sentient skin blasting Britney Spears and a human/cat-man marriage that produced literal kittens."
Worth pointing out that this all comes from the 1980 comic the episode is based on, Doctor Who and the Star Beast (Pat Mills and Dave Gibbons got Story credit in the title card, which was nice). https://tardis.fandom.com/wiki/Doctor_Who_and_the_Star_Beast_(comic_story)
Liked the episode a lot, and I'm already disappointed we're only getting three episodes of this, though I'm looking forward to Gatwa too.
That new TARDIS set is massive, the new money is clearly on screen.
I read the original comic and listened to the 2019 Big Finish audio adaptation starring Tom Baker before I watched this episode, because I'm a maniac. It was fun to see how RTD kept the core of the story intact while making it all about Donna's family.
Had no idea this episode was based on an old comic, thanks for that bit of trivia!
While I'm very, very happy to have RTD back running things, I can't help but hope that sometime over the course of the next few years (maybe when they need a Doctor light episode, or maybe a big, weepy two-parter), they give Moffat a call. I liked a lot of Moffat's run, but the show was never better than when RTD did the season-long heavy lifting, and Moffat got an episode or two per year.
Hear hear! I would love a Moffat-penned episode in this new RTD era.
That was tremendous!
I spent the last few months rewatching the first few seasons and the last two weeks watched Series 4 and the specials, for the first time since 2009-10. The end of Davies and Tennant’s run is incredible, and I’m so giddy they’re back at it again.
I’ve also been saddened by how much the last few seasons have been underwhelming; I loved Jodie Whittaker as the Doctor, but frequently felt that she was short changed by the writing.
This episode felt like an absolute return to form, and I agree with Caroline that it feels like there’s been no time at all since ‘The End of Time’. For the show to be funny and heartfelt and to feel like the show I grew up with again is truly joyful!
It definitely felt like a return to form. I really have soured on the Whittaker era, though I agree that it wasn't her performance so much as the writing and everything else were mostly bad
What a fantastic return to form for Doctor Who. The Chibnall era had its ups and downs (more downs) but even when it was up it was rarely this fun. Assuming RTD has a nice long second tenure with the show I assume at some point I might start to find these big goofy stories exhausting, but for now I'm just excited to watch a version of the show that wants to celebrate its history rather than reinvent it.
Just about the only thing I tripped over was Donna and Rose just "letting go" of their metacrisis power to resolve that plot. It felt pretty hand-wavy, especially with the rather glib gender essentialism that came with it.
Tenant's always had problems with attachment "I don't want to go" (End of Time, Part II). Agree though it's mostly a stretch just to get Tenant and Donna back.
Fully agreed with all your points Caroline! I felt the need to drop in a comment to note how, as a man in his late 30s who has to work a *lot* harder than he used to to look good in tight clothes, Donna's line about Fourteen's suit cut me straight to the bone 😭😂 Welcome back, Catherine and RTD! Now please stop attacking me personally.
And Tennant is my age! (early 50s)
Let's be real here: David Tennant can wear a suit that tight for *as long as he damn well pleases*.
Wonderful return to form for the show. All hail RTD! I have always enjoyed the bonkers he brings to the show and he is by far my favorite writer of New Who. (There are flashier episodes, but for my money "Midnight" is a wildly impressive bit of writing. It is damn hard to do a locked-room style episode and make it gripping, but wow, does he succeed.) His writing may not always make logical sense, but it makes *emotional* sense, and that can be very powerful.
After the Doctor forcibly took Donna's memories despite her protests - after he made the choice *for* her - I think it was really important that this episode gave her the ultimate choice about her fate. She's Donna, so of course she would sacrifice herself to save everyone, but it was vital that she have agency here, that she make that informed choice herself and that the Doctor respect it. Really appreciated that fix-it for a tough moment from RTD's first run.
I do so love Doctor Who in all it's wonderful and messy incarnations but, despite it being Davies who got Nu-Who launched, I have always been much more of a Moffat fan than a Davies one. His willingness to hand-wave away continuity and to always opt for a joke or a lovely emotional beat seemed to me to undermine the stakes of a story - a trait I found frustrating.
On another note, I found this a bizarre way to re-launch Who in the Disney+ era. Viewers who may be tempted to try it out will surely be immediately put off by the sense that this is a show which is 13 seasons deep.
That info dump at the outset was likely needed but it was clumsy and ugly.
But what do I know?
I am delighted to have the Doctor back on our screens and I am looking forward to the next few episodes and to reading about them here.
I'm hoping Disney will give the show a bigger push when Ncuti Gatwa's era kicks off, as I suspect that will be a way more natural jumping on point. I've been thinking of these three specials as something designed specifically to win back fans who fell off during the Capaldi or Whittaker eras. And then the start of Ncuti's run will hopefully be the big push to get new viewers onboard too.
Either way, however, the weird opening recap absolutely reeks of something Disney forced them to do as a weird sort of compromise, even though it seems equally off-putting for old fans and new.
I do wonder though if it's a good idea to have the headliner for the next Doctor be the one of the most acclaimed pairing in the series run. Unlike most doctors, 15 wouldn't have to deal with everyone still grieving over 13.
The INSANE chemistry between Tennant and Tate is no joke. I would watch as many seasons of ANY show they'd do together. In fact, I wonder if she's interested in joining him on S3 of Good Omens if that happens (the combined chemistry of Tennant/Sheen/Tate? I want to know.)
This was honestly so incredibly wonderful (even with some slightly dodgy and classically goofy Who storyline shenanigans) that it took me way more than an hour to watch because I kept going back and rewatching bits. 14 handing Donna the sonic and her just taking it automatically. The bit with the coffee. Talking about Wilf. The conversation between Donna and Sylvia, further proof that sometimes even not great mums can be great grandmothers (and get better as mothers in the process).
I really can't get over what an unexpectedly great arc Sylvia has now gotten over these 17 years. Especially for a character who started off so one-note and off-putting.
As someone who fell off in the Tennant years and came back for Capaldi, I appreciated the bizarrely-shot recap at the top of the episode!
I had a good time with this! For an anniversary special, I admired how pleasingly low-stakes it seemed (before the eleventh-hour destruction of London). Running about, riffing on Spielberg, bug-men chasing a Furby: it’s that slightly naff type of wonderful that RTD does so well.
Watching Tennant and Tate reunite was such a joy it solidified in retrospect for me that, yes, they are my favorite Doctor/Companion pairing.
But: the binary/nonbinary celebration of being trans saves the universe stuff was just so cheesy, and so over the top that it pulled me right out after what was a very emotional scene leading to Donna's purported sacrifice.
Also, and I'm not the guy to parse this really, I guess, but it ... makes no sense? Donna's child is a transwoman, who presents as a woman, identifies as a woman, and uses she/her pronouns. So how is that "non-binary" exactly? It's literally adopting the binary gender framework. No "they/theirs" going on. It's like Davies wanted to make some big statement, maybe as a planting-the-flag moment to drive off bigots for good, but...it doesn't really work narratively or dramatically at all. Nor does the "You wouldn't get it because you're a dude again, but us ladies can let stuff go." Like, what??
75% of this was great, I thought, but that climax was just goofy.
I'm hesitant to mount the strongest defense here, because there's equally a chance that a lot of this was just RTD being well-intentioned but still limited to his own Boomer perspective. But I do think some people use the term "non-binary" fairly fluidly, to denote an experience that's not just tied specifically to what pronouns they use. Or even just to encompass the entire non-cisgender experience as a whole. So, for instance, even if Rose has ultimately ended up on one side of the binary in some ways, she might still want to claim the word to describe herself or embrace the sort of "crossing-the-binary" experience she had to get there?
IDK, as with my concern about the idea that Donna "needed" to have a child to fix herself, it's hard to figure out how much "agency" or whatever to grant these characters who are ultimately all the brainchild of a 60-year-old Welsh man with a very different lived experience. Obviously if Rose were a real person, it'd be easy to support whatever words she wants to use to describe herself. But here it's hard to parse where it makes sense to accept that she's got a fluid sense of self-identity vs. where it makes sense to call out RTD for mixing up a couple different ideas.
As for the big "let it go" moment, I liked that as an acknowledgement that women so often have to learn to let things roll off their backs as a survival tactic or just to stay sane. And Donna being rude to The Doctor about it even felt true to her character. But I agree it was weird to really emphasize the "you're a man, you wouldn't get it" element, right after acknowledging that the Doctor used to be a woman and has a deeply gender-fluid experience of his own. Probably would've been better (and funnier) if Rose had called out her mom's gender essentialism there, rather than leaning into it too.
All well said, and I would have absolutely loved if Donna had been called out on that last point. If nothing else, it would reinforce the point the episode made early on with Donna's mother - most of us have no clue what we're doing, but we're trying!
Certainly a mixed bag of using the essentialism that's convenient and tossing the complexity when it's not, but to add an extra degree of "what he missed" -- the "you're a man, you wouldn't get it" would have been a fine way to acknowledge and engage with the question of if/how much 14 IDs as a man *if* it was "you're a man, you wouldn't get it, but you should know better, since you've been more than that." Take the Boomer/cheesy on-the-nose commentary elements, and use the moment to more pointedly critique the misogynistic, macho, or simply patriarchal notions often present in trans and/or queer male perspectives (such as RTD's), or hell, awkwardly poke at the "transmisogyny-exempt/affected" discourse.
Also, agreed that Donna, especially this new MommaDonna, could use a moment of external deflation to update the regular mode of self-loving self-deprecation, and it'd be tough for Rose to hit that note without betraying the trust and loyalty to her protector, but thus would've been all the more effective if they had managed it.
I had such a blast with this one. So much fun.
I wasn't the biggest fan of Tennant's Doctor but it was lovely to have him back again even though it's only temporary and seeing Donna again was awesome.
I love the Nobles/Temples! They've got such wonderful chemistry together. I was really tickled that Donna's husband is played by Karl Collins who starred in The Bill for a number of years around the turn of the Millenium.
Rose is wonderful! She brings such a fabulous presence in her scenes. I also really dug Ruth Madeley as Shirley Bingham! She and her rocket-firing wheelchair were brilliant.
Really looking forward to seeing the the rest of theses specials!
That's exactly how I felt. This was just so much fun. Probably the most pure fun I can remember Doctor Who being in years, maybe since before the Chibnall/Whittaker era
I'm really curious how the Chibnall/Whittaker era is going to be seen in decades to come. I really liked her as the Doctor, she has tonnes of charisma and presence but I felt the writing was really lacking for much of her run.
You know, I'm actually wondering if time is going to soften people's frustrations with it. I was never the biggest fan of her era, but I rewatched a bit of it to prep for these specials and I think it plays better when it's freed from the weight of being THE iteration of the show and it's just low-stakes sci-fi that you can easily/quickly binge.
It certainly could! The McCoy era got a bit of that kind of reassessment in the years after it went off the air.
On a similar note, I'm curious to see whether time and circumstance softens to view of Star Trek Nemesis now that it's no longer the final journey of the TNG cast. Part of the frustration towards it was that it was such a weak ending to their saga. The Picard series built heavily on Nemesis, while its final season gave us the last TNG adventure and a happy ending.
I live for Catherine Tate's line deliveries. My suspicion is that next week's mystery involves the episode.being between 80-100% a two-handed, and, like, if you had these two on your call sheet, why wouldn't you?
One moment here really crystallized the difference in showrunners for me. Chibnall would have had a big shout-out scene but avoid having anyone die because he wants it to be a family show. RTD makes the fact nobody is dying an integral part of the plot.
Glorious to have this back - I too would have run around the new TARDIS like a giddy child. Imagine the right-wing critics will be screaming about the show forcing trans ideology on people so credit to RTD for doing what all good sci-fi does by taking the issues which matter most to him personally and using the genre to analyze them.
I really liked Davies just going right at the anti-trans bigots and on TERF island no less!
Yeah, his intentions are so pure and the country he's writing in so hostile (especially when you factor in how JK Rowling has tainted her own family-friendly British genre world) that I was way more inclined to forgive some of the uneven or cheesy writing. The spirit feels right, at least.
Non-binary people fall under the trans umbrella (I'm queer and know people IRL who ID as both non-binary and trans). That said, I don't think the use of the word non-binary was meant to indicate that Rose herself is non-binary — it was more that the DoctorDonna was a binary and that by adding Rose the meta-crisis was able to be diffused or whatever. But as a trans teen, Rose likely has enby friends and it makes sense that she reaches for that word in that moment — the knowledge she already has, that gender is not just a binary, makes grasping what's happening in that moment intuitive for her. It was cheesy but also lovely (which is classic RTD).
yes, but it should be pointed out, as someone does below, that being non-binary and being trans are not the same thing. So he kind of messed that part up
I would say at worst it was as Caroline puts it, a square peg in a rectangular hole, but as with many other (especially during Specials) elisions and partly implied/patly explained details, I simply took that as Rose telling us that non-binary gender is part of her experience as explicitly other things told us being trans is part of her experience.
At the risk of philosophical woo-woo, I'll add an extra wrinkle since it elucidates some gender theory while matching up with plot resolution. Yes, Rose can be two things: trans as well as non-binary. But also, non-binary can mean two things. It can be someone who doesn't identify with any binary gender, uses they/them pronouns, exhibits some degree of neither/both/beyond-the-binary presentation; this may be what some viewers expected to see from Rose if she was "non-binary" and not "simply trans". However, non-binary can also, as Helen and Caroline and others have alluded to, refer to an element of the trans experience, in that the movement outside of one's assigned binary gender is itself non-binary, even if your destination is towards "the other binary". In this way, Donna+Rose more resembles the 14th Doctor's experience of gender, encompassing trans, binary, and non-binary existence across time and in the present.
Well, that was absolutely fantastic! I was cautiously optimistic about RTD, Tennant and Tate all returning to usher in a new era, but they pulled it off like nothing had changed. As someone who fell off near the end of the Capaldi run, it was refreshing to see Doctor Who be this fun and light. Will it get tiresome if every episode is like this? Absolutely. Was it exactly what we needed to recharge the show? Also, absolutely!