Their capital city being a bunch of egg-shaped buildings around a giant birdcage building was a hilarious touch.

The social media thing is a bit of a red herring. This isn't an episode about social media really, it's an episode about race and class - if there is a comment on social media in particular, it is about people's tendency to use social media to insulate themselves from their own awfulness, which they use social media to inculcate. It's an episode about people rather than about the tools they use.

The people of Finetime (and, it seems to suggest, the Homeworld – or at least, those people of the same class as those of Finetime) are a segregationist, hyper-privileged class that values appearance, propriety, and conformity with social expectations. They prefer surface-level friendships and interactions that enhance their social standing or self-regard to deeper or more complex relationships, and there's a blurring of social and parasocial relationships so that they're essentially the same. The Bubbles don't create this culture, but they allow their users to wallow in it completely and exclude anything distasteful or any challenges to this worldview.

Spurred to consider our own world, we might ask ourselves if there's any equivalency (again, the show's not an allegory, but it is a commentary). And if so, who is it that is performing the labor that keeps that class going? What does it mean to put them out of view? What do we become if we put everything unpleasant like that out of our minds? What happens when that becomes completely untenable?

The slugs are controlled by the Dots. The implication is that the people of Finetime are so loathsome that their own social media platform has grown to hate them enough to kill them (which, fair).

Who created the slugs? I dunno, a Doctor Who creature designer who liked The Macra Terror. Why didn't they just kill everyone at once? Because then there wouldn't be time for an episode of Doctor Who. If we want to guess at the alphabetical thing, a social media app presents users in alphabetical order, so for the rogue AI of the Dots, that's just what their programming supplies. Why don't the Dots just kill people themselves? If we want to guess, well, people would just take off their Dots if they started killing people (or whatever company produces them would see them malfunctioning and fix the error). And it seems a lot more obvious to people in Finetime when someone has trouble with their Dot than when a slug quietly nabs someone. But also, because the episode wouldn't really work if the Dots just sniped people. These are the sorts of questions that don't really matter –– personally, I don't think leaving their answers to the imagination weakens the episode at all, and putting it in just wastes time spelling out unimportant details. There's a certain degree of suspension of disbelief we need for stories to work.

Lastly, while it may seem sci-fi that an ultra-privileged, racially-homogenous class of people would create an environment for their children where they can succeed and meet no challenges while performing essentially no labor or doing anything of consequence, I invite you to visit the Hamptons or, like, any golf course.

There's quite a lot to think about in this extraordinary episode. In my mind, it's one of the best episodes since late Capaldi, and of post-2005 Who as a whole. Also always worth noting that Gatwa's final scene here was the first scene he shot as the Doctor (save for those with Tennant).

Actually this brought up a completely buried memory for me. For a few years I lived in the same neighborhood as him – at the time, cool guy that I was, I had a Starfleet badge on my coat, and one day I was at the grocery store and had an awkward moment with him where our carts got sort of wedged together negotiating the too-narrow checkout lanes. He saw my pin and gave me a Vulcan salute as he moved into his lane. He seemed nice and a bit sheepish. The staff at the coffee shop I used to go to told me he was extremely lovely.

Yeah, all of the recasts have been spectacular with this one exception; I'm fully stumped by Paul Wesley and his take on the character. I don't need anyone aping Shatner and I love the idea of highlighting the more bookish actual Kirk as opposed to the pop culture image of him, but Ozempic Kirk spends 90% of his time looking bored out of his mind and 10% of his time doing a terrible Han Solo impression that just comes off as creepy. I cannot understand spending so much time on him when literally everyone else on screen sparkles and he has the charisma of wet felt.

Breaking the fourth wall is a Doctor Who tradition - the First, Fourth, Sixth, Seventh, Eleventh, and Twelfth Doctors all directly address the camera in addition to the Fifteenth, as do River Song, Martha, Clara, and various Classic villains. I don't understand why people suddenly need some sort of in-universe explanation for it. It's a narrative technique, and Doctor Who is a goofy camp show that's always been flexible enough, playing with various tropes, that it works. Davies explains it perfectly in the link: "I mean, you would [be taken out of the story by it] if it was Pride and Prejudice, that would be odd. But there’s something showy about Doctor Who, there’s something proscenium arch about it. There’s something arch about it, full stop."

This sort of needing an in-universe explanation for every theatrical device or inconsistency is how you get garbage like Trek's Klingon augment virus.

I struggle to think of a Trek character more Star Trek than Saru. DSC has its (sometimes severe, sometimes not) flaws, but it has an impressive track record of occasionally absolutely nailing how to make some of the trekkiest Trek characters.

It's going to be interesting where the series ends up in the inevitable reevaluation once a few years have passed.

Man, you have to watch the one with Giant Spock ("The Infinite Vulcan")

I don't know how you could get past Capaldi's first series and not see what an incredible Doctor he is.

I tried so hard to like things in the Chibnall era –– I was so excited when Whittaker was cast and I think she did the best she could -- but after reading Elizabeth Sandifer's evisceration of the Chibnall ethos in her piece on Kerblam! (which I think also applies to ENT, tbh) I think I've come to terms with the fact that I'm not really going to get there.

Major spoilers in the summaries attached to the titles here. I couldn't help myself from reading them - holy shit. I was excited for this before, but wow.

As much as I want every Star Trek show to now have one musical episode once a season –– just to annoy Subspace Rhapsody grinches –– I don't think it's funny enough for Lower Decks. I would love to see an episode where, like, the same anomaly happens but it makes everyone speak exclusively in limericks, or some shit like that.

Weird way to spell Link Hogthrob.

Knowing a few people who have worked on series that ended up looking for new networks, I feel pretty confident that for zillions of reasons (both legal and promotional) they would never have shown this footage if it wasn't basically a done deal –– this is just marketing to see us go bananas over the Doctor before they reveal the streaming deal. Which –– I could not believe it when I woke up this morning because I was totally sure all the "new home" stuff was entirely wishful thinking and that Prodigy was fully dead.