SpaceScotsman

I think Antony Head was pretty good in this one, but I agree not as good as he was in buffy.

I watched SJA as it aired, and from what I remember there wasn't much if anything that related to this episode. Even K9 wasn't really in it.

I have mixed feelings about this episode. From a nostalgia bait front, it hits just right. Especially the reveals of SJ and K9. Though again, would have been better without the "next time" spoilers. Anthony Head is absolutely perfect for the role - from the downright evil treatment of the kid in care at the start right down to the tempting offer he gives at the final confrontation. There's also a lot of humour sprinkled throughout - Teachers living in the school, "I'm the tin dog ". A really nice moment from the doctor as he reveals how he feels about travelling and being around humans.

However, there's lots that also doesn't really live up to expectations. After the pretty good werewolf creature last episode, the bat gargoyle creatures look lacking in comparison. The bickering throughout just feels awkward and annoying, whether it's between Rose / SJ or Mickey. The climactic school lockdown feels over the top, with music too loud and lots of directorial adrenaline without anything much happening. Other than the teachers being eaten, which almost feels played for laughs, it does not feel like there is enough threat. The God maker feels like it comes out of nowhere and I'm still not really sure what it's about.

There's so many plot holes and annoyances here it almost seems like cheating to list them off, but I'm going to do some anyway. Why is headmaster recommending visitors try the chips, why have a dramatic K9 sacrifice only to resurrect him minutes later, why does the projector screen explode in the classroom, how has only one journalist spotted whats going on, why does a match-the-symbols puzzle game rewrite the kids brains (that's all it was, you could play a flash version of this on the bbc website), why does the whole school explode at the end - wish fulfilment for the episode writer maybe?

All that being said, I still enjoyed this episode for the cross-over of characters and the acting from everyone involved. At the end I am glad that SJ got to keep a K9 (of theseus), and in a way I am also glad that mickey finally joins them in a trio.

The bit about them not taking it seriously is a good point. The Doctor spotted pretty quickly that rose was acting oddly in the previous episode. Given how badly the landlord was trying to make it seem like something wasn't right, Doctor should have spotted it right away.

I agree about the "just let it be a werewolf". The bit at the close of the episode where they go on about werewolves, the way people react to the monster, it would have been perfectly fine to just let it be a werewolf.

This is one that I haven't rewatched in a long time. There's lots of good scottish actors in this one. The plot is good. It's not one of my go-to standout episodes, it's not the most exciting, but it holds up okay.

The fantasy story of werewolves is something I could easily see them having done in the recent series. Something that shines through in this episode is some of the DNA of doctor who as an educational vehicle. I didn't know about her survived Victoria's assassination attempts or that she had a disease. Some of the comments made me look up when wolves were last seen in britain - about 200 years before victoria. More than enough time for folk stories to evolve about them. We really need to reintroduce them back to our country, there's far too many deer. They mention a great comet, but I can't figure out which one it would have been in 1540.

I really like the way Queen Victoria is played here. It would have been easy to go full pomp for a story about royals but its very understated. Which plays well considering she is in mourning. But she is still willing to stand up to the Doctor's nonsense when he starts babbling. When she starts talking about tales from the beyond, it's nice to compare this to the Doctor who has also lost his species and is in mourning, who you have to imagine would also be desperate from some kind of message.

I was preparing myself for some ungodly CGI, but actually it's pretty good. The transformation is creepy, and the actual wolf design looks great, if a bit blurry. The split-screen screen with doctor and wolf listening through the doorway was really nice.

Character-wise it's nice to see Doctor catching himself being rude, and getting used to his new self. Rose is shown competent, taking charge, which is nice against all the women cowering at the beginning. The women eventually take on some strong action later in the episode. The running "not amused" bit is some nice levity, and continues the kind of humour that Rose had with 9, but it feels a bit more playful or flirty (?) to me when she does it with 10.

Plot annoyances:

• When in human form, the monster has the same desire as the assassins - go after the queen. When in wolf form, it can break out of the cage easily. Why is it even in the cage to begin with?
• How did the wolf get out of the mistletoe library doors that the doctor closed?
• The chase scenes went on possibly a little bit too long for my liking

Fun facts:

• On BBC iPlayer, the sub track for this episode has the continuity announcer's dialogue on-screen for a fraction of a second when the episode starts.
• Doctor makes a joke about "Balamory", a Scottish kids TV show which was cancelled just as Doctor Who was being revived. Doctor who is now effectively cancelled, but in this year "Balamory" was revived with new episodes.
• The bad wolf meme rears itself again.

I forgot these were happening again. Tennants first run is a pretty good one, though upon rewatching this episode isn't the best opener.

Thoughts for this episode:

• Within the episode plot, there's some good stuff here. Lots of opportunity for angry doctor. It's a good exploration of the ethics of the lab. It has to be vulnerable people who already have incurable diseases who help to test our new treatments. They're effectively slaves in the episode but in the real world can you truly consent if you're being offered something when you're in a vulnerable position? Much less when being taken advantage of by for profit pharma companies funding the studies. The whole ethics thing might have been more impactful if we had seen a progression from something obviously harmless like single-cell brains or cultured meats (that we actually have right now), stepping slowly up to full life forms, as then there's some ambiguity about where exactly you should draw the line.
• However, the actual logic of the entire hospital doesn't make much sense if you think about it for more than a few seconds. The disinfection scene is amusing but it makes no sense. The solution of mixing a literal solution of different medicines feels like it can't possibly work. Nor really did having lifts going to a basement people know nothing about - particularly a hospital that has hidden a whole load of secret stuff would surely have spotted it. And the footprint of the whole hidden lab seems bigger than the hospital itself.
• I am not a fan of the hospital set designs. The reception for the hospital looks like an airport check in desk. The wards don't look much like hospital wards either. The CGI in the ladder and lift shafts during the "zombie chase" has not aged well at all.
• I wonder if they knew what they were doing with Bo at this point in the storyline. The idea of a silent watcher following humanity is a nice contrast compared to the doctor's often quite obvious interventions. I don't think it really meshes with who Bo ultimately is revealed to be, though. The general effects and his (their?) design are nice. The melody and themes used with the Bo meeting is really nice.
• As most of you already commented, the rose mind swap bit is quite awkward to watch, doesn't really land for me. It's good the doctor immediately clocks something is wrong, though he probably should have acted sooner. The swap isn't much better in the doctor.
• The design and acting of the various cat nurses is really creepy and well done. Ditto the infectious pustules and scab effects, very offputting. The idea of a "petrification" disease is weird, but cool.
• The circular ending is a really nice way to round off the episode and humanise cassandra's character - time travel used well here.

Two stand out lines this episode: "You're talking out your arse" and "Who needs arms when you have claws"

Those other services are not great but they are at the very least not actively promoting AI-generated child abuse imagery. It's an incredibly low bar, but they do pass it.

For a long time after they removed the 5 star system, if you subscribed to a channel via RSS, it would show you the like/dislike data for videos as a 5 star rating. You can't see it easily any more but I suspect, due to tech debt, youtube's internals are still using the 5 star rating.

I really did not enjoy this one.

The "documentary" that ends up being made feels like the worst kind of propaganda that tries to feign a sense of "there's two sides to every argument", all while clearly pushing in favour of the agenda the documentary initially tried to critique anyway. It felt at moments like a military recruitment advertisement. I would not choose to watch such a documentary in real life, and watching it within a star trek episode just feels like I've wasted my time.

The writing makes use of the idea of military censorship and a film that jump cuts around to not so cleverly hide the fact that the writers are missing a plot. We are presented with a people in conflict, who abuse a creature to create a weapon. We have no other information about the conflict, beyond "there's mass casualties". No explanation of why starfleet is involved beyond "starfleet is here to help". No explanation why they chose to make that kind of weapon in particular. On the matter of the alien war we are left to fill the gaps ourselves entirely, and because our in-universe director is acting in the role of an unreliable narrator, we have no idea if any of what ended up in the film they ended up making can even be trusted. That FOIA disclaimer at the start could be just as real as those films that say "based on a true story" when they are anything but.

We did get some good character development, particularly with Ortegas finally being up front and open about what she's been through recently. But not really enough for it to feel like it matters. Ditto Uhura and Spock. Furthermore, despite self-harm and suicide being a central theme of the episode, other than an incredibly brief argument with the alien scientists about whether thier victim should be allowed to commit suicide, it's not really debated. The crew just accept that they need to do an assisted suicide, and that's that. Fair enough, if that's how human morals work centuries from now, but then it leads again to an episode without a useful plot. For contrast, multiple past star trek series have had their take on this topic and done a much better job.

After watching this I am left unsure what wider contribution this episode is meant to make to the series. For all the silliness of the comedy episodes, at least they were entertaining to watch and usually had at least one major plot development by the end. This one could have been cut from the season roster and nothing would have been lost.

Random assorted notes:

• The decoded alien vocalisations kind of sounded like whalesong to me. Perfect opportunity for some cetecean ops, right? nope.
• Beto is shown to be incredibly manipulative, especially with recording people who don't want to be recorded. Why on earth is he not in the brig?
• Many times in the episode the direction attempts to foreshadow someone dying. I thought for a moment the writers were going to be brave and kill off someone in the crew. Particularly when chapel and spock are stretchered in with uhura standing there in shock. Nope, it's the random alien of the week instead.
• The alien visuals, both the CG and prosthetics were very nice. I like the idea of a species that, like some animals on earth, begins life underwater and then metamorphoses into something that lives in a completely different environment out of water. That was possibly the only highlight of the episode for me.

Looking forward to the next one, it can't possibly be worse than this.

Jack is definitely much better in this episode. His banter is much less in your face, and having Mickey call him out on it is a nice bit of self referential humour.

I've never been to Cardiff. I looked up the filming location as it's one that seems to get reused a lot, it's called "Roald Dahl Plass", which incidentally is a great author to recognise, and as a filming location it is very striking.

I enjoyed this episode. Seeing a return of a villain that makes them better than they were originally is rare. The central theme of this episode is how to do right by people - whether that's treating your friends right or your enemies.

I am glad that Rose finally had to confront Mickey. It is hard to blame her for wanting a more exciting life, but just running off leaving her boyfriend in the lurch is terrible behaviour. But on this the Doctor (and Jack) haven't been great supports. At the very end, when Rose clearly needs to talk to someone, they both just completely ignore her. They are all getting along quite well at the start of the episode, so it is rather jarring to end like that.

Being forced to confront justice is a really interesting dilemma. It is pretty clear that Blon has not and will not change, and that she's manipulative, and a killer. But the raxacori..., the Rs, are not much better, engaging in public torture shows and collective punishment of whole family groups. Ultimately I feel like the resolution could have been better - the doctor and co doesn't end up having to make a choice as Blon and the Tardis make it for them. The idea seems to be that by reverting to an egg and growing up in a happier family, Blon will live a better life... but If you've had your whole life reversed and live a different one, I'm not sure that's all that much better than a slightly expedited death penalty.

Annette Badland does some really good performance here, especially in the restaurant. Which is nice because it offsets the somewhat Scooby-Doo-esque "And I would have gotten away for it if it weren't for you pesky kids" at the start and the gloating double cross at the end. I did like that they managed to direct it such that the slightly dead-eyed slitheen costume actually show some sad emotion.

Other notes:

• The doctor is wearing a blinking bike rear light for a headlamp, did they run out of props?
• The jokes about Margaret as Mayor feel like they could have come out of a Thick of it or yes minister episode. I wonder if there was any inspiration there.
• The punchline of jack's story is "I knew we should have turned left" - I wonder what RTD was thinking there
• I know this is set in the early 2000s but even then there was no way that a politician running for mayor would get a whole 6 months without a single press photo
• "A skip on the isle of dogs" - this is a suburb of east london, apparently, nothing to do with the excellent Wes Anderson film set in a scrapheap which came much later
• I liked the music in this one, especially the way it was used in the Bad Wolf joke, but there were some points in this episode where I could barely hear the dialogue because of the music and sfx
• That's the same restaurant as ep 1, and I'm fairly sure they reused some of the downing street set.
• The "next time" trailer really doesn't leave anything to the imagination

I enjoyed this one, though I feel it could have been better. The metaphor in the title and used in the episode is a perfect one for the situation.

I was convinced up until the reveal that the "alien" was a sort of scavenging species 0 of the Borg, with the robotic look and the ability to adapt to phaser fire. I'm not sure how I feel about the writers going in a different direction. It fits with the theme OK, but the ending scene where they're all reminiscing about this forgotten crew of humans past didn't go down well for me. It's a generational ship, none of the original "good guys" were still on it, and it is very tempting to do the maths that for the 7000 on that ship, many thousands more have probably died and would die on the planets they've killed.

The ultimate lesson, of needing to have empathy even for your enemies is a very important one. Seeing how that is used to help Kirk grow is nice, and from what I remember, it is something he embodies quite a lot in his captaining. However, I am very confused why everyone is so bothered by the fact that they were humans. Surely they didn't need to be humans for this lesson to be learnt. They're all part of a federation of different species, and Kirk's captain literally is not a human.

The phone setup is a hilarious, and really clever solution to a problem, but plot-wise it fails to achieve anything because when the Enterprise crew actually need to use the phones, the alien ship and the comms jamming has already been disabled. But they use the phones anyway. I question whether a closed airlock decompressing would have quite enough inertia to balance out a chemical thruster, and if it was, why did they need the chemical thrusters at all in the first place. I felt like what was going on on the Enterprise was much less interesting than what we saw in the Farragut. I wonder how the episode might have turned out if it was shot entirely from the Farragut's perspective, with no hints of what happened on the enterprise.

Random other thoughts:

• Getting to see more of Scotty is really nice, especially his acerbic dialogue.
• Doctor M'benga, head medical officer, warzone survivor, having little screentime other than running phone cables and joysticks around is funny.
• Ortegas getting a light scolding for being a wee bit suicidal is all we got for her ongoing sub-plot.
• La'an has shown a previous liking for Kirk, but we didn't really have a chance to explore what her new thing with Spock means for that.
• I hope the transporter buffer wasn't affected by all this now that it's holding a literal horror from beyond in it

My thinking was he was almost dead. What's a kid's last words going to be if he's almost dead? "I want my mummy". If that was the last thing coursing through his neurons, the nanogenes would pick that up and might think it "normal".