After traveling with Heather for a while, Bill decides she needs to give the Doctor a proper goodbye, especially because he doesn't know what happened to her, and has her death on his conscience. So she asks Heather to take her to the Doctor, and since Heather is the Pilot, and can go anywhere, she does.

Death is overrated as a means of risk. Bill suffered a fate far worse than death! It was brutal, it was undeserved. and the show doesn't really take it back, because she lived it, and she lost her old body. Some people would say living on as a non-human entity isn't really living at all. It's not an unreservedly happy…

Just this once, everybody lives!

It doesn't really mean much to me, either, but I'm willing to give it an open mind. Hell, if you've been watching Doctor Who this far, references to the old show that you don't get should be old hat at this point. watching Utopia, I was like "who the heck is the Master??!" and had to have someone explain it to me.…

Why does that need to be explained?

eh, he's the definition of mediocre. As is Chibnall, for that matter, but despite Chibnall's four episodes not being super-great, I think he's demonstrated better character work. Gatiss is all about the goof, and too arch by half.

Knowing that Bill isn't returning after the special, what I want is for her to at least be there for the Doctor's regeneration, mostly so the Doctor doesn't regenerate alone. Alternately, surprise-introduce a companion for next season meeting the Doctor immediately post-regen.

It's a different kind of unpredictability, though, isn't it?

I like twists where there's an obvious explanation for things, but either the reader or the characters are unwilling to believe it could possibly be true. One example of this is Iain M. Banks' novel Use of Weapons, which telegraphs things pretty heavily, but what it's telegraphing is sufficiently dark that the reader…

if you think about it, nobody ever tells it like it is, because reality is mostly subjective.

uh this is obviously not true unless you're exclusively talking about leftists (or have only had significant experience with people on the left side of the political spectrum). Go to any small, dying rural community and ask the people at the local diner what they think of Islam.

When push comes to shove, I would expect a lot of the commentariat is not fond of militant atheism. Not to say I think AV Clubbers are super-religious themselves, but that they don't like evangelism any better coming from a nonbeliever. One hard lesson I've learned in life is that, just because something is true…

At least progressives care, and don't have a philosophy completely antithetical to the spirit of the Constitution.

I feel like the purity test people were actually more likely to vote for Clinton, and it was the anti-PC people that tended to be among the bitterest about Sanders. I could be wrong, but that's the feeling I got from skimming through Reddit (which, while a horrible place for political discussion, is a good gauge of…

and thus the firing squad continues firing in a perfect circle. Your rhetoric is complementary action, in terms of the intra-ideological conflict. Shit, let's all be assholes. Have you ever considered not using gasoline to put out the fire?

oh, yeah, the racism, and the winking at transphobia are one thing, but anti-vaxxers are monsters, and I'm willing to be a little bit illiberal with those irredeemable scumbags. There's no defense for it.

He is a liberal. It's a broad tent, with room for commies, Black Panthers, and racist Bernie-bros. and our common ground is based on thinking we are all the only True Liberals, and Those Guys aren't.

Crazy person aside, I'm not entirely sure a hacky comedian that habitually makes stereotype-dependent jokes is a great standardbearer for our side. If I had to choose, I'd go for someone I believed to be a kind person. Maher holds a lot of the right opinions, but I think character matters, and by many accounts, Maher…

I'm waiting for classism to actually become an issue that people on my side really care about. It might be a long wait.

ehhhhh, I don't know about that. You've probably never paid much mind to suburban politics, but living in a suburb of Seattle, I can tell you than the country clubbers are really fond of making life impossible for homeless people. and then talking a big game about the "homeless problem", pretending to care, and then…