Hey, now you can see Michelle Gomez as a witch on Netflix in the The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.
Michelle Gomez fans should search Youtube for her appearances (as “Sue White”) in The Green Wing.
Yes it did. In fact, it felt like a carbon copy of Timeless. I like Timeless too, but I do not want Doctor Who to become it. In Timeless:
- Characters Inevitably run into one or more important historical figures.
- Said meetings happen at very critical point in our timeline.
- Has black guy Rufus inevitably having to deal with one more more racist assholes.
- Has a bad guy trying to sabotage the timeline. (At least this guy’s name wasn’t “Rittenhouse”).
- Has the characters playing interference in order to correct what the bad guy has fucked up.
Did they do a decent job of playing the formula? Yeah I guess, but If I want to watch Timeless, I’ll watch Timeless (which, imho is an inferior show that probably will be cancelled soon). I hope to god these kind of episodes are few and far between.
I think you mean that Timeless is a carbon copy (or shameless ripoff!) of Doctor Who.
(I remember watching the first Doctor Who episode in 1963.)
Not really. The formulas are quite different, Timeless is more grounded, formulaic, takes itself too seriously, and tries to stick to reality. If EVERY Doctor Who episode was like this last one, I’d be done with it right quick. I don’t need to be reminded that there was racism in the past every episode. No shit!
FYI, Timeless was cancelled but they’re going to air a TV movie in December to wrap things up.
I like the smaller scale of this series, and I like how Jodie Whittaker has just become a female Doctor, without any fuss or feeling the need to call attention to it: I also like how she’s becoming the responsible Doctor. Fun episode, although essentially a retread of The Green Death from way back in Pertwee’s run: a cameo from Katy Manning’s Jo Grant would have been a nice touch. And the loudmouth Alec Baldwin lookalike was a touch too obviously the Ugly American, although the actor was clearly having fun: he should have been dragged off and eaten, though. Good, cheerfully creepy low-stakes fun.
Also the new, branching Time Vortex looks great, and it’s hard to dislike a pun as terrible as “Arachnids In The UK”.
Chris Noth, formerly of the original “Law & Order” series and, occasionally, “Sex and the City”. Definitely hamming it up.
God yes. To an utterly, utterly tiresome degree. It’s taken as read that spiders are a bad thing, and if you’re not freaked out by them - just normal, harmless, spindly British house spiders - then you’re weird. So if you’re just creeped out or startled by unexpectedly happening across one, then you have licence to be ‘one of those people who hates spiders’ because that’s such a normal thing, rather than having a word with yourself for being so bothered by something so benign.
Because it’s so utterly entrenched, it’s perpetuated as kids learn from their parents and teachers that spiders are creepy and problematic. And when they don’t automatically react like that, they’re praised as ‘brave’, which pretty soon cements the idea that spiders are creepy and problematic. My kids love spiders, because my wife and I have always said how cool they are. Their friends think that’s weird. Guess what? Their parents get all shrieky and hysterical about them.
Well excuse me for freaking out about house spiders. I try to humanely remove them via the cup-and-paper method but I have had spiders in my kitchen too big to get a pint glass over and while I know they’re harmless I’m still dropping a heavy object on them rather than risking having them loose in the house.
I appreciate that many people find spiders creepy.
I quite like them because:
- they kill flies
- I once got called in by a girl I liked to remove a spider from her bath
What is the pun aspect of that?
Not much, but “anarchy in the UK”
(post shortened)
There aren’t that many storylines available. Writers can change the time, the place, the characters, the McGuffin, etc., but it’s up to the writers, directors, and actors to provide the audience with a new, entertaining, view of an old story.
Fans eventually grow tired of the old, stale, repeated stories, and search for new shows that repeat the same old, stale, repeated stories in a new way. What makes Dr Who stand out from other shows is that the fans never know who, what, where, or why Dr Who, and his/her companions, will be placed in danger, or how they will survive. Every week is a brand new adventure.
And googling that tells me the rest of the answer–that Anarchy in the UK is a song.
Nobody studies the classics anymore. 
I’m OK with the new opening visuals, but am still not liking the new arrangement of the theme song. Too dark, or something . . .
I forget I’m mostly talking to Americans sometimes.
I finally got around to watching the Rosa Parks episode this week, and I’ll rank it as ‘pretty good’. They didn’t handle the situation badly, and especially avoided any of a ‘The Doctor actually motivated Rosa Parks to do it’ story line. The episode had a lot of plot holes, but that’s pretty usual for the show so most of them are fine for me- why didn’t Krasko just time zap Rosa (or the driver, or the bus), why was the policeman who followed them when they broke into a hotel room not concerned about breaking and entering, why wasn’t Rosa a bit more freaked out by these weird Brits following her around. The Very Special Episode bit at the end was a bit too much, I think the episode would stand better if the ‘And Now You Know’ part wasn’t so overdone.
They did break a longstanding Who ‘rule’ though. Typically The Doctor and her companions get spillover from the Chameleon Circuit or Translation Matrix and don’t get noticed for being out of place in far future and alien worlds, even though their clothing, body type, speech patterns, social knowledge, and so on are radically outdated or alien. Notably Martha and the Doctor had very little problem posing as an interracial couple in 1960s America during Blink. I don’t have a huge objection to it since they wanted to tell a particular story, but it is a deviation.
Ryan firing the time gun was badly handled. The Doctor telling him how it worked meant that he obviously was going to use it by the end of the episode, but she didn’t do her usual ‘oh you can’t kill the bad guy’ speech when he sent Krasko back ‘as far as it would go’. If she’s really fine with time zapping the bad guy to ancient times, why not just zap him early on instead of trying to counter him by normal means and risking history breaking? Why zap him to the distant past where either he’s going to die or mess up history even more instead of zapping him a week into the future, allowing them to hang out for a few days, then pick him up and drop him back into his proper time? The Doctor doing stuff that ‘just works’ is fine with me, but introducing a special device that’s crucial to the story, then not using it in an obvious way to solve the problem but instead in a way that’s either morally questionable or ineffective gets a low grade.
It’s no more unrealistic than the idea that ‘petty bigotry’ hundreds or thousands of years from now will take the exact same form that it does in modern times even though the idea of white/brown/black’ races has only had a short historical lifespan. Before the Enlightenment, there was lots of prejudice, but skin color wasn’t considered all that different from skin color or hair color. Different language, culture, religious belief, family connections, clothing styles, and the like were what people used to determine that someone was a ‘barbarian’. All the complicated classifications of ‘negroid’ ‘caucasian’ ‘mongoloid’ really come from the 19th century, they just weren’t a serious concept before that.
I find the idea of a guy 6000 years from now being agitated over black and white humans being equal about as likely as someone today getting agitated over an Assyrian vs non-Assyrian descent; there’s probably someone who does it, but it’s likely that people will regard him as mentally ill, not prejudiced per se. It’s typical of the show to have future and societies very much like 20th-21st century Britain though, so again it doesn’t take me out of the show.
The problem is that Krasko told Ryan that he should know his place during their confrontation, which is pretty clearly signaling that Krasko is racist. They could have done the episode with that motivation, but I don’t think it fits what they actually put together. Would actually be a bit more interesting IMO, instead of having FutureRacist doing racist stuff, you would have a villain with sympathetic motivations.