Another comedy episode? You know what, if that’s what SNW is, a comedy series, maybe it doesn’t bother me. If I lower my expectations and just lean right into it, the fact that we have a slightly lower rate of “serious” episodes is fine. Maybe if I keep repeating that to myself I’ll start to believe it.

The whole episode was fun, taken as a series of “what if” vignettes, and I did enjoy it, but it is lacking that spark that makes Star Trek great.

The plot setup is totally contrived, and I am a bit miffed that we missed out on a “how can we avoid breaking the prime directive” episode. And it does seem a bit like a rehash of the episode we already had with spock. As fun as it was to see the other actors do the whole “I’m a different person for an episode” episode. I have no idea why their hairstyles changed so suddenly but I love it anyway. Especially Pike’s JoJo’s-Bizarre-Adventure hair.

This is purely my personal preference - I really am not a fan of montage scenes set to songs in TV episodes in general. So the marching scene at the start just felt awkward to me. Not very trek. I don’t mind this kind of thing so much in films, or in “musical” episodes, but it didn’t really click for me here. It does fit a bit better when I realised this was going to be a comedy episode.

Patton oswalt was great here. For a moment I wondered if the storyline they were going to go for was that Una had been mind-melded into falling for Doug, as a b-plot to mirror what happened with Uhura/Beto. It seems very easy to basically date-rape-drug humans for a vulcan to take advantage of them. I feel like this story idea merits deeper exploration. As it is, we never really get an explanation other than “they’re really into each other”, which is fine I suppose.

All of the new vulcans being mean to spock contrasting with what must be the only vulcan there, Doug, who is envious was an interesting choice but never goes anywhere. Doug never gets a chance to chastise them on their bullying, and I am sure he would have been able to derive a punishingly logical reason why bullying is bad.

The writing completely skipped over the mind melds and catra explorations into 3 of the 4 characters. What did they talk to spock about? How much of a push did Pike need to realise he was hurting his crew? How did uhura initially react when she realised she had brainwashed someone with the intent to further a relationship with them? How did chapel come to terms with the fact that she’ll have to give up her science experiments? This all would have helped to develop the characters. And in the one we did see, given how driven La’an was to become a mirror universe character, I don’t understand how a dream sequence dance with spock was enough to change her mind. Maybe there are some visual metaphors in the direction I’m missing. Or maybe it was literal and Spock dream danced with Pike to change him back too!

Some stand out scenes with Kirk and Scotty. Also Batel speaking out against power, challenging perceptions, and then getting recognition and a job offer all while struggling with a new medical disability. That was a nice outcome.

24 years of waste? I find it immensely annoying that this is 8 x 4 pairs of casks and not 6 x 4. We should just dump a couple of columns, it will be much neater then.

I think this one is better seen as a black mirror episode starring the doctor than it is a doctor who episode. The overall plot is OK as an introduction to the finale, I’ll need to reserve my thoughts on the two parter as a whole once I rewatch the next episode.

I was never a fan of reality shows, so I didn’t really like that part of it first time I watched, nor this time. There is something interesting I noticed here, is that the station could have easily automated everything in a dystopian hellscape, instead the humans are assisting in managing and controlling the shows, which makes it worse (in a good way). I feel like the trope of this kind of televised murderporn used to be a kind of niche in scifi with stories like The Running Man, but more recently you have stories like Squid Game that are reaching into the mainstream, and I have to wonder if that’s a sign of things to come. It hits harder with the news coming out this past week of the french streamer dying live while being tortured by his captors, and apparently no-one lifting a finger to stop it.

The story also uses the “your whole civilisation depends on the abuse of a child” plot point. That’s a good litmus test for when things have really gone off the rails - are you willing to sacrifice innocents for the status quo. My only small gripe there is it’s only been 100 years, things must have gotten pretty bad for a society to change that much on so little time. Given it’s the future, the before times are probably within living memory for a lot of people. This is sort of acknowledged with an offhand remark about big brother housemates that went on strike some time ago.

On news, the doctor having to face the consequences for his meddling is a good plot point. So often the doctor jumps in, changes time, and then leaves without ever looking back. Here he is forced to confront the fact that, when he shuts down the news, no-one “does the right thing” as he would have done, nobody steps up to take charge and make things right, no-one comes together. Instead he makes a power vacuum that leaves things worse than when he started. This plot point is undermined by the fact that the Daleks would never allow this to happen anyway, it otherwise would have been a great idea to explore. It’s important especially now in the Fake News era, and at a time when younger people show an increase in distrust of democracy. Might be worth revisiting.

One thing the episode does very well is setting the stakes for what is happening. It starts off presenting things as incredibly bland, but then Rose gets thrown into the deep end very quickly with blood on her hands. Then the Doctor is shown acting incredibly nonchalantly when we the audience know what’s about to happen, and that makes the big brother death more impactful. For once they didn’t play any background score and just kept it silent, which really helps a lot. On top of this we get foreshadowing of Lynda with a Y joining the doctor, and he is incredibly taken with her, so when Rose gets killed at the end of the very tense quiz head to head you do wonder for a moment if she was killed off for good (or you would if you weren’t rewatching). The only thing that doesn’t really fit is Jack’s story. I never really got the sense that he was in any danger, and the handling of his episode is a bit disjointed from the rest of the episode. The whole “Nude barrowman” thing hasn’t aged especially well.

The handling of the bad wolf meme and the eventual reveal that the Daleks have been behind everything is great. As a kind watching this, even though it lacks any subtlety, I loved it. The episode would have been better without the satellite 5 “last time” recap the and the 100 years later title card, this was too hand-holdy, and the implication is that the Daleks have been pushing things for a lot longer than just 100 years anyway. That does make the, what I felt was unsatisfying, blob monster from the previous Sattelite 5 episode a bit better.

The doctors final line “I don’t have a plan and doesn’t that scare you” is great. No amount of planning will help you go up against a lone wolf.

Random notes:

• In The Weakest Link, Ann Robinson is basically just playing herself, robot not required.
• I now have those 2 or 3 bars from the big brother music now stuck in my head, they’re going to be there a while.
• I’d seen Nisha Nayar in a few other BBC shows, forgot she was in this one. I looked her up on IMDB, and in addition to Tracy Beaker that I remember her from, turns out her first role was one of the kids in the doctor who serial “Paradise Towers”. Neat.
• In the time between Cardiff and Now, the tardis crew went off to 14th century kyoto. I want to see that episode.
• From a quiz question, Cardiff has a massive pyramid built in it’s centre. We also get a torchwood namedrop here.
• I don’t like the fluorescent blue bloom effect in the control room - it’s very early 2000s, of this era, and is reminiscent of bad graphics in video games of the time.
• The economy of this time is said to be in ruins, which makes one wonder why the weakest link contestants were playing for money when no-one else was, and why the control room folk were doing what seems to be a paid job. It feels a tad inconsistent.

I really did not enjoy this one.

The “documentary” that ends up being made feels like the worst kind of propaganda that tries to feign a sense of “there’s two sides to every argument”, all while clearly pushing in favour of the agenda the documentary initially tried to critique anyway. It felt at moments like a military recruitment advertisement. I would not choose to watch such a documentary in real life, and watching it within a star trek episode just feels like I’ve wasted my time.

The writing makes use of the idea of military censorship and a film that jump cuts around to not so cleverly hide the fact that the writers are missing a plot. We are presented with a people in conflict, who abuse a creature to create a weapon. We have no other information about the conflict, beyond “there’s mass casualties”. No explanation of why starfleet is involved beyond “starfleet is here to help”. No explanation why they chose to make that kind of weapon in particular. On the matter of the alien war we are left to fill the gaps ourselves entirely, and because our in-universe director is acting in the role of an unreliable narrator, we have no idea if any of what ended up in the film they ended up making can even be trusted. That FOIA disclaimer at the start could be just as real as those films that say “based on a true story” when they are anything but.

We did get some good character development, particularly with Ortegas finally being up front and open about what she’s been through recently. But not really enough for it to feel like it matters. Ditto Uhura and Spock. Furthermore, despite self-harm and suicide being a central theme of the episode, other than an incredibly brief argument with the alien scientists about whether thier victim should be allowed to commit suicide, it’s not really debated. The crew just accept that they need to do an assisted suicide, and that’s that. Fair enough, if that’s how human morals work centuries from now, but then it leads again to an episode without a useful plot. For contrast, multiple past star trek series have had their take on this topic and done a much better job.

After watching this I am left unsure what wider contribution this episode is meant to make to the series. For all the silliness of the comedy episodes, at least they were entertaining to watch and usually had at least one major plot development by the end. This one could have been cut from the season roster and nothing would have been lost.

Random assorted notes:

• The decoded alien vocalisations kind of sounded like whalesong to me. Perfect opportunity for some cetecean ops, right? nope.
• Beto is shown to be incredibly manipulative, especially with recording people who don’t want to be recorded. Why on earth is he not in the brig?
• Many times in the episode the direction attempts to foreshadow someone dying. I thought for a moment the writers were going to be brave and kill off someone in the crew. Particularly when chapel and spock are stretchered in with uhura standing there in shock. Nope, it’s the random alien of the week instead.
• The alien visuals, both the CG and prosthetics were very nice. I like the idea of a species that, like some animals on earth, begins life underwater and then metamorphoses into something that lives in a completely different environment out of water. That was possibly the only highlight of the episode for me.

Looking forward to the next one, it can’t possibly be worse than this.

Jack is definitely much better in this episode. His banter is much less in your face, and having Mickey call him out on it is a nice bit of self referential humour.

I’ve never been to Cardiff. I looked up the filming location as it’s one that seems to get reused a lot, it’s called “Roald Dahl Plass”, which incidentally is a great author to recognise, and as a filming location it is very striking.

I enjoyed this episode. Seeing a return of a villain that makes them better than they were originally is rare. The central theme of this episode is how to do right by people - whether that’s treating your friends right or your enemies.

I am glad that Rose finally had to confront Mickey. It is hard to blame her for wanting a more exciting life, but just running off leaving her boyfriend in the lurch is terrible behaviour. But on this the Doctor (and Jack) haven’t been great supports. At the very end, when Rose clearly needs to talk to someone, they both just completely ignore her. They are all getting along quite well at the start of the episode, so it is rather jarring to end like that.

Being forced to confront justice is a really interesting dilemma. It is pretty clear that Blon has not and will not change, and that she’s manipulative, and a killer. But the raxacori…, the Rs, are not much better, engaging in public torture shows and collective punishment of whole family groups. Ultimately I feel like the resolution could have been better - the doctor and co doesn’t end up having to make a choice as Blon and the Tardis make it for them. The idea seems to be that by reverting to an egg and growing up in a happier family, Blon will live a better life… but If you’ve had your whole life reversed and live a different one, I’m not sure that’s all that much better than a slightly expedited death penalty.

Annette Badland does some really good performance here, especially in the restaurant. Which is nice because it offsets the somewhat Scooby-Doo-esque “And I would have gotten away for it if it weren’t for you pesky kids” at the start and the gloating double cross at the end. I did like that they managed to direct it such that the slightly dead-eyed slitheen costume actually show some sad emotion.

Other notes:

• The doctor is wearing a blinking bike rear light for a headlamp, did they run out of props?
• The jokes about Margaret as Mayor feel like they could have come out of a Thick of it or yes minister episode. I wonder if there was any inspiration there.
• The punchline of jack’s story is “I knew we should have turned left” - I wonder what RTD was thinking there
• I know this is set in the early 2000s but even then there was no way that a politician running for mayor would get a whole 6 months without a single press photo
• “A skip on the isle of dogs” - this is a suburb of east london, apparently, nothing to do with the excellent Wes Anderson film set in a scrapheap which came much later
• I liked the music in this one, especially the way it was used in the Bad Wolf joke, but there were some points in this episode where I could barely hear the dialogue because of the music and sfx
• That’s the same restaurant as ep 1, and I’m fairly sure they reused some of the downing street set.
• The “next time” trailer really doesn’t leave anything to the imagination

I enjoyed this one, though I feel it could have been better. The metaphor in the title and used in the episode is a perfect one for the situation.

I was convinced up until the reveal that the “alien” was a sort of scavenging species 0 of the Borg, with the robotic look and the ability to adapt to phaser fire. I’m not sure how I feel about the writers going in a different direction. It fits with the theme OK, but the ending scene where they’re all reminiscing about this forgotten crew of humans past didn’t go down well for me. It’s a generational ship, none of the original “good guys” were still on it, and it is very tempting to do the maths that for the 7000 on that ship, many thousands more have probably died and would die on the planets they’ve killed.

The ultimate lesson, of needing to have empathy even for your enemies is a very important one. Seeing how that is used to help Kirk grow is nice, and from what I remember, it is something he embodies quite a lot in his captaining. However, I am very confused why everyone is so bothered by the fact that they were humans. Surely they didn’t need to be humans for this lesson to be learnt. They’re all part of a federation of different species, and Kirk’s captain literally is not a human.

The phone setup is a hilarious, and really clever solution to a problem, but plot-wise it fails to achieve anything because when the Enterprise crew actually need to use the phones, the alien ship and the comms jamming has already been disabled. But they use the phones anyway. I question whether a closed airlock decompressing would have quite enough inertia to balance out a chemical thruster, and if it was, why did they need the chemical thrusters at all in the first place. I felt like what was going on on the Enterprise was much less interesting than what we saw in the Farragut. I wonder how the episode might have turned out if it was shot entirely from the Farragut’s perspective, with no hints of what happened on the enterprise.

Random other thoughts:

• Getting to see more of Scotty is really nice, especially his acerbic dialogue.
• Doctor M’benga, head medical officer, warzone survivor, having little screentime other than running phone cables and joysticks around is funny.
• Ortegas getting a light scolding for being a wee bit suicidal is all we got for her ongoing sub-plot.
• La’an has shown a previous liking for Kirk, but we didn’t really have a chance to explore what her new thing with Spock means for that.
• I hope the transporter buffer wasn’t affected by all this now that it’s holding a literal horror from beyond in it

My thinking was he was almost dead. What’s a kid’s last words going to be if he’s almost dead? “I want my mummy”. If that was the last thing coursing through his neurons, the nanogenes would pick that up and might think it “normal”.

The banana gag was great, and I think it starts to signal the doctors ongoing hatred of guns. He was quite quick to grab one at the end of Dalek, but now he’s more critical of them.

As for the cliffhanger resolution, I would struggle to answer if you asked me to name one episode where a cliffhanger was resolved well.

This is a really good episode and pairs nicely with the previous one.

It’s got really nice character work - Nancy being street smart enough to turn tables on the home owner, and a touching twist of her being a single teen mother (and everything else that implies). Jack is a lot more tolerable on this one now he’s stopped his fake persona, even if the sonic pissing match is a bit much for me.

The direction in this one is really nice - multiple times there is a sequence where the characters are chatting away and not realising something critical has happened around them. For that I absolutely love the scenes in the doctors room, with the typewriter, and the teleport during the dance.

The explanation of how the child is able to control radios and all the hints leading to the final answer to the puzzle of what’s happening are well written. It’s a story straight out of black mirror with an all powerful AI gone wrong - a story still very of our times. My only gripe there is his on earth does the child remote control the typewriter, but given how well that scene was done I don’t mind it.

The set design of the bomb site is great and really gets the vibe of a hastily erected military encampment. Music wise I again feel that it was a bit much, especially when it interrupts the sweet but creepy lullaby.

Random other remarks :

• why on earth was Jack riding the bomb? It’s so ridiculous but it works for his character
• the doctor says he’s done a software patch and will email the upgrade - even in 2005 those words in that order are a bit dated
• doctors final words to doctor Constantine made me wonder if this was meant to be a real historical person, but I did a quick search and apparently that’s not the case. Maybe a missed opportunity there?

I like this as a replacement for the Winnie the Pooh tuxedo image macro

Given it’s been established the only person who can really help control Batel is Spock, and he is incommunicado for the whole episode, both Batel and Gamble should have been in confinement as soon as possible.

The auto-red alerts did stick out a bit, but it kind of makes sense. The computer knows where everyone is and what they usually do, and behaviour-based intrusion detection systems are starting to become normal cybersecurity concepts even today.

The story is reminiscent of more classic trek - away mission, something goes wrong, and the crew have to fix it. There was a lot of classic science fantasy tropes in here - right from the start with the blood magic to open the prison up. When immortality was first mentioned, my immediate thought was that immortality would involve consciousness transfer into another being, and we kind of got that, but not from the immortal beings themselves and instead from others that snuck in through the gaps in between dimensions. I guess these creatures are some sort of lovecraftian indescribable horrors. Seeing how Pelia and Batel both reacted to them suggests there is some shared history amongst many of the species that now exist, and that they all know instinctively to fear them.

They killed off a named character (F for Gamble), which is surprising, but definitely raises the stakes for the rest of the show. I was really not expecting that, and getting such in your face gore (pardon the expression) was quite a lot to take in. The evil doesn’t really seem quite well contained in the pattern buffer, and I hope the crew notice this pretty quickly. If it’s messing with the computer system, if it can quantum phase itself around any barriers, it should be obvious fairly quickly something isn’t right. And the pattern buffer has shown that it can’t keep stuff stable forever without continually re-materialising it, which seems like a really bad idea, so that needs dealing with.

Amongst the characters, Spock really shines out here as the voice of reason. If they had listened to him in the first place this whole thing could have been avoided. While I get where the archaeologists amongst the team were coming from, they should have been overruled, and Spock’s only flaw here was not putting his foot down. As security, La’an should have pushed behind him on this, and chapel shouldn’t have let her desire to explore cloud her judgement.

On sets: Nothing beats a good quarry, love to see that. I really like the exterior and background visuals within the prison - reminds me of the videogame manifold garden (highly recommended if you like first person puzzlers). However, I did feel that the physicality of the room (or just floor) they were on made it very obvious it was a set. The background visuals felt detached from the area where the away team were standing and, backgrounds aside, was too bland for my liking. I think it is a pity we didn’t get to explore more because some parts, especially the exterior and the life form they found, had a really cool design.

The directing was good. It was tense, it captured the confusion in the prison well. The chaos on the ship was exciting and felt like there was a risk of real damage. My only major nitpick was it made it very obvious when the evil was first making it’s presence known. I don’t know if this was an attempt to capture the fact that the evil was there all along and it could choose when to appear, or if it was just trying to signal to the audience “hey, right now something’s not right”, but I would have preferred if it had been more subtle and let us try to figure out what was going on.

Great episode. With an episode like that I can see why they wanted to add some extra comedy ones around it, but I hope there are more like this. Though I could do without the eye gore, in future.

bottom can’t drop out if they never had a bottom

I’m in the UK, and I don’t see it expiring on the iplayer any time soon, so I’m up for continuing them. But if there’s not any critical mass of others watching along, it might make sense to put it on break, at least until someone else picks the rights up.

The blitz setting was very well done. Sci-fi spaceships aside, this story feels like the kind of ghost story people might have told each other during that era.

Watching this episode for the first time really creeped me out as a kid, and has given me a lifelong thing about gas masks. They did a great job on the writing and direction in this episode, my only note there was at times the background music was a bit too much. It might have been scarier if it was a bit quieter. The CGI on the transformation at the very end still looks pretty good - Creepy as hell.

The story of the homeless kids that have run away is really touching - especially how Nancy tries to raise them politely despite everything going on. The kid who ran away says “there was a man” and I never clocked this when I was watching this as a kid, but re-watching as an adult, it says everything without going into unnecessary graphic detail.

I remembered this being Jack’s introduction, I don’t remember him being as insufferable. The first time we see him, he’s introduced as basically the classic caricature of a perv with binoculars. In this episode he comes across as very unlikeable.

The fact that rose is so smitten with him makes no sense to me, especially given how negatively she reacted to Adam behaving in a similar “sidling up with you just to scam you” way recently. Rose spends much of the episode complaining that the doctor is not “spock” enough, doesn’t have gadgets, but he has all the same gadgets as Jack, right down to the space binoculars, just is more selective with when to use them. I don’t understand what that plot point is about - Rose just wanting more excitement and that not meshing with Doctor’s more peopley approach? This is one of those times where I think they could have cut much of the B-story and not really missed anything.

Various notes:

• Episode starts with a great Red Dwarf callout (Mauve alert / brown alert).
• Towards the start of the episode the camera zooms in on the Masked child a few times, and it’s painfully obvious how low the camera quality is here
• The gag with the phone not being a real phone is great - I can’t remember if it was ever explained how the child controls the electronics around him
• At one point doctor says “Nobody here but us chickens” - I had to look this one up, and it might be referencing a 1946 song, if so he’s off by about 5 years too early.

This is a great site. Trying to break it is fun. It’s possible to make a long neck giraffe ship with a giant cowcatcher on the front.

Aside: This is the first time I’ve ever seen a site ask for cookie consent via a submission box. Annoying. At least in EU if the cookies are purely functional, as seems to be the case here, you don’t need to ask permission and you can just notify when the user is about to save to local storage.

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot while I’ve been rewatching DS9 while listening to The Delta Flyers.

They do have the odd one-off “fun” episode in DS9 - this past week was “Our Man Bashir” which is also a fun holdeck episode, and shares a lot with this episode. But the one off fun shows aren’t really needed for DS9 to be funny. What makes DS9 work so well is that they have more episodes to develop character relationships. Once you have that built up, DS9 is able to pack in a lot more humour without even needing one-off comedy episodes, just from the characters riffing off each other.

When you have a limited episode count, like in SNW, that’s much harder to do. There is a bit of genial poking at spock’s vulcan nature, and some character based humour between the engineering staff, but that’s about the extent of it at the moment.

And so as nice as these fun episodes are, it does feel like there’s missing opportunities. There is a random line about giving Ortegas the bridge when we know there was character development from the last episode that still needs to be dealt with. And one of the main characters in this episode wasn’t even really there, so that’s a whole lot more time unspent, and whatever development Spock and La’ans relationship has may end up happening offscreen.