Dr Who

"Vote"? Wouldn't we all mate.

Trying to look at positives -

I can see that they're maybe trying to get away from what might be "formula Dr Who" , by not having returning characters/old aliens etc; and avoiding alienating new/casual viewers by not (seemingly so far anyway) having annoying self-referential story arcs.
So I applaud that.
But I think maybe they just haven't found how to put their twist on the "formula" to fire on all cylinders quite yet.

Saying that, how many Eccleston stories really stand up at this distance ?
So it maybe just needs time.

(First one, yes OK,
second one with the talking skin/face on the spacestation, pretty meh;
the Charles Dickens one with the gas ghosts - alright
the farting aliens invading Downing St - oh dear me no
the Rose meets Dad one and changes history - quite good, a time travel idea classic Dr Who never really engaged with as much as you thought they could have?
Dalek - pretty decent re-establishment of "iconic" foe
the gas mask child - probably best of the season;Moffat managing to keep some of the sitcom/Sherlock quips and bantering to an acceptable level and not becoming the thing he seems most interested in writing; OK it introduced Captain Jack as a returning character but you can't have everything.
the Simon Pegg one, pretty forgettable
the farting alien returns as mayor of Cardiff one, cheap budget saving treading water one of the season? only seems to be in there to use the Cardiff location and set up the "heart of the Tardis" trick for the finale.
the two-episode finale - more Daleks, but let down by the sledgehammer unsubtle Big Brother/Weakest Link parodies in the first half.)

That one was OK.
The sense of mystery about what was going on was quite well sustained, and the stuff in the "anti-zone" reasonably creepy.

Just hope the finale doesn't feature the return of "teeth on his face" from the first episode, that would be a letdown imho.

It was fairly middling, and keeping the audience guessing always lives or dies on whether your reveal is worth it.

The dad who effectively terrorised his own daughter seemed to get off lightly. Mind you, the Doctor chalking a secret message took advantage of her too.

It would be a good idea if the writers (and this goes for any drama) put the phrase "What is the Moral of this Story?" on a Motivational Poster to help them out. It might have improved this series no end.

I see we're now being invited to re-purchase both Season 18 (Tom Baker's last) and Season 19 (Peter Davison's first) on Blu Ray.

I admit to caving and getting the Season 12 one (T Baker's first) but that was mostly nostalgia. It is a handsomely packaged artifact but really most of the "new" "extras" are of curio value only. ( Old previous VHS collections from the 90s of Tom Baker sat in front of a TV looking bemused and being asked to comment on random clips from stories he clearly has no recollection of - "I don't remember that at all, but I enjoyed seeing it again". ?)

Similarly, having Louise Jameson, Janet Fielding and Sarah Sutton sitting on a sofa commenting on stories that none of them are in, or have ever seen before by the looks of it, is a bit silly; and not really balanced by wheeling out Tom Baker, Philip Hinchcliffe and Elisabeth Sladen's daughter to do the same exercise.
The overall effect is of a kind of Who-meets-Gogglebox mash up.

Matthew Sweet gets wheeled out to interview Tom Baker, and it looks like he had to bribe Tom with the promise of a bottle of red wine at the end of it in order to do so.

And of course Revenge of the Cybermen gets some much needed CGI effects for the spaceship bits and the "fly-the-crashing-spacestation-over-the-plasticene-drum-planet" finale.

No expense spared on that frog lol

I thought that one was pretty good

Right up until almost the end. If the alien entity was able to reach inside a persons head and perfectly recreate someone they'd lost, in order to keep them there, why did the Doctor get Kermit sat on a chair ffs
If they'd brought back Bill, for instance, it could have been a very powerful scene.
And perfectly encapsulated. The Doctor could've jumped back through the portal, put her smiley face back on, and no-one else would've known. Huge opportunity missed there imo.

^ Probably unlikely they would have brought back Bill or similar recent companion. But agree the frog didn't really make sense.
They could have had it looking like Gallifrey and had some unnamed/unspecified figure from the Doctor's past that we don't really know about and been a bit opaque about who it might be ?
The episode almost wrong-footed me when the blind girl knocked out Ryan, I thought it was going to set her up as the villain in disguise.
But then her Dad turned up looking like he was missing his bandmates from ABBA and it got less interesting again.

There was a lot to like about this episode, it was a bit of an original concept and I really liked the pace of it. I also liked the anti-zone, when they went into it I kind of got a Stranger Things feel. As I was watching I was thinking to myself, if this Grace then this is going to be a really low blow and it was, I felt Bradley Walsh played it really well. Again I thought Jodie did really well I liked the compassion and love she showed to the Solitract at the end, exactly what you would want to see from The Doctor.

The thing that got me, other than the stupid frog, was that I didn't really buy that a father would abandon his kid like that even if it was to spend time with his lost wife. Correct me if I am wrong there was a bit in the episode where Hanne said to her father "you are not well" perhaps suggesting that he was suffering from depression. Had they gone into that a bit more it might of been more believable to show that he wasn't thinking correctly but ultimately I just didn't believe that a dad would ditch his daughter like that.

I quite enjoyed the episode I just watched on TV. Lots of typically classic Dr Who memes:

high sided abandoned quarry location = alien planet
grandiose psychopath bent on Universe Total Domination
grandiose psychopath exiled in Sleeping Villain for millennia plot
grandiose psychopath in mask and life-supported by lots of healthcare tech after horrific disfigurement and injury in the previous disaster that also led to the millenia-long exile
Dr and pals stumble across the grandiose psychopath's whole shooting match just in time to not only precipitate the execution of world domination but luckily to prevent it
Several 2 dimensional humanoids who become zombified cult members and who worship grandiose psychopath as a (false) God after developing a curious variant of Stockholm Syndrome
Crystal things that glow and light up ominously and when al are in one place at one tine give the owner power to take over the entire universe - wasn't that Pertwee and the Giant Spiders?
Sonic screwdriver thingy capable of pretty much anything when you need it to be.


Less impressed by:

Tick box approach to casting and characterisation, which while trying to be inclusive and diverse only serves to perpetuate stereotypes. But hey it's ok for the negatively-projected stereotype to be a middle aged person with Received Pronunciation English diction, accent and vocabulary, and be a grandiose genocidal psychopath...

The good guys all have regional accents and you can see the casting director with his map of the UK, thinking....'ok we have got the posh white southern psychopath...we now need several northerners from each side of the Pennines and a Cockney...oh and the Cockney is a bit un PC and wants to kill the evil posh chap who's face is covered in black treacle and kids milk teeth, but gets put right by the Northerners....and we due deffo need a Muslim who is a really positive character.