To be honest, I think this is slightly better than ‘Be the Cowboy’. I feel like this is one of the many reviews that are unduly disappointed at the absence of some seismic change in musical approach to go with the (actually fairly short by historical standards) hiatus in releases.

Ah - this is going to turn out to be what Brian Aldiss called a ‘shaggy god story’, isn’t it?

And the secret to great SF worldbuilding is to build a world with roughly fifty people in it.

I think her ‘dark side’ is precisely her breezy obliviousness and refusal to engage with anyone at any more than the most superficial level - or even to examine her own actions and impact.

So I have just as much of a cisclaimer in place as the author, but I’m still going to go in on the whole Adira/Gray thing because it’s a really shitty metaphor for the thing it’s trying to be a metaphor about. Gray is getting their old body back, with which they are, and as far we know have always been, perfectly…

The Doctor getting those memories back would be far too much of a change for the show, I think. My suspicion is that they will have the choice to let it all back in, but at some carefully calibrated expense (like maybe there would be a way to use the stored Artron energy in the watch to stop the Flux but it would…

I think the only chink in his armour that I heard about was some interview where he let slip that he was a Shakespeare truther. Which is (or has become, now that it’s detached from its original rather nasty snobbery) one of the more harmless consipracy theories, I guess. Like discovering he believes in bigfoot or…

As well as it being competent as horror, can I also throw in a shout out for its equally better-than-it-needed-to-be science fictional aspect? The technobabble and production design successfully makes it feel like there’s some sort of coherent set of scientific theories operating in the background - something that…

I somehow convinced my grandmother to video it for me when I was about 12. I remember somehow watching it as a double bill with the 1970s version of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (although I may have conflated two incidents of lax grandparenting) and being profoundly affected by both - the latter because it was the…

Well, I suppose that’s one way of delivering character backstory (‘I’m hiding in my own timestream, but for some reason in a slightly more linear fashion than the other characters!’), but can we talk about the wierdly nothing-y way in which the supposed ‘cliffhanger’ of the previous episode was resolved?

Nobody should need an excuse, but on analysis I suppose having actually been packed off to shitty, non-magic Hogwarts makes watching the population of the entire world somehow being convinced that childhood at an old-timey boarding school is a delightful experience a tad galling. Certainly enough for my refusal to…

If it was really an antithesis they’d get Bela Tarr in. Opens with a 15 minute panning shot of a garage, affectlessly moving past a grubby looking Vin Diesel in a ragged vest looking bitterly at a spanner. The only thing on the soundtrack is intermittent clanking and an unseen second person periodically having some…

I mean, it probably will, and then there will be a complicated series of nested flashbacks, with the day of the big important test as the centrepiece, and everyone will think it’s terribly elegant and clever.

I’m presuming the teddy bear was an extremely oblique reference.

Really looking forward to civilisation collapsing at least in part because Usher didn’t think the messaging around climate change was a bit too negative in tone and didn’t generate enough clicks and likes.

what a time to be alive

Yeah, if you put a gun to my head and asked me to name an even lazier cliche for ‘fancy art’, Faberge eggs are going to be the go-to,

They’re really low-key embarrassed about the whole thing as well. Like, there are these half arsed photocopied signs when you get near the Rennaisance stuff (oh, alright if you want...), and a whole display room nearby where you can get an explanation of how the Mona Lisa became a cultural icon despite it being a…

Wow. This looks like it’s for absolute idiots. Just every single cliche in the book, including the Mona bloody Lisa (which I thought had died as a lazy stand-in for A Big Art Thing to Steal decades ago - displayed as usual at double its actual size).

The answer to why something is rubbish is always capitalism.