Regarding selling workers their oxygen: this is called a 'company shop', or more broadly a 'company town'. It's happened repeatedly throughout history in frontier economies. Workers move to a place for a job. They get paid, but they need to buy things like food and shelter to live. Because it's a frontier and the…

It could have done with a few more minutes of wrapping up at the end so that it felt less of a jolt. But otherwise, yes, this was one of the very few Dr Who single-parters that DIDN'T need a second part.
I think everything the reviewer disliked was what was good about the episode. That it did just sketch out the…

To return to historical analogues: the killing in the Congo DID end, eventually, and one of the biggest reasons why was Casement's report that told Westerners what was actually going on there, and spurred the creation of philanthropic organisations to campaign for reform. You can't have reform - or indeed a revolution…

That's actually pretty much what happens when you have unfettered capitalist extraction companies - like those a century ago in the Congo or in the Amazon. (Or to a lesser extent many brutal mining companies around the world, even in the developed world until quite recently). When labour is cheap and resources are…

But I don't think this IS child abuse. I don't think her parents are "abusers", and I'm not sure Tim does either. Her parents have done something terrible, but it's not something they can ever do to her again - there's no ongoing abuse situation to rescue her from here.
And in any case, while of course it's good to…

They did indeed!

It's not really a symphony, though he does call it 'symphonic'.
Missed an opportunity with the narration - so many people have narrated it!
Narrators they could have picked from include: Eleanor Roosevelt; David Bowie; Alice Cooper; David Attenborough; Alec Guinness; John Gielgud; Patrick Stewart; Christopher Lee;…

Tim has no reason to suspect that her parents are going to teach her to use sex to extract information and to kill people in cold blood. That would be a sort of lunatic thing for him to think - just because he's found two agents of a foreign power doesn't mean he should assume they're Bond villains (even if, as we…

I don't see how you can read concern for someone's wellbeing as "disgusting". He has no way to extricate her from the situation that wouldn't make everything much worse for her (and possibly get him and his family killed into the bargain). He is counseling her - to rely on her faith and to maintain hope. That may not…

The point of hyperbole is that the facts are exaggerated. Or in this case just simplified - I don't know the location of the prisons used to hold suspected traitors in the early 1980s, and other readers here probably don't either, so "Guantanamo" stands for the concept as a whole.

If we're being pedantic, parts of Kazakhstan are geographically in eastern europe, and as a result the country as a whole (much like turkey) is sometimes considered eastern european for some purposes. [usual definition of the border is along the Ural river. Some put it along the Emba river, which puts significantly…

Spoilers for next season: in an alternative ending to Battlestar Galactica, the Galactica fleet lands on this version of earth.

I don't think having the kid's parents arrested and thrown into
guantanamo, having her publically outed as an alien, having her brother
find out she's been lying to him, and having them both put into foster
care is really something that would improve the situation!

I don't know - I think they're committed to one another now.

And when you say "Philip's", you means "everyone's".

Modern fashion needs more mediaeval crowns.

I don't know if it's anger. I think it's Pastor Tim's thought that she doesn't realise how badly she's suffering, or doesn't want to admit it. Photographing someone saying you're fucked up, and standing next to your parents as you 'innocently' get them to develop those photographs, kind of screams "classic cry for…

As a non-photographer, I was a bit miffed to miss out the interesting stage that I'd be curious about, getting from the negatives to the prints. But whenever you see darkrooms on TV, it seems to be just the prints.

I don't see what Tim has done that's so bad. He's desperately worried about a child he knows, but he reassures her anyway. That's not duplicity, that's optimism. And that's his job - if he told everyone who came to him for help that they were probably doomed whatever they did, he'd be a terrible pastor. But at the…

Even if they didn't give her a motivation for evil, it would be nice to get a motivation for what she does while evil. Instead of 'well, I'm evil now, so I guess I'll just murder you for no reason!'