#love the sontarans in flux tho

[rosewaterconley]

the thing I can't stand in modern dr who is how resistant it can be to change. not even talking about how flux of all things is somehow the most radical experiment in format we've seen since 2005 or the fucking embarrassing midlife crisis the series is going through now, just bringing everyone back who was on when the show peaked in high school and expecting it to be as good as last time. nah what I mostly mean is monster design. how the hell have Daleks and Sontarans looked the same for almost 20 years? I actually love the Time War Daleks! serious contender for my favorite Dalek design. but cmon man. I liked the 60s Daleks and the Imperial Daleks just as much and a lot of my love for those comes from the fact that they weren't seen as the be-all-end-all. the show moved on. new who needs to move on from what davies thought was cool in 2005!

[frogmascquerade]

Doctah...who?

[jolivira]

so 13 kissing yaz to save her 9th doctor style, that is all

also I dunno if this counts as a dw spoiler but im tagging it anyways just to be safe

[galacticlamps]

that episode was such fun! the sontarans were great, I honestly don’t know if they’ve ever been so captivating to watch before. my other spoiler-free thought is Damn i can’t wait to see some crazy-skilled cosplayers recreate those villains’ costumes, i know we had pics of them before now but still, the whole time watching them i was just thinking about how fantastic they looked

yaz not freaking out too much and yet having to ask ‘promise?’ while she was disappearing broke my heart. which was good because the next bit of her literally having written wwtdd on her hand was well intentioned but pretty stupid. i get it had to be something specific and physical for the full creepiness of mr swarm knowing about it to hit home (versus it being some kind of inference anyone could’ve guessed about yaz trying to emulate her more generally) but still, it struck me as so dumb i’d actually like an explanation for it at some point - why’d she have that on her hand today? she can’t always walk around like that, can she? but other than that everything with yaz this ep was great so can’t complain.

dan is so dumb i love it. no i dont mean the tempura line either. i mean him telling his parents it’s okay he’ll go deal with the sontarans bc he has experience with aliens now. dude you might’ve known aliens existed a day ahead of everyone else but that’s because you got kidnapped and locked in a cage and keep getting teleported places. i don’t think you exactly had much in the way of useful experience by the time you made that claim, but you’ve got a bit more by the end of the episode, at least. and you seem to be becoming a proper companion now, you made the choice to go when you could’ve stayed home this time, anyway.

i also liked dan’s parents! i know a lot of their lines were kinda eyerollish parents-being-parents type things to say but i also believed his mother about the sontarans coming to liverpool first, and i like the idea of the place itself being important to this plotline for some reason, im interested to see where all that goes

god help the tardis tho my girl does not deserve this. im still not sure if dan’s slated to stick around post-flux but i wonder what it would do to a companion’s understanding of the whole doctor/tardis/time travel situation for their first impression to be the tardis being this uniquely fucked up.

i think the ep itself struck a good balance between stand alone and part of the arc, which i was happy about - i really enjoyed everything that happened in the historical storyline, so i wouldnt mind if any of it comes up again later but it’s also nice to feel like you’ve absorbed a full story start to finish by the end of an episode, and i do feel that way tonight so that’s good. the trailer for the next ep was super short, and without much identifiable except a menagerie of characters/villains it’s hard to say if it’ll be similar to this week’s in that regard or go back to focusing on developing flux-centric stuff - maybe there’s a pattern of alternating episodes spending more time on self contained plots vs the big picture? or maybe there is a way all those seemingly unrelated things could be sewn up in one smaller story, afterall we are on the planet Time, and presumably in a different universe/dimension/something at least equally weird. I guess there are some simpler contexts that could account for everything in the trailer though - like god complex or even the death zone - but then again, if we are in an altered reality, i suppose even something like the environments in celestial toymaker/mind robber/deadly assassin is also on the table. maybe that’s why thirteen’s coat’s reversed, maybe it’s to indicate the difference between the real dr and an avatar of her.

i think the thing that surprised me most in this one was the muttonchop man yaz first ran into at the temple. he also showed up early on in the first ep but that one was so busy it didn’t feel strange, whereas here he definitely feels like the most unrelated thing to show up in the episode. and being at the beginning of both without ever reappearing, i feel like he’s meant to be seeded in and forgotten about, so hopefully that goes somewhere interesting. obviously thirteen’s vision of that nightmare house at the start was very weird too, but in the context it seemed less strange - it was way too big to resemble wherever diane got sucked into right? idk i feel like it’s a future thing not a past thing but who knows. unless its being in black and white was supposed to have ruth/pre hartnell vibes but im probably over analyzing now

also honorable mention to the triangles at the temple, who were kind enough to call themselves triangles. i do love a service bot with a bit of personality