I think the episode got a lot wrong that it really didn't have to get wrong, either because they wanted a specific bit of imagery or because they just didn't do their homework.

There's an old tradition in literary science fiction of setting up moral dilemmas in which a brutal choice is necessary for survival, with the moral being that in a harsh universe, sometimes we have to be cruel for the greater good. Tom Godwin's short story "The Cold Equations" (in which it turns out to be absolutely…

The science in this episode is all so wrong, I'm not even sure where to begin to critique it. Even by Doctor Who standards it's ridiculous.

…Though I think the place where I got the idea of an edit was that there was a CD release of the complete audio track with some added narration, and they used the narration to cover up the slur.

Aha, that's the explanation: I saw the one surviving episode on the Lost in Time DVD, and I think it was not the episode in question.

I don't know how those lines played in the UK, but speaking as an American, yeah, the Doctor being racist was the first place my mind went. At least, that occurred to me as how Danny would perceive it. (Danny was definitely irked, but he eventually expresses it in terms of the officers vs. enlisted men class divide.)

I think the line has gotten edited out of later video releases of the episode, hasn't it? I was recently surprised to hear that it had been there.

The Doctor is a real jerk in this episode, to Clara and even more to Danny. And I thought it was interesting and funny… but it seems to have gotten a lot of extremely negative reactions. Some people don't want the Doctor to be a jerk.

I thought "42" was a terrible episode; a friend of mine pointed out that it was the basic setup was remarkably similar to that of the Jack Black action-show parody "Heat Vision and Jack", only played straight.

Yeah, I guess the missing part of the formula there is that the Doctor is still the hero. Though RTD's focus on companions as POV/audience-surrogate characters may have been pushing against that for a while.

This latest one, with its quivery theremin-like main melody, reminds me less of the Derbyshire original, and more of the Dominic Glynn and Keff McCulloch versions that were used in the Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy eras.

…nah, can't be that, the chronology's all off (and his TARDIS was disabled in those days)…

The red jacket lining is one of the things that gives me a Jon Pertwee vibe. There's an anecdote about Pertwee's outfit claiming that it was inspired by the vampire's cloak he wore in the movie "The House That Dripped Blood" (though this is disputed).

If anything the Doctor is the Manic Pixie Dream Boy, more in some incarnations than others (10 and 11 particularly). He's forever and always sort of a Holy Fool/trickster archetype; make him cute and energetic and put him together with a companion with some romantic chemistry going on, and MPDB is basically where you…

…obviously, there were exceptions, such as Mawdryn Undead and the beginning of Logopolis. But they never quite went all in the way Moffat has.

It is different from classic Doctor Who scripts, which used time travel as a plot device in itself only rarely. Most of the time, it was just the way they got into the setting of the story and back out again, and there was frequently talk about how the Blinovitch Limitation Effect or the Laws of Time or some such…

He even had a name that sounded like a Greek letter.

What impresses me is that he held my attention even in "Into the Dalek" and "Robot of Sherwood," which I thought were weak episodes. I liked Matt Smith a lot, but he didn't have quite the same ability to rescue a subpar script through force of personality.

…There are passages in L. Frank Baum's Oz books that capture this aesthetic wonderfully as well. In one of them, there's a country infested with man-eating bears that are invisible. But the protagonists have gotten hold of some magical means of walking on water, so they avoid the invisible bears by only standing on…

That's always struck me as playing (very effectively) to the kids in the audience. What these things have in common is that they resemble ritualistic children's games. The floor is hot lava! Step on a crack, break your mother's back! Don't think about a white bear!