2026 has started strong with reviews of Matt Smith's grimly comedic Brighton drama The Death of Bunny Munro and Doctor Who spin-off The War Between the Land and the Sea. Plus, season four of classic Doctor Who is now complete, with my reviews of The Smugglers, The Underwater Menace (what a classic) and The Moonbase, plus The Highlanders and The Evil of the Daleks from site chief Laurence Marcus.
So if you want to know what Matt Smith got up to in the block of flats where I live, how underwater civilisations looked in 1967and 2025, and just which alien menace mocks "stupid Earth brains," you're just a click away.
It should be noted composer Murray Gold said Davies wrote "multiple versions" of the unmade 2026 Christmas episode. While there are definitely conflicting accounts from crew members or filmmakers in films/series, the RTD message got me thinking. I definitely believe that the Christmas special script was originally supposed to be made. While it going into speculation, it is very possible that the pitch was rejected. I know RTD denied the script had been made, but I don’t buy it. There is no way it was never considered.
ReplyDeleteI used to be fine with Kate Stewart but later appearances have ruined the character for me, along with UNIT in general.
ReplyDeleteWhile it’s true that Kate’s out of character behaviour in The Giggle and 73 Yards wasn’t really her fault because she was essentially mind controlled, the latter’s big dumb reset button ending meant there was no real acknowledgment outside the episode of all the betrayals Ruby endured, which makes her subsequent interactions with those other characters rather hard to swallow from an audience perspective; The Giggle at least showed Kate apologising to Shirley for the ableist slurs.
It also doesn’t excuse UNIT’s use of child soldiers (e.g., Morris), violating their staff’s bodily autonomy and privacy by chipping them, sending the repeatedly traumatised Ruby alone and unprotected to deal with her armed, violent, psychopath abuser, or them ganging up on Ruby to gaslight and pathologise her when she tried to remind them about Poppy without even apologising when they realised she was right. The show doesn’t problematise any of these things, presumably because the creative team had it in for Millie Gibson for whatever reason and found it amusing to make Ruby the kicked puppy of this era.