Doctor Who Social Club

I avoided watching this one all week, because I don't remember liking it very much, and...well, I was right.

It's not that bad, really. Thebasic story is fine, and themes of the media shaping the way people think are evergreen. But it's directed like something from at least 10-20 years earlier, and the whole thing is sort of lifeless and boring. This is Brian Grant's only DW directing credit, and that's a mercy.

The Adam arc...maybe it should have had one more episode than it got. His initial culture shock is done pretty well, and his greed makes perfect sense, given his previous job. But his (non-) relationship with Rose is rather undercooked - there's no reason to get invested either way. It also serves to paint the Doctor and Rose's relationship in a more romantic light, and...I love Ecceleston and Piper together, but they just don't have that kind of chemistry.

Simon Pegg is rather wasted as the Editor, neither interesting nor funny enough to justify his casting. Suki and Cathica are both more compelling, and the nurse is portrayed in a memorably unusual way by Tamsin Greig.

I keep having the stray thought that "The Interstellar Song Contest" seems like a bit of a do-over of this one. It doesn't map 1:1, but the similiarities are strong enough that I keep drawing that line.

I had completely forgotten Simon Pegg was ever on Who until last week's preview reminded me of this episode. I agree with ValueSubtracted that he's not used well here. Simon's only 35 here, and I was struck by the thought that he could have made a better Adam. We're really running short on reasons to care about our Adam, so casting somebody who could give us equal parts charm and smarm could only improve him. You'd probably want to lose any suggestion of a romantic subplot between them in a Pegg-centric rewrite, but I'm getting way off-track at this point.

Behind the scenes, Adam was originally given a more sympathetic reasoning for wanting knowledge from the future. His father was suffering from crippling arthritis, which he discovered had been cured by this time. His actions in this episode would have been all about alleviating his father's suffering. I wonder why that was removed. It doesn't really change much; maybe they felt the Doctor refusing to allow this relief made him seem too cruel? But it leaves us with no reason to like this guy. Oh well.

The look of this episode reminds me of nothing more than Roger Christian's quasi-Scientology epic, Battlefield Earth, adapted from the novel by founder L. Ron Hubbard. Couldn't you imagine this guy as the Editor?

That's really not the comparison you want to invite. In fairness, I've watched a couple of Christian's films, but only because they're bad. I'm not really opposed to bad sci-fi, but that's a separate (albeit overlapping) thing to cheesy or low-budget sci-fi, which is what I like to see in Who.

The cast really is stacked for this one, so it's such a shame that this episode isn't more fun. Almost everybody here is either just off the back of or about to do something seminal (Pegg's Spaced and Shaun of the Dead, Tamsin Greig's Black Books and Green Wing, Christine Adams's Pushing Daisies). Anna Maxwell Martin is a decade and change away from Motherland, but is nice to see in her early career retrospectively. If all I knew about this episode was the cast, I'd be really excited to see so many of my favorites in one place.

And yet, there's just no meat here. I just want a moment that I love somewhere in the episode and there simply aren't any. I'm a broken record but the snap fight once Adam gets back home could have been a lot funnier with Pegg. Overall, disappointing.

I am not a fan of this episode. It has some really great plot points and themes but the whole episode fails to bring them together in a satisfying way, and most of the guest characters aren't really useful.

Simon Pegg, in my mind, made for an OK editor, but this story would have been great with him as the Editor-In-Chief. I don't see why we needed an alien with an unpronounceable name and a CGI design that has aged incredibly poorly. Humans are perfectly capable of being awful to each other without outside intervention, and here was an opportunity to play that up. Pegg could have been great as an evil mastermind instead of a mere henchman.

With Adam, I'm confused. Rose has changed her look since the last ep, and the way they act in the beginning seems to suggest some time has passed since they left the museum. But then it doesn't appear that time has passed at all because Adam feigns feeling uneasy and wants to be alone. He leaves at the end of this episode with a character arc so unsatisfying it might be more accurate to say he didn't have one at all. The doctor does something incredibly nonsensical and leaves him, a known alien artefact profiteer, with the stuff installed in him, even though he makes a show of erasing the phone answering machine. Despite trying to scare him, he would obviously have the ability to analyse, pilfer, and sell what is in him. Nothing about his character makes any sense.

Cathica and Suki are alright, but I am not sure they really did anything of much consequence, excepting cathica jumping in right at the very end.

The standout guest for me here is Tamsin Grieg as the sales medic. I forgot she was ever in DW. A future where they upsell medical treatment like they would options in a car is freaky, even down to them installing extras that are on offer without even asking. Her creepy performance really sells how weird it all is.

I don't like the whole body horror "you can see inside your brain" stuff, even with the dated CGI. Gives me the ick. And also makes no sense - if you have a chip, why on earth do you need trepanning other than to shock the viewers?

Which brings me to the themes and major plot points. We have:

• future medical horror show (used better in the next series with 10)
• workplace political drama,
• journalism and its role in politics (I think this alone should have been the plot),
• conspiracies vs freedom fighters,
• privacy rights (very perceptive in ~2000),
• digital money and worker scrip,
• racism (RTD re-used this "you don't see racism" idea to much better effect in Gatwa's series); Just to name a few. If the episode had focused more on just one of these that would have been better.

The design of the station itself is confusing, even if the CGI visuals and set design are nice. It has spinny bits, but because they're always in the central column it clearly has artificial mavity, so why does it need the spinny bits‽ I also don't rally understand why they needed the "it's really hot" ventilation plot point - usually larger animals tend to have a lower metabolism, not higher, and the editor was going to invite the doctor up anyway. And you don't ventilate the get rid of heat in space, you radiate it.

As usual I enjoyed the score, from classic themes to the upbeat accompaniment during the tourism scene early in the episode, and the later conspiratorial detective melody.

The only thing that really happens of any note here is the perhaps unnecessary setup for the series finale, and a deepening of 9 and Rose's relationship, which could have easily happened in any scenario.