Oh hell yes for Louise Fletcher…!

It’s jarring if you only know him for his cool-headed leader or mentor roles like Picard or professor Xavier… He really lets rip as this extremist POS.

Ha, sometimes even the production crew suffer from the Mandela effect 😆

I honestly don’t recall. You’d think that sort of thing would be etched onto your memory 😬

It would be easy to just gesture vaguely at all of Sir Patrick Stewart’s career. But your question was about better performances than in Trek, and I actually think he did an excellent Picard during the original TNG run. Not quite a hot take, I know.

However, for a double off-Trek billing, I suggest Green room (2015) where he plays against Anton Yelchin among others. It’s a pretty taut little thriller about a punk band on the road that realise to their horror that their gig for the night is at a neonazi club out in the sticks. It goes downhill from there.

And Re-animator, and Castle freak. He has a very good track record in a certain subset of horror movies!

Ooh, I forgot the Arthur Dent mention! And that reminds me why the Sycorax ship feels so uncanny: it “hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t”. 🙂

I did watch this over the weekend, and it’s a banger of a start for David Tennant. Even if he spends a great deal of the special asleep.

First thing I noticed doesn’t have any bearing on the episode: producer Phil Collinson is credited as “Phil Collision”, which I guess is his rave DJ alter ego. This was the '00s, after all.

We see the debut of two tropes that will recur through RTD christmas specials: a murderous Santa band, and Slade’s “Merry Xmas everybody”. One is a cool idea that only happened once more, in “The runaway bride”, and the other is a terrible novelty song that might’ve been put to rest after one outing. Ugh, Slade.

The Sycorax are quite terrifying, they feel more at home in a Conan setting than Doctor Who, with their skull helmets, “blood magic” and swords, and that janky looking ship that has the air of an ancient desert stronghold. And if that wasn’t enough to sell the episode, having a third of Earth’s population sleepwalk onto the nearest roof or precipice is a haunting image.

Jackie’s neighbour Jason is Paul Anderson from Peaky blinders, BTW. A rare occasion of “where did I see that Who actor before?” where the answer isn’t Game of thrones.

For the first half of the special, I’m really on board with the Doctor-less narrative. Jackie, Mickey and Rose work so well together, trying to survive christmas like any family. And Harriet Jones is set up as a capable leader with a human side — we know what they say about “too good to be true”, but I actually rooted for Harriet all the way up to her call with Torchwood.

I think this must be the first mention of Torchwood? So what are Harriet and the general referring to, about the institute having lost a third of its staff? Maybe it’s just the third that’s on the roof at the moment.

Rose and the Doctor, though… It’s hard to revisit this episode, knowing what lies ahead. Not because I nurse some parasocial romance for their arc, quite the contrary. I find the while thing pompous and tedious at the same time, and even more so with every return of Billie Piper to the show.

There is a better, hypothetical version of the show, where the Doctor (and really RTD) just let go of Rose after “Doomsday”. No dimension-hopping, gun-toting return in season four, only maybe the 50th anniversary bit as the Moment (although that really only makes sense if they’d landed Eccleston instead of Hurt), but definitely no dumb, faux-regeneration cliffhanger after Gatwa’s exit.

But it all starts here. “ENOUGH WITH THE F—KING FLIRTING,” I shouted at the screen on this rewatch. “The christmas invasion” does set the template for the rest of the Tennant run. Good to terrific stories, with an insistently humdrum romantic subplot.

It most certainly is/isn’t (but also a celery).

You never know, there could be a celery stick in that tube he’s cradling.

Noughties, not naughty 😂

Generally speaking, I have never been completely wowed by GM’s slightly kookier Alan Moore rehashes. Oh really, Grant, you’re a magician too now? 🙄 For anybody prone to really long reads, I recommend El Sandifer’s Last war in Albion for a deep, critical view on the two’s decades long “magic war”.

And while I never take things back, I do change my mind depending on time of day and/or median wind temperature. So there’s that.

That whole tying up of loose threads sounds dreary. Enough with the Tennant/Piper nostalgia already. Morrison is quite right that all of that is best left for quick quippy commentary while the show just gets on with the next iteration.

I also agree with their point that a full reboot would be throwing 60 years of lore out with the bathwater. What makes Doctor Who special is exactly all that baggage, littered across the universe and in the quantum backrooms of the TARDIS.

I don’t think the show needs another past-their-prime, self absorbed showrunner, though. People who recommend Grant Morrison for the position, or J Michael Straczynski for that matter, need to get their heads out of their noughties comic books.

Oh, they should know better by now. It’s like the Scottish Play curse. They discussed a crossover back when the Doctor Who revival first aired, and Star Trek Enterprise got cancelled.

This time crossover talks put both shows on indefinite hiatus. You don’t ever cross the streams, people. It’s just too much space-time continuity to bring together in one event.

“Let’s assimilate some Ferengi ourselves instead”

It helps in telling me it’s not the default behaviour I’m seeing, so thanks for that 🙂

“I said, ‘Well, you can cut that in half with no problem at all.’”

Next meeting, the engineering team showed up with 200 half tampons.

Sure. I’ll probably skip rewatching a good bunch of episodes, just because I’ve seen them so often. A bit of '00s TV grade CGI fatigue does set in. But a weekly discussion of 20 years old episodes, absolutely 🙂

Well, they’re public funded to a large degree. I don’t have any real insight into UK public service media and how the BBC ended up here, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this has to do with general public spending cuts to fund tax reductions 🤷

Not mine either, but I share your concerns. Doctor Who is clearly only a minor part of all this, in light of thousands of jobs on the line not even a significant part. Given the subject of this community, however… wanna bet this is going to affect the show’s future? 😣

I see you get your opinions prepackaged from YouTube. That’s an easy, instant block for me.