I remembered the Doctor and Leela on Gallifrey running into some Time Lords who had abandoned the city and were living in more or less barbarity (back to the earth sort of, without the crunchy granola implications) and she found them more compatible than the city people.

I remembered the Doctor and Leela on Gallifrey running into some Time Lords who had abandoned the city and were living in more or less barbarity (back to the earth sort of, without the crunchy granola implications) and she found them more compatible than the city people.

Yep, that's this adventure. The Doctor exiles Leela while he's still acting evil. She comes across the Shebogans, who live outside the city (at least some of them by choice), and pretty much becomes their queen. (She doesn't go sweet on a Shebogan but a city guard.)

I keep reading Shebogans as Sheboygan (a city in Wisconsin) and it's really confusing.

From what I remember, they'd have been dressed for the weather in either location.

Following my previous post, Chibnall has carried something over from last year, namely the dubious moral sense.

To clear the brush first: destroying Gallifrey... I like that there's something in the story arc slot, but I'm not keen on this particular choice. We've already done "Gallifrey is gone!", and it was more interesting when the Doctor had done it. Gallifrey hasn't really been back long enough to make this as big as it should be. (Oh, and it was no longer in a pocket dimension; Hell Bent revealed it now to be parked at the end of the universe. For what that's worth.) Still, I like them having something big to build the season round (big step up from Tim Shaw), and it gave Jodie Whittaker some slightly more emotionally complex material to work with (I'm thinking particularly of her last scene with the companions).

A little trivia: we first saw Gallifrey at the end of The War Games, the Second Doctor's last adventure. But we didn't learn its name until the Third Doctor's last season, in The Time Warrior. (It was originally supposed to be Galfrey.)

Back to the morality. I... am not a fan of the Doctor defeating the Master by weaponising racists. And she made a point of noting that he was going to fall afoul of their notions of racial purity. I would prefer a Doctor that is willing to fire guns and eschews firing white supremacists. (The gun stance remains incoherent, noting that she condemned steampunk guns and threw a grenade in virtually the same breath.)

The Guardian has been tracking this too, and saw fit to publish an article under the mildly hilarious title, "Doctor Who Is More Offensive Than Ever". That... is a bold call, given the show's history; but it has a point. [link]

One could certainly argue that the show has less sense of perspective than ever, by which I refer to the Doctor saying that impersonating a German soldier (German, not Nazi) was "a new low", even for the Master. I'm pretty sure his plot in The Sound of Drums, Frontier in Space, The Deadly Assassin, or indeed Logopolis would beat it. (Hell, if it's just fashion choices, there's The Keeper of Traken, where he kills the father of one of the Doctor's companions and starts wearing his body like a skinsuit.)

The last thing that stood out to me was the return of the mind-wipe. The Tenth Doctor of course used it on Donna in Journey's End, controversially as it was against her wishes.The Twelfth Doctor intended to use it on Clara in Hell Bent; at that point, the show emphatically treated it as a violation. Indeed, hard not to read it as a direct criticism of the previous era. I'm not exactly saying Chibnall made the wrong call to have her doing it again - there are different circumstances on which one can argue the point - but I'd have liked some recognition that it engaged a fraught issue from the show's past.

Still. This was fun, and reasonably assured in a way that the show often missed last season. Fingers crossed for next week.

Stan Kirsch who played Richie Ryan on Highlander died

Someone needs to explain the end of Crisis to me.

Oh man, I was going to watch Crisis! I can probably do that next week.

I was really shocked to hear about Stan Kirsch.

I forgot about Crisis and it was LoT tonight! arg. I need to watch it tomorrow. I need my Legends fix