Don't get too excited - this is just the individual episodes of "Unleashed" for the season, stitched together.
Welcome to the regenerated Retrospective Discussions! The idea is simple: we discuss each episode as normal, but there's no need to pretend the subesequent years of stories never happened - feel free to reference later continuity, compare it to future episodes, etc.
As long as the threads are minimally active, I'll post one every Sunday until The War Between the Land and the Sea comes out, at which point we'll shift are attention to that for a few weeks.
As for myself...I haven't rewatched "Rose" yet, and haven't seen it in a few years, so I'll be back after I've rectified that situation.
Batel Watch 2025: maybe she survived the Gorn?
is this a cynical attempt to make political hay out of alluding to what has been said of Kinew’s past?
The PCs have done this for years, so it's an understandable instinct.
That said...I'm not convinced that there isn't a little fire beneath the smoke. The 2023 altercation was inconclusive. I just don't know.
It could be a case study for Portage & Main.
Toronto @ Montreal
Once again, I saw a bit of this one live, and caught the highlights for the rest. This Winnipegger is never going to be upset about watching the Argos lose.
Montreal looked very well put-together. I've got to agree with the officials on the Arbuckle "forward pass" - there didn't seem to be an eligible receiver anywhere near that ball. Toronto's O Line was a bit of a disaster.
That one Toronto TD was great, though - love the effort.
Ugh, I barely engage with the Endeavor System, so I'm not 100% sure.
I think New Who has definitely danced on the razor's edge, getting by with narrative shortcuts as long as the emotional resonance lands. And when a story doesn't land with you, those shortcuts are very visible.
I actually do like the small bits of exploration of the a Timeless Child that RTD has done using it to inform the Doctor's personality in new ways. It would be great to see a Jo Martin story or something like that, though.
Trying another "Flux"-type season could be interesting too - sort of a hybrid between the old serials and more modern episodes. Hell, the eight-episode seasons are practically begging for it.
All good - I love the Mastodon engagement, even though it's kind of awkward.
It's a pretty pedestrian-heavy area. It's probably justified.
The TARDIS materializes in 1990s San Francisco.
Billie Piper stumbles out, is shot almost immediately, regenerates into Paul McCann.
Okay, rewatch complete.
I do think that anyone who genuinely believes that something like "Space Babies" (which, to be clear, I did not particularly enjoy) was somehow out of line needs to pop back to 2025 and really look at what RTD was doing in his original run. A garbage bin belching after eating Mickey The Idiot kind of says it all.
This episode does a very, very good job of introducing the Doctor, and the basics of what he's all about (no Time Lords or Gallifrey to be mentioned just yet) to a new audience. Rose really was the best idea RTD had, allowing her to serve as the audience proxy moving forward. The focus on Rose's "domestics" was also a very good move, one not really replicated in the following seasons (though RTD certainly tried, and came pretty close with Donna's family).
The Nestene are a bizarre villain to open with - it's like RTD has a thing for smacking new viewers in the face with the goofiest things he can think of, just to set the expectations. Armies of department store mannequins in the streets of London are truly a sight to behold.
The episode isn't shot particularly dynamically, but it gets the job done.
One thing that I absolutely hate is Murray Gold's scoring for this era. The opening music over the montage of Rose's daily routine encapsulates it nicely - that driving percussion over the orchestral stuff just doesn't work for me at all. I'm going to try not to harp on it through the Tennant era, but I think Gold's work improves a lot once Matt Smith takes over. "The Doctor's Theme" is fantastic, though.