Doctor Whoke
I know, I said I wasn’t going to watch this again but it’s kind of like having a quart of milk in the refrigerator that you know has to be bad. I mean it was stuck behind something for two months and you forgot that it was there. Gallons of milk have come and gone since that one quart was forgotten about. There is no possibility whatsoever that it is fit for human consumption.
And you still have to smell it.
I’m honestly kind of impressed by their ironclad determination to refuse to learn from the mistakes of others. A few years ago it was understandable to a degree. Everyone in Hollywood is on Twitter, they all DM each other all the time and Twitter was completely ideologically captured. There were no dissenting voices permitted on site. Consequently, when social justice weirdos swore up and down and in unison that these old franchises only had to be made into a safe space and they would come in by the millions, the producers convinced themselves they’d found an untapped gold mine. They told the old fans, this is no longer for you, so, if you don’t like it, we don’t want you here.
The old audience left but the new audience, whose coming was foretold in prophecy, failed to appear. Which hasn’t stopped Russel T. Davies or Nucti Gatwa from declaring in every media release that if the old audience isn’t happy with things then they want them gone. Because that public relations strategy worked so brilliantly for Marvel, LucasFilm, Disney Animation and Star Trek. The only thing it seems to have accomplished is to get the critics in line. Season 1 of Doctor Who has a 100% fresh score on RT. That is unquestionably a guarantee of something so bad that like that expired milk, I just had to give it a sniff. And then wished I hadn’t.
The episode opens with a music teacher in 1925 trying to teach a bored student, then a Bette Midler drag act pops out of the piano and steals all the music that was in his soul. This week’s enemy is called the Maestro, he has plural pronouns which I’m going to ignore and he wants to steal all the music in the world. Davies has a talent for horror but he seems to have forgotten one of the fundamentals. The thing you are supposed to be afraid of needs to be scary. A hulking scene chewing drag queen is a bit worrying but not frightening.
Credits roll Now we are in the Tardis with the Doctor’s new companion Ruby Sunday, (Russel Davies is a British Boomer). Ruby’s job is to be god’s perfect fag hag. The fabulous Doctor’s new companion is a Zoomer with a Boomer’s taste in music. Instead of wanting to see the end of the Earth or birth of the universe, Ruby wants to watch the Beatles record their first song.
Because all Zoomers are completely obsessed with the Beatles and everything else that Boomers love. (Eldest Dark Spawn is miming vomiting while this going on)
The Doctor thinks that’s a super idea and they get to cosplay Swinging London. It’s kind of an odd thing with this Doctor, he doesn’t have a set costume all of the others did, even Jodie. Gatwa is too special for that I guess. I admit Ruby looks hot that way, which is probably why she is gone at the end of this season.
So they go to London in 1963 when the Beatles recorded their first song. Which was actually in 1958 when they were the Quarrymen. Anyway, they go to EMI studios and sit in on the Beatles, except it’s not Please, Please Me, it’s some grade school song.
It turns out all the music in the world kind of died about 1925.
The Doctor has a piano put on a rooftop, no he didn’t have a reason for that, and he has Ruby play a song that she wrote for a heartbroken lesbian she knew. And the hulking, scene chewing drag queen from the prelude pops out of the piano alternating, simpering and bellowing like a bull rhinoceros. This was accompanied by various facial acrobatics that were meant to simulate acting.
The Doctor is very, very frightened of the drag queen because he is clearly somehow connected to the Toymaker. Because it did the Toymaker’s laugh.
You can’t make this stuff up, but Russell T. Davies can and I’m still disappointed by that.
The Doctor declares the world will end. Ruby then states that logically the world didn’t end because she was born in it. I immediately knew they were going to rip off one of the Tom Baker episodes called Pyramids of Mars. Sure enough the Doctor took Ruby to the present and it’s amblasted wasteland just like it was in that real Doctor Who episode.
The Maestro shows up and does facial contortions again, apparently it is the Toymaker’s offspring.
They go back to 1963 and try to use a magical piano that the Beatles used for recording, to banish the cross-dressing hyper intelligent superbeing that dresses like Bette Midler in Hocus Pocus. Except the Doctor can’t get the last note right. He and Ruby have lost the fight, however…
You’ve probably guessed this part, haven’t you?
The Beatles find the right note through Boomer magic and banish the Bette Midler drag act.
The show ends with a non diegetic song and dance number. Just like Doctor Who has always been famous for.
Star Wars is dead, Star Trek is dead, Marvel is dead. You name it and if there was a reboot, it’s gone. Doctor Who is dead. It’s still dead.
This new reboot version is what a gay Boomer thinks that the Tik Tok kids want. Except they don’t Russel T Davies can’t get away from the obsessions of his generation. Not least of which is Beatles worship. They were just a boy band from Liverpool and in fifteen years they’ll be in the same boat as Bill Haley & His Comets.
The reception has been hilarious. The shill media is desperately trying to find some reason, any reason for Doctor Who’s failure. The overnight ratings were about 2.4 million viewers. My favorite excuse for the low numbers was that the weather was too nice. They really said that.
Everybody is saying that if this show doesn’t deliver on the ratings or streaming minutes then Disney will cancel it. I’m not so sure myself. This thing has Dana Walden’s fingerprints all over it and there is no way in hell a Disney executive at her level can admit to having made a mistake. Especially when she is first in line for iger’s job, which she is at the moment.
I personally suspect they will renew it for one more season on a slashed budget. Gatwa’s agent will probably be pressuring him bail out and when he does that probably is the end of Doctor Who. Although in truth it’s been dead for seven years already. The last Peter Capaldi episode aired in 2017.
There were no songs by the Beatles in this entire episode.
