AudienceofOne

I'm just ready for everyone to be back together. That's it, that all I got.

It's a hard habit to break. Once you start doing it, it's not easy to stop. And I imagine there's a part of her that's scared of getting that emotionally dependent on someone again.

I personally think Cyn is the absolute worst of the bunch and was glad his "It really hurt that I had to repeatedly stab you in the back" schtick didn't result in some kind of nonsense redemption but instead got him dead. I actually liked this episode in multiple ways, not the least of which because I think that Filip and Naomi are now working together and that whole sequence at the end was planned. It made no sense for Filip to suddenly demand a command, he only did it because his father would knock him back (also I suspect because he wanted to see for himself that his father really was the narcissistic his mother told him he was). This whole scheme to send the ship to destroy the Roci is a plan that Naomi and Filip have cooked up. Also, to detour off the Ship of Shits, I don't believe the Zmeya would blow itself up if it still had the protomolecule, it's definitely been offloaded. I understand that all our cast had to try to Go Home Again or have Conversations With Dead People or something but I want everyone back together now, thanks. Well, except for Alex. He can die horribly.

Well he saved her for one thing, brought her to the ship. Clearly had some romantic notion she'd join them. So it's not entirely sudden. He's a typical petulant teen with Mummy issues when he's not being a typical petulant teen with Daddy issues. But it was Cyn (sorry I don't remember his name) standing up to his father that gave him the shock to the system he needed. Remember that Naomi said to him that his father "wouldn't die for you but would ask you to die for him" and then when Marcos asked him to throw his mother out an airlock, someone finally brought attention to the fact that his father could have done it himself but was trying to get him to do it as a power play. All of that combined with seeing a respected Belter woman being friends with his mother and talking about her saving everyone's lives has shifted his perspective enough that he's willing to talk to her. I still think he's an annoying little idiot and a murdering POS but it worked for me.

That episode was amazing btw. AHAMAAAZZING.

I don't think he cares tbh. These kind of people just want to prove they're better and/or smarter than others. They never believe the cause they're supposedly fighting for. They're just manipulators and con artists who want to win. Whether the Belt rallies behind him or not is only relevant in whether they can do him personal harm. Which they probably can't. He did this entirely for the moment at the end of the episode where he can portray himself as the saviour of his people. He could not give a shit about what happens afterwards. And his son's an idiot.

I loved this episode, although I didn't have any more philosophical epiphanies from it. But I also hate how each of these episodes seem to merge effortlessly into each other and once again I'm regretting diving into the season now rather than waiting and binging. When I found out about this delightful news, I thought "well, at least he's not a romantic lead so I guess I can put up with him being a pilot or having Bobbie slapping him over a head for a season". And then they literally put him into this plotline where some poor woman had to kiss the bastard. So, yeah, it was a struggle. I don't hate Naomi and I don't hate this plotline thematically but in execution I'm also a little annoyed at her lack of planning. Although - to her, she's still a Belter going into Belter territory and I guess she thought she would still be seen as one of them. And I agree with everyone else who said she had to at least try. Parent/children yes but, also, I feel like there's a strong theme of people trying to go back to the past because things are changing so radically around them. Everyone's trying to regain something they've lost out of a sense of nostalgia or a sense of instability. It kind of reminds me of Blank in Grosse Point Blank trying to go home to his reunion to find himself again. And if you remember the tagline of that movie was basically, "You can never go home again".

Gosh I loved this episode so much. I almost don't know where to start on everything that was packed into it. I feel like it needs an essay to tease out everything. So I'll stick only to my main takeaway and that is Amos' character who is so nuanced and so complex and so beautifully fleshed out over five seasons so that he's grown as a person but still makes sense as a person. It's kind of like - there are two kinds of monsters in the world. Those that think that because they're monsters everyone else is and so every monstrous thing they do is justified. And those that know that there are others who aren't monsters and when they encounter them they want desperately to protect them so they can stay in the world being not-monsters. And Amos is the latter and I love that about him. He's a monster who almost aggressively respects those who have the ability to not be monsters and we get a backstory that sums that up in such little screen time. It's perfect. Honestly the writing in this episode was magnificent and reminds me why I love this show so much and why I wait all year for it to finally be released.

So the theme of this season is wanting to go home but being too late? Of trying to recapture the past and it always being forever out of reach? That's a sad theme but if there's any show I trust to do it justice, it's this one. Oh God I've missed this... what is it?

That was how I read the text myself so I'm glad someone else did too. I saw this as about her seeing the possibility of a new kind of life, one that suits her better than anything available on Earth and it suddenly being sharply taken away from her just as she was starting to embrace it. It's possible people are just slightly traumatised from the way in which the last show runner treated female characters and are reflexively drawing on that experience to read this text. I hope so because that's the sort of nonsense Moffat would pull and, as I said, I expect much better from the Chib.

This. I hated this so much. This was not who Sarah Jane was and it speaks to the misogynism that creeped into NuWho due to Moffat. I personally didn't read the text in the same way as others in regards to Yaz, however I can see the possibility of this plotline now that people have pointed it out. I don't want it in any way, shape or form. While I have issues with Chib's middle-of-the-road calmer Who, his gender issues are far less problematic than Moffatt's and frankly I was expecting better than this. And a crazed obsessed lesbian plotline is the last thing we need. I wish male writers would stop sometimes and just think things through.

I really enjoyed this episode; it was a perfect rollicking New Year's special. I'm still not thrilled with Chib's Doctor retcon but thankfully it only got mentioned tangentially and so I can pretend it never happened for a while. RTD remains the very very best at characterisation and you can tell when one of his characters is on screen. Jack Harkness is amazing and I would love to have him back full time. He just has so much energy and heart. This is possibly all true but her character is the one that is still on an arc they can explore. Graham and Ryan don't really have a narrative arc other than coming together as a family and having fun with the Doctor and as a consequence that arc is long done. Yaz's screen presence may be a little too low key and her character a bit too pleasant for an apparently gung ho cop but there is at least aspects of her character they can still explore. I know people like Graham but if they spend less time on his folksy meanderings through the universe we may get some better development of other characters. And I still think he was only there so the viewers who can't cope with the Doctor being a woman can still have an old white man to watch. Yaz may not interest me that much as a person but I think this was quite a good change.

Cameron looks so much like Isobel that in the first season I regularly got confused as to which was which. I just thought it was typical casting director predilection for tall blondes but maybe it's deliberate. Yip I mean, this segues into my main criticism of the show overall. ALL the relationships feel shallow. Every single one of them. And part of the reason is this They jump into a scene for people to deliver pertinent angsty dialogue and then bounce right out again. It's shallow. But it also results in me never knowing who knows what or who has told who what. We just have to assume that now Maria knows everything. But does she? What specifically was she told? And how? We have no idea. This is a far nicer way to put it than I would have, which is keep your superstitious nonsense off my science fiction show. I mean, it may be a ridiculous science fiction show with bad science. But at least it's still science. Speaking of crappy science - does the Serum of Alien Death and the Serum of Alien Life need to be ingested, injected into the veins, or pumped straight into the heart. Because they keep doing all of those things and it's annoying me far more than I should.

Show started off with a hot af Lone Cowboy allusion and that distracted me for a good half an hour, which means it took me that long to realise this show isn't about anything. Yeah, I have this issue too. It seems like the airforce cut loose their alien investigation years ago - probably because they had a bunch of aliens in prison and no evidence of any further alien threat - and Jessie Manes has been running an illegal offbook operation. This means that now that Noah has been revealed and eliminated, Jessie Manes is the sole point of threat and he's no threat at all really. If they're not worried about exposure, imprisonment and experimentation then where is the point of conflict? It just becomes about who is speaking to who right now and whether so and so will end up together or not. Basically it becomes a soap opera. The show has actually done a really good job with Rosa. In the season 1 flashbacks, they portrayed her as this cool offbeat older sister. Now that she's back it's clear that she's just a lost and messed up teenager with poor coping skills. I have to give kudos to the actor, they've done a great job on showing the Rosa that Liz saw as a 17 year old and the real Rosa that Liz now sees with adult eyes. In fact I think the show is doing characterisation better on a number of fronts this season judging from these two episodes. Yeah, Michael always blames Alex for leaving but he's also tried to put Alex in a 'just sex' box several times. Alex clearly needs more from Michael than Michael is willing to give right now. Hence Alex's several attempts to talk or be friends while Michael has only just gotten around to admitting to his friends that he and Alex were even a thing. One thing I liked about this episode surprisingly were the Michael/Liz moments in the holding cell.

Well, here we are! Season 2. Pours wine. Pours more wine. Boy, show isn't less angsty and overwrought this season is it? The alien organs are made of organic technology! While the pedant in me took issue with this revelation (our organs are organic technology too, you know. Our body engineers them out of stem cells so they're fit for purpose), I kind of got what they meant. At some point the aliens must have used their organic technology to replace the organs. It doesn't make them more or less able to 'fixed' though. I really like this explainer of Michael's behaviour, I just wish they'd had anything in the text to indicate it. He seemed to be just Michael level of self-destructive. But I am glad the writer took some time out to explain why he spent the whole of the last episode realising how much he loved Alex only to hook up with Maria. But losing one of the few family members he has would no doubt put him into a spiral about how everyone leaves. I think his character might be the only one that makes sense. Other thoughts: Nathan Dean's acting has not improved over the break. After Liz's "Old white men keep stopping me from doing unethical research on humans" speech, I see she hasn't improved as a scientist either.