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The Next Season of Doctor Who Is Going to Introduce Us to Space Babies (and Much More)

Space babies! Dinosaurs! The Beatles!

By Molly Templeton

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Published on April 1, 2024

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There’s a new trailer for the upcoming season of Doctor Who, and it’s full of hints, excitement, dinosaurs, Ncuti Gatwa in some incredible outfits, talking space babies, and, yes, Jinkx Monsoon. But the BBC has also released the intriguing list of episode titles, along with the writers and directors of each episode. This basically amounts to a list of hints that we’re all going to read into, for better or worse!

• “Space Babies,” written by Russell T Davies, directed by Julie Anne Robinson
• “The Devil’s Chord,” written by Russell T Davies, directed by Ben Chessell
• “Boom,” written by Steven Moffat, directed by Julie Anne Robinson
• “73 Yards,” written by Russell T Davies, directed by Dylan Holmes Williams
• “Dot and Bubble,” written by Russell T Davies, directed by Dylan Holmes Williams
• “Rogue,” written by Kate Herron and Briony Redman, directed by Ben Chessell
• “The Legend of Ruby Sunday,” written by Russell T Davies, directed by Jamie Donoughue
• “Empire of Death,” written by Russell T Davies, directed by Jamie Donoughue

It is pretty much impossible to see a Steven Moffat-penned episode with a single-word title and not think of “Blink” (even though he already wrote at least two more one-word-named episodes). The other non-Davies writers, Kate Herron and Briony Redman, are an interesting pair: Herron was the director of the first season of Loki, and Redman has so far only written short films—but she and Herron are listed on IMDb as the co-writers of the Sims movie.

As for the directors: Julie Anne Robinson has directed episodes of Bridgerton and The Good Place; Ben Chessell was director for four episodes of the excellent Aussie series Deadloch; Dylan Holmes Williams directed four episodes of Servant; and Jamie Donoughue has directed A Discovery of Witches and The Last Kingdom. All are newcomers to Who.

A sparse few details have been announced about the first two episodes: Golda Rosheuvel (Bridgerton) guest stars in “Space Babies,” and Jinkx Monsoon appears in “The Devil’s Chord” as “the Doctor’s most powerful enemy yet”—who the Doctor and Ruby encounter while visiting the ’60s and meeting The Beatles.

Along with Gatwa as the Doctor and Millie Gibson as Ruby Sunday, a very long list of actors will appear on this season of Doctor Who: Michelle Greenidge, Angela Wynter, Anita Dobson, Aneurin Barnard, Yasmin Finney, Jonathan Groff, Gwïon Morris Jones, Bonnie Langford, Genesis Lynea, Jemma Redgrave, Lenny Rush, Indira Varma, Callie Cooke, Dame Siân Phillips, Alexander Devrient, Bhav Joshi, Majid Mehdizadeh-Valoujerdy, Tachia Newall and Caoilinn Springall.

It’s going to get crowded in the TARDIS. (Just kidding! Just kidding.) Doctor Who premieres May 10th on Disney+. [end-mark]

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News Doctor Who

Doctor Who Trailer Has Ncuti Gatwa Making Everything Possible, With Panache

David Bowie’s “Changes” shepherds us through in the first trailer for Ncuti Gatwa’s first season

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on March 22, 2024

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Everything is possible!

That’s what Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor tells us in the first official trailer for the next season of Doctor Who. In the two-minute teaser, we see the Doctor and his companion, Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson), travel all over time and space, from the era of the dinosaurs, to a Bridgerton-like affair, to what looks like the 1960s. We also get hints that Ruby’s life will be in danger and that the TARDIS may get stranded somewhere long enough for moss to grow on it.

It is, in short, a very Doctor Who affair. And Gatwa looks great in it!

Here’s the official synopsis:

Who is the “most powerful enemy yet,” you ask? It’s still a mystery, one that will soon unfold when the next season of Doctor Who begins streaming May 10, 2024 at 4:00 p.m. PT / 7:00 p.m. ET on Disney+.

Check out the trailer below. [end-mark]

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News Doctor Who

Doctor Who: Steven Moffat Wrote an Episode for Ncuti Gatwa’s Upcoming Season

The former showrunner was keeping it under wraps, but the secret’s out

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on March 19, 2024

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Things are feeling kinda timey wimey. Steven Moffat, the man who showran Doctor Who when Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi held the titular moniker, has come back to the franchise.

Russell T. Davies, who helmed the show before Moffat in its Eccelston/Tennant days, is now back as showrunner. The two worked together then, and now Moffat is back to pen an episode in the show’s upcoming season, where Ncuti Gatwa (pictured above) is now the Doctor.

“Yes, okay, fair enough—apologies to everyone I’ve very slightly misled—I am in fact writing an episode of the series of Doctor Who. Exactly like I said I never would,” Moffat said in a statement on the official Doctor Who website.

He added, “What can I tell you? There was begging, there was pleading but finally Russell agreed to let me have another go—so long as I got out of his garden. Working with old friends and a brand new Doctor I couldn’t be happier. Sorry I was a bit reticent on the subject for so long. It was all part of an elaborate plan that would have delighted millions but at the last minute I forgot what it was.”

The director of Moffat’s episode is Julie-Anne Robinson, who also directed the episode that comes right after “The Church on Ruby Road,” which premiered on Christmas last year. “Steven Moffat gave me an intense challenge as a director,” she said in the same statement. “I asked him for a keyword to describe the overall tone of the episode he said: ‘Hitchcock.’ I can’t wait to see what everyone thinks.”

We can figure out what we think when the next season of Doctor Who with Ncuti Gatwa as the Fifteenth Doctor premieres on Disney+ on May 10, 2024. [end-mark]

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News Doctor Who

Ncuti Gatwa’s First Season of Doctor Who Gets a May Premiere Date

Join the best Ken on a cosmic joyride

By Molly Templeton

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Published on March 15, 2024

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The Doctor may be able to watch his television shows whenever he likes—the benefits of having a time-traveling police box—but the rest of us are subject to the whims of linear time (and massive corporations). Disney has just announced the premiere date for the extremely anticipated new season of Doctor Who—the first season with Russell T. Davies back at the helm, and Ncuti Gatwa starring as the Fifteenth Doctor.

In the US and most of the world, the Doctor arrives on May 10th at 7 pm EDT, on Disney+. Somewhat confusingly, a press release says “audiences will return to ‘The Church on Ruby Road,’ which premiered last December, and journey through two all-new episodes.” (“The Church on Ruby Road” is already on Disney+, so I’m unclear why we will “return” to it then.) In the UK, the season begins on BBC iPlayer at 12 am GMT on Saturday, May 11, and appears on BBC One “later that day.”

A very brief summary of the coming season says:

This season stars Gatwa as the Doctor and Millie Gibson as Ruby Sunday; Gibson will spend only a season on the TARDIS, as Andor’s Varada Sethu will step in as companion for Gatwa’s second go-round. This season also has quite the list of guest stars, including Aneurin Barnard, Anita Dobson, Yasmin Finney, Michelle Greenidge, Jonathan Groff, Bonnie Langford, Genesis Lynea, Jemma Redgrave, Lenny Rush, Indira Varma and Angela Wynter.

The trailer for the upcoming season will arrive next Friday, March 22nd. [end-mark]

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News Doctor Who

You Can Now Read a Whole Lot of Doctor Who Scripts Courtesy of the BBC Writers’ Script Library

It’s a regular script treasure trove

By Molly Templeton

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Published on February 15, 2024

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If you have ever wondered what an episode of Doctor Who looks like before it’s filmed—which is to say, on a page, fresh from the mind of the show’s many writers—you can now sate your curiosity many times over. BBC Writers, a group which describes itself as “the public face of the BBC to the UK writing community,” has added a whole pile of Doctor Who and Doctor Who-related work to their online script library.

It’s not just recent Who; it’s also scripts from Sarah Jane Adventures, the short-lived spinoff Class, and Torchwood, among other tidbits and interviews. Yes, I did immediately go read part of the script for Torchwood: Children of Men Part 1; yes, this was depressing; yes, now I want to watch the whole thing again. So the library is clearly doing its job and then some.

You can even read the audition piece Russell T Davies wrote for the Fifteenth Doctor, which is an intriguing inclusion that somehow manages to sum up decades of Who in just a short paragraph at the start:

This scene goes on an on with the Doctor quoting song lyrics and movie lines and in fact I would like to see Ncuti Gatwa ask, “Aren’t you a little short for a stormtrooper?” to be honest. But like so many good Who stories, this one has a twist, and it’s kind of a gut-punch even though the piece is only eight pages long.

Take your own deep dive into the Whoniverse scripts here.

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But, Radio Times notes, Gibson “will still appear in the series but with a smaller role.”

Sethu was fantastic—if underused—as Cinta Kaz in Andor. She also appeared in Jurassic Park Dominion, played a CIA analyst in Prime Video’s Hanna, and was a detective in the British series Annika. Absolutely nothing has been revealed about her Who character.

The fourteenth season of the series, showrun by Russell T. Davies and starring Gatwa and Gibson, is set to arrive on Disney+ in May. The season will feature more than a few guest stars, including Nicola Coughlan (Derry Girls), drag queen Jinkx Monsoon, Glee’s Jonathan Groff, and Indira Varma (Game of Thrones, Obi-Wan Kenobi).

Season fifteen, Variety reports, is now filming in Wales.

The post <i>Andor</i>’s Varada Sethu Will Climb Aboard the TARDIS for <i>Doctor Who</i>’s Fifteenth Season appeared first on Reactor.

Yes, thank you.

Recap

A child is left on the doorstep of the church on Ruby Road, and is named for it. Years later, that child is Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson), who is currently being interviewed for Long Lost Family by Davina McCall (playing herself) in hopes of finding out who her parents might be. Following this, she has a string of terrible luck, which she attributes to clumsiness. While playing keyboard in her band at a local club, she spots the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) on the dance floor. He catches a glass that she’s about the drop and tells her that this isn’t just human error, but something much worse. Later, the Doctor saves Ruby from a falling snowman decoration, but it falls on him instead. On Christmas Eve, Ruby arrives home to be told by foster mother Carla (Michelle Greenidge) that they’re getting a new foster infant today. A child is brought to them by the name of Lulubelle, coincidentally having the birthday as Ruby. Carla goes out to get supplies for the baby before the shops close, leaving Ruby in charge. Outside, a neighbor Mrs Flood (Anita Dobson) is complaining to another neighbor Abdul (Hemi Yeroham) that he must be responsible for putting the blue police box on the sidewalk.

Ruby gets a call from Davina McCall letting her know that they couldn’t find any trace of her parents. She also wants to know if Ruby’s been having terrible luck, because she’s been having a horrifying string of it since their interview. She’s killed suddenly by a falling Christmas tree while they’re on the phone. There’s noise through the baby monitor, and Ruby heads to the nursery to find the baby missing. The skylight is open, so she climbs through it and find goblins stealing Lulubelle. She jumps onto a hanging ladder into the sky and gets swept away. The Doctor appears, jumping across the rooftops to ask her what she’s doing, and jumps into the ladder with her. He’s got a special pair of gloves he designed himself that focus his weight into the glove, allowing them to stay on without exertion. They both climb up the ladder into a ship in the sky, and are promptly captured and tied up by the goblins. The Doctor tells Ruby that the goblins are creatures of coincidence and luck, that it gives them power, and that their ship is powered by ropes, which he is trying to learn that language of as well. He slips their bonds and they make it into the ventilation system.

As they’re crawling along, they hear a music number for Janis Goblin (Christina Rotondo) as Lulubell is moved along a conveyor belt toward the Goblin King, who will begin the baby feast. The Doctor and Ruby fall onto the conveyor from above before this can happen, and the Doctor asks why they’ve stopped the music, beginning the song anew. He and Ruby grab the baby and the Doctor uses his gloves in reverse, making them heavier so they slide back down to Ruby’s home quickly. They put the baby back in her crib, and the Doctor suggests that they search for anything in the house that could cause bad luck, and in doing so learns about Ruby’s family—Carla has fostered 33 kids but Ruby is the only one who stayed with her permanently, and Carla’s mother Cherry (Angela Winter) lives with them in an attic flat that she won’t leave due to the rent being fixed. Carla returns from shopping and Ruby tells her that they can’t find her parents. She comforts her daughter and tells her that she’s happy to have Ruby all to herself. The Doctor admits that he was adopted too—a coincidence. And that he doesn’t know who his true parents are either—yet another one. They begin to stack up until a crack forms down the ceiling the flat, which the Doctor assumes is the goblins taking their leave.

Suddenly the cracks heal… and Ruby has vanished. What’s more, Carla never fostered all those children, and only takes them in occasionally for money. Cherry is considerably more ill. The Doctor realizes that the goblins followed the coincidences back in time to take Ruby instead of Lulubell, and heads back to stop them. He finds the ship ladder on the roof of the church, grabs it and reverses the gloves again, dragging the ship down until the spire drives up and right through the Goblin King. The ship dissipates and the Doctor catches baby Ruby and leaves her in front of the church. He sees Ruby’s mother walking away, and heads back to 2023, finding everything has been put right, including the awful crack in the ceiling. Then he remembers to go back and stop Davina McCall from being murdered by a tree. He stands outside Ruby’s home and wonders if maybe he’s the bad luck, then heads back to the TARDIS after being wished well by Mrs Flood. Ruby works out that the Doctor must be a time traveler after the comments he’s made, and she heads outside. Mrs Flood nods toward the TARDIS, and Ruby walks in and asks the Doctor who he is.

After the TARDIS dematerializes, Mrs Flood breaks the fourth wall and asks the viewer “Never seen a TARDIS before?” and grins.

Commentary

The Doctor sang a musical number. They. They did that. They didn’t even hesitate, just dropped him into it. He sounded incredible.

And I love that we already know Ruby is in a band, so you buy that she could seamlessly pick that up, too. Is this the first time a companion has been in a band? I think so? I love this.

Episodes that introduce a new Doctor alongside a new companion are tricky: There’s so much to do and so little time to do it in. But this episode balances it well in part due to the sheer force of nature that is Ncuti Gatwa. Fifteen is so vivid in every single scene, so captivating to watch. We’re getting an even better sense of the personality now, and there’s real grace here, with a wonderful heaping of excuse-me-I’m-working-here to keep things sharp. Coming off of Fourteen and Thirteen, who are both champion wafflers, it’s hilarious to see.

It occurs to me that Ruby might be the first companion who works out that the Doctor is a time traveler on her own? I can’t remember anyone doing that before now. That said, we know Ruby a little less than usual after an introduction—we don’t even entirely know her reasons for stepping aboard the TARDIS aside from curiosity. So here’s hoping we get to know her much better as we go along, but the chemistry between her and Fifteen is great so far.

There’s just one thing that niggles at me in a decidedly bad way; while I understand the impetus to suggest that Ruby is incredibly important to Carla and Cherry’s life, I do not like the suggestion that without her, Carla would become this embittered and cold person who only fosters for the money. There’s a way that you could suggest that their lives are significantly altered for the worse without seeming to say that she needed one of those children to be “hers” in order to be this better version of herself. Foster parents are a key part of a very difficult system in the countries that have them, and hopefully understand the importance of providing stability to children who they will likely not get to adopt as their own. I don’t believe that a woman who is this adamant about taking care of kids in need would become the complete opposite sort of person because she never got to “keep” one of them? It’s a hamfisted way of showing the negative impact of Ruby’s absence, even going so far as to suggest that Carla loves her own mother less due to this change. Nah.

Like, I get the impulse to ghost-of-Christmas-future a Christmas episode, but that wasn’t it.

Having said that, the Doctor’s reaction is a beautiful thing because he won’t stand for that version of events. He is invested in this family and how good they are to each other and all the children who cross their threshold, clearly in response to all he’s recently learned about himself. The way he mentions being adopted, as though he’s suddenly remembered it. The way it instantly bonds him to Ruby despite spending very little time with her compared to your usual first companion encounter. It’s going to be an interesting road for the two of them going forward, and I’m hoping we’ll see plenty more of Carla and Cherry too.

Spearing the Goblins King feels a bit harsh for the Doctor, but the episode seems deliberately unclear on exactly how alive the goblins are in any case—especially since they just evaporate on the king’s death and seem to be creatures that feed on coincidence and luck, which are conceptual. Perhaps they are as well, as a people?

We’re getting plenty of seeds for what’s coming—for one, we never see Ruby’s mother. And you knew something was off about Mrs Flood from go. In the first scene, she just seems like a casually racist neighbor, but the shift in her demeanor when she sees the Doctor is marked, suddenly warm and kindly. There’s a long list of potential suspects, of course. She could be the next iteration of the Master; Ruby’s mother; a member of the Toymaker’s legions; “The Boss” that the Meep mentioned. She could also be any combination of those things, or something else entirely. So that’s a fun little mystery to look out for as we go.

Time and Space and Sundry

• Long Lost Family is, of course, a real UK show that Davina McCall has been hosting for over a decade, so that was a fun bit to throw in there.

• He said MAVITY again, I am going to harp on this for all time. There is no gravity, only mavity.

• The Doctor uses very Holmesian logic to figure out that cop is about to propose. It’s cute of him. Also, the irritation at the woman pushing a pram at midnight, he just has no patience for nonsense and I love that about him. (But some kids want walks in the middle of the night, sorry, Doctor. Even if that’s not what she was doing.)

• Everyone hates the name Lulubelle except the Doctor and that is so damn cute.

• The Doctor slips his ropes after mentioning a hot summer with Harry Houdini, but while this may be the first time it’s been suggested that there was a “hot” factor to that prolonged meeting, the Doctor has mentioned Houdini kinda forever? The Third and Fourth Doctor both use tricks that they claimed to have learned from Houdini (in “Planet of the Spiders” and “Revenge of the Cybermen” respectively), Donna asks the Tenth Doctor about meeting him, and both Eleven and Thirteen make mention of tricks they learned from him as well—with Thirteen using one to escape being drowned as a witch.

• It feels like such a fun little nod to how the character has grown that the Doctor used to be very difficult about people’s mothers and now is not only deeply invested in Carla’s life but also flirting with Cherry? I mean, he’s right, but that’s a big step for him.

• Here’s hoping that Fifteen gets this many costume changes all the time. Yes.

Doctor Who returns in Spring 2024… see you then.

The post Doctor Who Learns the Language of Luck in “The Church on Ruby Road” appeared first on Reactor.

What.

Recap

In Soho, London in 1925, Charles Banerjee (Charlie de Melo) heads into a toy shop and buys a marionette from the man who owns the shop (Neil Patrick Harris). He’s bringing the doll back to John Logie Baird (John MacKay), the man who invented television, who is in the process of recording the very first image for it.

In the present, the world breaks out in chaos because everyone on Earth thinks that they’re right. The same man who owned the toy shop briefly dances with the Doctor, and U.N.I.T. shows up. Donna demands that they take her grandfather to safety, and they’re taken to HQ, where Kate Lethbridge-Stewart (Jemma Redgrave) gives the Doctor a fierce hug; everyone on the planet is being affected and they suspect that it’s the result of a satellite network being complete, and everyone having access to screens. Kate gives an example of how this affects people by deactivating the blocker they’ve developed; she immediately becomes paranoid and vicious, and apologizes once the blocker is back in place. Melanie Bush (Bonnie Langford) is currently working for U.N.I.T. too, and she and the Doctor have a little reunion.

The team figure out that the spike in the human brain is a replica of the laugh from that doll on the very first TV image. The Doctor and Donna take the TARDIS and go back to the point when this image was filmed and find the toy shop, and the owner… who the Doctor recognizes at the Toymaker, a being he fought long ago in his first (remembered) incarnation. He tells Donna to go back to the TARDIS, but the Toymaker runs away and they run after him, winding up in his domain. The Doctor tells Donna that he’s not sure he can save her life this time, and that this is his fault—he allowed the Toymaker into their universe with the salt trick. Donna’s not worried, but wishes he would be more up front with her. They get separated; the Doctor runs into a human marionette and Donna is attacked by dolls. They find each other again and are forced to be an audience for the Toymaker, who tells the story of the Doctors last few companions (minus Thirteen’s group) and the Flux.

The Doctor challenges the Toymaker to a game for the universe, and loses. But since he won their previous game, he invokes “best two out of three” rules. The Toymaker agrees, but only if the next game is back in 2023. The Doctor and Donna escape his realm, get back into the TARDIS and head back to U.N.I.T., which has just destroyed the satellite that completed the global network. The Doctor has Donna create a code that can help the technology they’ve got scan for the Toymaker’s presence, hoping that they can make him leave the way he entered. Suddenly “Spice Up Your Life” starts playing and the Toymaker arrives, dancing, murdering, and assaulting the Doctor’s friends. He seems to vanish, but they find him on the launch pad with the galvanic beam they used to destroy the satellite. The Doctor insists that the Toymaker leave his friends alone because he’s the one who agreed to play the final game; he offers to travel the stars with the Toymaker and show him a universe of games. But the Toymaker refuses, and has decided that since he played the first two games with different Doctors, he should get a new Doctor for the last one—he shoots the Doctor with the beam.

Donna and Mel go to the Doctor to be with him with while he regenerates, but the process seems to complete… and he’s the same. He asks Donna and Mel to pull his arms—the regeneration feels different this time. They do as he asks, and the Fifteenth Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) pops out of the Fourteenth’s body.

Fifteen explains that this is an instance of the rumored bi-generation process—there are two of them now, and they are both going to play the Toymaker’s game because he insisted on playing the Doctor. Fourteen asks for a game of catch: Whoever drops the ball loses. After a high-octane game, they manage to win, and Fourteen tells the Toymaker that he banishes him from existence. The Toymaker folds up to be put in his box, but promises that his legions will return. Fourteen can’t stop thinking about how many people died because of this, but Fifteen holds him, and says that he’s got him. Everything is okay. As they walk inside, a gold tooth (which the Toymaker earlier claimed to trap the Master in) is taken by a unknown hand.

Fourteen wants to know how things are going to work with two Doctors in the TARDIS, but Fifteen and Donna are ready for this talk; Fifteen points out that they’ve been handling their trauma backwards, but that he’s in better shape because the Doctor has been working on themself. Donna knows why this Doctor’s face came back—so he could come home. And what’s more, Fifteen points out that for winning the game, they get a prize: The Toymaker’s rules still apply in the wake of their victory, and he takes out a big wooden mallet and knocks the TARDIS into two. (Fifteen’s has a jukebox.) He tells the Doctor to go with Donna and be happy. They watch him take off in the TARDIS, to have his own adventures.

Some time later, the Doctor is with Donna’s family, having a garden party, and Mel has just stopped by. He’s telling the family a story about a previous adventure he had, and it slips out that he’s taken his niece (Rose) to Mars already, and also taken Mel on a quick trip to the past. Donna tells him that he doesn’t have to stay forever, and the Doctor looks wistful. But he tells her that he fought those battles for all that time—and finally knows what for. It was for this. And he’s never been so happy.

Commentary

Bi-generation. BI-generation?

I see what you did there, Mr Davies. I see it. I see what you did.

It’s still funny to me that they went through the trouble of bringing Neil Patrick Harris in to play the Toymaker, however… because his role in the episode is pretty unimportant. Fun, but unimportant. Aside from that Spice Girls dance break, which was exactly what I was hoping for, thank you.

There’s a lot of talking to the audience happening in this episode with commentary about technology and bigotry and post-truth thinking, and some of it works great, while a few bits of scolding feel a little too on-the-nose. Davies couldn’t resist giving Fourteen one of his usual speeches of “oh, but humans really can be this horrible and you are not off the hook for your behavior,” which is mostly amusing because it’s another base attribute that was bound to resurface in him. And there’s the necessary sequence where the villain takes the Doctor to task for all the people he loses, but I do find it mildly hilarious that the Toymaker goes through all the Moffat companions, then jumps right to the Flux when talking about Thirteen’s tenure… because if he’d talked about her companions, he’d be snipping the marionette strings while saying “Und zen she dropped zem off at home!” as though it had been some terrible fate.

There’s more deliberate replication of the old RTD-era tropes here, but it’s all so good. We now have two instances where a horrifying villain decided to do an incredibly gay dance break while David Tennant is helpless to stop it. Two instances where the gambit is “why don’t we travel together, evil friend, and I can help make you less evil,” only to be cruelly rebuffed. Yet another instance of a small item (containing the Master) being retrieved by someone with a fantastic manicure while maniacal laughter plays in the background. In a less deft writer’s hand, it would feel like you’d run out of ideas, but it’s clearly Davies assuring us: He’s back.

And now we’ve got Fifteen, who in the first fifteen minutes of his tenure has made it clear exactly what kind of Doctor he will be. No confusion, no upset, no angst—he is pure joy. He’s love. He’s practically ethereal? The image of him holding Fourteen, a replication of the face who was still reeling from PTSD and heartbreak, tucking him in close and promising that he’ll be okay…. It’s therapy made manifest. Find your younger self and give them the advice that you needed. Comfort them and show them that they are cared for. And Donna is right there on the other side to tell Fourteen the truth:

This face came back so he could come home. To his best friend, to his former companions, to family that he never knew he had.

Many of us have been mildly traumatized for the past thirteen years over Ten’s last words: “I don’t want to go.” Those final moments as an iteration who finally enjoyed being himself for the first time in a long time, and had his life cut short. In many ways, Ten was a Doctor who was made to settle down, no matter how much he loved to run—he was created for Rose Tyler, and once she was gone, he was always seeking out “the slow path,” even when he didn’t mean to. If any Doctor deserves to set up shop on Earth, reconnect with all his old traveling companions, and sit at garden parties, it’s him. If any Doctor deserves to hang out with Wilf under blankets and watch the stars through a telescope, it’s him. If any Doctor deserves to rest and appreciate all the mundanity of life, it was always him.

But I never, in my wildest dreams (or a million words of fanfiction), imagined that it would happen. And, pointedly, it has happened for David Tennant’s incarnation of the Doctor twice. He’s special, okay?

The fact that Fifteen is so canny about how their suffering has shaped them is massive for the character and future of the show. He lays it all out: The ones they’ve loved, the atrocities they’ve witnessed, and people they’ve lost. (The way they both said Adric. It broke me.) Historically, the Doctor either skirts the past or buries it—those are the rules. They’ve always been the rules, and even the people who were close and learned the most never had a fraction of the picture. But Fifteen has decided that they’ve finally moved beyond some things. He’s pragmatic about what he can do (“You can’t save everyone”? That’s growth, my dear), but also full of hope. There’s a levelness to him that we’ve never seen in the character, and I am ecstatic for more.

I have to point out that this is the only time when the Doctor has regenerated with people present who understand what’s happening, and are explicitly making themselves available in that process. I have to point it out because it has literally never happened in the 60 year history of this show. For the first time, he wasn’t alone or about to terrify someone with a change they never knew was coming. He had two dear friends who chose to stay with him and hold his hands. And if you don’t think that had an influence on who he bifurcated into… he literally pops out of himself to say “honey, you’re loved, now go eat a snack and take a nap.”

To say that this has a wild bearing on what the show can do now is an understatement. Hopefully Fourteen will take his retirement (aside from a few quick trips to show off now and again), but we don’t know if he can regenerate. Or what his lifespan looks like. And now we know that whenever U.N.I.T. needs help, they’ll be waiting for the Doctor to show up… but if he’s otherwise occupied, they do have an extra on retainer. And, of course, it gives the show the ability to have David Tennant and Catherine Tate show up whenever they darn well please. Which they should obviously use sparingly, but what an ace to have in your back pocket.

And for now… Fifteen is going to light up the stars.

Bits and Bobs

• John Logie Baird was indeed the inventor of television. That first image looks much creepier on the show, however, which I assume was the Toymaker’s influence.

• The Toymaker heralds from a 1966 Doctor Who serial of the same name… which is mostly lost. (Many older episodes of Doctor Who were not properly stored or saved by the BBC, and are being painfully reconstructed via animation and dodgy audio recordings. Every once in a while, someone unearths a recorded copy of a lost episode in their basement.) Only the last piece of the story is in the BBC archives.

• Again, this idea that Kate Stewart is just going to scoop up all the former companions, who are now all middle-aged women, and give them all of them great jobs with health insurance and vacation time. Continue. More. Now.

• They bring up the Archangel Network, which was the system of satellites the Master used to take power in season three. So yeah, Davies loves satellite networks. They’re bad, or maybe good, or maybe something.

• Mel Bush was companion to the Sixth and Seventh Doctors, so she knows all about regeneration. (Though she was unconscious when it happened during her time on the TARDIS.) When he asks how she got back, it’s because the Doctor didn’t leave Mel on Earth—she decided to head off with a galactic conman named Sabalom Glitz (basically Who’s version of Zaphod Beeblebrox), and nudged the Doctor into taking Ace on in her place. The description she gives of Glitz’s death is… yeah, that checks out. I’m just glad she got home safe.

• Davies making fun of his own weirdly specific obsession with the Doctor’s age during his run (he literally went from 900 to 904 over seasons 1-4, it was silly) by having the Doctor be like “I’m a billion years old!” to Donna now. He could be, after all. He doesn’t know anymore….

• I maybe shouted “kick the doll!” at the television when Donna got cornered by them, and I’m very glad she followed my advice and cowed those creepy babies.

• People will probably go on for a while about the fact that Fifteen spent his entire first appearance in his underwear (which is entirely fair). But did you catch it? The point is that he’s wearing pieces of Fourteen’s outfit. Their clothes separated. Which means that Fourteen is commando at the same time, friends.

See you on Christmas!

The post Doctor Who Takes Regeneration to a Whole New Level in “The Giggle” appeared first on Reactor.

The clip, titled “The Goblin Song,” features a goblin-like race that’s very excited to eat a human baby. The song features a mosh pit of said goblins and includes lyrics like, “We’ve got a baby we can feast; we can dine for three days at least!” The catchy tune goes on to tastefully sprinkle the baby in the basket with seasoning as the wee one slowly makes their way down a conveyor belt, closer and closer to the giant maw of the Goblin King.

The musical video also gives us extra glimpses of Gatwa as the Doctor with his new companion, Ruby Sunday, played by actor Millie Gibson. Hopefully, the two will save the baby in time (I’m optimistic), although the fact that they unceremoniously drop down onto the baby-eating festivities suggests that their negotiations with the goblin-like aliens may include some carnivorous bumps along the way. 

The Doctor Who Christmas Special, “The Church on Ruby Road,” starts streaming on Disney+ on December 25, 2023. If you want to see Gatwa’s first appearance in the Whoniverse, the last special, “The Giggle,” is now available on the platform for your viewing pleasure. 

The post Doctor Who Christmas Special Includes a Baby-Eating Musical Number appeared first on Reactor.

But is it possible she’s met him before?

That seems to be what the brief synopsis for the special is hinting at:

Long ago, on Christmas Eve, a baby was abandoned in the snow. Today, Ruby Sunday meets the Doctor, goblins, stolen babies, and perhaps, the secret of her birth.

Maybe baby Ruby met the Doctor? Maybe not! Maybe the only baby here is the one endangered in the video for “The Goblin Song,” which elaborates on the connection between said goblins and said stolen babies. It’s a bit more, uh, culinary than one might generally expect. (It’s enough to make you really miss Labyrinth‘s downright friendly goblins—and their king.)

This Christmas special is a story “of chance, coincidence, and luck,” and also involves a flying ship and Santa (maybe). The special also stars Davina McCall, Michelle Greenidge, Angela Wynter, and Anita Dobson. Titled “The Church on Ruby Road,” it airs December 25th on Disney+.

The post The Doctor Meets His New Companion in the Teaser for This Year’s Doctor Who Christmas Special appeared first on Reactor.

Below you will find: MUSICALS. QUEER PIRATES. A CHONKY DRAGON. MULTIPLE MEET-CUTES. FRIENDSHIP.

The Magic of Good Omens

Getting to spend more time with Aziraphale and Crowley is always something to be thankful for, especially since the first season of Good Omens covered everything from the original book by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. Good Omens 2 delivered the goods—giving text to the subtext of the angel and demon’s romance, performed to perfection by Michael Sheen and David Tennant respectively. Each episode of the second season brought me joy, with the minisodes (the Nazi zombie magician one was a particular favorite) being the whipped cream and sprinkles on an already delectable viewing experience. And now that Amazon’s given the greenlight to a third and final season, even more magic (and presumably the Second Coming) can ensue.

—Vanessa

When Jim Met Spock

I want Star Trek: Strange New Worlds to do its own thing, not just play prequel connect-the-dots. Truly. I swear that I do. But there are things that matter to me, points of clarification and history that need addressing. Chief among those was: How did Kirk and Spock meet?

It needed to be something casual, of course; no swelling score and heightened drama to signal its import. We rarely get so obvious a cue when meeting the people who change our lives. But I needed to see it, and the writing on Strange New Worlds gave me hope on that front—namely by allowing James T. Kirk to behave like himself instead of the depressing Zapp Brannigan-ized headcanon that the character has become to so many. Look at this weirdly charismatic bookworm who must help anyone who looks even slightly sad! He can’t stop himself from trying to play that Vulcan’s chess game from across the bar. He’s not gonna inappropriately flirt with Uhura, but he will bring her a cookie. He can sense that La’an is tuning into him, even if he can’t understand why. That’s the guy I remember.

But the show did one better by setting up an antagonism between Spock and Jim’s older brother, Sam. The two scientists never got on particularly well, but in the lead-up to our legendary meetcute, we see Spock getting aggravated with Sam for minute-but-incredibly-irritating things, namely being messy and never clearing his dishes. So when Jim and Sam have a fight in front of Uhura (over their dad and legacy and who is the favored son, which Sam should be talking about with said father instead of his little brother, by the by), Jim is understandably embarrassed and a little miffed at his brother’s behavior and his storming off—

—leaving Spock the perfect opening to clear Sam’s dish in annoyance and instantly bond with soulmate life partner t’hy’la future captain. Uhura introduces them and grins, as though she knows she’s just done something momentous. Jim invites Spock to sit with them. It’s mundane. It’s silly. It’s absolutely dazzling.

—Emmet

The Second Joyous Gorgeous Season of the Ongoing Miracle That Is Our Flag Means Death

LET’S TALK ABOUT JIM. As a queer, nonbinary person of Puerto Rican descent, I really never thought I’d see a queer, nonbinary Puerto Rican on TV. It’s too niche an identity for TV Executives to bother with, I figured. Sure, there have been major strides made in terms of Latinx representation in media (Wednesday! Andor! Anything Pedro Pascal is doing!) but for a character to be Latinx AND queer AND gender nonconforming seemed like too big of a gift to ask for.

And then, there was Vico Ortiz.

Granted, Jim isn’t specifically Puerto Rican on the show, as OFMD exists in a kind of vaguely Victorian Era Atlantic Ocean liminal space. But Vico is Puerto Rican, Vico’s accent is Puerto Rican, and that matters. Like, remember when Diego Luna was doing the press tour for Rogue One and was talking about how important it was that a Star Wars character was allowed to have his Mexican accent? It’s the same thing. They aren’t anglicizing the way the actors speak, so there are Mexicans in space and Puerto Ricans on the high seas.

Specifically, really hot queer nonbinary Puerto Ricans on the high seas. Because this season, Jim was allowed to have short hair and a polyamorous relationship and a drawn-on mustache. We got to see Jim as part of Blackbeard’s crew in a sexy, bondage-y leather-and-rope situation. We got to see them kiss people and stab people and saw off Izzy’s leg and it’s just ALL SO SEXY. Like, how am I even supposed to concentrate on anything else when a character like Jim exists. Maybe this isn’t nerdy joy, maybe this is nerdy yearning, but whatever. We are blessed for having a character like Jim on TV both for Representation reasons and for horny reasons.

—Christina

I’ve never met a fictional Purgatory I didn’t love, but OFMD’s Gravy Basket might have vaulted to the top of my list. The lighting, the inexplicable pig, the need for a reasonably priced inn, the Thinking Cliff—it all adds up to a great netherworld/peek into Ed’s tortured psyche.

—Leah

Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi was a popular fantasy release this year, so I don’t think I’m breaking any new ground by talking about how excellent it is. Amina’s infamous pirate days are behind her; she’s dedicated to being a mother now, and protecting her family by staying out of the limelight. But when she’s blackmailed into a quest to find the missing daughter of a wealthy noble, she finds herself more willing to return to her old ways than she would like to admit. The twelfth-century cities along the Indian Ocean are richly imagined and heavily researched, and Chakraborty weaves together whimsical characters and high stakes with a mastery recognizable to fans of her previous Daevabad series. But our main character, Amina, is a fantastic centerpiece: torn between the need to protect her family and her own habits towards recklessness, Amina is a rare protagonist, and one I’m looking forward to following through the series.

—Bailey

The Carousel Ride in The Last of Us

I don’t have any particular nostalgia for shopping malls—they weren’t a big part of my teenage life—and yet this scene, set in an extended flashback in which Ellie and Riley spend a night in abandoned and decaying mall, has stuck with me all year. Maybe it’s down to the Cure (a band that was very much a part of my teenage existence). Not only does this mall have a relatively pristine carousel in working condition (something the malls I grew up with definitely did not have), but as it starts to whirl the opening notes of “Just Like Heaven” chime out and suddenly I was fully drowning in nostalgia. Turns out, not even the apocalypse can dim Robert Smith’s mopey romanticism… It’s the perfect song to sell this moment, capturing the giddy joy and awkwardness of these two friends/crushes, uncertain about everything except their happiness at being together again.

In the middle of an ultimately devastating episode, this scene carves out precious space for these two teenagers, whose lives have been defined by danger and loss and strict rules for survival, to bask in the warm lights and just enjoy being together as the carousel spins and the familiar song plays. And I love that it’s not rushed: it all lasts just a little under two minutes, with roughly 30 seconds in which they simply ride in companionable, tipsy silence, reveling in the moment as the music surrounds them, and it’s perfect. It can’t last, but within the world of The Last of Us, these moments of joy feel so triumphant and so hard-won that they resonate for me in a way that outshines everything else.

—Bridget

Launching Koroks Across Hyrule

This was another excellent year for video games, and while I spent my fair share of time with smaller indie games—Dredge, Sea of Stars, Cocoon, and the surprisingly SFF-tinged Powerwash Simulator to name a few—I sunk at least 400 hours into The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Like its predecessor, Tears of the Kingdom shows you the end goal (defeating a particularly ghoulish version of the ancient evil know as Ganon), but encourages you to meander your way to the finish line. And meander I did. Investigate rumors about the missing princess with a reporter who also happens to be a pelican? Sure! Follow a group of pitchfork-wielding locals into battle? You betcha! Rebuild an entire seaside village? It would be my pleasure. But it was the task of reuniting several hundred adorable, bumbling forest spirits that brought out the best and worst in players, including myself. The first few times I came across a korok with a too-big backpack, I treated them with care, building a makeshift cart to safely deliver them to their friend across the field. Then I realized I could attach the korok directly to my horse’s hitch and bounce on down the road, the korok “oof”ing all the way. By the tenth time, I noticed that the game designers often left building materials near the stranded korok—including rockets. And thus the Hyrule Aeronautics and Space Administration was born…

–Sarah

“Dear Alien Who Art in Heaven”, from Asteroid City

In this year of extraordinary films, I would argue that Asteroid City was one of the best. (In fact, I’m going to argue that, soon, in essay form.) And “Dear Alien Who Art in Heaven” is a perfect encapsulation of why: on the surface it’s silly and catchy, almost lighthearted. But it’s also a group of children processing the terror of the unknown, in a song, while their teacher desperately tries to stick to her script and ignore that her understanding of reality has to change. This is happening while the kids’ parents are being told lies by their government in another room—even though at least some of the truth has already come out in the papers. And then the parents see their kids performing this musical number through a closed-circuit TV, even though they’re only a few feet away and could just come outside to watch.

There’s so much going on here, and the song is good, and Seu Jorge is back in the Andersonverse! The alien’s in their heaven and all is right with the world.

–Leah

Dressing Up for Ren Faire

I’ve always been too timid to throw myself into the earnestness of cosplay or Halloween costumes without a clear theme, but for my first trip back to a Renaissance Faire in a decade, I had to at least make an effort. It helped that I was joined by the boundlessly creative Tor folks—not to mention the perfect Etsy find in a secondhand dirndl that was exactly my size and adorned with edelweiss (my Oma’s favorite flower) buttons. Walking through the Ren Faire in a swishy dress that fit like a glove and fit the brief made me feel like saying “hurra” (apparently “huzzah” in German).

—Natalie

David Tennant Owes Me Money for Making Me Feel Too Many Feelings

David Tennant has been many things over his career. A duck with far too much money. The literal Casanova. One of the most frightening Marvel villains. A detective who can’t seem to shave for his depression, stuck in a seaside town full of secrets. But, of course, he gained prominence in the public eye by playing the starring role on Doctor Who when the show came back from the dead in the 21st century. As his iteration is my Doctor—being the person who is your favorite, or even the fundamental version of the character in your eyes—I was heartbroken when he left. And I’ve enjoyed many of the projects he’s been a part of since (Scrooge McDuck has never been more lovable, which is a weird thing to think at any point in life), but I always assumed that the Doctor would be the role he was forever tied to in my mind.

Then he became Crowley in Good Omens, based on one of my favorite books. And he was absolutely perfect. How rude of him. Oh, and a cameo in a very good spate of Clone Wars episodes turned into a full co-starring role as keeper of all lightsaber knowledge on Ahsoka, the ancient droid Huyang.

This year conspired against me—the second season of Good Omens was arriving mere months before Doctor Who’s 60th anniversary, with Ahsoka smack in between them. David Tennant was set to play the Doctor again, alongside one of the show’s greatest companions, Donna Noble, a character who’d received a decidedly unjust fate at the end of her tenure. I was already prepared for the emotional wallop of having the Doctor and Donna back, but before I could even reach those summits, Good Omens slid in out of nowhere and K.O.’d  me with a love confession from Crowley to millennia-long best friend Aziraphale that goes decidedly awry. I gasped. I cried. I might have genuinely had a panic attack out of surprise? It was glorious.

Two months later, there’s a robot (I should mention that I am always emotionally compromised by robots) voiced by David Tennant, giving Ahsoka Tano advice about her relationship with former-Padawan Sabine Wren. David-Tennant-the-robot telling the duo not to separate and, when they don’t follow his advice, David-Tennant-the-robot openly grieving in the wake of their possible deaths. And there’s me, sobbing again over robot feelings.

Then there was David Tennant several weeks after that, back as the reminted (and justifiably confused) Fourteenth Doctor, immediately reunited with his best friend who can never remember him, Donna Noble. Of course that problem got fixed, as it was always meant to, but this Doctor noticed some interesting changes in the midst of all that. He was quicker to say that he loved people, attuned to Donna’s moods, constantly holding onto her as though separation might kill him. Just two best friends, clinging to one another in a reunion they knew couldn’t last forever until… it did. He broke me a third time.

I just don’t think that one actor should be allowed to shove me through a meat grinder of emotions on multiple television shows in the space of less than six months. David Tennant owes me money.

—Emmet

Chuck Tingle Takeover

Chuck Tingle took over this very site! And it was magnificent! Go check out the index if you missed any of it, and read Dr. Tingle’s excellent horror novel, Camp Damascus.

—Leah

Everything About Reservation Dogs

Reservation Dogs wrapped up its third and final season in September, and while fans might be tempted to mourn or wish for more, this is a show about how to say goodbye, and how the things and people we love are never really gone. And it does so with incredible humor, intelligence, and earnestness—it absolutely made me cry throughout its run, but not nearly as often as it made me laugh out loud, or left me beaming and feeling happy to be alive.

If you haven’t seen the series, please give it a chance at some point (it’s currently streaming on Hulu). It’s such a special show—I could go on and on about the wonderful cast (impossible to pick a favorite, though it’s fun to try!) and how perfectly the overall arc of the narrative resolved in the final episodes, but mostly I just want to thank creator Sterlin Harjo and everyone else who worked on the show for making television that’s not quite like anything else I’ve ever seen before; I’m so excited to see where this cast and creative team go in the future.

—Bridget

Levi’s garden in Scavengers Reign

Scavengers Reign took me completely by surprise, both because I had seen zero advertising for it before it appeared on HBO Max, and because it’s a wholly original and engrossing science fiction epic. It’s a brutal tale of shipwrecked space-haulers fighting to survive and escape a mostly-hostile alien world populated by telekinetic salamanders, giant parasitic crabs, and other fascinating perils—so where is the joy, I hear you asking. Among the survivors is Levi, a robot that finds itself slowly changed by the planet, its circuits altered by symbiotic spores. It is primarily through Levi that we’re able to occasionally slow down and appreciate the beauty of this world, as the robot begins to wonder and even dream for the first time.

–Sarah

Big Door Prize

Did no one else watch The Big Door Prize? A perfect cast, a lightly goofy premise, a lot of teen and adult drama, a great moment of tension involving a Ferris wheel, and the long-underappreciated Josh Segarra playing the owner of a kind of weird restaurant? (Segarra was so dour, so serious, on Arrow, and I am loving the way Big Door Prize and She-Hulk let him branch out.) The whole idea here is that a weird vending machine appears and if you give it your details (including your SSN, which, no thank you!) it will give you a card that tells you your destiny. This works out for people in all kinds of ways. Also there are weird moles, and Chris O’Dowd, and I really just think you should try it.

—Molly

James Urbaniak in Oppenheimer

As my group chats can wearily attest, I’ve talked of little else but Oppy since July. I’ll be writing about the movie more in the new year, but for now, for this list, I want to give a shout to the pure joy of seeing Dr. Rusty Venture himself, James fucking Urbaniak, appearing as mathematician Kurt Gödel, walking through the Princeton campus beside Tom Conti’s Einstein. In real life, Einstein once claimed that he stayed at Princeton: “Um das Privileg zu haben, mit Gödel zu Fuss nach Hause gehen zu dürfen” (more or less “to have the privilege of walking home with Gödel”—but even kinder than that in a way that doesn’t quite translate) and it made me so happy to see him included in the movie.

—Leah

Loki Gave Birth to the Multiverse Because Loki Is a Mom

Apologies, but I’ll never stop yelling about this particular thing. So many excellent bits about the second season of Loki aside, this part had me screaming at my television. Because the Loki of Norse mythology has done all sorts of fun things, and one of those things was having a truly ambiguous gender. Another one of those things was giving birth to a bunch of really cool animals (Sleipnir, anyone?) So Loki is a trickster god and a cosmic problem and a multifaceted being, but Loki is also a mom. Unfortunately, the MCU didn’t much like those aspects of the myths, and made Asgardian culture pretty sexist, or at least very into gendered norms. And yet…

Loki goes fully arcane at the end of season two and saves the multiverse by literally pulling the cords of all timelines together, dragging them to the End of Time, and using sheer force of will to weave them into a tree (that looks an awful lot like Yggdrasil, of course). The act is clearly arduous, painful, demands every bit of his strength—and at the end, the multiverse is born. It can’t be any clearer than that.

LOKI IS OUR MOM. THANKS MOM.

—Emmet

(Spoilery) Moments from Mrs. Davis!

Jay’s Sandwich

Jay’s whole thing is that he feeds people. He runs his decrepit diner out in the desert, and any time someone stops in, he makes them a plate and listens to their sorrows if they want to talk. He gives and gives and gives. The moment when Sister TK comes in, makes him sit at his own bar, and makes him a simple TK was one of the most moving artistic moments I had this year. I had to pause. I might have cried. (I do not cry.) There are Reasons for that, and I’m not gonna talk about them. But it makes me happier than I can say that this ridiculous show went there.

—Leah

 “The wings… are LITERAL.”

Of all the revelations on the delightfully bonkers Mrs. Davis, from Jesus Christ to the Holy Grail sneakers ad, this was the one that had me absolutely cackling: Nun Simone has no love lost for the universally hailed AI known as Mrs. Davis, yet even she is disillusioned to discover that this do-good algorithm, which has transformed into a modern religion, was based on a Buffalo Wild Wings app. People have sacrificed their lives, often literally, for a chance to be granted “wings” via app filter, and they aren’t even poetically metaphorical—gah, it’s perfect. And the fact that it was delivered in conversation with Ashley Romans as app developer Joy—a welcome return to television after her short-lived brilliance in Y: The Last Man—was the spicy buffalo sauce on top.

—Natalie

…Everything!

Mrs Davis is a show that encompasses an unbelievable number of things, and I was entirely in for everything: cell phone smashes, Betty Gilpin’s determination, exploding heads, Jesus making all kinds of delicious food, a screwy heist, and Shohreh Aghadashloo in a role that no one should ever spoil for anyone else, ever. Magic sneakers! Never-seen commercials! A really special roller-coaster, literally! I can’t talk about this show with anything approaching coherence, but it was the most inventive, most unexpected, most itself thing on television this year. Let Leah tell you more.

—Molly

Welcome to… Schmicagoooo!

While I enjoyed season 1 of Schmigadoon!, I couldn’t keep up with all of the classic musicals lampooned (though of course I appreciated Jane Krakowski’s riff on the Baroness from The Sound of Music), but season 2’s shift to Schmicago! was right up my musical theater nerd alley. Titus Burgess as the Narrator; Alan Cumming and Kristin Chenoweth showing us what would happen if Sweeney Todd and Miss Hannigan fell in love, then decided to grind some orphans into sausage; and, yes, Krakowski stealing the spotlight again as a gender-swapped Billy Flynn in lawyer Bobbie Flanagan. It was a smorgasbord of superstar cameos and sly winks that I was delighted to catch.

—Natalie

The Appendix to Matt Singer’s Opposable Thumbs

Opposable Thumbs is a co-biography of Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. It’s one of my favorite things I read this year, and among its many great moments, singer includes an appendix titled “Buried Treasure That Siskel and Ebert Loved”—a chronological list of 25 movies that the critics championed, but that, for whatever reason, never landed with audiences. It’s such a cool and big-hearted gesture to use the last pages of this book to spotlight these movies, and I think S&E would have loved it.

—Leah

Madeline Usher’s wig in The Fall of the House of Usher

There was a lot to enjoy in Mike Flanagan’s camp horror miniseries The Fall of the House of Usher: Carla Gugino’s performance as a demonic entity, abundant references to Edgar Allan Poe’s canon, and the dramatic monologues we’ve come to expect from Flanagan’s work. But every time Madeline Usher (Mary McDonnell) stepped into the frame, her silver wig became the central focus. I cannot emphasize enough how positive this comment is. There’s a great scene later in the show when we encounter an emotional climax for Madeline’s character, and when she reaches up, we’re expecting her to take the wig off, a metaphorical shedding of the armor and chilly exterior she’s worn all season. But she just unclips the bangs. Excellent.

—Bailey

The Ending of Killers of the Flower Moon

DO NOT READ THIS BLURB IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE MOVIE.

OK?

The moment when Martin Scorsese takes us to the set of a radio program (The Lucky Strike Hour, a real show from the 1930s) to show us the immediate mediation of the white supremacist terrorist murders of the Osage—all of whom are voiced by white actors—is breathtaking. The moment when he himself steps out to read the obituary of Mollie Kyle, taking us into what can only be the future from the radio station’s perspective, to show us that after everything we’ve seen, the killers outlived those they wronged, and that now Scorsese is calling himself out for being complicit in the ongoing mediation of a terrorist nightmare, is one of the greatest cinematic moments I have ever seen.

—Leah

Justice for Ro Laren and Donna Noble

You know how you watch a show that purports to be (sometimes) about empathy and decency, and then something horrible happens that seems to undermine those themes and it’s just left hanging there? Because that was how it felt to watch Ensign Ro and Donna Noble’s last episodes on their respective shows, Star Trek: The Next Generation and Doctor Who. In Ro’s case, it was always particularly painful because the show, at the time, clearly sided with Picard’s hurt feelings over her desertion to the Maquis. How could she do that to him? He had placed his trust in her, a man who never did so easily, and that betrayal was going to haunt him for the rest of his life. With Donna, it was even easier to see where the story was falling down—not only did the Doctor forcibly block Donna’s memory without her consent, but it was done on a narrative level to make the Doctor really sad.

When Jean-Luc confronts Ro Laren in the final season of Picard, it makes no difference that she returned to Starfleet some time ago and was reinstated (after a lengthy rehabilitation process that he knows nothing about). He is still angered by her actions, unwilling to trust her. And finally, thirty years after her defection aired on television, Ro gets the chance to counter this narrative… because Jean-Luc betrayed her, too. She questions his loyalty to institutions, calls him out for his entirely conditional support, tells him that he confused morality with duty. Jean-Luc may still be heartbroken by what happened, but he doesn’t have more right to that hurt than Ro Laren does. He never did and, in fact, the fault for this hurt lands equally at his own feet. And though Ro does die shortly afterward (having given Picard information essential to the Federation’s survival), she does so on her own terms—and Picard is left with the knowledge that his own pride prevented him from healing this wound a long time ago.

In Donna’s case, the ending is much happier, but no less emotional; The Doctor knows that Donna will die once he releases the knowledge in her brain and they save London together. Donna, once restored, tells him these are the best sixty seconds of her life, and dies in his arms. The Doctor tells the Meep’s forces that they were defeated—”by the DoctorDonna.” But a moment later, Donna gasps back to life, and everything is fine. Donna Noble gets her story back, her memories back, and everything that she deserves. And it happens in a snap because that’s how easy it should be. Television gets pulled together quickly and often in a hodgepodge state. It’s great to hit the Undo button now and again.

—Emmet

Grimm! (yes, the TV show from 2011)

My year began with a very weird time in which I couldn’t do anything. (Recovering from surgery is a trip.) And so I watched Grimm. I watched all seven seasons of it, all the patently absurd character twists, the shift from fairy-tale monsters to elaborate otherworldly schemes, the relationships that made no sense and the … listen, I still don’t really understand what happened with Juliette, but I’d probably watch a whole show about it. I watched Grimm partly just to watch Portland (while I was stuck inside, not being in Portland), but also because a magical procedural is a ridiculous and perfect idea. Please give me another one. Twenty-two episode seasons and all. Please.

—Molly

Dungeons and Dragons Rolled a Nat 20

There was a lot of trepidation around the original announcement of a Dungeons of Dragons movie. While the tabletop game has had a large impact on the fantasy landscape (as well as a generally improved image in the eyes of the public), its vastness in scope and generally complicated ruleset make it difficult to sell. But this movie does it justice—charming, funny, heartfelt, and imaginative, bolstered by a cast that commits to their performances (Regé-Jean Paige as Xenk Yendar and Michelle Rodriguez as Holga Kilgore come to mind). Honor Among Thieves balances introducing new viewers to an unfamiliar world with callouts that players will recognize and appreciate. There’s an attention to detail here that points to a genuine love for Dungeons and Dragons and enthusiasm for sharing that love with others. I would watch a sequel. I would watch 10 sequels.

—Bailey

THEMBERCHAUD.

–Leah

In a year full of excellent movies, Honor Among Thieves may have been the most fun. It’s hard to pick a favorite moment or character or even an easter egg—but I see you, Bobby the Barbarian!—because it all fits so perfectly together as a whole. And that’s because everyone commits to the bit. The performances are all pitch-perfect, and the characters are recognizable “types” without being cliche (okay yes, the tiefling has a predictably tragic backstory, but a sorcerer who lacks self-confidence? COMEDY GOLD!). The meta-references are clever, but never overshadow the story. And best of all, the writing is funny, but never mean or snarky—this movie loves DnD, and it wants us along for the ride.

–Sarah

Wait okay, also: “Oh, Jarnathan…”

—Leah, again

Taylor Swift Friendship Bracelets 

The Swifties are a fully realized fandom. There is a plot, a mythology, layers of backstory you have to know in order to get all the references. You can analyze Taylor Swift the same way we analyze Lord of the Rings. One day someone will publish the Swiftmarillion. I’m right and you know it.

The Swiftie friendship bracelets quickly became a key element of her record-breaking Eras Tour this year, with fans exchanging homemade bracelets featuring lyrics and references with each other at shows. It’s a beautiful way to connect and share in each other’s excitement, but the cutest part of this is that the fans just…started doing this, and it spread. Taylor had nothing to do with it beyond a throwaway lyric in her song “You’re On Your Own Kid”. It’s one of the truly great parts of being in a fandom—someone does something really stinkin’ cute and it catches on like wildfire. Everyone is being creative in a way that’s relatively accessible and easy to participate in, and you don’t actually have to go to a show to participate (fans are mailing each other bracelets, or exchanging them at screenings of the Eras Tour movie, too). And it’s just so goddamn sweet, you know? (Made even sweeter knowing that Taylor’s new boyfriend, Travis Kelce, got her attention after making a bracelet for her with his number on it. WHAT A MOVE.) From what I hear, it’s spreading to other fandoms too. So get yourself a bead kit now, especially if you plan on being at WorldCon in Glasgow next year–I’ll have an arm full of nerdy bracelets to share with you.

—Christina

That Time Tech Tried Riot Racing Exactly Once and Won on The Bad Batch

A lot of great Star Wars stuff happened this year; droid bars became a thing; Din and Grogu got a house; Ezra Bridger pretended to be a stormtrooper again; Anakin Skywalker’s spirit teased Ahsoka into not dying; nightsisters were everywhere. But much of the best drama and comedy in that galaxy far, far away belonged to The Bad Batch. For most traumatizing entry, I give the award to “The Outpost,” a devastating short war film that finally breaks Crosshair of his loyalty to the Empire at great cost.

On the flip side, we had the early season episode “Faster,” in which half the Batch (Omega, Wrecker, and Tech) are dragged off by their employer Cid to a world called Safa Toma, where she has a droid pilot involved in a sport called Riot Racing. The droid in question is played by Ben Schwartz doing what he does best (self-aggrandizement via flawless delivery), but he’s offed by one of Cid’s criminal business associates who is hoping to collect money for her bad racing bets. This leaves Tech to step in and race in the droid’s stead… mostly because he’s interested and because Omega said they had to help. (You do what little-big sister tells you. It’s their only hard and fast rule.)

Riot Racing is basically Mario Kart, with added Star Wars flavor, but because it’s a bit slower and grubbier than podracing, there’s even more room for deadly shenanigans and it’s easier to see what’s happening on the track. And because Tech is incredibly intelligent—and more than a little autistic, as this season helpfully highlights—he handles the race with his usual straightforward unflappability and keen focus, while Wrecker worries at him over the comms. If you’re into competence porn, this is where it’s at. The fast and criminal nature of the sport overlaid with Tech’s utter calm makes the episode a very special kind of fun because it’s never about the tension of winning so much as the puzzle of how he will manage it. Tech’s perplexity on learning that Wrecker and Omega didn’t believe he would survive (“You sound surprised,” he says when Wrecker cheers over the fact that he won) makes the victory that much sweeter.

Is it even funnier that this occurs while the group is trying to keep a low profile and their most cautious members (Hunter and Echo) are on a cargo haul? Yes. Yes, it is.

—Emmet

Deadloch: The Greatest Feminist Comedy Crime Series to Ever Come Out of Australia

Deadloch tends to be described as a “feminist noir comedy” or a “black comedy murder mystery,” but it’s incredibly difficult to capture what makes the show so brilliant without digging into everything that happens across its eight hour-long episodes. The creators of the series called the project “Funny Broadchurch,” but it goes so far beyond a straightforward parody or wacky Australian spoof of the ultra-grim British/Nordic crime genre—it’s hilarious, but in genuinely surprising ways, while also weaving together some deeply compelling (and also very goofy) characters into its central mystery.

Set in the titular Tasmanian town, the story follows two mismatched female detectives as they investigate the homicide of a local man—at first the spoofing of conventions (one detective is a  hyper-organized straight shooter, the other is a foul-mouthed trainwreck) feels relatively safe, even as it smartly calls out some of the more troubling tropes we’ve seen play out a million times (the sexist police commissioner automatically assumes the murder victim must be a woman, and seems offended to find that he’s wrong). But as the series goes on, it becomes clear that the show is operating on a much higher level—the humor isn’t a veneer, it’s the entire point: startlingly irreverent humor as both a survival mechanism and a way forward, veering from the goofy to the absurd, from endearingly silly to absolutely savage in its takedowns of everything from the casual misogyny and homophobia of the locals and police brass to the hypocrisy and entitlement of the town’s wealthier and supposedly more enlightened residents.

But even that doesn’t do it justice. I finished watching Deadloch a few weeks ago and I can’t stop thinking about—both in terms of ridiculous and amazing bits of dialogue that cracked me up and the perfect balancing act it manages to pull off, in the end. The series is likely not for everyone, but it’s brilliant, and one of my favorite things to happen all year—it’s available on Amazon Prime if you want to check it out!

—Bridget

Characters Who Are Actually Allowed To Age and Still Be Rad

Ahsoka Tano. Stede Bonnet. Una Chin-Riley. Donna Noble. Blackbeard. Captain Christopher Pike. Hell, even Brother Day. And every character played by Pedro Pascal, everyone’s favorite middle-aged adoptive dad. It was a really, really good year for remembering that adventures, stories, lives don’t end at 40, 50, or beyond.. (Am I going to note here that there are still more men getting good grown-ass roles than anyone else? I sure am. But this year, unlike so many others, gave me a little bit of hope that it doesn’t always have to be like that.)

—Molly

Everything Is a Musical Now, Dammit

It’s no secret that I love musicals, and generally wish they were in more things. And sure, sometimes we get lucky, and the world provides. Buffy has a rightfully famous musical episode, after all, and I have the Quantum Leap Man-of-La-Mancha episode to keep me warm when the winter is particularly foreboding.

But I want more, and I deserve to be accommodated for no reason other than significant complaining. (That’s not true, the real reason is that I’m empirically right about musicals being a fascinating art form to port over into every other art form. I will never stop insisting this.) It must have worked, too, by the varied evidence this year.

“I’m Just Ken” was easily one of the best parts of Barbie, and contained endless homages to movie musical history therein. The Marvels went to a planet where people sang instead of speaking, and choreographed dance breaks ensued. Scott Pilgrim Takes Off offered layers of meta-reimagining to its source material, but the final form of Scott’s original story? A musical. The Enterprise crew accidentally activates an improbability fold on Strange New Worlds, causing everyone in the crew to break into song when their feelings are running high. BOOM. Musical. I have won my debate with no one. Thank you.

—Emmet

***

Those are our picks—be sure to share your own moments of joy in the comments!

The post A Few Things That Brought Us Nerdy Joy in 2023 appeared first on Reactor.

It turns out that Harris knew next to nothing about Doctor Who before the series’ current showrunner, Russell T. Davies, reached out to him.

“He’d never heard of [Doctor Who] in his life, bless him,” Davies told Entertainment Weekly in a recent interview. “I was lucky enough to work with the great man [Harris] on a show called It’s a Sin, about the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, and working with him was such a joy. The Toymaker, he’s kind of the god of games, so he shuffles cards, he does magic tricks, and all of that fits Neil Patrick Harris. If you go through agents, they often tell you to go away. I was able to send just a text saying, ‘Do you fancy reading this?’ He read it and literally phoned me up going, ‘Let me get this right, so the Doctor’s an alien, right?’ I was like, ‘Oh my god, you really have never heard of Doctor Who!’ But he couldn’t resist it, and he came to Cardiff, and we had the most spectacular time.”

Harris, who is a magician in his own right, seems like a great fit for The Toymaker, a villain we’ve seen before in Doctor Who, but not for many a decade.

“Oh, he’s good,” Tennant told EW about Harris’ performance. “I don’t quite know if he knew what to expect, but he dived in with such gusto and brio. This part requires a lot of skill sets and Neil turns up with them all. I don’t want to give away too much about what might be required of the Toymaker, but you need a sort of an all-round entertainer to play that part and a very good actor, so there aren’t a lot of people who could have ticked all the boxes required.”

We’ll get to see Harris’ performance, say goodbye to Tennant and Tate, and say hello to the new Doctor, played by Ncuti Gatwa when “The Giggle” becomes available on Disney+ starting at 1:30 p.m. EST on December 9, 2023.

The post Neil Patrick Harris Had Never Heard of Doctor Who Before Russell T. Davies Asked Him to Play The Toymaker appeared first on Reactor.

Recap

Isaac Newton (Nathaniel Curtis) goes out and sits under an apple tree; one apple falls and hits him on the head. The TARDIS crashes into said tree immediately afterward and the Doctor and Donna emerge, realizing who they’ve accidentally run into. Donna insists on making a joke about how Isaac Newton could certainly understand “the gravity of the situation,” and the TARDIS dematerializes. Newton tries to recall the excellent word Donna used and comes up with “mavity.”

The next place the TARDIS materializes appears to be some sort of spaceship. The TARDIS is still exploding from the coffee that was spilled, and Donna asks the Doctor if it can be fixed. The Doctor plugs his sonic screwdriver into the lock and the TARDIS begins a sort of hard reset. Immediately after this, it dematerializes and strands them. Donna beings to have a panic attack, but the Doctor promises that he will get her home, and thinks that the TARDIS left them because the HADS (Hostile Action Displacement System) engaged. Basically whenever the TARDIS senses that it might be in imminent danger, it leaves until said danger is resolved. The Doctor had deactivated the system, but with the reset, it came back online. So as long as they can figure out what the “hostile action” in question is and neutralize it, it should come back and they’ll be able to leave.

The ship is large and empty and keeps shifting its shape and carries one robot that is moving very slowly. Occasionally there’s an alarm and words spoken, but the Doctor doesn’t know the language. Donna and the Doctor get to the bridge of the ship and find a seat for a commander but very little information: What they do know is that three years before, an airlock was opened and closed. When they look out there’s no stars—they’re at the edge of the known universe looking onto vast nothingness. The Doctor has Donna work in one room to try and get the ship to stop running on automatic. He leaves to work in another room across from her, then comes back and listens to Donna talk about her family. He keeps asking leading questions about all the people in her life, then mentions that his arms are too long.

In the other room, the Doctor is working and Donna comes in and begins asking him a lot of questions about Gallifrey… and mentions that her arms are too long. These are entities copying the Doctor and Donna’s bodies, and Donna hears the Doctor scream her name at the same moment that his duplicate begins to stretch apart at the arms. The Doctor and Donna reunite, and ask these beings why they are copying them and what their purpose is. The entities say that they come from outside their universe, suggest that they will eat the Doctor and Donna, and chase them down the spaceship corridor, but they grow too big and get stuck because they don’t have the hang of physical form yet. The Doctor and Donna try to get away in the hidden tunnels of the ship, but they get separated and run into the entities again.

The Doctor winds up believing that this copy is the real Donna because she tells him that she has his more recent memories from being the DoctorDonna and that she wants him to talk about the Flux and all the terrible things that have happened to him. She can’t hold the form for long enough, though, so the Doctor runs away and winds up breaking down, screaming and hitting the wall and sobbing. Donna tricks her copy into revealing itself and runs away. All four run about until they meet up again, but the Doctor figures out which Donna is the real one, then suggests that these entities can’t cross a line of salt without counting it, like fae or vampires. The trick only works for a while, and the Doctor copy tells them that they were drawn to the universe because all the hatred, pain, and war called to them, and they want to join in by taking form.

Donna and the Doctor make it back to the bridge, pursued by the entities, but Donna thinks to ask why they keep trying to scare them. The Doctor realizes this is a good point… and that the answer is that adrenaline makes them thinks more and faster, making them easier to copy. They try not to think to slow the entities down, but of course, the Doctor can’t do that for long. They find the body of the ship’s captain outside, long dead, and know that she killed herself—that was the use of the airlock three years ago. The Doctor figures out that the ship is on a slow countdown to destruction because the captain didn’t want these entities unleashed on their universe, and the slower the system goes, the harder it is for them figure it out. They speed up the countdown and race the entities to the robot about to push the button to destroy the ship. Because the countdown is nearly complete regardless, the TARDIS is no longer in danger and materializes to pick up the Doctor. He gets on board and goes to pick up Donna, but she’s mixed up with her copy. He tests them, asking why a joke they made earlier was funny, and picks the Donna who insists that the joke is simply funny because it is… but he picks the wrong Donna.

Thankfully, the Doctor realizes that the entity still has arms that are a fraction too long and kicks her out, pulling the real Donna on board moments before she dies in the explosion. The Doctor worries that he shouldn’t have invoked superstition with the salt gambit, that it feels like a mistake. They materialize in the same alley a little off from the day they left and find Wilf (Bernard Cribbins) waiting for them. The Doctor embraces his old friend, but chaos breaks out all around them: Wilf tells them that they have to do something because it’s the end of the world…

Commentary

He licked something and then pretended it was killing him to freak Donna out, the absolute bastard. I love him. I love them. Argh. This episode did so many of my favorite things.

They clearly got a big ol’ Disney-backed CGI budget to make the space more expansive (and the copies more frighteningly uncanny), but this is that good crunchy locked-room style mystery with extra creepiness for flavor. It’s just like “Midnight” in that respect and relies on similar dynamics throughout—namely using your actors to create the unease, and really letting it sit there. The computer graphics worked well, but the episode’s most upsetting moments were created by David Tennant and Catherine Tate looking just a hair off: a bit nasty, a little too vacant, just the wrong side of calculating, all dead in the eyes. Then there’s the strange contortions done by their body doubles.

The key is then combining that with both Donna and the Doctor being far too raw to handle this kind of runaround. Allowing the Doctor a moment where he thinks Donna might understand his more recent pains, and then viciously clawing that away from him—a breakdown was the minimum that demanded. (And no one breaks down like David Tennant, as these episodes are keen to remind us.) Donna is very clear-eyed about what failure means this time around because she has far more to lose than she used to. She fully walks herself through the steps of how her family would grieve her, and we do it with her in that moment.

Having said that, this episode is also full of Donna Noble brilliance—the way she tricks the copy by just babbling at him for ages until he forgets about the tie and she notices that it’s gone is exactly what I’ve been waiting for. The fact that the Doctor simultaneously screws up the same scenario because he’s so desperate to be seen and known is spot on. The Davies episodes never forget to make the crux of most drama (and problems) the ways that people are people, and it’s always true for his versions of the Doctor as much as all of the companions, in a manner that is always deeply satisfying to watch. All the joking and teasing, running right alongside the Doctor and Donna fighting over whose fault it is that they’re stranded, knowing that it won’t help. And it’s this exact people-y problem that almost causes Donna’s death: She overthinks her answer to the Doctor’s question because she’s scared, and the fact that it’s only a little piddly mathematical thing that gets the Doctor to notice he’s got the wrong person… oof. That’s what makes the episode truly scary, far more than contorting void invaders.

It seems remiss not to mention that age plays into this as well, in a way that feels so real and earned. This is true for the fact that our actors are both fifteen years older than when they last inhabited these roles together, but it’s true for both characters as well (in ways that are frankly unfathomable to a human brain), and it makes the drama play very, very differently than it ever has on Doctor Who. When Donna is scared and the Doctor is trying to shore her up through his own panic, there’s a depth to the emotion here that is borne of time, plain and simple. Real time that is measured in the experience of its actors, and the narrative of the show, and it hits on a much deeper level than I think the show has ever achieved.

It’s interesting to note that most of the previous Davies era’s more frightening concepts hinged on the idea of nothingness and what crawls in to replace it: “Midnight” features an entity that exists in a place where no other life can survive, and it creeps into the bodies of sentient beings and steals their voices; the Wire, which takes people’s faces and leaves them blank on the street; the Daleks emerging from the Void between realities, after residing in a ship that could survive that lack of matter and life; now these beings from beyond the universe itself, drawn in and shaped by our worst impulses and copying our persons down to every memory. It’s a more extreme fear of the dark, in a way, what lies beyond our understanding.

And the parallels to “Midnight” in particular come through in the plot being exacerbated by Fourteen… just being himself. On the planet Midnight, the Doctor winds up nearly getting killed because he can’t stop himself from interfering in the situation at hand and believing his own cleverness will fix things. He also nearly has his personhood stolen by a being capable of perfect imitation and replication. Practically any Doctor would have difficulty not trying to think their way out of a problem, even knowing that more thoughts gave their enemy an advantage. But Ten (and Fourteen) is one of the worst for that because he has far too much energy and desperate need to show off programmed into the base code.

The tenderness between the Doctor and Donna, this deep well of understanding, is only growing in the next episode of their reunion. The way that the Doctor keeps physically needing to touch Donna, to remind himself of her presence, to reassure her in fear, to ground himself in his own anxieties, it’s plastered all over the episode. It elevates their banter and their turmoil to a devastating pitch.

And then to end with the streets of London exploding and Wilf! Knowing that Bernard Cribbins lost his wife, held on just long enough to shoot these episodes, and then passed away… it’s hard not to feel like he wanted to say goodbye here. To give the Doctor another hug, get him to set things right, and move on to the next adventure. Get your tissues ready for next week.

Bits and Bobs

• The use of “Wild Blue Yonder” feels very much like a seed being planted for something later, either in the specials or the upcoming season: It’s an interesting aside within the episode, but it doesn’t really play into the themes of what’s happening. I’m hoping it pops up again in the next episode to tie something together—after all, it’s not often that the TARDIS randomly plays music on speaker. The salt thing is going to come back too, of course, and I can’t wait to see how it’s used.

• The HADS has shown up in several Doctor Who episodes, most often during Moffat’s tenure, but technically first showed up in a Second Doctor serial “The Krotons.”

• The “mavity” joke plays throughout the episode with the Doctor and Donna both occasionally saying “gravity” and then realizing their mistake, changing to “mavity.” To say that I would be extremely happy if the show had to use “mavity” forever is an understatement. This is what’s good about a ridiculous time travel show. It’s mavity now. It was always mavity. The Doctor and Donna keep making the mistake because some part of their time traveling brains can remember the original timeline where it wasn’t. Yes.

• So here’s a thought: The Doctor agrees with Donna that Isaac Newton is hot, then has a moment of surprise wondering if this is what he’s like now. Other incarnations of the Doctor have been either canonically or implicitly queer—I’d make arguments for Three, Five, and Eight, while Nine and Thirteen simply are—so it’s not as though this is a first for the character. And it’s not as though it doesn’t work for Tennant’s portrayal, which was mostly Rose-sexual throughout his original tenure, but always had wiggle room he never truly explored. But… it occurs to me that perhaps this is a clue. What if these moments (where the Doctor finds himself surprised at new traits, maybe even the elevated desire for touch) are the Fifteenth Doctor’s personality attempting to surface? We know that something has gone amiss, and we don’t know exactly how this next regeneration is going to emerge. Maybe this is Fifteen beating against Fourteen’s skull, trying to push his way out? I’m thinking about how this arc into our next Doctor might play, and I’m kinda galaxy-braining with the theories right now, so everyone should probably ignore me, I will be down this well all week.

Next week. The Toymaker is coming…

The post Doctor Who Lets Horror Take the Wheel in “Wild Blue Yonder” appeared first on Reactor.

As someone who thinks about Doctor Who all the time (it’s true!) I’ve been musing about spin-offs I’d like to see. Here’s a bunch. (Warning: Spoilers for old Doctor Who stories ahead…)

U.N.I.T.

There have been lots of reports that this is the most likely new spin-off, including a Deadline report from last March that cited official BBC sources. And I’m so on board. Jemma Redgrave is great as Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, and the groundwork has already been laid for former companions like Tegan or Ace to work as field agents. The concept sells itself: a paramilitary science organization deals with threats to Earth when the Doctor is off doing stuff elsewhere.

Note: I’m not including a Torchwood revival on this list, because it sounds like a U.N.I.T. spinoff is a done deal, and Torchwood and U.N.I.T. would cover a lot of the same territory—and Torchwood could easily appear on a U.N.I.T. show as a rival organization.

The Eighth Doctor

This is one that’s been bandied about—basically, since Paul McGann only got to play the Doctor in one TV movie and one minisode, why not give him a show of his own? After all, he’s been incredible in all the Big Finish audios. I have to admit, I don’t quite see this one, because having two actors playing the Doctor on screen at the same time could be a mite confusing for casual viewers. And if any past Doctor could get their own show, I’d vote for the Fugitive Doctor (Jo Martin). But this is one that people keep talking about, so I thought I’d mention it here.

The Paternoster Gang

Apparently this one has been a possibility at various times. For those who missed it, past showrunner Steven Moffat introduced a lady Silurian (Madame Vastra) and her human assistant/lover Jenny, living in Victorian England. They were eventually joined by Strax, an oddly peace-loving Sontaran warrior, and made several appearances during the Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi eras, as well as some Big Finish audios. A lesbian dinosaur lady solving mysteries with her friends in Victorian England honestly just feels like a no-brainer. Why doesn’t this exist already?

Clara and Lady Me: The Immortals

Another hold-over from the Moffat era. The Doctor’s longtime companion Clara became immortal, teamed up with another immortal named Lady Me, and stole a TARDIS. And then… they were never seen again. I would give a few teeth (someone else’s, natch) to see what happened to these two unkillable ladies who used to be human. How much trouble can they get up to? (How much you got?) The main question is whether the quite-busy Jenna Coleman would come back to play Clara again.

(Side note: Borusa’s scheme in “The Five Doctors” seems increasingly silly, considering how easy it was for these two characters, along with Captain Jack Harkness, to become immortal. Five out of ten, Borusa!)

Porridge the Emperor

Neil Gaiman’s second Doctor Who story introduced a genuinely fascinating character: a galactic emperor who decided to quit and go work at a circus, Hedgewick’s World of Wonders, under the name Porridge. I stan a reluctant ruler! And watching this guy try to defend all the civilized worlds against alien armadas, when he’d really rather be sleeping in a barn and playing chess, would be super fun. Mostly, though, after falling in love with the TV show Willow and being supremely bummed that there’s no second season, I want more of Warwick Davis as a tired, burned-out warrior who’s still doing his best.

Clyde and Rani

I miss The Sarah Jane Adventures. So, so much. I’m still mourning the incredible Elisabeth Sladen, who meant so much to me as a child, too. My favorite characters in the show, apart from Sarah Jane herself, were the wise-cracking Clyde and the resourceful Rani. And the recent Tales of the Tardis episode with Clyde and Jo Grant made it clear that Clyde is in love with Rani. So now I want a TV show about Clyde and Rani as a couple who try to carry on Sarah Jane’s work while also trying to figure out who they are to each other. Also, Rani could meet the latest incarnation of the Master, and sparks would fly! (Rani is played by Anjli Mohindra, whose romantic partner is current Master actor Sacha Dhawan.)

The Masters

Speaking of the Master… Big Finish has already shown how fun it is to have different Masters team up/fight each other, plus there was that John Simm/Michelle Gomez crossover in Peter Capaldi’s penultimate story. A TV series, or at least a miniseries, would be so fun! Basically, take the Simm/Gomez dynamic, and throw Sacha Dhawan into the mix, and you’ve got wonderful chaos. I would watch each episode five times.

Abslom Daak, Dalek Killer!

Saturday’s Doctor Who episode was a loose retelling of the comic strip “The Star Beast” from Doctor Who Monthly. So on that subject, there’s another Doctor Who Weekly/Monthly comic that I’d like to see adapted for the screen: Abslom Daak. Basically, Abslom Daak is a criminal who gets a choice between execution and being sent to kill Daleks. (Guess which he chooses.) He just goes around cutting up Daleks with a big chainsaw, and occasionally tangles with Draconians and other aliens. He eventually gathers a crew of rascals who become a kind of chosen family, including an Ice Warrior. It is SO FUN. (Though I would leave out the girlfriend in the refrigerator, please.)

Class

Besides Torchwood and Sarah Jane Adventures, there was one other Doctor Who spinoff: this lovely show about high-school students who have to clean up some messes the Doctor left behind. One of the students and one of the teachers are both refugees from the same genocide, and it gets intense for various reasons. (Mostly because the Twelfth Doctor does not clean up after himself very well.) I really loved this show, and I’m still not over the fact that it only got one season. It ended on one hell of a cliffhanger, plus I need to see what happened to these characters. Okay, so they wouldn’t be teenagers anymore, but we could get a sequel with some new characters in the mix. Call it Class 2.0.

Martha and Mickey, Defenders of the Earth

And finally… this could just be part of a U.N.I.T. show, but I’d really love to see Martha Jones and Mickey Smith teaming up to save the Earth. They’re both really fun characters, and we never got to see enough of their relationship. And I would watch Freema Agyeman do literally anything. She could boil eggs for an hour and I’d be into it.

This article was originally published at Happy Dancing, Charlie Jane Anders’ newsletter, available on Buttondown.

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of the young-adult trilogy Victories Greater Than Death, Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak, and Promises Stronger Than Darkness, along with the short story collection Even Greater Mistakes. She’s also the author of Never Say You Can’t Survive (August 2021), a book about how to use creative writing to get through hard times. Her other books include The City in the Middle of the Night and All the Birds in the Sky. She co-created Escapade, a trans superhero, for Marvel Comics, and featured her in New Mutants Vol. 4 and the miniseries New Mutants: Lethal Legion. She reviews science fiction and fantasy books for The Washington Post. Her TED Talk, “Go Ahead, Dream About the Future” got 700,000 views in its first week. With Annalee Newitz, she co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.

The post Doctor Who Spinoffs I’d Love To See appeared first on Reactor.

The marathon will end Saturday, November 25, 2023 at 9:00 a.m. ET, which is also the end of MST3K’s latest crowdfunding efforts to get the fourteenth season of the show off the ground.

There are several places where you can watch said marathon, which are all helpfully listed on the website, MST3KTurkeyDay.com. One of those places is Pluto TV, which has an entire channel dedicated to playing Mystery Science Theater 3000 at all times.

If you want to sprinkle in some timey wimey times with your MST3K viewing, you can also check out Pluto TV’s dedicated Doctor Who Classic channel, which will apparently have “special marathons of iconic episodes” airing all day on Thursday, though which ones will be included remains unclear.

Hopefully, one or both of these options will help you have a nerdy and delightful Thanksgiving!

The post This Thanksgiving, You Can Once Again Watch MST3K Rather Than Talk To Your Family appeared first on Reactor.

Recap

In case you didn’t catch it, I’ll start with a brief recap of the Children in Need Special, “Destination: Skaro”: Davros (Julian Bleach) meets with an assistant named Mr. Castavillian (Mawaan Rizwan) to discuss his latest weapon to aid the Kaleds in their war against the Thals—an armored machine in which he plans to put their people once they’ve been genetically modified to that end. After being unimpressed with all of Castavillian’s possible names and ideas, Davros leaves the room for a moment. The TARDIS promptly crashes there—taking the weapon’s claw arm with it—and the Fourteenth Doctor (David Tennant) emerges. He immediately recognizes and names the Dalek, as well as its catch phrase, giving Castavillian plenty of good ideas. Realizing that he’s emerged at the Dalek inception point, he insists he was never there, but does replace the claw arm with the first thing he can find on the TARDIS: a plunger. Davros reenters after the Doctor is gone, sees the plunger, and decides that he loves it.

Onto the episode: After a brief reminder of New Who’s season four finale, the Doctor lands in London during the holiday season and immediately runs into Donna Noble (Catherine Tate) and her daughter Rose (Yasmin Finney). Trying his best to avoid contact, the Doctor ducks away as a spaceship appears to crash-land nearby. He runs into Donna’s husband Shaun Temple (Karl Collins), and pretends to be a friend of Nerys to explain all the weird personal questions he’s asking, the main one being why Shaun is driving a cab given that winning lottery ticket he secretly slipped them after their wedding. It turns out that Donna gave away most of the money, except what they needed to buy a house.

The Doctor heads to the crash site and meets Shirley Anne Bingham (Ruth Madeley), a scientist for U.N.I.T. who is excited to have her first encounter with the Doctor. He tells her that it feels as though fate is drawing him back to Donna Noble and explains that this is the first time that he’s regenerated back into someone he used to be—he worries that he doesn’t know himself anymore. Meanwhile, Rose bemoans her mother always missing all the alien stuff while Donna’s mother Sylvia (Jacqueline King) pretends not to notice it either. One of Rose’s friends brings her over to an additional crash site where an escape pod seems to have landed. Back behind the bins at home, Rose discovers a cute furry alien who calls itself the Meep (Miriam Margoyles), and warns her that it’s being hunted. She agrees to hide the Meep in her shed out back where she makes plush toys to sell abroad.

A team of U.N.I.T. soldiers try to break into the ship—which Shirley Anne believes parked in the steel factory rather than crashing into it—and are promptly brainwashed and go searching for the Meep. A group of aliens who look like bipedal moths called the Wrarth are also on the hunt. Donna goes to fetch Rose from the shed and finds the Meep, leading her to pull her daughter and the alien inside and ask why this is going on while Sylvia keeps trying to stop Donna from looking at the thing. The Doctor shows up on their doorstep and Sylvia tries to keep him out, but he figures Donna will be okay so long as she doesn’t remember him, and enters to try and figure out what is happening. The family is promptly attacked on both sides by the Wrarth and possessed U.N.I.T. soldiers, so the Doctor helps everyone upstairs and decides to escape through the attics of adjacent homes.

As the family flees in Shaun’s cab, the Wrarth fire on them, but nothing really happens to the cab. The Doctor parks in a lot and waits for the aliens to catch up, invoking the Shadow Proclamation and naming himself an arbiter in the proceedings. He points out that the Wrarth are using stun weapons and not trying to hurt anyone, and that the U.N.I.T. soldiers don’t seem to be working for them at all. He’s told that the Meep were a conquering species that almost succeeded in their horrible aims, and that this particular Meep was their ruler and the worst of them all. The Wrarth are trying to capture the Meep before it can do anymore damage. The Meep finally admits to all this and is planning to fire up their ship and escape using a “dagger drive”—which will destroy all of London if it goes off. The Meep is then retrieved by the brainwashed U.N.I.T. soldiers to be brought back to the ship. The Doctor and Donna’s family are taken hostage, they escape captivity thanks to Shirley Anne Bingham (and her packing wheelchair), and Donna insists that Shaun and her mother take Rose at least ten miles away to be safe… but she plans to stay with the Doctor.

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The Doctor is trying to shut off the drive, but he can’t work fast enough. He explains to Donna that she could help him fix it, but it would lead to her death. Donna doesn’t care because there are nine million lives at stake, including her daughter’s, so the Doctor says the necessary string of words to break the wall in Donna’s mind and bring back the metacrisis knowledge she possesses. Donna berates the Doctor for what he did (mostly because the bit of him that still resides in her is the reason she gave up the lottery money) while the two of them work to stop the drive as it’s firing. Donna dies in the Doctor’s arms and he’s about to be executed by the Meep’s soldiers—when Rose suddenly steps in to help and Donna wakes. The Doctor sees that the metacrisis became a legacy that Donna passed down to her daughter. Donna realizes that the knowledge of these events have been bleeding through in choices Rose has made—the shed that looks like the TARDIS, her chosen name, and her toys that look like aliens that the Doctor and Donna encountered together. Donna sees that they are binary but her daughter is not (and that the Doctor can be any of those things or none), and this has helped to balance the scales. Rose stops the Meep by ejecting it from the ship and London is saved.

The Meep is sentenced to prison for 10,000 years and threatens the Doctor: it plans to tell someone called “the boss” about his dual hearts. The Doctor tells Donna and Rose that they will still not survive the metacrisis energy levels, but they’re not worried—they understand the problem far better than a man ever could and simply release it. Rose feels like she’s finally fully herself. Later on, the Doctor and Donna ask if they can go visit Wilf together in the TARDIS (he’s in a community for the elderly now that he can no longer manage stairs), and Sylvia begrudgingly agrees. They both get aboard the redesigned TARDIS, which the Doctor tears around in a flurry of excitement. The console has a coffee-maker, so the Doctor gets Donna coffee and she suggests that he could stop by sometimes even if they’re not traveling together. Then she spills her coffee on the console, breaking everything and sending them… potentially anywhere in time and space.

Commentary

Look, there’s plenty to talk about, but I can’t start without saying… I missed them so damn much.

I also have to start by pointing out that reinstated showrunner Russell T. Davies was always taken to task by a certain contingent of Whovians (and the internet at large) for having an “agenda,” in a political sense, particularly when it came to queerness. And this episode seems very specifically designed to say oh, I’ll show you an agenda in sky writing, with letters at tall as skyscrapers.

So yeah, I also missed Davies a bunch.

This has all the hallmarks of a Davies episode, for good and ill: It’s high camp; it’s high emotion; it’s queer af; it’s got deus ex machinas up the wazoo; the villain is just as comical as they are scary (“Midnight” was pretty much the only exception to this); and London is in such imminent peril that it’s literally impossible for it to survive the attack that just occurred, but it’s completely fine.

Seriously, the dagger drive creates fractures and fault lines throughout the entire city, and in my head I thought these are going to close right up like they never existed as soon as they deactivate that drive, and that’s exactly what happened. Davies, my man. It makes no sense, but I have never minded when it’s you writing it.

I do need to give him a bit of a hard time for the way gender identity plays into the solution of the episode, however. The accidental gift that Davies gave himself in having “binary” being the word Donna got stuck on during the metacrisis meltdown in season four was a great gateway into the discussion, and I do love the interplay of the DoctorDonna being a binary while Rose Noble isn’t—mostly because it speaks to a better understanding of trans identity than most shows have. The thing is… I’m not sure if that’s by accident or design. Trans people are not all nonbinary due to being trans. Rose is a trans girl from the language used—Donna calls Rose her daughter, Rose uses she/her pronouns, no mention of genderfluidity is made—but it’s important to remember that plenty of trans people consider themselves nonbinary within their gender. There are nonbinary women and nonbinary men under the trans umbrella. It would have behooved them to be a little clearer in how they were using these words because most people still don’t have working definitions.

Having said that, I did appreciate the conversation between Donna and Sylvia about Rose because it was both incredibly well-written on its own and an excellent guideline for families with trans kids. Sylvia and Donna both express that they’re a little confused by all the changes, but they pointedly do so when Rose isn’t in the room; when she is in the room, there are only expressions of love and support. Moreover, Donna talks of the changes ultimately being positive, of how incredible it is to suddenly have this wonderful daughter seemingly out of nowhere… and then uses that example to try and get Sylvia to say something nice about her. It’s a great scene that doesn’t forget the family dynamics we’re already familiar with: that Sylvia was incredibly harsh toward her daughter for ages, and that Donna still has to prod her mother into complimenting her.

I also appreciate the continuing characteristic of the Doctor being entirely unfrazzled if corrected on how he speaks about sentient beings. When Rose points out that the Doctor is assuming the Meep’s pronouns, the Doctor is never offended—he pauses, reconsiders, and corrects himself without annoyance. And that’s important because, again, it’s a guideline: Maybe this isn’t a part of your daily life, the show is saying, but when you do encounter it, this is how to react with grace.

But then again, there’s a weirdness right there at the end with how Rose and Donna avoid having their heads exploded by Time Lord energy; when pressed, they both insist that the Doctor can’t understand how to fix this anymore because he’s a man, but they can as women. And what they know is that they can simply release the energy instead of making everything all fraught. And it’s just… goofy. Again, there’s that insistence in some realms of pop culture and fiction that feminism is just acknowledging that women are somehow better than men, and that’s what this moment reads as, instead of trying to point out ways in which they might be different due to experience.

They missed a trick by not giving a more specific explanation as to why Donna and Rose can figure out how to fix the metacrisis problem. It could have been tied to their gender, but it needed to not be a lazy “because we’re girls and we get it.” Moreover, it should have been something that the Doctor could understand once it was explained to him; he was a woman less than a day ago, it hasn’t just left him in a rush.

And then there’s also the question of how the Doctor views his own gender identity. It seems that the Doctor basically assumes the gender of whatever their body would be “assigned” based on its shape (which is what other Time Lords are shown to do as well), and I don’t hate that as a choice—the Doctor is an alien and Gallifreyan views on gender and bodies are liable to be different from a human’s. But I do wish the Doctor would talk about it a little? Especially in light of the changes that have just occurred.

So those are my quibbles, and they’re significant in their own way, but I also cannot care because Ten is my Doctor, and now Fourteen is also my Doctor because it’s just Ten having the benefit of being far older, much wiser, and more caught up in his emotions. The face he makes when he talks of how much he loves Donna—the shock at being the same person he was four regenerations ago, but still different because he never used to say things like that—is so important to how these anniversary episodes will unfold. We don’t have the full picture on why the Doctor did this, and there’s likely to be a sneakier explanation at work, but there doesn’t need to be.

The Doctor missed his best friend. Missed having a best friend.

And now he’s a raw ball of feelings in a plaid suit, back to being this bouncy, hyper-dramatic, aggrandizing fellow, who needs that balance back. The way that Donna begins slotting herself into that place well before the walls come down, the part of her that knows she’s been there before… that’s how you do a reunion. That’s how you revive characters and a dynamic you’ve lost. The two of them egging each other on, the joy they find at being the DoctorDonna, the identical expressions they make when standing side by side like two kids begging to go outside and play in the mud—there are so many wonderful Doctor-companion dynamics, but this one is truly top tier. It shines this bright because Catherine Tate and David Tennant love working together, and that enjoyment permeates every scene where they’re in the same room.

Add Miriam Margoyles as that classic brand of Davies villain, two cups cute with a teaspoon of pure evil, add some silly moth aliens who really just want to help, add family nonsense and holiday cheer, and you’ve got all the ingredients for anniversary specials that are here to give a hug to a certain generation of Who fan while preparing us for something entirely new. I’m glad we’re getting this moment, and I can’t wait to see what comes next.

Bits and Bobs

• That Children in Need special was also perfect. Again, high camp and adorable.

• I do miss Segun Akinola’s scoring for the show, but if he’s ready to move on, bringing Murray Gold back was exactly the right move. Listen to that theme go.

• Dave Gibbons (probably best known for his collaborations with Alan Moore on Watchmen and Superman) and Paul Mills (who created 2000 AD and also had a heavy hand in the development of Judge Dredd) are given story credit here because Beep the Meep is their creation, written for a 1980 Doctor Who comic strip that bears the same title as this episode. Not sure why the comic’s other writer, John Wagner, didn’t receive credit.

• So the Doctor shows Shaun the psychic paper, insisting that he’s “Grandmaster of The Knowledge” (being London cab driver Knowledge, which is a real thing, by the by), but Shaun tells him that the paper says “Grandmistress” which prompts the Doctor to scold the paper to keep up. But we know this isn’t the issue because Thirteen had the exact same problem on her regeneration in the other direction, and moreover, the paper is called the psychic paper because it’s psychic. Ergo, the paper doesn’t need to keep up, it’s the Doctor who’s having a hard time remembering that he’s a man again. And I just think it’s neat.

• Shoutout to Nerys, who is apparently still in Donna’s orbit and causing issues everywhere she goes. Everyone’s got a Nerys in their life.

• The number of shoutouts to the season four premiere “Partners in Crime” are great, with the Doctor looking through the mail slot being one of my favorites. (Also that E.T. reference with the Meep hiding amidst the toys.)

• Shirley Anne Bingham’s role in the episode is great, and while I’m always discomfited with U.N.I.T.’s militaristic leanings throughout the show’s history, I do appreciate their commitment to hiring misfit geniuses of varying neurodivergent and disabled stripes. And I also appreciate when it’s shown that you can work for an employer that values your expertise, and still fails to put ramps up to the spaceship you’re meant to study.

• The gorgeous shade of Donna pointing out that she’s going to hang out in a tiny box with another man, and Shaun Temple being like, my love, that man is not your type, I could just die.

• The new TARDIS interior is an interesting one—very old-school Who with the color and cleaner lines, but much, much larger in scope. Watching Fourteen run along the ramps was a shot of pure joy.

See you next week!

The post Doctor Who Celebrates 60th Anniversary by Reuniting One of Its Greatest Teams in “The Star Beast” appeared first on Reactor.

Normally, I’d be a little skeptical of this sort of thing. Logically I know that Doctor Who is a show that thrives on a certain amount of fan service and is indebted to a loyal audience that spans generations, which means that faces from previous seasons are going to pop up every once in a while. But I’ve been burned by these sorts of homecomings before. The 50th anniversary episode, featuring some icons of the “new Who” era (David included, and my main girl Billie Piper), was …fine, I guess, with a lot of loose ends left and a lot of timeline fuckery that I, personally, was disappointed by. We’re also in an era where a lot of reunions and reboots are happening. Everything from Gilmore Girls to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air is on our screens again. I mean, they’re rebooting Glee for godssakes. When will it end? It makes me want to throw myself into a black hole.

But that’s not the point of this.

Ten and Donna are fan favorites, due in no small part to the chemistry of Tennant and Tate, whose friendship shines through each episode. You can see it whenever they’re on screen together, from David’s turn as the English teacher in The Catherine Tate Show’s iconic Red Nose Day skit to their production of Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare’s hot-annoyance-to-lovers comedy. They just seem to have so much fun together, matching each other with a fast-paced repartee and a sense of sibling-esque teasing. So much of that is brought to their characters, and it’s that sense of fun and camaraderie that makes the DoctorDonna relationship stand out from the rest.

There is no better showcase of that than “Partners in Crime”.

We first meet Donna in “The Runaway Bride”, a holiday special that takes place after the brutal loss of Rose Tyler. But the Donna of this episode is very different than the Donna we eventually travel with. In “Runaway Bride”, Donna is suddenly transported aboard the TARDIS in the middle of her wedding, a result of her being dosed with huon particles by her husband-to-be, who is secretly working in conjunction with the Empress of the Racnoss. In her first meeting with the Doctor, Donna is a bit naive, distrustful, and ignorant—she admits to having missed the major events of the previous season, including the alien invasion of the last Christmas special (“I had a bit of a hangover”) and the Battle of Canary Wharf (“That big picture, Donna, you keep on missing it”). She insists on calling the Doctor a Martian, even after he corrects her. And Donna is headstrong to the point of near-abrasiveness—and I’m not going to get into “is she an unlikeable female character” territory because these qualities prove to be strengths—but I do think it’s important to note that Catherine Tate had a long and beloved career in British comedy before coming to Doctor Who, and not everyone would have gotten away with yelling at the Doctor like that.

But Donna changes after meeting The Doctor. Because that’s what an adventure with the Doctor does.

When we meet Donna again, she is actively seeking out potential alien activity in the hopes of finding the Doctor again. She’s investigating Adipose industries, a company selling a diet pill and promising “the fat just walks away”. As it turns out, so is the Doctor. The two of them are on parallel paths just waiting to crash. Quite literally. In the farcical opener, we watch them just barely miss each other—while Donna sits for the Adipose press meeting, the Doctor is in the projection room above. They bother employees just a few cubicles away, popping up over the partitions like time-traveling Whack-A-Mole set to a jaunty score. They interview people on connecting streets, and just as they’re about to reach the corner, they turn and go opposite directions. It’s a sequence that makes you go, wow, look at these two dummies being so dumb together! I love them. And later, we see the Doctor park the TARDIS just behind Donna’s car, a matching blue. Of course, this twinning of their characters is no accident. “Partners in Crime” is subtly preparing us for the rest of the season, in which the Doctor and Donna’s fates become intricately intertwined. Here though, they are simply and beautifully two of a kind, with Tate and Tennant showcasing the very British art of banter.

But the real gem of this episode is The Door Scene.

Having come to Adipose Industries at night to snoop around, the Doctor lowers himself down the building on a window-washers platform to find our antagonist, Miss Foster, interrogating a journalist. Across the way, our Donna stands at the door, listening to the same conversation. Slowly their heads turn. They meet each other’s gaze. And Donna’s face says it all:

The excitement of having found the Doctor again radiates from her as she mimes “oh my GOD, this is BRILLIANT”. In that moment, Donna is finally getting something she has been longing for—her eyes light up, her face is expressive and openly emotional. She forgets all about the Adipose investigation because in that moment, there is nothing more important than the Doctor. And he meets her joy with 50% you’re so weird and 50% what have I gotten myself into, which is pretty much what anyone feels when coming to a new season of Doctor Who.

It is that joy and excitement that transcends—Donna is fucking ELATED to see the Doctor, and so are we as an audience. She’s been waiting for him all this time, chasing leads in the hopes their paths will cross. And now, finally, it’s happened. It is the thrill of endless possibility, the knowledge that quite literally anything could happen from here on out. Because life with the Doctor is unpredictable in the most wonderful way, and all of time and space is now at Donna’s fingertips (and consequently, ours as an audience). She is hungry for something more, something astounding, and wiling to be struck by the beauty and wonder of the universe.

But it’s not all fun and games. Because we see both of them lonely, too. Donna looks up at the stars, wishing for a sighting of the little blue box. The Doctor talks out loud in the TARDIS, only to look up and realize there’s no one there to talk to. They need each other. After the heartbreak of losing Rose and the emotional turmoil of both his encounter with The Master and breaking Martha’s heart, the Doctor needs someone like Donna—a friend, a best friend, someone who can remind him that there is fun yet to be had, and laughter is still possible. We see the Doctor and Donna promise each other friendship right from the start:

Donna: Would you rather be on your own?

The Doctor: No. Actually, no. But, the last time, with Martha, like I said, it got complicated. That was all my fault. I just want a mate.

Donna: You just want to mate?!

The Doctor: I just want A Mate!

Donna: You’re not matin’ with me, sunshine!

The Doctor: A mate, I want a mate!

Donna: Well just as well, because I’m not having any of that nonsense! You’re just a long streak of nothing, alien nothing!

And it’s fucking beautiful.

In “The Runaway Bride”, we see Donna beg a man to marry her, because all her life she has been wanting to be chosen, wanting someone to see how special and worthy she is. Later, in “Partners in Crime”, we see her berated by her mother for wasting her life, for not living according to societal expectations. But Donna knows her time will come. She is waiting, as she tells her grandfather, for “the right man”—not just any man, but the right man, the man who can give her what she needs. Donna knows, deep down, that she’s amazing, and needs only be given the opportunity to shine. When she finds the Doctor again, Donna is the one doing the choosing—she says see how good I am, how worthy, Donna Noble Super Temp, a woman taking charge. She is no longer a passive participant in her own life.

And while she mentions that the promise she made to travel at the end of “Runaway Bride” didn’t exactly go as planned (travel is expensive, so she’s not at fault there), going with the Doctor isn’t simply traveling. She is making the decision to forcibly shove herself out of her comfort zone, to engage with the universe, to open her heart. She can finally see the bigger picture: “I believe it all now, you opened my eyes. All those amazing things out there, I believe them all.” The Donna of “Runaway Bride” was afraid of traveling with the Doctor and the potential danger that might bring (and let’s be honest, the Doctor was in no fit state. He needed to nurse his heartbreak for a while, eat some ice cream straight from the container. He like, fully committed genocide in that episode). But the Donna of “Partners in Crime” knows that the danger is worth it for the wonder.

Donna’s bags are packed. It isn’t just a yes, it is a FUCK YES, with her hat box and running sneakers ready to go. And we, as an audience, are ready to say FUCK YES too.

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Cascade Failure

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This is the reason viewers keep coming back to Doctor Who. Our story is Donna’s story—we come to Doctor Who for the endless possibilities, to get rocked out of our mundane little lives, to be scared and thrilled, to be taken to the furthest reaches of our imaginations. The Doctor is a hero for the nerds—he is endlessly curious, his superpowers are his intellect and his capacity for love and acceptance. No matter who his companion is or where they’re at in their lives, the Doctor helps people realize that they’re special, that their skills are useful, and that the brains they have and the bodies they’re in matter. And while the companion is always meant to be an audience stand-in, there is no skepticism or trepidation when Donna enters the TARDIS like there is with other companions. It is simply joy, and wanderlust, and pure, unbridled fun.

When “Partners in Crime” aired in 2008, I was at the height of my Doctor Who fever. I was a freshman in college, incredibly lonely, and in desperate need of escapism.  I suppose this isn’t unusual for a person in their early twenties, but pile on top of that an yet-undiagnosed anxiety disorder, no friends to speak of, and disordered eating habits, and you’ve got a recipe for someone ready to run from home at the slightest nudge. I used to close my eyes and imagine that I could hear the beautiful sound of the TARDIS and I’d finally be able to get out of my stagnant life and travel all of time and space. Cringe? Maybe. But look me in the eye and tell me you’ve never done shit like that. (You’re on Tor.com, you nerd. I know you’re out there cosplaying and roleplaying and fanficing. I know my audience.) And I always felt so jealous of the those who got to travel in the TARDIS. I yearned for more out of this life, like so many of the Doctor’s companions do. The allure of the Doctor as this great mysterious man who will come swoop you up and take you away is part of the appeal of the show, and part of why I clung so tightly to the show’s mythology. When I was alone and unsure, he was always there, reaching a hand out for me to take.

I didn’t realize it then, but Donna is aspirational as a companion. Because actually, it takes a lot of character growth to get to the point Donna is at in this episode: confident in what she wants and feeling capable of going after it. It isn’t ever that she needs emotional support from him, but rather that he’s a means through which she can become the woman she wants to be. It’s clear that Donna has done some work on herself between “Runaway Bride” and “Partners in Crime”, and it is only through that that she is able to approach her time in the TARDIS with such joy and wonder. And isn’t that the way the universe should be experienced?

If there’s anything that the Doctor teaches us, it is that there is so much more out there to experience, if only we’re ready to say yes.

Originally published in June 2022 as part of the Close Reads series.

The post “Partners in Crime” Is the Perfect Episode of Doctor Who appeared first on Reactor.

Not only do we have another official trailer for the three upcoming Doctor Who specials with David Tennant as the Fourteenth Doctor along with former companion, Donna Noble (Catherine Tate), we also have the release date for each of those specials, which are also pegged to the 60^th anniversary of the show.

The one-minute trailer admittedly doesn’t give us much new footage, but the big news is that we’ve got release dates and also some ambiguous descriptions as to what the three episodes are all about. Here’s the breakdown:

“The Star Beast” (November 25, 2023)

The Doctor and Donna will come face to face after all these years but just how, and why, is about to be revealed.

“Wild Blue Yonder” (December 2, 2023)

Viewers are about to go on an otherworldly adventure through space and time. 

“The Giggle” (December 9, 2023)

Joining David Tennant and Catherine Tate is a stellar cast including, Yasmin Finney as Rose Noble, Miriam Margolyes as the voice of the Meep, Jacqueline King as Sylvia Noble, Karl Collins as Shaun Temple, Ruth Madeley as Shirley Anne-Bingham, Jemma Redgrave as Kate Stewart and Neil Patrick Harris as the Toymaker, set to cause all kinds of mayhem.

We also got some cool posters for each of these specials, which I’ll post below. And, of course, before the end of the year, we will also get one more special over the festive season that will introduce us to Ncuti Gatwa’s Fifteenth Doctor.

The post Doctor Who Trailer Gives Us More Doctor and Donna Along With a Release Date appeared first on Reactor.

The BBC announced that one of Gatwa’s episodes is co-written by Kate Herron and Briony Redman. Redman’s previous credits include writing on the Welsh crime comedy, Pont Brec, while Herron’s previous credits include directing the entire first season of Disney+’s Loki and directing on Sex Education, where Gatwa once starred. “Clearly I can’t get enough of time travel,” Herron said in a statement. “It is an absolute honour to write for Russell and Ncuti. We had so much fun and can’t wait for you all to see it.”

Doctor Who showrunner Russell T. Davies was also enthusiastic about working with the writing duo. “This is when I absolutely love my job,” he said in the same statement. “Working with the stellar talents of Kate and Briony makes my whole world bigger and brighter, and a lot more fun. I was a huge fan of Loki and reached out to Kate to say so—she then introduced me to Briony, and it was all systems go! They’ve written a wonderful script which created unique challenges for cast and crew alike. The end result is gorgeous and thrilling and scary, and not like any other episode of Doctor Who.”

Doctor Who returns with three special episodes in November 2023 with David Tennant as the Fourteenth Doctor to coincide with the show’s 60th anniversary. Gatwa’s first episode as the Fifteenth Doctor will then air over the “festive period,” according to the BBC, which means the Christmas Special set to air in December. No news on when exactly Gatwa’s  season as the Doctor will premiere, but it will be sometime in 2024.

All episodes will air on the BBC for the UK and Ireland, and stream on Disney+ for the rest of the world.

The post Ncuti Gatwa’s Second Doctor Who Season Will Feature a Sex Education Reunion appeared first on Reactor.

With nearly every modern season of Doctor Who featuring famous faces like Charles Dickens, Vincent van Gogh, or Queen Elizabeth, visiting Sherwood Forest might seem like just a modest twist on the established “celebrity historical” format. But it was the start of the Peter Capaldi era as a stark exception: not a single one of his episodes featured real historical figures. Instead, across five episodes, Capaldi’s Doctor faced a pantheon of gods and folk heroes—Robin Hood, Santa Claus, the great Odin, a store-brand Superman, and finally, the most mythic figure the Doctor could ever face: himself. And lo! The celebrity historical fell into myth and legend, with a new subgenre I’m dubbing the “celebrity mythological.”

[Spoilers for Series 8-10 of Doctor Who, plus the existence of Santa Claus]

From climbing Rapunzel’s hair in a surreal Land of Fiction, to flushing Satan down a black hole, the Doctor’s met plenty of myth makers in some pretty tall tales. And yes, the celebrity historical relies on mythologizing real people, particularly “great men,” who must learn to live up to their own legends. But it’s not just that the reality of a ridiculous rogue like Robin Hood is given the same deference as Winston Churchill or Rosa Parks. What makes the celebrity mythological distinctive is how it makes “real” people out of myths, who must confront either their own fictionality, or the Doctor’s. As the Earl of Loxley tells the Lord of Time, “I’m just as real as you are.”

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The Ghosts of Sherwood

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The Doctor and Robin Hood are mirrored both as personalities and as equally “impossible heroes.” They compete, tied up in chains, over which one gets to be interrogated by the Sheriff. They compete in swordfights to win the favor of the Doctor’s companion Clara. And they compete over the narrative, with Robin Hood’s heroic ballad sparring against Doctor Who’s conventions in a 45-minute screwdriver-and-arrow-measuring contest. It’s only by setting aside their machismo and seeing their commonalities, as privileged men who help those less fortunate, that both characters symbolically cede narrative space. As much as Robin Hood has to accept the Doctor’s world of spaceships, so too must the Doctor compromise with Robin’s world, where that spaceship might have a bullseye on its engine that they have to shoot with a golden arrow. For once, Doctor Who doesn’t win out, because both worlds are stories. On learning that he’s only remembered as a legend, Robin says, “Good. History is a burden. Stories can make us fly.” In his final act of heroism, he accepts his own metafiction. Whereas the Doctor insists he’s not a hero, for Robin that’s entirely the point: “Well, neither am I. But if we both keep pretending to be—ha, ha! Perhaps others will be heroes in our name. Perhaps we will both be stories. And may those stories never end.” To be a hero, or even to be “real,” means simply trying, or pretending, to live your own fiction.

This theme can be immediately traced back to the 50th anniversary special “The Day of the Doctor” (2013), when the legendary John Hurt exploded out of the Doctor’s timeline like an alien chestburster. This so-called War Doctor had given up the name, having failed the Doctor’s values in wartime. But like a name, this idea was passed down to Capaldi. Suddenly, being “the Doctor” was less of an alias than an alter ego, bound up in ideals like “never cruel or cowardly” and “never give up, never give in”—ideals the Doctor tries, and sometimes fails, to live up to. The Capaldi era obsesses over this separation between “the Doctor” and the Doctor, the role and the character who plays him. The title is a promise others can take on too, with Clara trying to be more and more like the Doctor until, in “Hell Bent” (2015), she gets to steal a TARDIS and run away. And it’s a promise the Doctor doesn’t always keep. “The Doctor is no longer here!” he threatens. “You are stuck with me.”

By recasting the Doctor as a mythic role, even for himself, Doctor Who was grappling with the promise and peril of having lasted so long as a series. Both the character and the show had now regenerated 12 times, replacing actors and writers and producers over and over like a televisual Ship of Theseus until, as the Doctor says in “Deep Breath” (2014), “there’s not a trace of the original you left.” And having regenerated into a grumpier persona, he broods over whether he’s intrinsically “a good man,” or if he’s just performatively a hero, thanks to 2,000 years of muscle memory. These are transparently metafictional questions. By the Capaldi era, the show had not only survived but exorcised the trauma of its 1989 cancellation, becoming the most-watched British drama in 2013. But in the afterglow of its 50th anniversary, certain questions naturally emerged: Is the show still “good”? Is it even the same show, half a century on? And what’s the point of making it anymore?

Of course, in Britain, even Doctor Who’s biggest naysayers know what the point of it is. It’s for the kids. So “Last Christmas” (2014) pits the Doctor against the most famous children’s hero of all. The Doctor and Clara arrive in a scientific base at the North Pole, where Santa Claus and his comedy elves rescue them from facehugging Dream Crabs, who induce a dream state in their victims’ minds. The central joke, of course, is that Santa is a ridiculous fantasy. But then, so is the Doctor. Even Clara compares believing in Santa to believing in the Doctor. Which is why Santa—played by Nick Frost in a surprising bit of nominative determinism—tries to convince Clara and the base’s scientists that they’re all asleep, slowly getting digested by the Dream Crabs with Inception-style dreams within dreams. Their subconscious is fighting back with impossible fictions: not just “me, Sweet Papa Chrimbo” and his flying reindeer, but also “a time-travelling scientist dressed as a magician” and his magic phone box. But building on Robin Hood challenging the Doctor’s reality, Santa seems to tease that being fictional isn’t all bad. “You’re a dream who’s trying to save us?” a scientist asks, and he replies, “Sweetheart, I’m Santa Claus. I think you just defined me!”

After all, the Doctor is the only folk hero clever enough to realize he’s a dream. “Before the Flood” (2015) opens with a sci-fi lecture delivered straight down the lens: “This is called the Bootstrap Paradox. Google it.” Trapped and alone in “Heaven Sent” (2015), he glances at the screen and says, “I’m nothing without an audience.” And when a computer-generated version discovers he’s literally fictional, trapped in a perfect simulation of Earth for a perfect invasion strategy, the very idea of the Doctor fights back. “Oh, you don’t have to be real to be the Doctor. Long as you never give up. Long as you always trick the bad guys into their own traps.” The implication is that the Doctor doesn’t just save his fictional universe: he saves you, the viewer, the fan, the person reading this now. And he knows it.

Emphasis on “he”. Because along with metafiction, masculinity is the telltale sign of Capaldi’s celebrity mythological stories. All five celebrities are mythical men, who embody qualities and narratives the Twelfth Doctor—the last of the exclusively male Doctors—must embrace or reject. It’s most noticeable in “The Girl Who Died” (2015), where a fake Odin is stealing Vikings to grind into juice: “Testosterone, extracted from the finest warriors. Ahh! Nectar!” Toxic masculinity in a shot glass. But when the Viking girl Ashildr, played by Game of Thrones star Maisie Williams, challenges Fake Odin to battle, the Doctor is left with 24 hours to whip the surviving, far less manly Vikings into shape. Their role as warriors, as men, and as Vikings operates as a kind of story they refuse to escape from.

So the Doctor offers up a different story. They throw a party and hack the aliens’ technology to trick them into seeing a terrifying dragon from Ashildr’s imagination. “An army like yours, it lives or dies on its reputation, its story,” the Doctor says, while Clara shows a recording of Fake Odin’s warriors running scared. “If you don’t leave right now, I’ll put it out there for all to see, and no one will fear you again.” The Doctor claims victory in his epic battle against a Norse god by simply embarrassing him with a viral video. While puncturing both his and Fake Odin’s masculinity, the episode also complicates the audience’s folk memory of the Doctor as a “lonely god” when they realize Ashildr had died in the battle. Accepting his role as an almost godlike savior, he uses some of the aliens’ tech to revive Ashildr. This makes her functionally immortal, and makes the Doctor, in a sense, her (all)father.

The fourth celebrity mythological story takes flight as an homage to old-fashioned superheroes, with The Ghost explicitly standing in for Christopher Reeve’s Superman. But it’s his secret identity, Grant Gordon, whose issues with fatherhood and romance “The Return of Doctor Mysterio” (2016) soon settles on. With a suitably meta origin story as a comicbook-loving kid who meets the Doctor and accidentally eats a magic gemstone from space, Grant balances life as a Man of Steel with life as a mild-mannered nanny for his high school sweetheart Lucy Lombard. These two lives coalesce with Grant wearing a baby monitor strapped to his superhero costume, juxtaposing two visions of masculinity. The real superhero, then, is Grant rather than The Ghost: the secret identity who, like the Doctor, has to pretend to be someone else, while really saving the everyday with ordinary love, not superpowered fists.

Though the Doctor toys with the nickname Doctor Mysterio, the episode has little interest in equating him to a superhero. Instead, it treats the Doctor as a surrogate father and, like Grant, a hopeless romantic interest. He checks in on Grant throughout his childhood, imploring him not to use his powers, teaching him the facts of his new life, even when puberty gives him uncontrollable X-ray vision. And whereas Grant struggles to start a relationship with Lucy after 24 years, the Doctor has just ended 24 years with his wife River Song. “Man or myth?” had been the overriding question for the Doctor, but by Capaldi’s final year, the Doctor being a man specifically, exclusively, was something the show had to confront—and change.

Both the celebrity mythological subgenre and Capaldi’s Doctor end with “Twice Upon a Time” (2017), as he encounters the most mythic celebrity of all: himself. The First Doctor, played by David Bradley in William Hartnell’s place, wanders away from his last Dr Who straight into modern Doctor Who—from the days when he was simply the Doctor, to a time when the name “Doctor” has gotten bigger than he could have imagined: “The Butcher of Skull Moon. The Last Tree of Garsennon. The Destroyer of Skaro. He is the Doctor… of War.” Both Doctors refuse to regenerate, insisting on the right “to live and die as myself,” and facing the mythic heft of 21st century Doctor Who hardly persuades the First Doctor otherwise. He’s portrayed as a quaint scientific explorer who left home to analyze what “logic” or “mysterious force” allows good to triumph over evil, never realizing that in searching, in putting things right wherever he lands, he unwittingly creates his own mythic destiny. “You were right,” the Twelfth Doctor tells his original self. “The universe generally fails to be a fairy tale. But that’s where we come in.”

This is what gives him a reason to regenerate. Far from there being “not a trace of the original you left,” the Twelfth Doctor relearns Doctor Who’s same old story of change and renewal. By this point, the contradiction between “the Doctor’s” universal ideas and the Doctor’s far from universal casting had become painfully obvious, and most folk heroes never break free from a contradiction like that. Robin Hood never really changes, even if his shtick wears a bit thin. There’s only one Santa Claus in the British and American popular imagination. Even Superman is timeless. But hero or dream, repentant warrior or father figure, the Doctor has many faces, many lives. None of them are real, but the celebrity mythological reminded us that the Doctor is a myth who saves us, uniquely, by embodying the value of change. If the Doctor can change their story, so can you.

Embedded in this move is the realization that the Doctor is, increasingly, more than just another TV character. “They belong together, especially in the hearts of the younger part of our audience,” Steven Moffat said while promoting the 2014 Christmas special. “Doctor Who and Santa Claus and Robin Hood all live in the same place,” where all the dreams, myths, and legends live. So it’s no exaggeration to wonder if, one way or another, on television or in bedtime stories centuries from now, the Doctor might live forever in the realm of folk heroes.

Max Kashevsky is a PhD student in political theory at the University of Cambridge. He wrote “Doctor Who: Short Trips – Still Life” for Big Finish Productions, and he hosts a podcast called Base Under Siege. You can follow him on Twitter @MaxCCurtis.

The post Folk Heroes and the Doctor: Doctor Who’s “Mythological Celebrity” Stories appeared first on Reactor.

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The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

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Corden (remotely) invited six lucky Whovians in lockdown (Andrew, Dave, Jennifer, Katherine, Naome, and Nate) to create a cosplay using only household objects in less than 24 hours. The contestants each chose one Doctor Who character (a Cyberman, the Face of Boe, an Ood, a Dalek, a Cloister Wraith, and the Kasavin) to recreate using things like smartphones, floral bedsheets, tinfoil, and, uh, freshly made spaghetti, with mixed to brilliant results. We won’t reveal the winner, or the grand prize…

For more Doctor Who quarantine content, check out these new stories by Paul Cornell, Neil Gaiman, Peter McTighe, Steven Moffat, and Chris Chibnall.

There’s no word yet on a release date for Doctor Who season 13, but both Whittaker and Chibnall are confirmed to return, and fans can look forward to a holiday special featuring the Thirteenth Doctor and Ryan (Tosin Cole), Graham (Bradley Walsh) and Yaz (Mandip Gill) “around Christmas and the New Year.”

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“It would have been amazing to see a Trans person in a show like Doctor Who,” Root, who became the first trans actress to star in a sitcom for her work in Boy Meets Girl, told Nerdist. “In fact, to see a Trans person period would have been amazing. But I [grew] up in the ’70s and society was differently populated back then, and gender ID was not really ‘a thing.'”

In the interview, she described Tania as “much nicer” than the alien Sable, whom she played in Big Finish’s 2017 “Zaltys” story and called “a bit of a badass.” She also shared her hopes for future adventures starring the character beyond the “Stranded” storyline, “perhaps even in a spinoff too, somewhere along the line, somewhere in time…”

“I would love to see a story set in the distant future, in a different galaxy/universe, to see whether the human race got their crap together and survived being such idiots,” Root added, about a Doctor Who setting that she’d love to see the show tackle in the future. “Similarly, it would be fun to do something set in the past to see if you could influence humanity’s idiocy differently…”

Read the full interview here.

“Stranded” also stars Paul McGann as The Doctor, Nicola Walker as Liv Chenka, Hattie Morahan as Helen Sinclair, Tom Price as Sergeant Andy Davidson, and Tom Baker as The Curator. It arrives on Big Finish in June 2020. Here’s the official synopsis:

The TARDIS is gone. Stranded in one time and place, the Doctor, Liv and Helen seek refuge in Baker Street. But the house has changed: they now have neighbours – not all of them welcoming. And someone has a dire warning for the future.

The Doctor and friends face their greatest challenge yet: living one day after another, in 2020 London.

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The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

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When I started watching She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, I instantly recognized Catra as one of my types.

[Spoilers for the series finale of She-Ra below.]

Of course, I wasn’t alone in that feeling—Catra was an instant favorite on the show among its fans. But there was something about it that nagged at me, something more specifically related to her type, and what that type said about me, and what it meant that I kept returning to it.

Catra falls into a category that I mark as “Foils With Inferiority Complexes”: They are characters who are very close to a particular protagonist, who they are a bit unhealthily obsessed with. (They are often queer, or queer-coded, which is hardly a surprise.) They are in many ways that protagonist’s equal, though they don’t always believe it. They are often abused by authority figures, which causes them to lash out in increasingly violent and harmful ways. They are villains, but villains with deeply emotional motives. And one of their most desperate needs—though they’d never admit it—is getting their equal opposite, the protagonist they are so enamored of, to clarify their importance.

On Doctor Who, it’s the Master. In the MCU, it’s Loki. On She-Ra, it’s Catra. And there are countless more.

These relationships don’t have to include a romance, but there is something deeply romantic in the nature of them. At their core, these characters are defined by the existence of another person, and while that remains a point of great pain and irritation to them, it is also often a source of comfort and identity—being rejected by their equal opposite is a rejection of their whole selves. This push-pull dynamic forms a sort of dance, two characters forever circling each other in an effort to be better rendered by their opposing force.

But at the core of that dynamic is a far more basic desire, a far more vulnerable plea: Choose me.

*

Allow me to illustrate.

Throughout the MCU films, Loki insists that he’s trying to be rid of his brother, the shadow that he has lived his whole life beneath—he stabs him frequently enough that you could almost believe it. He keeps trying to usurp a throne that we later see he doesn’t really want, all because that throne was meant to be Thor’s. He gladly leads Thanos’s forces against the Earth to obtain the Tesseract because Thor cares about that world. His whole life has been built in juxtaposition, his magic to his brother’s brute strength, his silver tongue to his brother’s boisterousness, his trickery to his brother’s guileless honesty.

But the loss of both of their parents, his brother’s continued absence, and the appearance of a sister they never knew changes things for Loki. By the time we reach Ragnarok, he has every intention of parting from Thor and never looking back—until the god of thunder confesses that he believed they were meant to stand side by side forever:

“Loki, I thought the world of you,” he says.

And in that moment, everything changes, putting the god of mischief on a path that sees him sacrifice his life for a mere chance at saving his brother from Thanos. All because Thor finally admitted that he mattered.

*

Here’s another.

The fact that the Doctor travels with companions, with friends, is a source of constant bemusement, anger, and frustration on the Master’s part. You see, those companions were supposed to be the Master, not sad little humans with their sad little lives. The Doctor tells Bill Potts this directly: When they were young, they made a pact to see every single planet in the universe together, but then they went in different directions. The Doctor decided to travel with other exceptional people instead, because he thought he had lost his best friend, never quite realizing that a conflict of morality hadn’t prevented the Master from believing that they mattered to one another.

The Master does horrific things, but here’s the catch: More often than not, they’re doing them to get the Doctor’s attention. They spend an inordinate amount of time just hanging out on Earth or other random spots about the universe, hatching evil schemes that never work out, drawing the Doctor’s attention to them over and over.

When the current iteration of the Master learns of the Doctor’s true history, learns that they weren’t actually contemporaries, he destroys Gallifrey over that knowledge. Sure, he dissembles, tries to deflect around his motives, but the truth of the matter is plain and painful to see. The Master always thought that the Doctor was his ultimate foil, that they helped to create each other from childhood onward. The instant that he learns otherwise, it utterly breaks his sense of self.

*

And then there’s this one.

When I was very young, several moves across the country during childhood assured that I didn’t have many friends. Most of the time I played alone, amusing myself with toys and games of my own design, putting on strange costumes and jumping around my room. I created complex worlds for my stuffed animals to occupy, tracked their movements, adventures, betrayals. Other children were often baffled by my ideas of what “make believe” entailed.

Groups of friends would come and go during this period, but all I wanted was one. A friend, my friend, someone who would think of me and only me. Someone who might deign to put me first. It was needy of me, and unfair, and it was absolutely selfish, but it was the only thing I wanted with every fiber of my beating heart. One person, who knew me, and who loved me all the same.

As I got older, I gained more friends, but I still retained that inclination toward bonding overmuch with one other person. People call those sorts of friends “best friends”, but there was something missing from that definition by my measure. All of the best friends I ever had, they had other people in their lives who mattered far more than I did. Other friends, family members, even themselves. I was not the person they defined themselves by.

Of course, they weren’t wrong to feel that way. But that’s a hard thing to understand when you’re still growing and your emotions don’t make sense to you. I was sure that I was being unreasonable in my expectations, but I didn’t know why, or how to communicate that to anyone else. I only knew that I couldn’t find anyone who wanted as much from me as I did from them. And I felt deeply ashamed of that fact.

It was difficult to articulate this sort of shame to another person, so I didn’t. Instead, I decided that there was something irrevocably wrong with me, something unnatural and painfully out of step. After all, the only people who put such pressure on their relationships… why, they were all villains, weren’t they?

*

Catra becomes a villain, for a while.

Catra spends her childhood knowing that she is less favored than Adora, but still clinging to their friendship. Once Adora defects to become the leading member of the Rebellion, once her identity as She-Ra comes to the fore, Catra decides that this relationship was the one thing keeping her back, and tries to divest herself of concern for Adora. She tries to fight her, to ruin her, to take her friends from her. Until eventually, she realizes that none of it is making her happy, that it will never be enough. Finally, she switches sides and saves Glimmer, and Adora comes to rescue her.

Before that, trapped aboard Horde Prime’s ship, Catra recalled a memory from childhood—but this one was different from others we’d seen. A young Adora locates her to find out why she hit Lonnie, but Catra won’t answer the question. Later, Adora comes back to bring her to dinner, prompting Catra to suggest that she leave and eat with her new best friend, Lonnie. Adora asks if that’s why Catra got violent, and the response she receives is telling: “I know you like her better than me. You’re supposed to be my friend.” When Adora points out that she could apologize to Lonnie and then they could all be friends, Catra knocks Adora to the ground and vows never to apologize to anyone.

Before this moment, all of Catra’s backstory was couched in memories of Shadow Weaver’s clear preference for Adora, her promotion at Catra’s expense. But this memory makes Catra’s real pain stark as a blank sheet of paper—she wished for Adora to put her first.

Maybe that was needy and unfair and selfish of her. But it’s all she ever wanted.

*

My partner was assigned to be my roommate in my freshman year of college.

We bonded far too quickly and easily, and we never wanted to be out of each other’s company. People teased us about it, asking when we would admit we were dating, and we scratched our heads in perplexity. My roommate seemed to feel the same way that I did about friendship, but I knew that wouldn’t sustain; eventually he would realize that I was far too much, a sort of villain, and he would take a step back from me, the same way everyone else did.

I kept waiting for it to happen, in the months and years that followed. There was a boy that I thought he liked at one point, and I was certain that would be the end of us. Imagine my surprise when my roommate laughed at the mere thought of dating that boy. Imagine my surprise when he agreed to follow me after graduation, anywhere our lives took us. Imagine my surprise when he told me that he thought I knew. Somehow I’d missed it. Subsumed by the white noise of school and future planning and the constant undercurrent of believing that I asked far too much of others—

He chose me.

*

In every iteration I’d ever known, characters who asked so much of one other person were framed in villainous terms. It makes it hard to view their desires in a sympathetic light, which would seem to be the point—need is the messiest of human emotions. We aren’t meant to think of need as something valiant, or revolutionary, or beautiful. So when I saw Catra’s flashback and thought how closely it mirrored my own childhood, I was curious about where it was all going. I wondered if this would be another moment where need was framed as a weakness, as something small and ugly and best kept tucked away. I wondered it again when Catra admitted to herself that she loved Adora, but was certain that she didn’t feel the same way.

And then Catra followed her into the Heart of Etheria, where Adora intended to sacrifice her life. She refused to leave her. And when Adora considered giving up, Catra begged her to hold on—not for Etheria, or her friends. But for her:

“I’ve got you. I’m not letting go. Don’t you get it? I love you. I always have. So please, just this once… stay.”

Catra stood in front of the girl she loved and said, Please. Choose me.

Maybe that was needy or unfair or selfish. But… how could it be when that confession gave Adora the strength she needed to save the universe? And how can I ever feel bad about my obsessive, awkward heart again when I know now that this is the kind of power it possesses?

Throughout the finale, I sobbed so long and hard that I gave myself a headache. After it was over, I crawled into my partner’s arms and cried some more. And when I finally thought I could speak again without bursting into tears, I whispered, “Thank you. For choosing me.”

And he knew exactly what I meant.

Emmet Asher-Perrin would like to thank everyone involved in She-Ra for such an incredible journey. You can bug them on Twitter, and read more of their work here and elsewhere.

The post Love Can’t Make You a Villain: How She-Ra’s Catra Helped Make Sense of My Heart appeared first on Reactor.

But what if you long for something else? Like a hero who eschews violence where possible—one who finds a way to save the day without fists or swords. I’ve gathered five heroes who may not always avoid a well-timed punch or kick, but tend to pick non-violent tools as their “weapon” of choice.

Screwdriver—The Doctor

The Doctor often needs to save the day, or at least save as many people as they can from the evils of brute force and cynicism. But they don’t do this through violence or weaponry—cause that would undercut the point. Again and again, the Doctor stakes their own life and those of their companions on intellect and romance. Obviously a hero like that isn’t going to reach for a gun (The Doctor’s hatred of guns was actually ironclad during Russell T. Davies’ run on the show) but they need something other than jellybabies to wield, right? Enter the Sonic Screwdriver. It can do many things (maybe a few too many extremely convenient things) but it is, at its heart, a tool rather than a weapon. The Doctor uses to open doors both physical and metaphorical, and to build solutions creatively rather than lashing out with anger.

Shield—Captain America

Captain America is a super soldier, and he does use the shield as a projectile weapon on plenty of occasions, along with his fists. However, it’s significant that when his creators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby thought up an image of the representative of the U.S., they sent him against the forces of fascism even before his country declared war. And even more importantly they decided to make his most iconic weapon not a gun or sword, but a symbol of protection. Especially in the MCU’s version of the character, Cap’s sense of justice was expressed in his fighting style, which focused on protecting the helpless and assisting his teammates, rather than attacking evildoers. And even when he does fight, he does his best to stop villains, not kill them—a far cry from Iron Man blasting missiles at every threat.

Lasso of Truth—Wonder Woman

While Diana is trained in many different forms of combat, and uses many weapons, the one that is most closely associated with her is the Lasso of Truth. Like Cap’s shield, it’s not used to kill but to stop, to incapacitate villains long enough to protect the innocent, or to bind them until they can face the kind of calm, reasonable justice that’s impossible on a battlefield. The Lasso is itself a powerful symbol. What could stand more starkly in opposition to violence than the idea of a tool that will tell you the absolute truth? Obviously, it’s coercive, and used by anyone with less of a moral compass than Diana Prince could be an instrument of pure torture. But when she uses the Lasso she’s affirming the idea that, if only we could find the truth in a situation we would be able to do the right thing, to make the right choice. It might be impossible, but it tells you everything about Diana that she’ll fight with knowledge rather than force whenever she can.

Webbing—Spider-Man

The latest movie version of Spider-Man has a suit with an instant kill feature, but Friendly Neighborhood Cold-Blooded Murderer doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue, so Peter does his best to avoid that setting. Given the choice, rather than using his super strength to pummel people or his fantastic brain to think up weaponry, Spidey creates webbing so he can more easily swoop through New York helping people, and, when necessary, uses it to  capture villains and leave them for the police to deal with. And while things got a bit more intense when he helped out in the battle against Thanos, it’s worth remembering that Tom Holland’s take on the character actually saves his first real nemesis, dragging The Vulture away from a fire mere moments after the man tried to kill him, and tries to subdue Jake Gyllenhaal’s Mysterio without hurting him too much. And truly, whomst among us would not subdue Jake Gyllenhaal, given the chance?

Shield—Steven Universe

When Steven Universe began, it tricked us into thinking it was a cute show about a boy going on fun adventures with his alien guardians, The Crystal Gems. But it soon revealed it’s true purpose: telling a knotty coming-of-age story about identity and empathy. And as if that wasn’t enough, it complicated Steven’s relationship with the memory of his mother, and dug into the aftereffects of trauma with extraordinary nuance and care. But before all of that, in Season One Steven needed to prove that he was a true member of the Crystal Gems, and in order to do that he needed to find his weapon. All the Gems are able to generate their weapons: Garnet has gauntlets, Pearl has a spear, and Amethyst has a whip. Steven’s mother, Rose Quartz, had a mighty pink sword. But the Gems are also thousands of years old, and waiting for Steven to hit superhero puberty is a halting process. When he finally draws his own weapon, however, it’s not a sword, but a shield, and he doesn’t draw it because he’s in battlehe draws it because he’s singing the jingle for his favorite ice cream sandwich, Cookie Cat, and it makes him really, really happy. From then on, all of Steven’s powers, whether drawing the shield, creating defensive bubbles, or healing corrupted Gems with his magical spit (it works in context) are based on helping people rather than hurting them.

The post 5 Heroes Who Use Non-Traditional “Weapons” appeared first on Reactor.

Sontarans—Doctor Who

Plenty of nasties in Doctor Who can be rendered less effective with a well-aimed hit, but none so well as the Sontarans. A race of clones who are nourished via feeding tubes at the back of their necks, the Sontarans maintain that vent for feeding into their adulthoods. This means that a quick smack will quickly render them unconscious. This is supposed to be billed as a positive aspect, however—the fact that Sontaran anatomy works this way means that they are required to always face their opponents in battle. Turning their back would result in easy and immediate defeat, making it an unlikely choice for the intergalactic baked potatoes. For the glory of Sontar—HAH!

Vampires—Buffy the Vampire Slayer

In every generation there is a chosen one… and she’s pretty lucky because vampires disintegrate to dust if you stake them in the heart with sharp wooden sticks. Granted, some of these fanged monsters are a little speedier than others, but they cannot stand up to a nice pointy stake. Which is good because there are lots of them? And because this battle is basically never-ending, so Buffy deserves any breaks she can get. It’s a good thing that vampires come with so many rules, is really the point here. Obviously, Buffyverse vamps don’t have all of them, but most of the basic rules still apply, including the avoidance of sunlight and un-fondness for crucifixes, and so on. That aversion to pointy stakes makes it a lot easier for the Slayer to do her job.

Goombas—Super Mario Bros.  

Goombas are fanged shitake mushrooms who aren’t terribly threatening unless you get cornered by one—or have terrible hand-eye coordination. They tend to walk back and forth in a fairly predictable way, making it a simple task for a heroic plumber to jump on them, crushing these sentient anti-Italian slurs beneath his mighty boots. So, they’re a one-jump villain rather than a one-punch villain, but the spirit is the same—and don’t spend too much time thinking about the Goombas from the Super Mario Bros. movie because while it may have its charms (those charms being Yoshi and John Leguizamo’s world-shattering smile) those shambling behemoths are NOT True Goombas.

Putties—Power Rangers

If you watched the original show, you know that it used to take a few kicks to get the putties to disperse… but that eventually stops being the case. Later iterations of these faceless clay minions gave them funny power packs at the center of their chests—strike those and they instantly fall to pieces. That’s right, it got easier to defeat these Level One threats because Lord Zedd just couldn’t resist a branded chestplate. Of course, it’s hard to call Power Rangers out for this when basically every monster Rita ever made could be immediately defeated by one sword strike from the Megazord. It’s only irritating because if that’s all it ever took, you’d think the Power Rangers would start from the Megazord? No? Just us? Gotta watch the dino versions get smacked around a little, we suppose.

The Death Star—Star Wars

It’s supposed to be the most powerful weapon in the galaxy, but as long as you can get close enough? Yeah, you’re good. Both Death Stars (that’s right, both, because the Empire decided that the answer to the first one getting blown up was to just make another one almost exactly the same way) are capable of being destroyed with one (or two) precise hits to the main reactor, making their ability to blow up planets far less impressive than it should be. The same proves true for Starkiller Base, even though it takes little more coordination. And also the Emperor’s fleet of planet-killing Star Destroyers… which is sad because the cheese wedge ships were finally about to live up to their name before the entire Resistance happened to them. Point is, the Empire isn’t great with technology.

Zombies—Shaun of the Dead

There are different rules in different zombie narratives, but most of them work similarly: in order to kill zombie, you have to decapitate them, or destroy their brains, usually through one massive blow to the head. This is true for Shaun of the Dead, leading to the use of axes, vinyl records, cricket bats, and even pool cues in the destruction of the undead. When there are too many of them, this method of destruction stops being quite so effective, but as long as you don’t let a hoard of them into the pub where you’re hiding out, you’re in pretty good shape. You just need to make sure your swinging arm is good to go, and get some Queen ready on the jukebox.

The Chitauri—The Avengers

Look, there are plenty of hive minds in SF that you can ruin by blowing up some central hub, but the Chitauri are special because destroying the hub doesn’t just leave them rudderless—it actually destroys their ability to function at all. Tony Stark sends a nuke from New York City to their mothership in another galaxy, it detonates, and every Chitauri soldier just crumples to the ground. That’s… one heck of a design flaw. It’s not like Independence Day, where you give the aliens a computer virus and mess up all their ships, but still have to deal with the leftover aliens inside those ships. This is a one-and-done scenario, provided you can find a nuclear bomb and a fancy portal machine to chuck it through.

Anyone Who Goes Up Against A.D. Walter Skinner—The X-Files

While Mulder was busy dropping his gun and Scully was being the greatest character of all time, Walter Skinner spent his time on The X-Files perfecting the art of The Punch. Villains? Punch. Superiors at the office who have betrayed him? Punch. Monsters? Punch. Aliens? Punch. Mulder? Punch. Disturbingly hot double agent Alex Krycek? Punch, then HANDCUFF. It doesn’t matter who you are, if you cross Skinner, or so much as glance threateningly in the direction of his pain-in-the-ass underling/precious baby Fox Mulder, Skinner will PUNCH and you will go down.

And don’t even think about glancing at Scully—she’s the one he respects.

Achilles—The Iliad

“But he’s not a bad guy,” we hear you say. Well, if you’re a Trojan he’s sure not your buddy, so he counts.

The OG of this issue, you might say, Achilles is supposed to be the greatest hero the world has ever seen. He’s just got one problem—his mom, who dipped him in the fancy god-power river, didn’t dunk the heel she was holding him by, resulting in his truly embarrassing weak spot. Sure, Achilles can do feats that most mortal men could never dream of, but if you tap his heel? Game over. We can’t even blame this one on being played by Brad Pitt that one time; he’s like having some super high-powered computer that crashes after coming into contact with a lil bitty virus. The only thing we can say on Achilles’s behalf is that particular tendon named after him is kind of the worst. It does give up on you if you overwork it even a little bit, so… maybe this isn’t really Achilles’s fault? Maybe his tendons just needed a better warm up that day. Even superfolx need to get their gentle stretches in before the big fights.

These are just a few of our favorites—what about you? Who are your favorite villains to TKO with ease?

The post 9 Bad Guys You Can Defeat in One Punch appeared first on Reactor.

It was one of the most relieving things to be found on social media in months.

Incoming message… #DoctorWho pic.twitter.com/lTXziuzWVQ

— Doctor Who on BBC America (@DoctorWho_BBCA) March 25, 2020

There were many reasons for that relief, from the useful advice she gave (tell bad jokes!) to the reminder to trust in science (we forget that a lot lately, as a species). But chief among those reasons was the video’s existence, intent on reminding us that the Doctor is still here. And she cares about us. The Doctor believes we can be strong, and come out the other side of this.

But why is that so comforting to know?

*

Being a television series that has been around for over half a century, it’s hardly surprising when people are intrigued by Doctor Who. But when they have no knowledge of the series, that interest usually comes in the form of a question like, “So how is that show?”

I do not like this question, or any question related to it. The reason why is simple enough: It’s impossible to answer.

Now, part of the reason for that is the sheer volume of history that comes attached to Doctor Who, its mythology ever-expanding and multi-faceted. It’s like being asked how you feel about Superman comics—well, what era? What writer? What storyline? What artist? There are so many things that make up a good Superman comic, but it’s impossible for each story arc to achieve that pinnacle.

It would make more sense for someone to ask you how you feel about Superman himself.

*

When it’s hard to get out of bed—which let’s be honest, are most days lately—there’s a funny old quotation that sometimes gets caught in my head:

“There are worlds out there where the sky is burning, and the sea’s asleep, and the rivers dream; people made of smoke and cities made of song. Somewhere there’s danger, somewhere there’s injustice, and somewhere else the tea’s getting cold. Come on, Ace. We’ve got work to do.”

These are the last lines of the Classic Doctor Who series from 1989, spoken by the Seventh Doctor. And I’ve always thought that they resonate deeply because the call to action within them is almost an afterthought. We’re offered imagery to fuel the imagination, and a reminder of the state of the universe, a place that is full of risk (danger) and terror (injustice) and also simple actions of physical being (the tea’s getting cold). And then those final words: We’ve got work to do.

It’s such a useful pronouncement because it’s true, isn’t it? We all have some sort of work that needs doing, and this is a helpful reminder to start moving. It’s not scolding or nagging or mean-spirited. It’s also not saccharine or emotive. It’s just a statement, one that is no less meaningful for its pragmatic approach. We have things to be getting on with, even if that’s a tall order today, or every day. We should try to get on with them.

*

So people will ask “Is the show good?” when they want to know about Doctor Who. And the answer yes sometimes, and no sometimes, and the answer is also it depends on who you’re asking and when, because not everything will appeal to everyone all the time. But the more important answer is actually: Who cares?

Quality is a beastly metric to judge anything by. And I don’t mean to say that thoughtful criticism or having standards are pointless exercises—of course they aren’t. We should endeavor to make good art, and to absorb good art. We should care about quality, even when we’re fully aware that quality is one of the most subjective concepts we can foist upon entertainment. Also, as a descriptor, “good” is a relatively meaningless word, one that is often used in the place of purposeful discourse.

But what I’m really trying to say is, it doesn’t matter if Doctor Who is good. It has never mattered if Doctor Who is good because the only thing that matters about Doctor Who is that it gave us the Doctor. If a piece of fiction is the beholden to what it leaves behind, then that is what the show bequeaths to us.

And what a beautiful inheritance that has become over the decades.

*

If you know anything about its origins, you probably know that Doctor Who was initially conceived as a means to teach children about history. A time traveling main character makes it easy to showcase historical figures and events, and the Doctor’s first companions lent themselves to that job nicely—two school teachers and a granddaughter who was eager to learn. But it became clear, very quickly, that the show was a different sort of gift to children; it offered up a protagonist who used wit and knowledge against enemies, who valued what others often overlooked. And most important of all, it gave them a hero who readily admitted to their own fear. Or as the Third Doctor so readily put it:

“Courage isn’t just a matter of not being frightened, you know. It’s being afraid and doing what you have to do anyway.”

The Doctor’s creed has never relied upon might or power at the expense of care. Certainly, the character has the capacity for pomposity and boisterousness (most clever people fall prey to that trap), but that cannot outstrip the Doctor’s need to do as their name demands—to tend to others, to work tirelessly in the defense of people who cannot defend themselves, to make things right. The Twelfth Doctor put it into words as best he could, right before his own demise:

“I’m not trying to win. I’m not doing this because I want to beat someone — or because I hate someone, or because I want to blame someone. It’s not because it’s fun. God knows it’s not because it’s easy. It’s not even because it works, because it hardly ever does. I do what I do because it’s right! Because it’s decent! And above all, it’s kind! It’s just that. Just kind.”

As a child, there is nothing more valuable than having a someone to look up to who is exactly that. Just kind, history lessons or no.

*

I was watching the show the other day (Classic Who has been a very helpful comfort watch lately), and found myself struck all over again by something the Fourth Doctor put quite succinctly:

“The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common: They don’t change their views to fit the facts. They change the facts to fit their views. Which can be uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs changing.”

I don’t really think I need to explain why that landed like a sneaky little stab wound. I might still be bleeding over it.

*

People will ask “Do you think I’d like that show?” and honestly, which show? It’s been at least a dozen different ones, and showcased over a dozen Doctors. I could direct those people toward an episode or era I think they’d like if I know them well enough, but that’s not really how being a Whovian works. We watch because we need the Doctor. We need the Doctor because they remind us to be the best versions of ourselves—not just for our own sakes, but for others.

Right now, most of us are stuck in holding patterns. We’re depressed or exhausted or scared all the time, or some combination of all those things. But the Doctor knows that’s not the full sum of our lives. Look at what the Ninth Doctor has to say about us:

“There’s no such thing as an ordinary human.”

Or the Tenth:

“Some people live more in twenty years than others do in eighty. It’s not the time that matters, it’s the person.”

Or the Thirteenth:

“We’re all capable of the most incredible change. We can evolve while still staying true to who we are. We can honor who we’ve been and choose who we want to be next.”

We watch the show because we need the Doctor. We need the Doctor because their existence, their kindness, their belief in us makes it a little easier to be in the world. There aren’t many fictional figures who fill that need, who offer that manner of comfort, and certainly not with this longevity. Regeneration gives Doctor Who fans the greatest gift of all; there will always be a Doctor here for us, or, at least, there can be. That sixteen year hiatus where the Doctor didn’t appear on television seems cruel in retrospect. Imagining a future where the Doctor isn’t available to soothe our troubled minds seems equally cruel.

The character has transcended the boundaries of their story.

*

Since the lockdown began, Doctor Who scribes and actors have been banding together to create stories, and Twitter watch-alongs, and helpful PSAs for the world because they know this. They know that people need the Doctor, especially in times of upheaval or crisis. They’re not the only creative teams putting out free content and entertainment for the world right now, but the level of integration and output is different here, unprecedented. They know that seeing her face will make your day brighter, even if she’s filming from a cupboard and her hair has grown out past it’s regulated Doctor-length.

"Stay strong, stay positive. You're amazing".

Four tips from @bbcdoctorwho to get you through self-isolation. pic.twitter.com/8l9GFs4nLi

— BBC (@BBC) April 9, 2020

The Doctor remembered us because we needed her, and that means it’s going to be alright. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next week, or even next month. But eventually, it will be.

And for now, she just wanted to remind you to think of others because that’s “rule number one of being alive.” Excellent advice, that. Useful for children and adults. A good way to check in with yourself and make sure that you’re focusing on what matters. Practical, certainly—and still kind.

In the end, that will be the measure of us.

Emmet Asher-Perrin plans to laugh hard, run fast, and be kind. You can bug them on Twitter, and read more of their work here and elsewhere.

The post The Character of the Doctor Is More Important to Me Than Doctor Who Will Ever Be appeared first on Reactor.

In that first short story, “The Shadow Passes”, we saw the Thirteenth Doctor in her own lockdown with the fam, thinking about her past—particularly thinking about a certain family that she punished in her Tenth iteration:

“I sometimes think that’s why I change personality instead of just making my body younger. I need to switch myself off and on again so I can handle all the memories, so a lot of it feels like it happened to someone else. I get a different perspective on what I’ve done. I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately. There’s this girl in a mirror. Where I put her. That doesn’t suit who I am now. When we get out of here…”

Paul Cornell is back with two more short stories, these recorded as short radio plays. The first one, “Shadow of a Doubt”, involves Big Finish audio play companion Bernice Summerfield (typically found with the Seventh Doctor), who encounters a little girl in a mirror:

The second story, “The Shadow in the Mirror”, can be found above, and shows the Thirteenth Doctor making good on her desire to fix things between herself and one member of the Family of Blood. Lauren Wilson is back to voice little Lucy Cartwright, still trapped in mirrors and refusing to apologize for what she’s done.

Cornell laces in some beautiful details for these stories as well. There’s a suggestion that a red-headed Doctor exists somewhere in the time streams, which is a clever nod to the Doctor’s long-standing desire to be ginger. This Doctor apparently believes he’s the last one, but of course, we can take that with a grain of salt. Believing that you might be the last Doctor doesn’t count for much in Whovian canon—just ask the Eleventh Doctor.

The post The Thirteenth Doctor Revisits the “Family of Blood” in New Doctor Who Short Story appeared first on Reactor.

“As you probably know, we have all been, at one time or another, the Doctor,” they begin. “And the Doctor abides by one simple code: Whatever problem you’re facing, never be cruel or cowardly, never give up, and never give in.” Check it out below.

This wasn’t the evening’s only Whovian-approved segment. The Big Night In also featured a sequel to the classic sketch where David Tennant plays Catherine Tate’s new English teacher. The comedians reprised their roles with some very topical updates, including Zoom tutoring, TikTok fame, social distancing, the WHO, and, well, just see for yourself.

For more coronavirus coping strategies, check out the TARDIS-worth of goodies the Doctor Who family has been putting out to encourage fans to stay at home, from PSAs to watch-parties to new material. So far, we’ve gotten brand-new lore-expanding short stories from Chris Chibnall, Steven Moffat, Peter McTighe, and Paul Cornell, an “emergency transmission” from the Thirteenth Doctor herself, a video message from Rory Williams (Arthur Darvill) penned by Neil Gaiman, and episode live-tweets from Moffat and Russell T. Davies.

Additionally, Big Finish is making one Doctor Who audio play per week available to download for free until the end of May. If you’re not sure where to begin, Erin Horakova has a handy guide to the best episodes and arcs to start with.

The post Watch the BBC Doctor Who Reunion, Thanking Doctors and Healthcare Workers appeared first on Reactor.

According to the publication, the Doctors have recorded a message to thank doctors and other healthcare workers who have been on the front-lines of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. To watch, you should tune in at 8 pm BST/3 pm EST, or catch the clip after on the BBC One website.

The Doctor Who family has been keeping very active during lockdown, filming PSAs, holding watch-parties, and releasing new material to encourage folks to stay home. So far, we’ve gotten brand-new lore-expanding short stories from Chris Chibnall, Steven Moffat, Peter McTighe, and Paul Cornell, an “emergency transmission” from the Thirteenth Doctor herself, a video message from Rory Williams (Arthur Darvill) penned by Neil Gaiman, and episode live-tweets from Moffat and Russell T. Davies. Meanwhile, Big Finish is making one Doctor Who audio play per week available to download for free until the end of May.

David Tennant and comedian and beloved Doctor Who companion Catherine Tate will also act out a follow-up to this classic skit:

So it’ll be a fun night!

The post Tonight! Doctor Who Stars to Unite on BBC’s “Big Night In” appeared first on Reactor.

“Does the name Vincent Van Gogh ring a bell?”

“Don’t mention that man to me…he’s drunk, he’s mad, and he never pays his bills.”

When this episode of Doctor Who begins, we laugh at the absurdity that this restaurateur would reject one of the most famous paintings in the world because the man trying to hawk it was a bit of a drunk. Any of us would accept this piece, even if we’re not personally fond of the man’s work. We know its value, which is: practically priceless.

[Content Warning: this essay includes discussion of mental health, schizophrenia, and suicide]

The episode tells a fictionalized version of Vincent Van Gogh’s last days before his deepest plunge into depression. I personally like to think it happened this way, not because I love the Doctor and Amy, but because this would mean that the art darling would have known that he was loved, despite all the agony he experienced and the fact that he only sold a few paintings during his lifetime.

Van Gogh suffered from mental illness, though he was simply diagnosed as having “madness and an attack of fievre chaude (hot fever),” or being insane, according to fellow artist Paul Gaugin, who briefly lived with Van Gogh in the Yellow House.

When this episode of Doctor Who came on, something I had lost hope in ever happening finally did.

Vincent Van Gogh faced a monster that no one else could see—except the few who looked closely at the man’s painting of The Church at Auvers.

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The Madman with a Blue Box noticed this tiny, strange face and hurried back in time to discover the origins. What he found was a man driven mad by mental illness, depicted so aptly as an invisible monster.

“No one ever buys any of my paintings or they would be laughed out of town,” Vincent tells the Doctor, with all those around nodding in strong agreement. The implication that Van Gogh would be run out of town is clear. And, in real life, he was, thanks to a petition signed by the residents of Arles.

The scene brought me back to a night in 2014 when I received an unexpected phone call. “I have to tell you something about Elizabeth.”

Receiving strange news about my friend Elizabeth wasn’t that unusual, though it was uncommon for her mother to call at that hour.

Seven years prior, Elizabeth had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. She heard voices that told her to do things that weren’t good for her. Hallucinations scared and confused her. When she read her favorite book of the Bible, Romans, she believed that God was speaking personally to her.

“God is telling me to kill myself,” she told me on more than one occasion. “I don’t know if I want to. But I want to obey God.”

“God is not telling you to kill yourself, I promise. He doesn’t want that.”

This beautiful girl I’d known since 2002 was no longer the “sunshine girl” of my memory. She was still Elizabeth—the girl with whom I had started a homeless ministry in college and backpacked Russia and Europe—but she was not like the Elizabeth I had known.

My best friend was ill. She felt broken. Devastated by what she thought was God commanding her to do something she knew wasn’t right. But the voices were relentless.

Some days, she called to ask me whether or not she should drink water or if food was the answer to hunger. Other days, she seemed more like herself, speaking of family and relationships that weren’t colored strangely through the lens of her mental illness.

These voices—and the medications she took—changed the way her brain processed information. The illness changed the way she viewed the world. Our conversations no longer revolved around Jesus, missionary work, and the arts. Now, our conversations were filled with hurtful words.

It felt as though the illness filled her with anger, depression, and confusion. Our relationship suffered and eventually was severed in 2011 when the unhealthiness became clear to both of us.

We parted with these words:

“You are my best friend. Nothing will ever change how important you are to me. Nothing will ever make me love you less. If there’s ever a time you need me, I am here. I love you. I will always love you.”

For the next two years, we checked in with each other via mutual friends. Her mother or sister would give me an update or call if she needed something. In 2013, Elizabeth stopped taking her medications and often abandoned her car in parking lots, slept in parks, skipped meals on the regular, and didn’t use the financial vouchers or money she had to take care of herself.

By Autumn of 2014, I had no idea where she was. Occasionally, sightings by family and friends were shared, but none of us knew where she spent her days. Until the night of September 11, 2014.

“She was outside a restaurant. People were afraid of her erratic behavior. They called the police on her.” The broken sentences crackled over long-distance to Chicago. “Rita, she’s gone. They don’t know what happened. They took her to the hospital. She’s gone.”

At first, I listened to her mother in shock. Both Elizabeth’s mom and sister called me that night. I needed to love and support them. My mourning would have to wait.

When I hung up, I didn’t know what to think. Or feel. Elizabeth had been suffering for seven years. She hated this life with schizophrenia; she had told me so often. She had done things to hurt herself, turned her back on the dreams she’d had of becoming a missionary to Russia, and turned away from the God she so loved.

I felt relief. And then guilt for feeling that relief. I was glad her suffering was over, but should I be? The question haunted me for years, as I struggled, unable to mourn my best friend. That pain remained balled up tightly in a numbness that I—the girl who can cry on cue—had not been able to express.

In the episode, the Doctor found Vincent lying in bed, curled up and crying. Flashes of 2007 came back, reminding me of the nights after Elizabeth’s diagnosis. She would call in the mornings and I would spend the day helping her with tasks. Brushing teeth, drinking water, combing hair all had become burdens for Elizabeth. At the end of each day, I curled up in a ball and wept for her.

Vincent’s tears gave voice to my grief.

Amy Pond gave sunflowers to Vincent, hoping they would inspire more paintings. The Doctor took him to the museum where the gallery of Vincent Van Gogh’s work drew thousands of visitors a century later.

With Vincent standing near, the Doctor asked the curator, “Between you and me, in a hundred words, where do you think Van Gogh rates in the history of art?”

“Well, big question, but to me, Van Gogh was the finest painter of them all. Certainly…the most beloved…He transformed the pain of his tormented life into ecstatic beauty…To my mind, that strange, wild man who roamed the fields of Provence was not only the world’s greatest artist but also one of the greatest men who ever lived.”

The villagers were afraid of Van Gogh, so they voted him out of town. The restaurant patrons in California were afraid of the mutterings of a woman with a mental illness, so they called the police.

That night, Elizabeth went into cardiac arrest for seemingly no reason at just 30 years of age. In the timeline of the Doctor Who episode, Van Gogh took his own life a few weeks after he saw his artwork immortalized.

Amy and the Doctor returned to the museum one last time, Amy hopeful that there would be hundreds of new Van Goghs hanging in the gallery. There were none. The timeline had not changed, but there was something different about two of the paintings. The monster from the church window was gone, and across the vase for the sunflowers is scrolled, “For Amy, Vincent.”

Vincent’s gift to Amy reminded me of something Elizabeth’s mom told me the week after Elizabeth died. “She had photos on her when she passed. Photos of you and her together.”

Amy had her painting. I have the knowledge that time and space could not change how Elizabeth and I loved each other.

Vincent’s suffering paralleled with Elizabeth’s in so many ways. Amy’s hope and desire touched on mine. This beautiful telling of the final days of Vincent Van Gogh and the terribly painful mental illness he suffered frees my heart to weep.

“No new paintings. We didn’t make a difference at all,” Amy concluded.

“I wouldn’t say that,” the Doctor responds. “The way I see it, every life is a pile of good things and bad things…The good things don’t always soften the bad things, but vice versa, the bad things don’t necessarily spoil the good things or make them unimportant. And we definitely added to his pile of good things.”

You did make a difference, Amy. For Vincent and for me.

If you or someone you know are struggling with mental health, please find helpful resources below:

• Lifeline Crisis Chat: https://www.contact-usa.org/chat.html
• Crisis Text Line: Text REASON to 741741 (free, confidential and 24/7)
• National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-TALK (8255); www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org
• Suicide Prevention, Awareness, and Support: www.suicide.org

Rita Juanita Pike is the granddaughter of aviatrix, Jerrie Mock, first woman to pilot an airplane solo around the world. Rita has taken inspiration from her grandmother’s life and flight and pursued many of her own dreams in theatre, podcasting, novel writing, and cooking up delicious food from around the world. She now writes on food, travel, pets, faith, and the arts. She’s happily married to Matt, and faithfully serves the very fluffy kitten queen, Lady Stardust.

The post Amy’s Sunflowers: How Doctor Who’s “Vincent and the Doctor” Helps Me Mourn My Best Friend appeared first on Reactor.