As for the episode itself, it suffered badly from wanting to be two things. The killer bubble wrap was so stupidly awesome as a threat, but it came far too late in the episode: they should have just run with it from the start as a Moffat “mundane thing become creepy killer”, with us knowing more or less from the beginning what was killing all the eager package openers, and the Doctor and Co. struggling to put the clues together. The creepy robots turning out not to be a sinister threat, but victims of a deranged human conspiracy was a nice idea too, like an inverted Robots of Death. Unfortunately, the set-up was too muddled by the situation not really being resolved at the end, with no substantial changes being made at Kerblam!, which did seem like a pretty soul-crushing place for humans to work, so that you ended up thinking that the terrorist actually had a pretty decent point, and one which wasn’t going to fixed by a free trip home and an increased quota of organics. And everyone seemed pretty blase about Kira being killed off in front of them by Kerblam! as just collateral damage, which left a pretty bad taste considering how her character had been set up so sympathetically.
So. Witches.
A bit of moralizing, a bit of your standard alien threat, a bit of historical farce. Slightly bothered that no one seemed too concerned by the group’s weird clothing or ethnic mix, but not enough to suspend disbelief too much.
The big puzzler for me was: they cast a Scottish actor to play a Scottish king, so WTF was that accent Alan Cumming was doing?
Pure ham, the very essence of HAM.
And while I enjoy his ham normally, in this instance it detracted from the show. The same ridiculous caricature but with a Scottish accent would have been much better.
Another point: I can’t help but feel that after a couple of “humans are the real monsters” episodes this one re-subverted expectations by taking a known situation of humans acting monstrously and making it the fault of an alien menace.
That’s one of the things that has bothered me all season long. The TARDIS used to pop up clothing for everyone. What happened to these companions? Does it not like them? Has it run out of clothes? Is the showrunner afraid that we won’t recognize them if they’re not wearing denim?
I’m also annoyed by Ryan’s issues with balance and coordination which seem to have disappeared for all practical purposes after the pilot (he mentions them from time to time but shouldn’t it get in the way of something?)
This particular episode bothered me by the Doctor starting the episode laying out ground rules for historical visits as though going into history was new for this group (we’ve seen them visit historical sites before. They know not to screw with the timeline. This was not new information).
Overall, not horrible, but not great.
Yep. Especially “white people are the real monsters.”
I could hear Scots but it seemed they went for that educated Edinburgh accent that doesn’t really sound scots at all.
Maybe not historically accurate but definitely the the sort of accent modern Scots nobility have.
OB
A legitimate alien threat does not mean that everything that happened was their fault.
Even if Becka was actually being controlled by the Morax from the start, rather than reacting out of fear in a way that served their purposes (which doesn’t seem to be the case, but even if), she was still able to use existing witch hysteria to do her stuff without being stopped - even getting help from the townspeople, and eventually the king, himself.
It’s not the first time there’s been a real threat that could have been mitigated if humans acted less like <Agent K>dumb, panicky, dangerous animals</Agent K>.
Don’t know if this is been mentioned already, but rumor has it Whittaker and Chibnall are on the way out already.
ETA: Nevermind, it was.
I just think it’s interesting that they’ve gotten this far in the season before they reached their first actual evil aliens. All other aliens/monsters so far have been ether mindless or misunderstood.
For all that I love David Mitchell, and think he’s hilarious, I’m often reminded by things like this that he just isn’t my kind of people. This and the no music thing …
That’s a bit of a stretch. Apart from “Rosa” where the problem IRL **was **specifically bigoted white people, where are you getting this from? Most of the characters in general have been white but that’s nothing new and not a message in itself. In “Demons of the Punjab”, while there are a few jabs at the British for fucking up India the “real monsters” were the Hindu brother and neighbours.
Apart from the Stena in Episode 1 and the weird cloak things in Episode 2, you mean?
Um, yes. Besides them. Obviously.
Mitchell’s a smart, funny guy, but I don’t know of anyone who’s *less *in touch with his own inner child, or inner teenager, or inner twentysomething. He’s a pudgy middle-aged man trapped in the body of a pudgy middle-aged man.
That villain … I swear he was shortish. And oldish. And brownish. And mossy.
And he spoke with a voice that was sharpish and bossy:
“I am the Morax. I speak from the tree!”
Are we sure that that wasn’t a Truffula tree that Becca chopped down? Is a dunking stool also called a thneed?
And has been since he was a tiny pudgy baby, I suspect. The Coren/Mitchell household, I mean I don’t presume to know how it works, but I’m glad they found each other.
My closed captioning insisted on calling it a ‘ducking stool’. That’s what I thought I heard also, but my brain could have been overriding my ears with what I was reading. Which of course immediately brought to mind the witch’s weight . . .
And I was suddenly not too lazy to Google it, and low and behold, it appears that ‘ducking (or cucking)’ is correct!
I think **DSeid **was alluding to Dr. Seuss’s Lorax who was upset at the trees that were cut down to make thneeds.
It’s a fair cop.
She turned me into a newt!