Doctor Who (Spoiler/Episode discussion)

I agree, the ending didn't quite naturally flow from the beginning, we had 40 minutes of coherent story (e.g. acts 1 and 2) followed by 7-8 tacked on at the end where they all picked up a torch and went off to re-imprison the baddies. It didn't feel at any point like they weren't going to win, and the creatures' decision not to immediately consume King James (or indeed the Doctor / the companions) seemed like an unnecessary way of delaying until they could all toddle along to save him.

That is an interesting point. For one thing, it's partly the result of not having what had been the obligatory story arc, which as I've mentioned before is a good thing. But I hadn't thought about it in the way you said - the ability to mix the episodes up also reveals the lack of companions' development.

Re the various mentions of accents, in regard to anything to do with how alien and historical characters speak in this show I always assume we're hearing what the characters hear thanks to the Tardis translation thingy, in this case it means they (and therefore we) hear the King speaking modern English in that kind of posh Morningside voice.

I think to us his accent would sound rural. The RP is quite a modern development. Not Scottish like David Tennant ( be still my beating heart ) but with a country/ northish twang. But hey, what do I know? Let's have what we got which does I think reflect his pomposity and his ridiculous belief in witches. 

Ha ha ha ha! I suppose so. It seems such a universally liked activity, it never occurred to me that while everyone else is grinning away and popping to their hearts' content, there's a lone person on the margins grimacing and muttering "why I oughta...."

In fact, how much bolder if it turned out that the villain carried out their deadly plan for the sole reason he could no longer stand bubble-wrap being popped.

I thought this week's show was good, albeit starting a bit slowly.

I gave a little cheer when the Doctor was being challenged on everything and she announced how if she were still a man she wouldn't have to waste all this time justifying herself and could just get on with things! So far there hasn't been much gender politics at play, and I don't want to go that way myself, but there is plenty of evidence that very often, people with male names on email find it easier to get things done than those with female names.

Then I went online and realised that many were interpreting this as a dig at the man-boys who were complaining about having a woman Doctor before they'd seen anything she'd done. Which of course they were deeply offended by and that's it, they definitely won't be watching any more if their legitimate concerns aren't going to be treated with respect. So that's another bonus.

I'm a little bit torn over this series so far to be honest. By Series 10 I was really sick of Moffat not killing anyone and having half the episodes take place in an unnecessarily convoluted timeline but Chibnall seems to have gone the other way entirely and it all feels very... vanilla.

We don't know any more about Ryan or Graham than we did at the end of episode 1 and after the big "risk" of casting a female doctor (which has paid off) he's not taken any more risks at all with his storytelling. Rosa and Demons of the Punjab would have been fantastic "pure historicals" where there is no alien threat at all but both had a two dimensional unnecessary villain shoehorned in - Krasko the time travelling racist in Rosa and the Thijarian death observers in DotP. I didn't mind Donald Trump mark 2 being the villain in Arachnids but they forgot to do any satire with it, instead they pointed and went "hey look, Donald Trump!" then moved on to not arresting him for waving a gun in a police officer's face and only bothering to round up half the spiders. Tsuranga was the real weak point though, there's only so much of wandering around the same 3 rooms while the Doctor makes groaning noises that even I can take.

To give the series its due, the first two episodes and Kerblam and Witchfinders were both very enjoyable, but I just feel Chibnall is so worried about alienating viewers that he's refusing to do anything at all with the series. Ten weeks of characters who don't develop at all standing around delivering exposition at each other gets tiresome very quickly. I'm not bothered there's no arc this year, but there needs to be SOMETHING linking the episodes together, at the very least the characters should in some way progress. Ryan and Graham from episode 2 are no different from in episode 8, and although Yaz got brief moments in episodes 4 and 6, she's only had a third of a series of character development. Something needs to happen. I'm not bothered what, just something.

It’s what the whingers were asking for, I like story arcs but there was a lot of moaning about them. Having more standalones does hinder development but they are getting the strongest audience figures since 2012. A lot of the ITC shows in the sixties were even less connected, watching something like The Avengers now is quite an alien experience (no pun intended). 

I think the problem with story arcs was that Moffat's were a bit too convoluted. You can see it quite clearly in Sherlock, where it works well because its supposed to be clever and make Sherlock look like a flawed genius. But it doesn't work as well to that extent in DW.

To be fair, nobody writes a story arc like RTD.

Haven't watched last week's episode yet but when I heard Alan Cumming was in it, I hoped that he would be the Witchfinder General as that would have seemed an ideal scary,creepy role which he could have had a lot of fun with.

I felt the same about this one. First off, I know I'm not the target demographic and kids are used to being barraged with constant activity on screen, but I was hoping for a proper folk horror here, slowly building menace and mystery, and instead we got the usual breathless rushing about. Alan Cumming was clearly enjoying himself but it felt really inappropriate in a story about what was in effect a holocaust mainly against women (see Norman Cohn's books for the Europewide scale of the slaughter). And then the aliens - it didn't need them. Human behaviour is horrific enough.

Just caught up with last nights episode. There are 2 things I have learned from the episode -

1. Sheep are planning a world revolution (they always look so placid when you see them in a field. Who knew they are actually planning world domination?)

2. There are such things as talking frogs (We didn’t get this during the RTD era. Though more importantly what was the writer of this weeks episode on to come up with such an idea? Why not have a form that would have some real emotional impact like a person who the Dr had lost?)

Crazy talking frog aside, I didn’t mind this weeks episode. The one thing it did do was actually create that real danger element for the TARDIS team that seems to have been missing. I thought the more emotional ending at the end was well written and handled, particularly with Bradley Walsh and Sharon D Clarke was heart breaking and his conversation with Ryan was a nicely understated scene.

Overall, lots of nice ideas about loss and letting go of people, but that talking frog at the end really was a stupid idea and spoilt what was upto that point quite emotionally charged writing.