Danny Pink?
Yeah, the BBC shoehorning in a gratuitous PSA there. Or covering their asses against people bitching about characters with knives.
In a similar vein, I will admit to enjoying some schadenfreude at expense of the “My favourite character is a time-travelling, body-swapping, two-hearted, millennia-old alien…but having it be a woman stretches credulity!” crowd, but I also thought the little digs in the show itself about needing to accept change were forced, clumsy and unnecessary.
Leela. She carried a knife, which she used… a lot. Almost to the point where you would say, “This is a childrens’ show?”
Mr. Benton and Mike Yates.
I really like that they didn’t go the route of ‘oh look, the Doctor is a girl now, lets talk about purses and heels and girly things’ which I was worried about. They treated the new gender the same as old changes like “am I a ginger now?” and don’t look like they’re going to make it a gimmick. Like 13 quite well so far, she’s a little off but it’s a regeneration episode so that’s expected.
The Doctor has always held a hypocritical and grossly unrealistic position about other people defending themselves. Ten brought down a prime minister for blowing up a ship of violent aliens that were going to kill a big chunk of the population and enslave the rest, eleven went on a lecture when a parent who’s child was kidnapped fought against the kidnapper, all of them do the repeated ‘well, I could wipe out the Daleks, but maybe THIS time’ they’ll change speeches after the Daleks wipe out a city worth of people, and so on. It’s the same thing with the ‘only idiots carry knives’ line. The Doctor is happy to have companions who carry a variety of weapons - Jamie with a claymore, Leela with her knife, Ace with the exposives, Jack with his ARSEenal, Rory the Roman, and so on, she just doesn’t carry them herself and acts smug about getting someone else to do the dirty work.
It’s a thing that I definitely disagree with philosophically, but it’s 100% consistent with the character.
There have been some mind wipes, timeline rewrites, and active cover-ups of all of the various incursions. I think the Who world knows that there are aliens and sometimes they turn up trying to conquer London, but they’re not common and no one expects them in the middle of nowhere. It wasn’t ‘an alien on Earth’ that they found unbelievable, it was ‘an alien in this local area’. It’s a bit silly with how prominent alien invasions are in the new series (70s/80s UNIT actions were small enough to believe they hushed up), but they like having the locals be surprised ‘like us’ so isn’t likely to change on the show unless the real world starts having aliens pop up.
Even more hypocritical is the fact that, right before she gave Karl shit for pushing Tim Shaw off the crane, she revealed that she had transferred the DNA bombs into Tim Shaw, so that when he activated them, they detonated within his own body. Somehow that’s okay, but knocking a guy who was trying to kill you off of a high place isn’t.
I won’t bother to link to it, but there is a YouTube video that’s fairly easy to find if you search for it, showing that the Doctor in fact has a long history of using guns against various enemies, even while preaching self-righteously against ever doing such a barbaric thing.
Overall I liked it. My wife and I were laughing/smiling more at the little jokes and clever one-liners more than we have in the last several years with The Moffat Age getting worn and tired. Props to Chris Chibnall for pulling that off. The story of the predator dude was serviceable if not memorable. Honestly other than the blue-face-with-teeth, generally forgettable.
I’m liking Whittaker as the new doctor. I was getting a Matt Smith “manic pixie” vibe. So given the variety here, maybe she’s doing a decent job blending the various personality traits together. And the “companions standing around looking confused while the doctor popped up doing crazy things” reminds me of something I have on the tip of my … (what’s this? oh yeah) tongue, but Whittaker is pulling it off. I’m still not very fond of her new costume, but that’s hardly the first time that’s happened. Hopefully it’ll get tweaked and changed like Capaldi’s first outfit.
Overall, I vote the episode a strong B. Not one of the absolute best, but very serviceable and a solid rollout for the new Doctor and Companions.
[quote=“Andy_L, post:46, topic:822620”]
[/QUOTE]Ah, the Doctor Who/Geto Boys crossover the world has been waiting for!
That’s a total of four out of how many?
And Leela was descended from humans who had been separated from civilization for so long that they reverted to tribalism so she gets a pass for not knowing about any weapons other than pointy objects.
What I think elevated the predator dude somewhat above “generic alien menace” level was that he wasn’t just an alien menace; he was also a pompous jerk who liked to think of himself as a mighty hunter but still had to “cheat” to win his game. He wasn’t Predator; he was Predator’s less competent, more pathetic younger brother.
I like to think that no other member of his species has ever been to Earth, so none of his peers know that humans aren’t quite the fearsome warriors he is building them up as. “As the tales tell, not even the Daleks have defeated mighty Earth” etc.
Most of the filler was clips from the NYC Comic Con panel that followed the screening of the show at Madison Square Garden. I was there. 
Whittaker and Chibnall were very interesting to listen to, you might enjoy it.
Jamie was a Scottish highlander who was a piper for a military unit (and who carried a knife, incidentally). Harry was a naval doctor. Turlough was a member of his planet’s military (though that happened offscreen). Wilfred Mott was noted for serving in the military but never taking a life. Rory was a Roman Centurion for longer than the age the Doctor claims to be. Captain Jack has done several stints in the military at different times. So it looks like the majority of the Doctor’s male companions have actually been some kind of soldier.
Also note that the Doctor said “now with added Sheffield steel”, and for all we know killed the bad guy with that sonic screw driver by transferring the bombs. I don’t see any reason to think that it has anything to do with any more than the running hypocrisy.
The sonic screwdriver is used as a weapon and simply has no moral high ground to claim over a Sheffield pocket knife.
It’s moral quibbling, but he killed himself by attempting to kill the Doctor and friends. Seems like the Doctor has done that trick before - she seems to have no qualms about getting beings to off themselves. In Smith’s last episode, he got the wooden cyberman to shoot himself by implying that he’d reversed the function of the cyber-gun. I’m sure there are other examples of beings being offed trying to kill others.
I’d have to rewatch, but it seems like Tim Shaw had more-or-less surrendered (or at the least was beaten) when crane boy pushed him off, so at not ‘fair play’ (even if understandable).
Sill less than a dozen.
Are these goalposts an alien species? Because they sure seem to be moving, unlike normal ones.
I enjoyed the episode, thought the supporting cast did a fine job, and really liked Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor. I think the show is in good hands.
I prefer to come into things like this with no spoilers. But against my better judgement, I watched a 5-minute preview that my DVR recorded. It showed who the three companions were to be, and therefore I figured Grace wasn’t going to make it through the episode, which affected my viewing experience. Too bad, but I still enjoyed it.