I both love and hate this. At least here we can hand wave it away as “alien computers”

I think Antony Head was pretty good in this one, but I agree not as good as he was in buffy.

I watched SJA as it aired, and from what I remember there wasn’t much if anything that related to this episode. Even K9 wasn’t really in it.

I have mixed feelings about this episode. From a nostalgia bait front, it hits just right. Especially the reveals of SJ and K9. Though again, would have been better without the “next time” spoilers. Anthony Head is absolutely perfect for the role - from the downright evil treatment of the kid in care at the start right down to the tempting offer he gives at the final confrontation. There’s also a lot of humour sprinkled throughout - Teachers living in the school, “I’m the tin dog <sits down in defeat>”. A really nice moment from the doctor as he reveals how he feels about travelling and being around humans.

However, there’s lots that also doesn’t really live up to expectations. After the pretty good werewolf creature last episode, the bat gargoyle creatures look lacking in comparison. The bickering throughout just feels awkward and annoying, whether it’s between Rose / SJ or Mickey. The climactic school lockdown feels over the top, with music too loud and lots of directorial adrenaline without anything much happening. Other than the teachers being eaten, which almost feels played for laughs, it does not feel like there is enough threat. The God maker feels like it comes out of nowhere and I’m still not really sure what it’s about.

There’s so many plot holes and annoyances here it almost seems like cheating to list them off, but I’m going to do some anyway. Why is headmaster recommending visitors try the chips, why have a dramatic K9 sacrifice only to resurrect him minutes later, why does the projector screen explode in the classroom, how has only one journalist spotted whats going on, why does a match-the-symbols puzzle game rewrite the kids brains (that’s all it was, you could play a flash version of this on the bbc website), why does the whole school explode at the end - wish fulfilment for the episode writer maybe?

All that being said, I still enjoyed this episode for the cross-over of characters and the acting from everyone involved. At the end I am glad that SJ got to keep a K9 (of theseus), and in a way I am also glad that mickey finally joins them in a trio.

The bit about them not taking it seriously is a good point. The Doctor spotted pretty quickly that rose was acting oddly in the previous episode. Given how badly the landlord was trying to make it seem like something wasn’t right, Doctor should have spotted it right away.

I agree about the “just let it be a werewolf”. The bit at the close of the episode where they go on about werewolves, the way people react to the monster, it would have been perfectly fine to just let it be a werewolf.

This is one that I haven’t rewatched in a long time. There’s lots of good scottish actors in this one. The plot is good. It’s not one of my go-to standout episodes, it’s not the most exciting, but it holds up okay.

The fantasy story of werewolves is something I could easily see them having done in the recent series. Something that shines through in this episode is some of the DNA of doctor who as an educational vehicle. I didn’t know about her survived Victoria’s assassination attempts or that she had a disease. Some of the comments made me look up when wolves were last seen in britain - about 200 years before victoria. More than enough time for folk stories to evolve about them. We really need to reintroduce them back to our country, there’s far too many deer. They mention a great comet, but I can’t figure out which one it would have been in 1540.

I really like the way Queen Victoria is played here. It would have been easy to go full pomp for a story about royals but its very understated. Which plays well considering she is in mourning. But she is still willing to stand up to the Doctor’s nonsense when he starts babbling. When she starts talking about tales from the beyond, it’s nice to compare this to the Doctor who has also lost his species and is in mourning, who you have to imagine would also be desperate from some kind of message.

I was preparing myself for some ungodly CGI, but actually it’s pretty good. The transformation is creepy, and the actual wolf design looks great, if a bit blurry. The split-screen screen with doctor and wolf listening through the doorway was really nice.

Character-wise it’s nice to see Doctor catching himself being rude, and getting used to his new self. Rose is shown competent, taking charge, which is nice against all the women cowering at the beginning. The women eventually take on some strong action later in the episode. The running “not amused” bit is some nice levity, and continues the kind of humour that Rose had with 9, but it feels a bit more playful or flirty (?) to me when she does it with 10.

Plot annoyances:

• When in human form, the monster has the same desire as the assassins - go after the queen. When in wolf form, it can break out of the cage easily. Why is it even in the cage to begin with?
• How did the wolf get out of the mistletoe library doors that the doctor closed?
• The chase scenes went on possibly a little bit too long for my liking

Fun facts:

• On BBC iPlayer, the sub track for this episode has the continuity announcer’s dialogue on-screen for a fraction of a second when the episode starts.
• Doctor makes a joke about “Balamory”, a Scottish kids TV show which was cancelled just as Doctor Who was being revived. Doctor who is now effectively cancelled, but in this year “Balamory” was revived with new episodes.
• The bad wolf meme rears itself again.

I forgot these were happening again. Tennants first run is a pretty good one, though upon rewatching this episode isn’t the best opener.

Thoughts for this episode:

• Within the episode plot, there’s some good stuff here. Lots of opportunity for angry doctor. It’s a good exploration of the ethics of the lab. It has to be vulnerable people who already have incurable diseases who help to test our new treatments. They’re effectively slaves in the episode but in the real world can you truly consent if you’re being offered something when you’re in a vulnerable position? Much less when being taken advantage of by for profit pharma companies funding the studies. The whole ethics thing might have been more impactful if we had seen a progression from something obviously harmless like single-cell brains or cultured meats (that we actually have right now), stepping slowly up to full life forms, as then there’s some ambiguity about where exactly you should draw the line.
• However, the actual logic of the entire hospital doesn’t make much sense if you think about it for more than a few seconds. The disinfection scene is amusing but it makes no sense. The solution of mixing a literal solution of different medicines feels like it can’t possibly work. Nor really did having lifts going to a basement people know nothing about - particularly a hospital that has hidden a whole load of secret stuff would surely have spotted it. And the footprint of the whole hidden lab seems bigger than the hospital itself.
• I am not a fan of the hospital set designs. The reception for the hospital looks like an airport check in desk. The wards don’t look much like hospital wards either. The CGI in the ladder and lift shafts during the “zombie chase” has not aged well at all.
• I wonder if they knew what they were doing with Bo at this point in the storyline. The idea of a silent watcher following humanity is a nice contrast compared to the doctor’s often quite obvious interventions. I don’t think it really meshes with who Bo ultimately is revealed to be, though. The general effects and his (their?) design are nice. The melody and themes used with the Bo meeting is really nice.
• As most of you already commented, the rose mind swap bit is quite awkward to watch, doesn’t really land for me. It’s good the doctor immediately clocks something is wrong, though he probably should have acted sooner. The swap isn’t much better in the doctor.
• The design and acting of the various cat nurses is really creepy and well done. Ditto the infectious pustules and scab effects, very offputting. The idea of a “petrification” disease is weird, but cool.
• The circular ending is a really nice way to round off the episode and humanise cassandra’s character - time travel used well here.

Two stand out lines this episode: “You’re talking out your arse” and “Who needs arms when you have claws”

Those other services are not great but they are at the very least not actively promoting AI-generated child abuse imagery. It’s an incredibly low bar, but they do pass it.

For a long time after they removed the 5 star system, if you subscribed to a channel via RSS, it would show you the like/dislike data for videos as a 5 star rating. You can’t see it easily any more but I suspect, due to tech debt, youtube’s internals are still using the 5 star rating.

I don’t mind injected podcast ads so much, especially for smaller podcasts that need some financial support. What I tend to do is use a VPN, that way the podcast is in my local language, but the ads are in another that I don’t understand. I get my podcast, podcasters get paid, and I avoid tracking and brainwashing. win-win-win

Elect a president, but call whoever wins a king/queen. We get democracy, they get a royal to fawn over.

How many contrasting qualifiers does it take for a comparison to become useless?

• Mamdani?
• Female mamdani?
• White female mamadani?
• Seattleite white female mamdani?

This is one of the points that a French MEP brought up during the meeting. If this is pursued it could as a side effect open up space for digital “orphaned works” which would be fantastic.

Some parts of this bill, increasing the places where vaping is not permitted in line with smoking, are very welcome.

But bans of addictive substances only result in criminalising people who are addicted and putting them more at risk of harm, because now in addition to lung cancer they’ll have black market goons to deal with as well.

her avian intelligence was a parrot. pepper and carrot » cepper and parrot

While this is true, cars of any kind shouldn’t be going faster than 50k in a town/city anyway

The height of the london eye? Is this a UK citizenship test or a london citizenship test?

It may be waiting to enshittify, but as it is still DRM free, that’s not a huge deal breaker (as long as they don’t change this policy). Plus, they’re still doing Bandcamp fridays, so it’s still the best way to financially support a musician at the moment.

I want it banned. Then I want to see all the MPs who have continued to use it these past years figure out where they’re going to get their “engagement” from now.

Thankfully no microsoft, but I do have to use google workspace.

at least i can sandbox it to a web browser? small wins…

I’ve only watched the first episode, I don’t know if I’ll watch the rest. I think I’ve hit on the key problem that this episode has: Interesting ideas, that it just doesn’t do anything interesting with. There are three key areas the episode could have focused on:

• Translation. You have to be incredibly arrogant to assume you could instantly translate a language you’ve never spoken before. We get some hints of this but they never lead anywhere because the whole scene is cut off by the emergency alert and the cut to the news montage. The mistranslation we briefly see never has a chance to set in with any major down-the-line consequences. Even the reference to misgendering is a throwaway because there was never any danger of it leading to offence, and it comes across virtue signally more than having meaning. And I am very confused why the scene is directed as if this is the first time they’ve shared a dialogue, when there is loads of dialogue, equipment, and prior process to suggest they’ve already done this before.
• Diplomacy. Similar to translation, we never get a chance for any misunderstandings, cultural shocks, subterfuge, political bargaining. We get a generic british diplomat who has to leave before we even get a chance to know him and his mindset. We get some obvious low hanging fruit about pollution, but without any serious discussion. I suspect this may come in later episodes, but this first one fails to make a big impression on this.
• Gerry Anderson rube goldberg machines. The big tank forms a huge set piece. We get a very quick tease of a disaster scene, but it doesn’t lead anywhere. It fails to grip me with drama because there’s a sudden fear things are going to go wrong, only for the problem to immediately resolve without UNIT’s intervention itself when unnamed scaffold worker #3 tightens a bolt and fixes everything. If they wanted to play this up, they failed.

Other gripes:

• It starts with a dodgy CGI jumpscare, the soil liquefaction scene was honestly more terrifying, as something that can actually really happen in certain circumstances like earthquakes, but that only takes place about 10 minutes in. The liquefaction murder would have been a far more terrifying cold open that jumping in to a fishing boat monster. The story is being told from Barclay’s perspective, so I don’t think we should have seen any of the monster until the first time Barclay sees it in person.
• The voices of many of the cast were far to mumbly, I needed subtitles early on. No nonsense army captain has a particularly low monotone voice.
• The reference to the doctor didn’t need to be there, it didn’t contribute to the plot in any way. A spinoff needs to be able to stand on its own two feet. We already have UNIT, Kate, etc as the “hand over” characters, and I didn’t even see the whoniverse logo at the start, so I don’t know what the ultimate goal is there.
• Another admin security failure from UNIT. They keep doing this. They’re supposed to be the toughest top level security force on the planet, and they can’t get a basic HR form right. I can suspend my disbelief for sea monsters and instant translation tech, but ‘I’m here by accident’ is just to much. The hand wavy “ah, but you’re the civilian we need here” doesn’t fix it.
• Various minor writing issues. They “put the body far away from the village”? It’s literally in one of the houses next door. “I’m here by accident”, to which army guy immediately replies “So you’re saying you’re here by accident”. Why the deck chairs just to watch a loudspeaker blast some sound waves? Why is a helicopter carrying steel beams across london?