I'm always on board for a (quasi-) Jackie Tyler episode; she's one of my favorite parts of the Rose era. It is funny that Camille Coduri is playing a 20-year-old Jackie Tyler here with just an '80s perm to convince us. She's entirely unconvincing as a 20-year-old, but it's not really much worse than Billie Piper being 19. It's the Dear Evan Hansen industrial complex over here.
I love any time there's Back to the Future II (my favorite!) shenanigans in a time travel story, so the opening with multiple Doctors and Roses a few minutes apart immediately wins me over. They're followed by some pretty naff effects throughout, with the red-cellophane vision and dodgy CGI monsters all over the place. I'm still on board.
It's interesting to see the Doctor actively frightened about what he's done to the timeline, since plot conceits usually dictate that whatever he does is fine. There's some interesting moments like him watching that time-displaced death car with genuine concern. We also get his line, "An ordinary man, that's the most important thing in creation." I wonder if somebody overheard the Doctor saying this in 1987 and that's why we're dealing with the manosphere today.
The scene(s) where Pete starts to understand that he's not in Rose's future and in fact not in anybody's future are well written and performed by Piper and Dingwall, who is unfalteringly believable as a deadbeat husband and dad who both knows and regrets it. Rose's false monologue about the kind of father he becomes and his ultimate recognition that he can in some way be that father is genuinely affecting. Even though the music is doing its best to hammer the emotional beats home throughout, I don't think it was necessary in that moment.
This isn't an episode that I think should have won any awards, and don't worry: it didn't. Nothing ground-breaking for the show happens here, the music choices are incredibly ub-subtle, and it's ultimately very predictable stuff. But I find it enjoyable from start to finish. It's the fun kind of silly. I like getting to meet a bunch of the recurring cast at a different point in their lives in a story that's self-contained but with a satisfying payoff in the final Jackie and child-Rose scene. This isn't Doctor Who at its best, but it's supremely comfortable viewing and I'm happy with that.
Bonus points for the pre-Rickroll "Never Gonna Give You Up" in the scene with Rose and her father in the car on the way to the church. The meme didn't exist when this episode was first broadcast, it was just a hit song from the '80s. Hearing it in the background just to set the scene without the 20 years of baggage is a fun time. It's hard to remember what it was like to hear it without the modern context, but having nobody react strongly to it in-universe gives us a small taste.
"Rate" in the headline feels a bit misleading. It's not an app for quantifying hotness, it seems to be more about checking whether the men you meet online are safe to be around. You can upload their photos to do reverse image searches to detect catfishing, search public records for criminal records, sex offender registries, indications that they're already married, etc. and have anonymous discussions about men you are or have dated in case of any red flags.
I watched the eight-part miniseries Washington Black (US: Hulu, CA/UK/AU: Disney+). It's a sort of swashbuckling 1800s steampunk fairytale of a Barbadian boy (the titular George Washington Black) who escapes the life of slavery he was born into using his scientific aptitude and a fantastical airship. I have somewhat mixed feelings about the depiction of life within the show's universe, but going any further than that strays into spoiler territory. Overall, it was fun to watch. Sterling K. Brown is a major standout in the cast, but everybody is doing good work.
Below I'll go into a bit more detail about the things I liked less. It's fairly minor spoilers, mostly about things that don't happen in the show, but if you don't want to know anything going in, skip it.
Overall, I'd say it's what you might expect from a Disney(-ish) fairytale adaptation of darker source material. It just feels a little weird when the elements that were dropped are the harsh realities of 1800s racism and not ... little mermaids dying (Hans Christian Anderson spoilers). Again, I had fun watching it, but I feel conflicted about how healthy it is to make historical fiction fun by softening the harder edges. Who knows, maybe it's OK to have some escapist fiction with PoC protagonists, as a treat?
For people who have seen Nautilus (US/CA: AMC+, UK: Amazon Prime Video, AU: Stan), I'd say that's a better show, as far as swashbuckling steampunk adventures which try to engage with the racial dynamics of the (fictionalized) eras they represent. But both shows are very enjoyable, quite short and easy to watch. Go watch Nautilus.
It's all right. I fell off it after one too many comedy "animal accidentally gets killed" scenes for me, which hurt what was otherwise a fun, feel-good sitcom. Tudyk is excellent as always and the supporting cast of small-town weirdos are mostly likeable. It's not for me but I can understand people loving it.
But what was the reason for Henry’s condemnation by the University to five and a half centuries of infamy? It was a murder. In 1242 he and a number of other men of the town of Oxford were found guilty of murdering a student of the University. Henry and his accomplices were fined £80 by King Henry III in May 1242 and were made to leave Oxford as a result, forced to stay away (and allowed no closer than Northampton) at least until the King returned from abroad.
Further research is needed to discover the exact details of what happened here but it seems that Henry Symeonis had bought the King’s pardon and his permission to return to Oxford. The King was willing to allow his return if the University agreed to it. But the University refused and chose to ignore the King’s order of 25 March 1264, resuming its hostility to Henry Symeonis. In fact, it felt so strongly about it, that it gave Henry Symeonis the unique honour of being named in its own statutes, making the University’s dislike of him official and perpetual.
I would kind of argue it's Fox News that lied on this one. They edited down his full response which was a lot more sketchy about whether he would release the files.
In the interview, co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy asked whether Trump would declassify “9/11 files” and “JFK files.” He said yes without hesitation. Then she asked, “Would you declassify the Epstein files?”
His answer, as it initially aired: “Yeah, yeah, I would.”
But in the full version that only aired later, Trump said, “Yeah, yeah, I would. I guess I would. I think that less so because, you don’t know, you don’t want to affect people’s lives if it’s phony stuff in there, because it’s a lot of phony stuff with that whole world. But I think I would, or at least—”
Campos-Duffy interjected and said, “Do you think that would restore trust? Help restore trust?”
Trump hedged again: “I don’t know about Epstein, so much as I do the others. Certainly, about the way he died. It’d be interesting to find out what happened there, because that was a weird situation and the cameras didn’t happen to be working, etc., etc. But yeah, I’d go a long way toward that one. The other stuff, I would.”
His actual answer hedges on how much or whether he'd release any of the Epstein files and especially the actually damaging stuff, preferring to release only the stuff about how he died while casting aspersions about the reliability of the whole ... pedo jet and island part. Fox edited him down to a more agreeable position than the one he actually held.
I had completely forgotten Simon Pegg was ever on Who until last week's preview reminded me of this episode. I agree with ValueSubtracted that he's not used well here. Simon's only 35 here, and I was struck by the thought that he could have made a better Adam. We're really running short on reasons to care about our Adam, so casting somebody who could give us equal parts charm and smarm could only improve him. You'd probably want to lose any suggestion of a romantic subplot between them in a Pegg-centric rewrite, but I'm getting way off-track at this point.
Behind the scenes, Adam was originally given a more sympathetic reasoning for wanting knowledge from the future. His father was suffering from crippling arthritis, which he discovered had been cured by this time. His actions in this episode would have been all about alleviating his father's suffering. I wonder why that was removed. It doesn't really change much; maybe they felt the Doctor refusing to allow this relief made him seem too cruel? But it leaves us with no reason to like this guy. Oh well.
The look of this episode reminds me of nothing more than Roger Christian's quasi-Scientology epic, Battlefield Earth, adapted from the novel by founder L. Ron Hubbard. Couldn't you imagine this guy as the Editor?
That's really not the comparison you want to invite. In fairness, I've watched a couple of Christian's films, but only because they're bad. I'm not really opposed to bad sci-fi, but that's a separate (albeit overlapping) thing to cheesy or low-budget sci-fi, which is what I like to see in Who.
The cast really is stacked for this one, so it's such a shame that this episode isn't more fun. Almost everybody here is either just off the back of or about to do something seminal (Pegg's Spaced and Shaun of the Dead, Tamsin Greig's Black Books and Green Wing, Christine Adams's Pushing Daisies). Anna Maxwell Martin is a decade and change away from Motherland, but is nice to see in her early career retrospectively. If all I knew about this episode was the cast, I'd be really excited to see so many of my favorites in one place.
And yet, there's just no meat here. I just want a moment that I love somewhere in the episode and there simply aren't any. I'm a broken record but the snap fight once Adam gets back home could have been a lot funnier with Pegg. Overall, disappointing.
If you don't mind revealing (hi ninjas), how were you playing this on PC? Only, there's a lot of options these days. There's the time-tested N64 emulators, but more recently we've got two new methods:
For anybody who's unfamiliar with decomps ports and recomps, they have outwardly similar results but are achieved using very different methods.
Using the old "source code == recipe" analogy, a decompilation is where you purchase a meal and take it back to the lab where a team of scientists painstakingly analyze it to uncover the original recipe that made it, both in terms of ingredients and the cooking method. Once you have that, you can either make an exact copy of the meal or change it to suit your preferences. Dropping the analogy for a minute, you can modify the game any way you like and even go as far as building it for completely different platforms, across as many CPU architectures as you like.
Recompilation is a bit harder to describe using the recipe analogy, because at no point do you actually uncover what the original recipe was. Let's say you have a fancy Klingon delicacy prepared which is utterly inedible to humans. Unfortunately, you are human. Without knowing how it was made, you feed the dish into the back end of a replicator, which puts it back together in a form which offers the same flavor profile but is edible by humans. In this analogy, the Klingon meal is a game built for the Nintendo 64's MIPS CPU, while your human anatomy requires food for an x86-64 CPU. However, you can't feed the output to a Vulcan for the same reason you couldn't eat the Klingon meal.
As an end-user, the result doesn't change that much if your goal is just to play Mario Kart 64 on PC. Decompilation is the more labor-intensive process which eventually results in a more flexible "recipe" you can mix around as you like, while recompilation gets you a meal without necessarily helping you understand what went into it or how to make it yourself or change its composition to your preference. Both of these analogies undersell the amount of work that goes into either approach, so I do apologize for making it sound as easy as the sci-fi technology suggests.
I'm always on board for a (quasi-) Jackie Tyler episode; she's one of my favorite parts of the Rose era. It is funny that Camille Coduri is playing a 20-year-old Jackie Tyler here with just an '80s perm to convince us. She's entirely unconvincing as a 20-year-old, but it's not really much worse than Billie Piper being 19. It's the Dear Evan Hansen industrial complex over here.
I love any time there's Back to the Future II (my favorite!) shenanigans in a time travel story, so the opening with multiple Doctors and Roses a few minutes apart immediately wins me over. They're followed by some pretty naff effects throughout, with the red-cellophane vision and dodgy CGI monsters all over the place. I'm still on board.
It's interesting to see the Doctor actively frightened about what he's done to the timeline, since plot conceits usually dictate that whatever he does is fine. There's some interesting moments like him watching that time-displaced death car with genuine concern. We also get his line, "An ordinary man, that's the most important thing in creation." I wonder if somebody overheard the Doctor saying this in 1987 and that's why we're dealing with the manosphere today.
The scene(s) where Pete starts to understand that he's not in Rose's future and in fact not in anybody's future are well written and performed by Piper and Dingwall, who is unfalteringly believable as a deadbeat husband and dad who both knows and regrets it. Rose's false monologue about the kind of father he becomes and his ultimate recognition that he can in some way be that father is genuinely affecting. Even though the music is doing its best to hammer the emotional beats home throughout, I don't think it was necessary in that moment.
This isn't an episode that I think should have won any awards, and don't worry: it didn't. Nothing ground-breaking for the show happens here, the music choices are incredibly ub-subtle, and it's ultimately very predictable stuff. But I find it enjoyable from start to finish. It's the fun kind of silly. I like getting to meet a bunch of the recurring cast at a different point in their lives in a story that's self-contained but with a satisfying payoff in the final Jackie and child-Rose scene. This isn't Doctor Who at its best, but it's supremely comfortable viewing and I'm happy with that.
Bonus points for the pre-Rickroll "Never Gonna Give You Up" in the scene with Rose and her father in the car on the way to the church. The meme didn't exist when this episode was first broadcast, it was just a hit song from the '80s. Hearing it in the background just to set the scene without the 20 years of baggage is a fun time. It's hard to remember what it was like to hear it without the modern context, but having nobody react strongly to it in-universe gives us a small taste.