#is weaponized homophobia okay if it's to steal from the well-off to feed orphan children?

[kayzero]

My Favorite Episode of Doctor Who

tonight i wanted to rant about my FAVORITE Nine episode:

"The Doctor Dances"

Firstly, “Are you my mummy?” rewired my fucking brain, I had that echolalia going for months after the first time i watched it

secondly. it’s So Fucking Smart.

Jack Harkness, don’t much like him to be fair, he’s too flirty, but i suppose i might’ve gotten The Curse of Immortality from him subconsciously. but you could get the twist of the episode with all the clues from the previous episode

same as the Doctor did

here are the facts of the episode:

German Air Raids have poor children scrambling about stealing food—woulda died anyway if a bomb were to hit, yeah? might as well get something out of this horrible situation.

A Child Died during an air raid, Nancy’s brother, to be precise

The Bomb That Wasn’t A Bomb was actually an alien ambulance, and finally,

Something Is Going Around looking for its Mummy, changing anyone it touches or that touches it into a perfect copy

The second that the word ambulance came out of Jack’s mouth, the first time I watched it, I said to my girlfriend at the time (first girlfriend, high school senior while she was a freshman, she actually introduced me to Doctor Who), “How do you think an alien ambulance goes around healing its patience?” And you know what she did? She just smiled and said that she had already seen the episode, so she already knew the answer.

But like.

Actually, the perfect comparison comes to mind—Penny Snapcube banned the smile emoji from her chat halfway through her playthrough of Tears of the Kingdom. It’s a subset of Twitch culture, popularized in Pointcrow’s stream, I could believe.

His exact quote was, “Do not say things like ‘oh I can’t wait for him to X’, or ‘chat, what was his reaction to Y?’ That’s a spoiler too. I now know those things are coming. Just smile instead.”

So now, instead of incidentally spoiling a twist or a secret in a game that a streamer is playing, or when the streamer shows any amount of foresight and like, correctly guesses near a plot point, chat will spam the smile emoji.

But Penny got pissed by her chat doing that Every Time she would say or do anything related to the game, because, in her words, “You responding like that tells me that there’s something involving what I just said coming up in the game.”

so my gf saying “I’ve already seen this episode” not when I asked about the air raids and not when I wondered about the Time Agents and not when I said something about this being Doctor Who’s take on a zombie invasion, never any of those times, but specifically when I mentioned the ambulance?

You know how Netflix does that “hey are you still watching” prompt shit, where the only time you wouldn’t be annoyed is if you fell asleep or started making out with someone? The prompt popped up in between The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances and I clicked off the iPad, stood up, started pacing, and going like

“What’s the easiest way for an alien miracle machine healthcare system to function?”

And eventually I opened Netflix back up and turned The Empty Child back on and skipped ahead to when the doctor (not the Doctor) got a gas mask. At this point my girlfriend clearly gave up and knew I would get it eventually and wanted to go back to cuddling so she skipped back a bit to where the doctor was talking about the sick kid being brought into the hospital.

I think I said something to the effect of “It probably transforms you into a healthy specimen. But how would they know what a healthy human looks like?” And my girlfriend skipped ahead to when the Doctor was saying that something was stupid.

“Oh,” I realized. “They don’t.”

so the machine scans a specimen, heals it up to full, catalogs it as a healthy member of its race, and then shoves it full of nanobots and makes it heal every other member of its race it comes into contact with by transforming it into what it believes is a healthy specimen.

so the machine scans a specimen, heals it up to full, catalogs it as a healthy member of its race, and then shoves it full of nanobots and makes it heal every other member of its race it comes into contact with by transforming it into what it believes is a healthy specimen. except it’s stupid. it thinks a distressed child wearing a gas mask is a perfect human. don’t explain the psychic connection, neither. how come they all surged forward when Jamie found Nancy that first time? how come Jamie went back to his room when the Doctor told those sickbed patients to go to their room? eh. who knows. anyway, i felt like a proper genius when the next episode came on and the Doctor said word for word what i said

(those two skips from the gf probably helped more than a little, but i paid her in cuddles, she received her due recompense, if not the credit at the time)

oh right, the mystery of the mother didn’t get this one the first go round but i think i’d get it today. back then i didn’t know The Mystery Novel Rules—All relevant characters must be introduced in the first act. Or in this case, the first fifteen minutes of the previous episode. So now I would realize that they wouldn’t introduce a new character to serve as the mother, so the Older Sister must actually be a SA Victim and a teenaged mother to her ‘younger brother’.