Why though? I genuinely don’t know what the use case is here. If you have a bookshelf it already has your books on it, you could take a photo of that. If you wanted a list of book recommendations, a text list would be more useful.

Agreed on the martha stuff. I enjoyed that she called it out as a rebound date, the doctor needed to hear that, though this should have been the moment she stops the crush altogether.

This is a really good episode, it has everything. Multiple good sci fi concepts, horror stories of tech gone wrong and the social impact, great direction, loads of emotive acting, and a great soundtrack.

Throughout the episode we get some really nice writing. At the start doctor’s poetic description of gallifrey gives us a sense of optimism and hope that is bookended really well with the fade out at the very end of the episode. There are multiple lines throughout that end up hinting at the face of boe - brannigan’s joke about a giant head, martha relying on a complete stranger. Hologram Sally’s “we’re so sorry” line echoes the doctor’s catchphrase and you think it’s about the non-functional motorway jam, when it is in fact an apology that they’re the only ones left alive.

The acting and character work is excellent. At the beginning, when they open the tardis door, the doctor appears to break something which is a lovely bit of business that makes their trip seem genuine and unplanned. Martha’s distraught expressions throughout, while still maintaining her competence as a smart person - caring about a pregnant woman and her idea to run silently. Tennant looks incredibly emotive during the doctor’s sad story at the very end. Despite having no real actor present, the face of boe is voice acted really well.

Effects wise, I did find the CGI a bit jarring, and the macra monsters were particularly bad. With the lack of a joke about carcinization, I feel it might have worked better as a lovecraftian unseen monster. But then we get a lot of really great practical effects like very good cat makeup, and close ups of the face of boe that don’t make his head look like just a lump of plastic.

I love the cars as a way to showcase the claustrophobia of both non-functional transport, we’ve all been trapped on a delayed bus or train or plane at some point, but also the limits of technology. Only being able to contact people on your friends list, and being trapped in confined lanes, every car homogeneous. The rumours of hope. The denial. I do have some quibbles though - if the system is automated, why are they even sitting at a steering wheel. And given all the exhaust fumes, they must be getting fuel, but from where?

Really enjoy this episode.

I was anticipating the painful jk jokes. I do think that the ‘just wait until you read book 7’ line was actually a really good sci fi time travel joke. But aside from the obvious association with Rowling, it also dates the show unnecessarily because it picked a book that was obviously going to be released at some point.

This is an odd episode, it feels like it could have been more than it was. The focus on magic feels a lot like the approach taken in the latest series, and I think there’s definitely something there but I’m still not quite sure what the witches were meant to be doing.

The witches themselves felt to cartoony. The makeup looked far too stereotypical, and the hissing and gesturing reminded me in a bad way of the early depictions of ferengi as these weird cave goblins rather than scheming powerful beings.

Martha has the opportunity to be great in this episode. Shes even presented as very cultured enjoying theatre. but after the episode briefly touches on medicine of the time, bedlam, even race, theres not a whole lot there. She does get a few med community jokes in like “I work the late shift”, which is a nice way to set her to as less squeamish than some other companions.

Some parts are alright. Tennant is a Shakespeare actor so it’s fun watching it in kind of a meta way. The general concept of language and magic as an alternative to science is good, and I did like the doctor trying to hide that fact to prevent unrest when the man drowns. We get introduced to another of 10s upset royals, which is a nice running joke. A line or two imply that Shakespeare may be bi, which feels on topic. The CGI scenes are decent.

But none of these things are given a lot of time to shine as the central important part of the episode. So a lot going on, but maybe not enough of a focus for the episode.

Just wait until you hear about scotland’s national animal

Totally agreed on the unnecessary Martha love arc.

Nerys making a surprise appearance would have been amazing.

I really enjoy this opener. Martha’s introduction feels a lot more fleshed out than Rose’s. We know more about the Doctor, so its a bit easier as we’re only introducing one new character. I like that Martha feels a bit more clued in than Rose/Donna from the get go. It fits with what 10 seems to be doing, which is somewhere between an interview for a companion and being in denial about needing company. Martha’s justification for wanting to leave, having a lot of domestic trouble, is a lot more compelling than Rose’s who seemed just a bit bored with life. One thing that did bug me was the Doctor-Martha kiss, while I understand the logic of 10’s plan there were obviously better ways of transferring DNA which would be less invasive, and in a modern context this didn’t age well.

Throughout this there’s quite a high energy, mostly quick movement from scene to scene, and the threats feel genuine. The straw bit is a funny joke, and is probably peak dark humour in this episode. There’s also comedy in the curmudgeony old timer handing out the old “I’m just about to retire and relax with my grandkids”, shortly before he gets offed. Time lords needing 2-heart CPR is a fun idea as long as you don’t think too hard about it. There’s plenty of references as well. Mr Saxon. Ronald Biggs, a fugitive of the great train robbery is mentioned. Continuity around Martha’s cousin as gets thrown in.

On the sci-fi side, I enjoyed the idea of a vampire that uses shapeshifting to hide their insides rather than their outsides. Overriding an MRI scanner to output 50 KiloTeslas is a bit of a reach, considering the hospital is probably running off of emergency generators. Wikipedia tells me that’s somewhere around the equivalent of a neutron star. ACAB applies to the space police as well, I guess, though it’s a bit unclear exactly what their status as mercenaries is. I enjoyed the mask design of the judoon - space rhinos is a monster design I’ve never seen anywhere else. The whole Judoon “we’re going to do whatever we want” and the ship designs feels reminiscent of the Vogons from Hitchiker’s.

There’s a lot going on in this one and I enjoyed it.

Observation: Another hospital series opener. Rose’s second series, Martha’s, Donna’s is medical-adjacent, Amy’s climaxes in a village hospital, and Clara’s in the Dalek Asylum. Hospitals make for an interesting setting because there’s lots that can go wrong, and they can feel like very liminal spaces with all the closeness to death and white antiseptic spaces.

They dropped them on to the platform

Off topic, but: Can I just say I continue to find the use of the verb “drop” to interchangeably mean both cancel and release immensely confusing. Every time I read the word I need to think carefully about what is actually being said.

played in a rather Klingon-like fashion

With all the hissing, I was thinking more along the lines of a feral cat.

I really like Donna’s energy. Her no-nonsense attitude instantly complements 10’s hyperactivity. I think of 10s various companions, Donna is my favourite. Throughout the episode Donna keeps the Doctor grounded, and human, and helps to use this episode as an important epilogue for what happened with Rose at the end of the last season. Donna is often very acerbic, but when push comes to shove, she has her priorities right, and she has some stand out lines: “you’re a doctor, can’t you help”; “You need someone to stop you”.

Her decision to not follow the Doctor is a refreshing change from Rose who just discarded everything to join him, and I can emphasize a lot more with it. She needs to grow a bit before she’s ready to join the doctor anyway, the running gag of Donna not even recognising the past invasions is a great joke that almost breaks the 4th wall.

Production wise, I was not surprised to see them reuse the santa mobsters, gotta keep that budget low. I was surprised though with the tardis chase scene, the visual effects were pretty good there. This is the introduction of Donna’s theme in the background music, and I like the energy that it has. The giant spider monster actually looks pretty good and scary, but its let down by the over the top acting from the humanoid half sticking out the front. The final scenes with the water was miniatures! It looks pretty cool, we don’t see enough of that. It looks so much better than CGI water, which is notoriously hard to get right.

Random extra thoughts:

• Wilf is noticeable in his absence. I guess Donna is being walked down the asile by her dad? I don’t think we ever see him again.
• I like that with an almost throwaway “Mr Saxon” reference they’re being a bit more subtle with the series meme in this one.

I’ve never been really sure how I feel about Doctor and Rose together. Plot wise it doesn’t make much sense, they are completely different species, and it’s been pointed out previously to them multiple times how they couldn’t ever grow old together. But Tennant and Piper have good chemistry, so I enjoy it for that.

The Cult of Skaro, in its prime, is one of those concepts that merits its own episode. War-gaming as the enemy as a way to find tactics to beat them. Alas, even now I’m getting flashbacks/flashforwards to the dodgy prosthetic makeup to come.

I was a bit late on replying here, busy week.

I enjoyed this final episode with Rose, and it is a nice send off to her time with the Doctor. She gets to declare her love, she gets to stand up to the Daleks, and she saves the world with the doctor.

On the battle between the Cybermen and the Daleks, I enjoyed the pairing. On one hand we have an enemy that is emotionless and perfectly rational, and another whose entire philosophy is one of hatred to others. One minor complaint I have is a battle between metal beasts doesn’t offer very much in the way of voice or physical acting, so it doesn’t feel as energetic to watch. Getting good dialogue is important, and we had some of that. I enjoyed that the cybermen managed to trick the Daleks into identifiying themselves through wordplay. Cyber!Yvonne gave me an interesting insight, she retains much of her identity post upgrade, I think this implies she was an emotionless psycopath to begin with. It fits her character well.

In the quieter moments at Torchwood there is a lot of good acting, body movements, between the human characters. It felt very human in the face of battle. Not so much the scenes with the wider public though, cybermen wandering through empty streets, they felt a little incongruous. I noticed that Doctor was pushing Pete to join up with Jackie, which felt a little contradictory against his whole “they’re not the same person” schtick in the parallel earth episode earlier in the season, but the final resolution of the family getting together again is very sweet.

I did initially think that Jake & Mickey’s resistance didn’t do a very good job, but I forgot about the plot point of people debating whether they were alive. Political debate leading to inaction feels pretty spot on.

Despite enjoying the run-around chaos thus far, the climax of the episode annoys me. Those damned levers, which we already know can be controlled digitally, end up causing Rose’s “death”. The doctor’s eagerness to send rose away, feels out of character given we’ve seen him grow to love Rose. Even if there was a threat of her getting dragged in, the fact that a couple of magnets could save her from the void does kind of imply he could have moved her, and anyone else who wanted to stay, far away from the tower (in the tardis, for example) and they would have been fine.

Maybe I missed something in the article, but what is the title even talking about? What’s the “winning formula” it mentions? What’s being rewritten?

This was a really good finale. It was well paced, the stakes for the crew felt strong, and it was a great timey wimey time travel sci fi story.

Regarding the stakes, one of my criticisms of prequels was that, as fans, the future is fixed, but here it felt a lot more tense. Even though we know scotty doesn’t die, I was half expecting one of the Uhuras to have to sacrifice themselves to save the other, which felt a substantial risk, and it really helped sell the episode.

CRG did great acting here, and did justice to “the same character but at different points in their life” - the confidence in future!uhura stood out.

I was very confused about the black hole / white hole’s scale - I was suprised at the final act when they’re basically right up against it, and the holes turn out to be roughly the same size as the enterprise itself. I think it could have been established a little better at the beginning, but that’s a minor annoyance.

The midwife aliens are the same being as DS9 prophets, I guess, they spoke to Uhura in song because they would know she can interpret that, where they knew to speak to bajorans in poetry and scripture.

I liked the little preview of future!enterprise’s looks, especially seeing a few background characters from different species.

Overall, great finale to an okay season. I hope the final season has loads of episodes just like this one.

That AI was clearly trained on stolen property - the angry guy is obviously meant to be Dan from “Dan Vs”.

The “ghosts” are a neat concept, but sort of a bad fit for Cybermen, since they’re the one villain that have a very distinct way of moving, and the ghosts aren’t like that.

I wonder if at some point during the plot’s development the “ghosts” were meant to have whatever was left of the alt-universe people post-conversion reaching out. There’s a lot more they could have done with the ghosts here.

It’s a decent start to the finale. Rose’s monologue at the start is okay, but it’s a bit of a reverse rug pull, given she never actually “dies”, unless I am misremembering something. At the start there’s a bunch of TV spots, which are cringey to watch, but pretty spot on for british daytime TV. I guess they would have been social media spots now. The ghosts as a whole are a nice “monster of the week” idea, but they’re not really used much beyond a setup for cybermen. It’s a very RTD thing to include people getting used to them because of the desire to want to hold on to loved ones. I enjoyed Jackie in this. Her explaining the ghosts to the Doctor, her whole back-and-forth about knowing more than he does. I do think 10 was a bit mean to her, probably still feeling that slap a few years ago.

This incarnation of torchwood is a nice side effect of the doctor’s meddling centuries ago, a kind of butterfly effect, and it feels a bit more impactful across this series than a random phrase like “bad wolf”. Torchwood here gives everyone psychic training, and I love it, a proper approach to operational security - See a problem, immediately call it in. Which makes the pointless digitally controlled Levers in the room literally signposted as “LEVER ROOM ->” all the more annoying. But seeing the doctor and co wandering around Torchwood and all the banter therein is fun. I like the idea of a void ship being a way to reintroduce Daleks even if it’s a bit out of nowhere, and the doctor’s metaphor illustrated by the cracking glass was some nice sci-fi theory.

There’s a lot of continuity stuff in this episode. I noticed Rose and the Tardis were parked up next to a sarcophagus, a nice reference to a past adventure. When the cybermen appear they cut through plastic, again a nice reference to classic doctor who stories. I had forgotten completely that Freema Agyeman was in this episode, that was a pleasant surprise.

Random back of the envelope maths fact: The energy coming through the rift is stated at “5TW” I guess about an hour, give or take, for a “shift”. Given e=mc^2 that gives a mass passing through the rift of around only 200 grams. Which seems like not a lot for a bunch of invading cybermen.

I don’t have much to say on this one. It was alright. Nice to see La’an make some forward progress in her own issues. When I saw the flat planet going through space I thought for a brief moment we were going to get a Discworld parody/crossover. I didn’t mind this diversion so much, given that it was grounded in some kind of reality, and continued the story we had already started much earlier in the series. I do think everyone should have caught imposter pike much earlier on.

This is an odd episode. It’s another one that seems to want to mix humour in - with an opening joke about lowercase d-doctors, references to the cat nuns, and the “right angle parking” of the tardis bit. But it also goes into some dark topics - missing children, abusive parental relationships, loneliness. But none of it really comes together. The acting doesn’t help - the kid actor is pretty bad, even by kid actor standards, and the dialogue on the TV news sequences is awkward. I’m also at a loss of what the story is even about - the aliens spend an eternal childhood in space, so they makeup their own imaginary worlds, which doesn’t at all mesh with the SCP-085 plotline. The sequence with the doctor racing with the olympic flame is maximum cheese, and would be a great ending if it had been a “fun” episode all along instead of trying to also be serious. The ending feels pointlessly enigmatic, as if to telegraph “oh but travelling with the doctor is always a risk”, but that was the whole point of the previous episode too so the writers are repeating themselves a bit.

Random note: It’s supposed to be in summer for the olympics, but at times you can actually see their cold breath because they filmed in winter. They had doctor and rose comment on how cold things are to try and cover for this.