AudienceofOne

Speechless Frankly, I can only assume that it was nostalgia and good will towards the community that motivated Gillian Anderson to do this season at all. The show's treatment of her character is offensive and dressing her up as a strong, powerful woman only makes the whole thing worse.

I just don't... even... I don't... what... don't... can't... I could not agree more. If we do get another season, I will not be here. I mean it's taken me like a year to watch these 10.

He did and Two is the Doctor she most reminds me of. He made mistakes, he had a lot of companions, and he tended to think of them as family rather than friends. It may sound contradictory when what I most like about this season is Chip bringing Doctor Who back to its roots, but this bumbling incompetence seems jarring to me sometimes. And part of that is because she's a woman. If you'd only watched New Who you might find it problematic that the only female Doctor is the least competent.

I agree with this and it's why I've enjoyed this season a lot LOT more than most of Moffatt's run. The Doctor was originally an unassuming scientist and it makes me feel Chib understands the character way more than Moffatt did. My main issue with this episode - and the reason I rather pithily labelled it 'terrible' - was that the Doctor was essentially useless. I'm all for giving up the self-aggrandising bloviating nonsense Moffatt gave his Doctors - President of Earth, the Universe's Biggest Badass, Intergalactic Stud (god can that be retconned out, that was horrible) - but at least have the Doctor be the driving agent in her own story. Instead of this being about how terrifying the Daleks are, it instead became about how useless the Doctor is. And then she nearly killed Ryan's Dad on top of it. The whole episode was her declaring she'd found a solution to something and then f'ing it up. Ryan saving his father with the Power of Love was the eye-rolling cherry on the top.

That was terrible.

Maybe Oliver and Felicity faked their deaths and are currently sipping Mai Tai's while taking down tin pot dictators on a tropical island somewhere. They couldn't contact William because of [insert reason that involves protecting him] but left breadcrumbs so he'd know they're safe and happy and loved him.

I was a bit chastened by the Mod warning and so didn't bring this up but it annoyed me no end across all three parts. Not only does everyone rag on Oliver but they constantly compare Barry/Iris to Oliver/Felicity with Barry/Iris being the superior relationship too.

Cool. Sometimes people spray things out of planes. That does not a chemtrail conspiracy make. Especially since nobody can decide WTF these "chemtrails" are supposedly doing - other than both causing AND fighting global warming. Also, I might strangle somebody if I have to look at one more crazed timeline from a person tweeting endless photos of evil clouds. Enough, already. This is as bad as the vaccine nonsense - although at least a belief in chemtrails doesn't kill your children like antivax does.

This comment pretty well makes up almost entirely for this shitty Dark-Mirror-wannabe episode. God that would have worked so much better. I spent the whole episode going "are we supposed to think they live separately"?

Hey, let's make an episode decrying mob rules and witch hunts where witches literally exist. Because that doesn't undercut your point at all. No siree. But thanks for the lecture about how mob rule and witch hunts are bad. But not. On account of there being real witches. Meh. The whole thing was not only derivative - it was derivative of itself. It was a mashup of two or three earlier episodes with a bit of Channel Zero thrown in.

Hey, did you know that Oliver has darkness in him? Apparently, Oliver has darkness in him. Also, this episode of Supergirl - a show defined by the fact that Kara is a capable superhero who doesn't need Superman to save her - was about how Kara needed Superman to save her. Awesome, guys. SUPER!awesome. Also, do you think the writers actually poured through 100 years of mythology just to find the dumbest thing ever included in a superman story? Slow the Earth's rotation? Really? That was stupid the first time.

What a mess Honestly, I could parse out exactly what I hated but it'd take too long. I'll settle for "using crossover as excuse for bad backdoor pilot" and leave it at that.

What show was this supposed to be again? These writers really hate Oliver though, right? The switch to Smallville was definitely the best part of this. But let's consider that for a moment - a parody of a long-dead and frankly sub-par superhero show was the best part of this episode. Let's ponder that.

The line that really annoyed me was "Since when are you so concerned with security?" And I'm like "since always"???? Did I miss something? Who do you think she is? What is happening? I think I've decided it's not sexism at all (although the show's sexism bulges out in odd moments). It's the same crappy writing that had Oliver repainted as a cold-blooded assassin in the earlier season when he clearly wasn't.

It's amazing how much better an episode of Arrow is with the Arrow in it. Having said that, I find this whole 'Felicity gone dark' thing weirdly offensive and sexist in a way I almost can't enunciate. Why are the women in this show constantly held to a higher standard of behaviour than the men?

Even through the worst of Moffatt (and it was truly the WORST) I didn't give up the show because I knew that in a few years it would change. That's the show's biggest draw. It's eminently flexible. I'm enjoying this season far more than any other season since Moffatt's first. All the others have been dumpster fires IMHO, it's just the size of the fire that changed.

This is either the strength of this episode or its biggest flaw. It was an entirely metaphorical discussion of grief. So some people will see that and find it profound. Others will look at what's written on the page and go, "What???!" Erik was suffering from depression after the death of his wife and so retreated into a fantasy world in his bedroom. Terrified something would happen to his daughter, he had imprisoned her in the mountains with a fear of monsters (the outside world) that didn't exist. The Doctor and the gang had to take a journey through the dark tunnel of his grief - one that mirrored their own after the death of Grace - and help remind him that he had a daughter that needed him. Only then could he take the journey back out from the darkness and into the real world.... ..................... ...Don't ask me about the frog...

I think it could have been if they'd been given two episodes to really flesh out the themes. The blind girl trapped in the house, the absent father, the journey through the Norwegian underworld to an after life that resembles heaven (but is not), and the grief of having to leave behind those that you love in the journey through life. All of these things - especially around the darkness of Hanne's life, the darkness of the tunnel between worlds, the death of her mother and the crazy protectiveness of her father - were dealt with in glimpses on a drive-by. Basically, this was like the Twitter version of the story. Oh and there was a frog...

Yeah me too. I was kind of onboard until the Conscious Universe thing. It sounded a bit too much like religious dogma masquerading as science to me. Although I did like the way the Doctor delivered the lines about "making a new friend and having to say goodbye". It was just the perfect combination of statement and endless sadness.

Wow, you mean Moffatt repeatedly broke established world building mythology for his own plot purposes? Stunned.

So... So...

But this episode was DUMB. So dumb. Everything was dumb. I can't get past it.

I just think it's human nature to project your anger onto someone who is visible and able to be yelled at. That's why people blame migrants for their unemployment rather than the economic conditions created by a million decisions over the last 25 years. If you lost your job because it got moved to the Phillipines, why attack a Syrian refugee in your local street? Because they're there. As you said, it's not like Dom chose to be there. This was a spiral of decisions that, on a short-term basis, started when Darlene seduced her for her access pass. Yes there are other people are who are more deserving of that hatred but it makes complete sense that our brain is not working at 100% capacity after having a man chopped up with an axe in front of you while being told to imagine he's your 4-year-old nephew. But then I've noticed people are very hard on Dom generally. It doesn't take an economics degrees to work this out. But then Elliot, Angela and Darlene have suffered somewhat from Smartest Person in the Room Disease. They think grand gestures can fix systems. And they haven't worked out that it is always ordinary people who get screwed.

I'm not going to embarrass myself by commenting on a plot that's far above my pay grade, other than to say this is shaping up to be another fantastic season. What I will say is that it's a) refreshing to not just have a lesbian character but one that feels real and b) to have a sex scene that also felt real but also not exploitative. For once I felt genuine chemistry and not that I was watching the juvenile porn fantasies of a bunch of 14 year old boys.

This episode had such a beautiful surreal feel to it that was nonetheless so sparse and precise in its imagery. it was just beautiful. While I usually hate religious metaphors, this was probably the best Jesus walks in the desert and meets himself episodes I've ever seen. I too think most of it didn't happen at all. He met the families but then everything with the boy was simply him coming to terms with himself. The movie theatre was such a dense barrage of symbolism - time travel, wanting to change the world, reconciling with your past self, nostalgia and revisiting the scene of the "crime" - him taking his father's jacket. I particularly liked the contrast of Back to the Future with the Martian. One is about somebody who fucked everything up, the other is about somebody who built something from almost-nothing. And Elliot wanted to dive into the nostalgia of his biggest failures while the child-like part of him wanting him to fight back and rebuild. And then adding in the War of the Worlds, where humans prevailed - not through conflict or violence - through simple resilience. The aliens defeated themselves, we just had to stay alive long enough of it to happen. In fact, this was such an extraordinary episode I feel like watching it again. PS - Time travel is impossible at least based on what we know about physics currently. So while it's not out of the realms of possibility that we could be talking about parallel universes, I strongly believe that time travel remains a red herring. This episode just re-enforced that.