Warning: do not read this until you have watched or listened to the Doctor Who episode ‘The Legend of Ruby Sunday’. Spoilers ahead!

It’s hard for me to separate my feelings for this episode from the frustration of the poor audio and audio description. For a show that purports to be inclusive, it excludes a whole lot of people who have to rely solely on the audio.

There are lots of reasons why people can only listen to a TV show but not watch it; for some it’s their eyesight, for me it’s my neck (see here), for others it will be something different. Throughout the episode, I had trouble distinguishing the words of at least four characters at certain moments due to their poor diction and enunciation. However, what was meant to be the episode’s dramatic culmination was, to anyone solely listening to the audio, a confusing jumble of many people speaking over each other, lots of people speaking all at once, or switching very quickly from person to person, too fast for the audio description to describe which one was speaking. It was upsetting, especially when I’d been looking forward to this episode so much.

On the positive side, it was a dynamic and exciting episode, clearly building to something. I love it when Kate Stewart features in Doctor Who and one of her exchanges with the Doctor was my favourite moment of the episode, for its humour:

Doctor: Kate, do you have a time window?

Kate: You expressly told us in the 1970s, UNIT was absolutely forbidden to experiment with any form of time technology.

Doctor: Do you have a time window?

Kate: Ten floors down

Once I had listened to the audio again to work out what was happening at the end, with the revelation of the identity of ‘the one who waits’, I was still left with an overwhelming feeling of confusion. Sutekh??! Who??? I was also unsure which of the two creatures that materialised was actually this ‘Sutekh’, god of death: the big weird jackal beast or the corpse person that Susan Triad morphed into? Both? The audio didn’t make it clear if the giant jackal was speaking itself or if it was only speaking through Susan.

Was Susan Triad a normal human being who was chosen randomly by Sutekh to use as his vessel? Was there something special about her? What was the purpose of her repeatedly popping up in every episode? What technology was Susan going to give to the world for free? What does Sutekh have against the Doctor? Also, who is Mrs Flood? I’m guessing that we might get some answers next week in the finale.

I didn’t grow up with Doctor Who on the television. Doctor Who was off air from when I was 3-18 years old so I was completely unaware of it and unfamiliar with it until it returned in 2005, a month or so before my 19th birthday. I’ve seen (or, for the last four and a half years, listened to the audio of) every single episode since then. I’ve never gone back to watch Classic Who though, mainly because the very first episodes aren’t available and I’d want to start from the very beginning. So, although I’ve been a Whovian for 19 years, I don’t have the knowledge from the Classic series.

At the end of this episode, when the reveal of the Big Bad was someone of whom I’d never heard, I was left disappointed. I enjoy figuring out theories from clues dropped throughout the series but this is something that I could never have guessed because I didn’t have that knowledge from Classic Who in the first place. Yet, the show acts like the audience should know all this information. The closest I came was thinking that the Big Bad would be The Trickster, with whom I was familiar because of the Sarah Jane Adventures.

I’ve heard of the Egyptian god Seth (mainly because of Stargate SG-1 from way back when!), of whom I’m guessing that Sutekh, god of death, is a version. Given that Ruby might have been abandoned as a baby by Sutekh at the church, my previous theory that Ruby may well be related (the daughter?) to this sort of otherworldly being, might end up being correct! I’m trying to reach back to my Stargate knowledge of the Ancient Egyptians, but wasn’t Anubis the child of Seth in some versions of the story? Is Ruby a version of Anubis, if they’re following Egyptian mythology? Was this hinted at in ‘73 yards’ – protector of the dead?

Alternatively, although we’ve been led to believe that this Susan was not in fact the Doctor’s granddaughter, if she still is somehow, maybe she’s Ruby’s mother, making Ruby the Doctor’s great-granddaughter! That would make sense of why Susan kept popping up in The Doctor and Ruby’s timeline – she’s drawn to Ruby, even if Susan is in Time Lord hiding mode with a Chameleon Arch and has forgotten who she is.

I enjoyed that Ruby’s (adoptive) mum was more involved in this episode (and I know that someone who reads and comments on this blog will be very pleased about that!), though I’d like to see more of her.

In the end, unfortunately I’m still left with the overriding feeling of bewilderment and anticlimax. Plus exasperation at the audio description. Nevertheless, I’m looking forward to the finale.

What did you think of the episode? Was it a much more enjoyable episode to watch visually, without the confusion and frustration of the audio description? Let me know your opinions and thoughts in the comments! (No spoilers for next week’s finale though, please)

<p>The post My thoughts on ‘The Legend of Ruby Sunday’ – episode 7 of Doctor Who first appeared on Jenny Rowbory.</p>

Warning: do not read this until you have watched/listened to the Doctor Who episode ’Rogue’. Spoilers ahead!

This episode is incredibly fun! I think that it might be my favourite episode of this new series so far. It has the humour and the quick repartee back and forth that we’ve been missing up until now. I didn’t realise how much I’d been missing the fast dialogue, the witty replies. Multiple times it leaves you with a big grin across your face so I don’t care that this episode might be considered a bit silly or cheesy. It just feels, in essence, so very Who.

When the Doctor says at the beginning “just try not to get engaged or accidentally invent tarmac. 1902 got away from me”, we know that we are in for a great script and that maybe one of those things mentioned or something similar is going to happen! If you’ve been reading my previous posts about this series of Doctor Who, there has been a theme of little things that the Doctor and Ruby say or do that cause ripples, small changes throughout history. In this episode, you think at first that it’s Ruby who is going to be the culprit by introducing the word ‘OK’ in 1813 (the year in which this episode is set) but it turns out that the person to whom she is speaking is one of the shapeshifting ‘Chuldur’ creatures, who gets sent to another dimension at the end of the episode, so no butterfly effect there. And it turns out that it’s the Doctor who sort of gets proposed to, not Ruby!

I find it interesting that at the end of the episode when the Doctor is in pain, this new “healed” bi-generated 15th Doctor (I speculated here whether he would revert to old habits), starts to veer towards what he’s always done: never stopping, never looking back, never dealing with the pain. But it then goes a different way as Ruby pulls him back and we see the effects of the bi-generation, of him being able to stop, with a little help. This is seen when the Doctor is trying to breeze past the pain of what has just happened, saying “anyway, it is what it is, so, onwards, fine, next. Off we go! Where shall we go? Anywhere!”
However, Ruby recognises this for what it is and doesn’t let it go, saying “Doctor, you don’t have to be like this”.
The Doctor replies “I have to be like this because this is what I’m like. Onwards, upwards, new horizons, moving on, it’s fine.”
It’s very clearly not fine though and Ruby lets him properly feel the pain. So we see that the Doctor doesn’t have to be like that anymore; he doesn’t have to always be running, never stopping, never processing. It was good to finally see an effect of the bi-generation and the changes it has made to the Doctor, in a good way. This is the first episode where I’ve started to like Ruby a little. I love it when the Doctor’s companions are able to pull him back from his worst instincts.

There is another incident that I noticed in passing that may or may not be significant. One of the Chuldur says that Ruby has the scent of a Chuldur, which is why the creatures don’t notice that she isn’t one of them. They pass this off with the explanation that it is a false scent because of the psychic earrings that Ruby is wearing. This may be all there is to it but I’m wondering if there is something more here. Could Ruby be a shapeshifter somehow, without knowing it? Or is it just alluding to the fact that she might be another sort of being? We still know so little about Ruby. We don’t even know what job she has. But I like what I see of her this episode, supporting other women (it’s not her fault that the person that she’s helping turns out to be a Chuldur!). I also like what we see of the Doctor this episode — his playfulness, yes, (the Kylie Minogue music scene anyone?!) — but also that he refuses to lose his friend to save the world.

I hope that we get to see more of Rogue again in the future (loved Jonathan Groff as King George III in the musical ‘Hamilton’ and he’s great here too). I wonder if the new boss that Rogue mentions (in his work as a bounty hunter), the one who makes him do all the correct paperwork, will turn out to be someone significant in orchestrating events.

I know that I’ve been going on about the random singing in each episode but I actually liked it this time (the Doctor sings a bit of ‘Pure Imagination’ from ‘Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory’ when he’s introducing Rogue to the Tardis). The singing seems more natural and apt in the moment.

Enjoyed this episode. Great fun!

What did you think of this episode? Agree/disagree with me? Let me know in the comments! I love to hear from you.

<p>The post My thoughts on ‘Rogue’ – episode 6 of Doctor Who first appeared on Jenny Rowbory.</p>

Warning: do not read this blog post until you have watched/listened to the episode ‘Dot and Bubble’. Spoilers ahead!

At first, this episode is very ‘Black Mirror’-esque with a similar feeling to the start of the Black Mirror episode ‘Nosedive’.

‘Dot and Bubble’ appears to be a commentary on social media, on shallow and superficial influencers with no substance (the way Lindy talks is very familiar to us; she has the same inflections, way of speaking and content as influencers in real life). The ‘dot and bubble’ technology encloses the user’s head in a bubble full of little screens, each of which is a direct video connection to one of their “friends”. This fills their entire vision so they can’t see where to walk; they have arrows onscreen telling them which way to go. They are completely reliant on the ‘dot and bubble’ technology. It tells them when they need to go to toilet, when to stand up or go to sleep etc. It erodes their ability to think for themselves. They see nothing of reality, nothing of the truth all around them, nothing beyond their bubble, beyond their echo chamber; they cannot see the monsters that are literally eating them alive. Anything boring or uncomfortable can be swiped away or blocked from their life.

If you’ve seen Black Mirror, ‘Dot and Bubble’ doesn’t feel like anything original or new. I felt like I’d seen it all before but I didn’t mind because I love the genre.

However, this is where the audio description really let me down. With the audio description, all that you could tell was that a lot of privileged, rich young people had gone to a planet called Finetime, ‘where everything is fine all of the time’ (which has echoes of the ‘Everything is Awesome’ propaganda from The Lego Movie!), financially supported by their parents on their homeworld; the young people (solely 17-27 year olds are allowed in this domed bubble city) only have to work two hours a day and the rest of the time is for partying.

The audio description never mentions the race of any of the characters but then audio description rarely does. You just assume that there’s a fairly diverse cast, unless the audio description mentions anything specific. The accents were eclectic so it was reasonable to think that there were a range of ethnicities and geographical identities involved. So, given that I thought that the characters were diverse (there was no possible way to know through the audio description that every single person was white), the phrases that one might have usually recognised as racist microaggressions went over my head as meaning something else because I didn’t know that all the characters were white. So even at the end, it wasn’t completely clear from the audio description that they were discriminating against the Doctor on the grounds of race. It came across on the audio description as them not liking the Doctor because he wasn’t in the same clique, not on their ‘friends list’, not rich enough, not elite. It didn’t make any sense why the survivors refused to be saved by the Doctor. The audio description really should have been better.

However, I did start to realise that I had missed something when one of the men said at the end “we can go out there to this planet and we can fight it and tame it and own it, be pioneers just like our ancestors”. This set off alarm bells, especially the word ‘own’. There was mention of a ‘Great Abrogation’ but I didn’t know what the word ‘abrogation’ meant. But then it became very obvious from what three of the survivors said to the Doctor next that I had definitely missed that there was something more going on here.

After the episode, I had to go online to find out that the domed bubble city’s inhabitants had all been white, living in a segregated colony that had security settings (both physically and digitally) to keep out POC. There had been no way to tell via the audio description. This then made a lot of comments throughout the episode start coming to mind to see them for what they were and recognising them as microaggressions and white supremacy, and then at the end it became overt discrimination and devastating racism. This was one of the bleakest endings of Doctor Who. The characters refused to be saved by the Doctor. They chose to potentially die rather than be saved by him. There was no redemption.

I liked that the Doctor, even in the face of their abhorrence towards him, still tried his hardest to persuade them to let him save them. It shows us what sort of man this Doctor is; he even wants to save those who don’t deserve it.

This episode made me feel stupid because I very nearly missed the point of the whole episode. However, it seemed like you would need several university degrees to unpick all the layers and meanings. I don’t know if this was because of the audio description being bad or if I was being dense or because the writing was deliberately obfuscating and trying to catch you out. It felt rather scrambled, confusing and addressed lots of issues all at once. But the audio description definitely needs to improve! Anybody listening, as opposed to watching, was definitely at a disadvantage and kept in the dark.

I wonder at what point a viewer who was watching the episode visually would have noticed that everyone was white. I imagine that if you didn’t notice until the end, you would have to ask yourself the question ’why didn’t I notice?’, which is what the writers were trying to get the viewers to reflect upon. I’m not sure that getting the audience to feel shame that they didn’t notice is the best or most effective tool to address racism. It can make people get defensive as opposed to engaging in some self-reflection. The episode pulls no punches though and we all need to be challenged on our potential prejudices and blind spots.

Overall, I did enjoy the episode but it is not an easy watch/listen.

What did you think of the episode? Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

<p>The post My thoughts on ‘Dot and Bubble’ – episode 5 of Doctor Who first appeared on Jenny Rowbory.</p>

Warning: don’t read this until you’ve seen/listened to the Doctor Who episode called ‘73 Yards’. Spoilers ahead!

My initial response to this episode was ‘yes! That’s more like it’. I enjoyed it but then also my brain began to crank into gear and lots of thoughts started to fire off.

Many questions remain. Even if Ruby branched off into an alternate timeline, why did the Doctor disappear; shouldn’t he have entered the timeline with her as soon as he stepped on the fairy circle? Also, what did the woman say to people that made everyone, including loved ones, turn against Ruby and run away screaming? Will we ever know or is it intended to be left a mystery? On the one hand it feels lazy, like they couldn’t think up something good enough for the woman to have said. On the other hand, it feels like an astute, if frustrating, storytelling choice to make it more chilling.

Unfortunately I guessed who the woman was pretty much right from when she appeared. I don’t know why; that’s just the way my brain works. It may also have been the audio description that made it slightly more obvious than if I had been watching the episode instead of listening to it.

What happened to Ruby in this episode had echoes of what happened to Amy Pond in ‘The Girl Who Waited’, both ageing in alternate timelines, living a whole life waiting. Amy Pond also waited 12 years for the Doctor to reappear in ‘The Eleventh Hour’. This, along with the 15th Doctor referring to the 11th Doctor’s favourite food (fish fingers and custard) last week, makes me wonder if this is building to something alluding to Amy and the 11th Doctor or if it’s just a red herring. The Toymaker and the Maestro both hinted that someone is coming and the Maestro said “the one who waits is almost here”. So it might have nothing to do with Amy and the 11th Doctor but instead be to do with these supernatural beings. The person who set down Ruby as a baby by the church certainly looked similar to a being that featured in the Sarah Jane Adventures (and classic Doctor Who that I haven’t seen) but I won’t mention them by name as I don’t want to spoil it in case I’m correct.

A theme also seems to be emerging of very small things changing events, people and the whole course of time. For example, in previous weeks, Ruby stepping on the butterfly, also the ‘gravity’ to ‘mavity’ word change, and now this episode with the Doctor changing everything with just one step in the wrong direction. I really hope that Russell T Davies is planting all these clues and that this will be a key theme in something big to come.

My joint favourite episode of Doctor Who ever is ‘Turn Left’ (which feels like a precursor to Russell T Davies’ incredibly prescient, masterpiece of a television show ‘Years and Years’) where the course of time is changed by Donna’s decision to turn right instead of left; ‘73 Yards’ nowhere near rivals that episode but it had similar vibes in places – time passing in a dystopian world (side note: the Albion Party – genius but disconcerting/eerie because you just know a similar ideology already is happening in real life in some quarters) without the Doctor.

I’ve been wondering for a while now if Ruby herself is a being (or daughter of a being) similar to the Toymaker or the Maestro. We don’t know anything about her origins, she can make it snow and in this episode, the older, ghostly version of herself was able to break through Kate Lethbridge-Stewart’s psychic shields, like The Toymaker could.

This episode was encouraging and hopefully things will only get better from here. I still have many questions. Why couldn’t the old woman version of Ruby just tell the younger version what she had to do (save the world by stopping nuclear war) instead of making her wait most of her life for one single moment when she had to figure out why the woman had always stayed 73 yards away from her? Why did the old woman version of Ruby turn everyone against Ruby, including her own Mum? Why would she make herself so miserable and alone like that? Was it at the moment of death that she became an apparition and appeared back at the moment in time to stop the Doctor stepping on the string? How was that possible: how did she get from the care home to a cliff in Wales? It doesn’t make sense! I’m not sure that it was meant to though. Ghost stories often don’t make logical sense and that is what this episode is really.

I’d love to know your thoughts on this episode. Leave a comment below to let me know!

<p>The post My thoughts on ‘73 Yards’ – episode 4 of Doctor Who first appeared on Jenny Rowbory.</p>

I wonder if the writers of the TV crime show ‘Castle’ have a bone to pick with ‘Boom’ (the latest episode of Doctor Who)?! In season 5 of ‘Castle’ there is an episode called ‘Still’, where Beckett steps onto a pressure sensitive bomb and has to stay still for the whole episode. In ‘Boom’, the Doctor steps on a pressure sensitive landmine and has to stay still for the whole episode. Déjà vu!

There isn’t a lot going on plot-wise in ‘Boom’ but there are encouraging signs of potential and we start to see properly who this Doctor is and get to know him a bit. This is definitely a character centred, getting-to-know-the-new-Doctor episode. I loved that the Doctor does some quick complex maths in his head; this is what I’d been waiting for. I’m glad that the Doctor’s clever, fast mind is being allowed its moments; more please! I’m still not sold on Ruby though (see my blog post on my initial thoughts of the new series and characters for my reasons on this). I just can’t get any sort of a hold on who she is as a person. It didn’t help that she spent a lot of the episode unconscious!

The writer of this episode, Steven Moffat, seemed to pour out all his feelings about the senselessness of war, about the waste of each precious life in this episode. He slammed home how each person who dies, each one of whom is loved and is someone else’s whole universe, becomes an anonymous statistic to an indifferent world. Moffat also hits home about the people who profit from war and the arms industry, those who benefit from keeping the war machine going. He also has things to say about the medical system and how it costs less to let the ill/injured die rather than to heal them or pay for the care of the disabled. I didn’t mind Moffat having his say as it’s obviously topical, but I’ve never known Moffat to be quite so preachy before. In a couple of the Doctor’s speeches, it sometimes felt like we were definitely getting Moffat’s view of the world, rather than the Doctor’s, especially when it got judgemental, acerbic and simplistic about faith. I don’t want to be brought out of full immersion in a story by a writer shoving himself into the limelight. If done well, a viewer shouldn’t once think of a writer during a TV show. It’s certainly impassioned and heartfelt though.

As a side note: what’s with the singing in every single episode? Is it just that they wanted to use the two actors’ talents in this area or is it building towards something? Is it significant? Or completely insignificant? I still maintain that it would have been better (and fun!) to have made one full musical episode of Doctor Who, rather than sprinkling one song per episode, as seems to be happening. I’m hoping there’s a plot-related reason for this (to do with The Maestro?) and not just because Ncuti Gatwa has a nice singing voice!

I also feel like there are little seeds being planted here and there (having started with the ‘mavity’ instead of ‘gravity’ change) that might all be pointing to something big to come.

I don’t know if the 15th Doctor’s ‘fish fingers and custard’ comment, linking him to the 11th Doctor, will turn out to be of note. They do both have a certain playfulness to their nature that makes them a little similar.

I think maybe that this episode lacked the emotional clout that it would have had if we had known these characters more and for longer; I don’t think we care enough about what happens to them yet so it lacks the jeopardy that it should have had.

Unfortunately the “twist” falls apart if you think about it for even a few seconds. The twist is that there is no enemy in this war zone. The “ambulances”, with their algorithm to keep the war ongoing, only kill injured people. To have that many injured people, there would have to be someone injuring the soldiers. Even if they thought that the enemy entities were the fog itself or the mud, if they were shooting at the mud or fog, nobody would be shooting back to hurt them. The soldiers would be organised so ‘friendly fire’ would cause a nominal amount of injuries. Who has been bombing them, causing craters, explosions and fires that make up the landscape? It doesn’t make sense.

Faith comes under heavy fire in this episode. Humans will use any excuse for war though, regardless of the existence of faith. Ironically, the fact that it was a father’s love that saved the day and the assertion that what survives of us is love, is actually very Christian.

What did you think of the episode? I’d love to know and am eager for some interaction with other humans! Feel free to leave a comment below. No spoilers for future episodes please!

<p>The post Quick thoughts on ‘Boom’ – episode 3 of Doctor Who first appeared on Jenny Rowbory.</p>

I’m trying to figure out my feelings about the new Doctor Who episodes (I listened to the audio description since I’m unable to watch due to my neck). I did think the plots were rather poor, especially ‘Space Babies’, and I was left thinking ‘have I missed something here?’ in ‘The Devil’s Chord’ but some other problems seem to be emerging already.

This new 15th Doctor is meant to be the “healed” Doctor due to the bi-generation that occurred instead of regeneration. David Tennant’s Doctor was left to finally stop and do the work of healing. As a result of this work on himself, the 15th Doctor is meant to be all better, healed, without all the pain, without a dark side. I think that they’ve rather shot themselves in the foot with this, if they stay true to it. It might land them without as interesting a Doctor. Is someone without flaws, who is happy and grinning all the time, going to be compelling enough? It’s too early to judge the 15th Doctor on that count though. His character might develop beautifully or might regress to old, more interesting, habits.

But I think that the key weakness was the companion Ruby. She seems to be of the Clara and Amy mould – a generic perky, feisty young woman – nothing interesting or different about her, no substance, depth or personality. Is she there just to look pretty and have a vague mystery about her origins? What worked so brilliantly with the 10th/14th Doctor and Donna Noble pairing was that they were equals in strength of personality and Donna was so distinctive. Their interactions were magic. Catherine Tate could also do both comedy and drama equally well; she could have you laughing one moment and really moved the next, with very touching, tender moments. There were hilarious scenes, like in the Adipose episode where the Doctor and Donna catch sight of each other through some windows and start mouthing/miming to each other (you would have to see it to understand!). Donna also tempered the Doctor’s harsh side and could pull him back if he went too far. If this new Doctor is all healed, no harshness, all heart, what’s the purpose of the companion, except to be present as an audience to the new Doctor? The Doctor and companion are too similar; she’s not bringing anything different to the equation. They both appear to be all heart, all energy. I hope that we get to see the Doctor’s more cerebral, clever, quick-thinking side.

It’s so early to judge though. I hope that all of this is proved wrong, that the characters will develop in depth and that the brilliance of the show will return.

As a side note, I wish that they had made a full musical episode of Doctor Who and then normal service resumed (like ‘Once More With Feeling’ in Buffy the Vampire Slayer or ‘The Song in your Heart’ in Once Upon a Time), instead of having random songs sprinkled over several episodes (the Goblin song and then ‘Always a Twist at the End’ in The Devil’s Chord episode). A full musical episode would have been great fun and The Maestro would have been the perfect opportunity for it.

I didn’t like the breaking of the fourth wall either, with another wink to the camera. Overall, beforehand I had been excited but it was anti-climactic and I was left a bit disappointed and underwhelmed. I’m hopeful for improvement though! Maybe Russell T Davies raised my expectations too high with the excellence of ‘The Star Beast’ and ‘The Giggle’.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments.

<p>The post Initial thoughts on the new series of Doctor Who after the first two episodes first appeared on Jenny Rowbory.</p>