I find it immensely infuriating that the article’s byline shows they are reporting from ‘London’ when in fact this happened not just in a different city, Edinburgh, but in a completely different country, Scotland.

Sad about the pandas, there are far too many people that simply can’t be trusted with fireworks. Limiting it to a single night in dedicated display venues run by licensed organisations wouldn’t remove the noise entirely, but it would reduce the frequency and would probably help all animals.

That 2012 one looks like I’ve focused it as a UI component. I need to get out and touch some grass.

According to the 3 criteria mentioned in the article, YouTube wouldn’t need to be banned, logging in to YouTube would be banned. YouTube is still functional (mostly) when logged out, and wouldn’t violate those 3 criteria. The other services mentioned, like gaming, would be banned.

I thought elvish meant someone who likes rock and roll music

You can’t misgender a brand. You can’t deadname a brand. You can’t befriend a brand.

I misread that as prefix and, honestly, forthwhence doesn’t sound half bad.

Women are a better person to be in the past than a good quality piece of wood

That was an OK finale.

I’m of two minds about the resolution with Ruby’s mum. On one hand, there being no significance at all is a bit of a let down, but on the other hand when dealing with gods, the whole point of the power is the belief, and that explanation does tie everything up fairly neatly. (not sure why ruby kept snowing though). Seeing her get back together with her mum was a nice send off.

Getting rid of sutek by throwing him off into the vortex, and having that undo everything was a bit iffy for me. There’s not been an established precedent that throwing someone into the time vortex undoes every action they ever did, and surely if that were the case that leads to a paradox?

Lots of call backs to past DW. Including the trend that at the end of the season every single person in the universe dies. But I guess that is the risk when you have a show that’s gone on for so long, once you’ve pushed the limits of danger to the max, there’s not really any way to escalate the tension further.

Not a fan of the anagram stuff, but i can imagine myself as a kid really enjoying that. Looking forward to the finale, I hope it delivers.

I’m not a bidgerton fan, I prefer my period dramas to be of the star trek variety. But this was still a good episode, I was getting echoes of “family of blood”.

Rogue is interesting, we’re given basically no back story but I was convinced they were going to tie the character somehow to Jack Harkness. I’m glad they actually followed through on the kiss and didn’t just leave it teased, that would have been very 2005.

The marriage proposal scene got me thinking - the doctor is already married to river song. We know that she has had interactions with doctors other than 11, so the marriage seems to go beyond regens. How does marriage even work. Is that polygamy? Parallel monogamy?

I like the inclusion of nerd terminology like cosplay and dnd - Get the kids watching radicalised early :)

Ruby was good in this - clearly a competent companion that can think on her feet. I was kind of hoping we’d make more progress on the twist by now, I guess we’re keeping all of that for the very end.

Lesson to take away - always build a backdoor into your deadlock seals.

I had not made that connection - there are definitely a lot of parallels. good catch. Compared with this current episode, I think the peril on the ship was a bit better set up, and there were more characters in that episode that I genuinely cared about.

Alright, I have some feelings on this one.

First, I’m not a fan of when TV shows and movies use hones to have characters talk to each other. Texting is just awful (if I wanted to read, I’d read a book) and video chats often seem incredibly limiting and boring to me. Having a whole episode of that… ew.

The characters themselves, they’re obviously meant to embody the worst of vapid superficial influencer types. But my god, but the end I was 100% on side with the rogue AI here. Finish them all off and spare me having to listen to them speak. Pity about that Ricky guy, he died an unexpectedly brutal death.

It felt a bit black mirrory, with the way it was shot, with the makeup and costumes, with the way the actors were just overly smiley and oblivious. But even with the theme of over-reliance on tech, I found the “I can’t walk without the bubble” bit a bit of a stretch.

Morals: Don’t walk staring at your phone, you’ll walk right into traffic and die. Also felt a bit of environmentalism at the end - “I’m an expert, I can help, listen to me”, and of course everyone thought they knew best so now they’re all going to die.

We’re no closer to figuring out the mysterious woman, and I’m struggling to find what the connection could be.

Best part of the episode: The 2 factor authentication from hell. Loved that.

I really don’t know what to make of this episode. It was very creepy, and had time travel, but I don’t really know what it means. Is there a moral here? Is it literally just “don’t mess with sacred monuments you find on a walk in the countryside”?

And yes, as said above, if it was Ruby all along (somehow?) what made people scared?

Still, not a bad episode, but somehow a bit unsatisfying.

It would be hilarious if this was just a massive misdirect because all the fans expect there to be a link and the real mystery is answered by something no one has noticed yet

What option do I need to use to get support for Heptapod B?

It’s still not as bad as we’ve had in the past (looking at you, love and monsters) at least they’re not suffering endlessly.

I feel quite dumb, I hadn’t even realised Susan was the same person. I noticed familiarity, but i didn’t put it together.

With that, the snow, and everything around Ruby I’m really not sure where its all going.

I think what works really well about the Anglican marines is it’s a perfect stand in to allow the writer to criticise the concept of English exceptionalism (acting in God’s name makes everything all right, going to war whether we’re needed or not, colonisation because we know best, etc) , but adding a bit of fantasy abstraction so they’re not being too literal about it.

That was a fantastic episode. It spares no punches on the military industrial complex, healthcare, acting purely on belief, and ai, all of which are incredibly timely topics. It’s an episode rooted in concept science fiction and yet this one felt realistic which only adds to the horror.

I would contest that it would be so easy to take over an entire organisations AI, but then again even here and now it seems any company that taints itself with ai tends to put good practice to the wayside,so maybe it’s not quite deus ex.

Not loving the gory bits though, doctor basically kissed a mutilated dead body at the end there…

I always thought that when the timeless child idea came up it seemed like it had something interesting going on. But the entire time I couldn’t figure out what was actually going on. RTD seems to actually care about overarching story arcs, so I look forward to seeing what he does with it.

I could not get into the baby episode. The talking babies just put me off. Might have been scarier than the actual monster.

But the devil’s cord was better. Great concept. Good mix of fun and serious and a nice follow up to the toy maker. I didn’t feel it really made the most use of the beatles though, the maestro could have been in any time period with any musician. I was pleasantly surprised by the twist at the end.

RTD likes his recurring threads, so I guess the pantheon is going to anchor this series. So far we’ve had masters (gods?) of toys and music. What next - the different parts of what makes being human? Love? Food? And how does Ruby fit into it.

So far ncuti and millie are fitting in well. A bit different, bringing their own flair, but still capturing the right feel.