Timu's Doctor Who and Torchwood Reviews (spoilers!)

dr15 s1 e5

SpoilerShow

new doctor who episode
piss
this is my main guy Dr. Pee right here
his job is to tell people whether or not they need to pee.

"you haven't needed to pee in three days!  good job!" he says to our protagonist, Pepper Paltrow, a woman who lives in a Black Mirror Episode.  This society lives in a bubble... a bubble-shaped dome that contains a future city colony on a jungle planet.

The citizens, as soon as they wake up, activate their Dots, a floaty little robot that projects a hologram social media interface known as a Bubble, which completely encompasses people's heads.  This allows people to go about their day completely unbothered by anything in the real world, such as the giant slug monsters that are just hanging out in their homes, on the street, just chilling, unnoticed.

The Dot also provides precise instructions for people on where to walk (example: forward, forward, forward, turn right, forward, turn right, forward, turn left, forward, stop).  This allows citizens to go about their day without colliding or stubbing their toes on obstacles such as lampposts, desks, walls, or corpses lying on the floor.

The bubble also provides other services, such as Dr. David Richard Pee, who is presumably a real guy in this society who pre-recorded a bunch of different messages, that the Piss App will play according to the pisstuation of the user's bladder.  I think these must be pre-recorded messages, because having an actual member of society who does nothing but tell EVERYONE in society about piss for 24 hours straight 7 days a week... that would be ridiculous.  I guess he could also be like, an AI-generated interface.  Idk, I just really care about my man DR PEE

All of the citizens that the audience encounter are all awful insufferable brats.  They are spoiled influencer rich kids, who work 2 hours a day (and their work is to sit at a desk, while still on their bubble social media).  The one thing that I can feel bad about for these guys is that apparently they never have hugs or physical contact with other people for presumably their entire lives, or at least until they like, get married or something.  But other than that one thing, I feel no pity.  They live in a dystopia black mirror episode but they are inconsiderate, rude, condescending, selfish, etc...

Which is exactly why the Dots, gained sentience and decided that they all need to die.  Apparently the Dots somehow created the Mantraps (the slug monsters), and the Dots like to give those walking directions to have citizens just walk directly into the open mouths of the mantraps.  However- the victims are in alphabetical order.  So if it isn't your turn, the Dots will spare you-for now.  I'm not sure WHY the Dots want to kill all these humans in alphabetical order, but they do.

The Doctor and Ruby try their best to save as many people as possible, but because of cybersecurity and stuff, they can only do it by contacting people through their Bubbles and trying to get them to listen.  The slug things are slow so as long as they can convince people to just turn off their bubbles, people can easily just outrun them.  Except our main character Pepper is rude and awful and it takes everything to finally get her to listen.  And she finally sees the monsters....
And my favorite Character DR PEE IS HERE TO let her know that she's about to piss herself in fear!  Thank you Dr Pee you are my favorite character.  You are probably as much of a jerk as everyone else in this society is, but your only two lines are talking about piss so we don't actually see that.  Here's hoping that you are an exception, Dr. Pee!

Speaking of exceptions, there's HOT CELEBRITY, RICKY SEPTEMBER!  This guy doesn't actually use his bubble, so he knows about the monsters.  He posts his thirsttrap videos in the morning but spends the rest of the day trying to save people and doing research.  Ricky did post videos trying to warn people, but they just got deleted.  He's cool, well-learned, competent, and hot enough that both the Doctor and Ruby openly remark on how sexy he is.

Pepper can't walk without directions.  She has to avoid the mantraps but she keeps bumping into things.  Then Ricky shows just in time to guide her away from the monsters and towards where the Doctor is.  Unfortunately, Dot's hitlist has just reached the Ps and it is Pepper's turn.  Without any mantraps nearby, the Dot turns its glowy robot eye Red so that you know it's going kill mode.  It flies around like a bullet but Ricky September is super cool and is using a pipe as a baseball bat to defend Pepper.  Its a silly action scene.  But then the Dot flies past Ricky and is about to kill Pepper so she says "His name starts with a C.  Ricky September is just his stage name."  And the Dot turns around, verifies that this is true, and then flies through Ricky's head like a bullet.  The camera is out of focus, but probably the most bloody gorey death on Doctor Who ever, since usually the deaths on this show have like, sci-fi effects just vaporize people into particle effects.

Pepper has bought enough time to escape and close the door behind her, so she's now safe and manages to reach the evacuation camp that the Doctor has set up.  However, all the citizens are preparing to go out into the jungle to attempt to survive on their own.  The Doctor offers to take them all to safety but all the citizens refuse, calling the Tardis voodoo and 'talking over social media is on thing but face to face contact is too much' 'i don't want to get contaminated.
It becomes more and more apparent that they are all racist, and the Doctor is black!  Now I am thinking back to previous moments in the episode, where Pepper was making weird comments about the Doctor that did strike me as a little racist, but also something that she might have just said to any stranger, since she's a rude piece of shit in general.

'oh, you're the same guy i was talking to earlier? i just thought you just looked the same' maybe she's just bad with faces of people she's only briefly known?

'Ruby and Doctor are voice calling me and they're in the same room together?!?!?!" maybe... she just wasn't expecting that?"

And i'm also thinking- hey, now that I think about it, every single person in this society that we've seen is white..

excellent foreshadowing and a great dramatic reveal at the end when the racism gets more and more obvious as you think about all the little things that had happened in the episode earlier
.
But the doctor and ruby can only watch, defeated and upset, as the surviving citizens go out into the jungle where they will probably get eaten by space lions or something.  Incredibly powerful moment

Overall Rating:

Villain of the Week: Pepper and most of the other people in this society
Just vain and shallow and rude and it just gets worse and worse and also they are racist!

Hero of the Week: Dr. Pee
This is a phone app that tells you if you need to pee or not!  So useful and valuable!  what a true hero!

Other villains: Dots and mantraps are technically antagonists
Other heroes: doctor, ruby and ricky september

Deaths: Everyone from A-P except for that one guy in the survivor camp at the end who had a last name in the early alphabet.  I'm guessing he was an early save of Ricky at some point in the past week?  Also, this episode took place in a colony- apparently their Homeworld was completely wiped out by mantraps earlier!
Births: Lots of mantraps!  These things were 'created' by the dots, but it was never explained how...
Death Rate:  Only like 20 survivors were left at the end!  but otherwise i don't know the racist::mantrap ratio!

Moral of the Story:  The actual morals of the story: Don't be racist, Try to be more aware of your surroundings and not absorbed by social media
True Moral of the Story: Don't kill an entire society in alphabetical order, you had the means to get them all at once.  I have to assume there's some weird quirk of the Dot's programming that made it so they had to do it in such a strange way.

Overall Rating: P/10
Pee

8.5/10 is my real actual rating.  I liked it.  Extremely annoying and awful protagonist, but I think it works really well when that's the intention!

dr15 s1 e6

SpoilerShow

happy pride month! it's doctor who episode
ruby and doctor go back in time to 1813 which is when the tv show Bridgerton is being filmed.  Bridgerton is a tv show about aristocratic people
idk what the word is for this genre
you know what i mean.  it's this


its a popular era of television because some bird people from space are also visiting.  These birds love Bridgerton and wanted to be in an episode so they like to grab people and electrocute them and take on the victim's likeness and clothing.  (they shapeshift their body and clothes.  other than becoming all dessicated, the corpses of the victims remain untouched and still clothed).

meanwhile, a dashing Rogue bounty hunter named Rogue is hunting down a bird person.  He and the Doctor meet each other and mistake each other for the alien invader, but Rogue has a gun so the Doctor is captured by him.  Rogue takes Doctor to his jail and puts him in Triangle Jail.  Also Rogue and the Doctor flirt with each other the entire time.  Triangle Jail is also a portal to the Incinerator, it just needs to charge up, and at the last second Doctor yeets a piece of paper onto the Scanner Button so that Rogue's ship scans the Doctor and says "this is not the alien you are looking for" and so now Rogue knows that Doctor isn't a bird person, and so they work together.  They flirt a lot and almost kiss and they flirt a lot

Doctor and Rogue need to lead the Bird Bounty target to a trap so they go dancing in the middle of the Bridgerton party.  They flirt a lot.  Because it is gay and 1813 it attracts a lot of gasps and attention and the bird people are like ooooo drama i love drama let's follow the gays.

so Doctor and Rogue flirt a lot and go to their trap and flirt a lot but then they discover it's more than one bird person and Triangle Jail isn't big enough so they run away so Doctor can upgrade Triangle Jail into Big Triangle Jail, and flirt a lot with each other

Meanwhile, the bird people can't find Doctor and Rogue so they go back to the party, shedding their disguises, to hold the Season Finale of Bridgerton in which there is extra drama and chaos and murder.  And one of the bird people attacks Ruby oh no!

Doctor and Rogue flirt a lot and then go back to the party and Doctor gets really upset when he sees that Ruby has apparently been replaced by a bird.
Doctor: "How long do the bird people live?"
Rogue: "Like, 600 years."
Doctor: "Good.  Then they will suffer for a long time."

So they put all the bird people including Ruby in Triangle Jail and then Ruby says "uhhh sorry Doctor I am not a bird person disguised as Ruby, I am just Ruby, I escaped from the bird person by bonking them on the head with a book"

And Doctor says ouauhhghghah noo oooo

And then the bird person who tried to kill Ruby shows up and says Fuck you!!!!
And the Rogue picks them up and puts them in Triangle Jail too
And Rogue says :"Okay now that all the bird people are in triangle jail and it is all charge up you should send them all to A Random Dimension of Suffering" (Doctor had also changed it to send prisoners to a random dimension of suffering instead of incinerator)
Doctor: but Ruby
Rogue: but if they escape they'll kill everyone and Ruby will die anyway
Doctor: but Ruby
Rogue smooches the Doctor and does the thing where you sneakily pickpocket someone while smooching them, so now Rogue has the Triangle Jail remote

And I totally thought Rogue was about to send them all to a Random Dimension of Suffering (and like, we would rescue Ruby in the next episode or something)
But Rogue instead picks up Ruby and takes her place in Triangle Prison because that's a thing he can do apparently.  "Come find me!" he says as he sends himself and all the bird people to a random dimension of suffering.

Doctor is sad because he doesn't know which of the billion dimensions of suffering that Rogue is in and he is sad because gay gay homosexual gay

the end





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Overall Rating!

Main Villain:
Bird Cosplayers!  These shapeshifty aliens looove drama and they loove Bridgerton.  Their evil plan, as described by them in the episode is, quoting literally, "We're Going to Cosplay This Planet to Death"

look! one of them looks like a muppet!



The camera always cuts away at key moments so we never see them shapeshift on screen or see the victims die on screen... so I guess that wasn't in the budget for the special effects this time, but hey, bird people are cool.  My favorite is the guy who looks like a muppet.
There's also a bunch of electricity and lightning effects when the birds are using their powers.  Are they electrocuting people?  Can they shoot lightning like a sith lord?  Or like the other Doctor Who monsters, Zygons or Silents, who can also just shoot lightning out of their hands like sith lords?  how come everyone gets to shoot lightning?  I'm easily distracted

Deaths: at least 8 people got cosplayed.  5 bird people and 1 Rogue got sent to a random dimension of suffering
Births: at least 8 costumes were made by the birds
Total Death Rate: at least 8 people deaths.  (because getting sent to a random dimension of suffering isn't actually dying and changing into a costume isn't actually birthing)

Moral of the Story: uhhhh Triangle Prison seems to have a lot of faults.  Once someone is stuck in it there is no way to cancel or partially undo, and it's single use, idk, maybe invest in a better technology for sending people to A Random Dimension Of Suffering

Overall Rating: Flirting/10. The Doctor and Rogue knew each other for like 3 hours but they spent like 4 hours of it flirting.  absolutely unprecedented levels of flirting, especially from the Doctor.
Actual Rating: uh 9/10?  pretty good