Having made a series of short hot take episodes on Season 2 of Doctor Who earlier this year, tonight we revisit Ncuti Gatwa’s final season with our ultimate cold take on it all, including tons of listener feedback!
Before then, our usual news and short topics segments, including CBeebies looking for its own Doctor Who series and RTD giving up his DWM column.
The Robot Revolution
Lux
The Well
Lucky Day
The Story and the Engine
The Interstellar Song Contest
Wish World
The Reality War
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I have a feeling Dave will be receiving a lot of pushback for his take on the ISC. As such, Id like to offer something else: Full support and gratitude. I will admit, I come to the issues between Israel and Gaza from a place of ignorance. Im not proud of it, but to be frank, the amount of horrid events in the world has overwhelmed me. I have a general idea of what’s happening, minimal at best.
As such, when I watched the Interstellar Song Contest, I had no hang ups about who was meant to represent who or what was meant to represent what. At the time, I thought of it as a pretty fun episode (up until the Doctor started to torture the Hellion guy because he got triggered, I love 15 but that was so wildly out of character for any Doctor, much more so for the supposedly “healed” one.)
Then Dave reminded me of the Nova massacre, and I put two and two together.
Now, I agree wholeheartedly with everything Dave said. I wouldnt necessarily have had a problem with Doctor Who doing this story in, say, a decade’s time. Doing it while the conflict is ongoing is truly mindboggling. Especially considering that this is also the episode that features the Doctor flying through space with a confetti cannon and declaring it “camp”. It feels really tonedeaf to have such a silly moment featured after what is meant to be an allegory for a recent and very real massacre.
Something I find more egregious, however, is that this episode ends on RTDs favorite trope: “Just this thousandth time, everyone lives!”
I already didnt like that they managed to save everyone in the end, as it took away from what I thought was a truly powerful moment of sheer magnitude, seeing the space station surrounded by frozen corpses. Now knowing that the moment was pastiching Nova? Having everyone just be alive at the end is just…such a choice. My view of the episode was already rather soured after the complete lack of follow up on the Doctor’s egregious actions, but now it’s sitting on the curb, about to fall into the gutter.
And now for the gratitude: Dave, you presented your points clearly, calmly, and without malice or anger. You had a unique view of this situation that most could never have conceived. You had a point to raise, and did so diplomatically and with compassion. The internet could use more of people like you.
Rob youre cool too, thanks to both of you