I take no fellow person with a grain of salt! Just part of my ongoing campaign to gently suggest people not think of things in terms of the grades. I get why they're there and why people react to them, so it's all very understandable, but I think a lot of digital ink gets spilled on "This B+ grade is ridiculous, it's…

For what it's worth, I'll go back to my old line that the grades mean less than nothing. Especially in the early going of a season when I'm still calibrating. But either way I spend like 15 seconds on the grades and move on. I'd forgotten I had given "Smile" a B+ and probably would knock that down if I were…

For the record, I would have been super happy if this were a fun romp and nothing more. That's 100% great. But (a) I didn't personally find it fun enough to be that and (b) the story itself kept momentarily highlighting deeper ideas that it then did nothing with, which is sloppy if you're going for a romp.

His two-parter last season was no great shakes, but "The God Complex" is an all-time great, and "The Vampires of Venice," "School Reunion," and "A Town Called Mercy" are all very good. And even that two-parter was fine.

Yes indeed (and Tegan, Nyssa, and Turlough, though only for two stories). I just made the Hartnell connection because Capaldi is such a stated fan of him.

With a bit of "Turn Left" in there too. But yeah, "The Last of the Time Lords" is the most obvious comparison, albeit with all the pieces seemingly *much* better arranged this time around.

And that's fair! If it doesn't work for you, it doesn't work. It just seemed worth pointing out that the episode did all it could (at least in terms of the dialogue) to explicitly sell the notion that Bill was doing this because she believes Earth needs the Doctor, and she trusts him to get her planet back.

I'm preemptively trying to tamp down my expectations for next week, mostly failing miserably.

But she actually said, "Doctor, this planet needs you, so I'm making an executive decision. I'm keeping you alive." That was pretty much exactly her calculation.

"Midnight" also does fantastic work deconstructing the 10th Doctor's presumptiveness.

That can be annoying, but Bill pretty explicitly argues the it's the world that needs the Doctor as opposed to her personally needing him and being willing to risk the entire world for that. So, I dunno, this felt materially different from some of the more annoying manifestations of this.

Say what you will about Peter Harness, but never tell me he's boring.

There's a lot of very good art that argues your position, and it's certainly a defensible one. But I really do think a crucial part of Doctor Who is that, at its core, nobody is ever expendable.

That's fair. Sometimes I get caught in a new writing tic. I'll eliminate at least two of them.

Yeah, I love how plummy her voice is in a way that surpasses even Law's Nyssa. It's so delightfully fake English that I can really only call it a "British" accent, even though such a thing technically doesn't exist.

Oddly British Lexa Doig > Josh Segarra, tbh

The headline was actually "Wait, what the hell did Arrow just do?", which to be fair is pretty vague and non spoiler-y, though I guess pairing it with the Laurel image could point one in directions.

I'm pretty much with you, although I don't if I can really call his plan "stupid." If anything, it was just too ludicrously brilliant. But either way, Prometheus was fine and Josh Segarra was fine, and he was a good foil for Oliver, but I don't really get what some people are seeing in him.

Wait, did one of my reviews do that? I'm looking at the headline for that review now, and it's actually about as non-spoilery as possible. I don't think I changed it after the fact, but… maybe?

You don't unload those first, you have only yourself to blame.