People are pretty sure that Aphrodite was based on a goddess worshipped in Mesopotamia (called Astarte or Ishtar or Inanna), and there are numerous examples of the Greeks and Romans adopting gods from other cultures (Isis is a pretty prominent example of this), or even claiming that gods from other cultures are just a…

I was curious how long I would have to scroll through the comments to find a JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure reference.

Boom Town is probably the best episode in that list that I threw together. The scene where they discuss the ethics of execution is really good, and Captain Jack is fun in it, but I find the evil plan to be too ludicrous to take seriously, and the episode takes itself too seriously for me to treat it as a comedy. Not…

I believe that Neil Gaiman hinted in an interview that BBC executives interfered a lot during the production of that whole season, and that what he originally wrote didn’t really make it onscreen. It’s never been said, but I wouldn’t be shocked if it was originally a two-parter that got condensed into one, because the…

Yeah, the Cybermen have been surprisingly hard to do well despite being a great concept on paper. Even Neil Gaiman couldn’t get them to work.

The main problem is how the Doctor faked his death. If the universe believed that the Doctor had to die then and there, how is using the Teselecta going to fool the universe? Maybe it’s that history says that the Doctor died there, so fooling most people is sufficient, but later story arcs (many of which were also…

I agree RTD’s average episodes are usually more enjoyable, but I think that RTD had lower lows (a controversial take, I realize). I despise “Arachnids in the UK,” but other than that, I’d much rather watch “Tsuranga Conundrum” or “Orphan 55" than “Boomtown,” “Love and Monsters,” “The Idiot’s Lantern,” the season 3…

I honestly think that Wedding is where it falls apart. The episode just does not establish the rules as to what and why things are happening very well. I quite enjoy the arc before then and have very few complaints (the main one that I can think of is that it’s unclear what Melody is up to between the 1960s and…

That wasn’t a real protest in-universe. Those were actors hired to demonstrate the security drone’s capabilities.

Big Finish’s “Spare Parts” is a haunting and brilliant Cyberman story that Moffat borrowed heavily from for “World Enough in Time.” In the show itself, I’d also argue for “Tomb of the Cybermen” which has a sequence that gives me chills every time that I watch it. The Cybermen slowly emerging from suspended animation…

To be fair to Chibnall, if the rumors that I’ve heard is true, most of the ending of “Power of Three” wasn’t really his fault. Apparently, the actor playing the main villain had a temper tantrum and stormed off the set, so Chibnall basically had to write a new ending that didn’t use the villain on the fly.

I believe the Doctor probably could have just dropped them off in the Tardis. Never explicitly shown, but I think that it’s a reasonable thing to assume happened.

See also, “Hell Bent.”

In Chibnall’s defense, the episode was written and filmed months before Rowling started openly showing how awful she is. They probably could have edited it out, but it might have been really hard to do so without making the scene feel weird.

I believe it was Terrance Dickes who said that Terry Nation wrote a great first episode, so he wrote that great first episode 20 times. There’s a lot of truth to that statement, as the first episode for pretty much any Terry Nation serial has literally the same plot and structure. (TARDIS lands in strange location…

I read an interview with Robert Shearman (the writer of “Dalek”) once, and he said that pretty much all of the final drafts for the scripts were written by RTD. It was mostly just to make the dialogue sound consistent with other episodes in the case of “Dalek,” and I don’t think much of the structure or plot was…

Even most of his best Torchwood work was pretty character focused or very light on sci-fi elements. “Countrycide” has literally no science fiction elements. “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” is more focused on Jack and John Hart’s dynamic than any sort of sci fi concept. His best Torchwood script, “Adrift,” had no action scenes or…

The Season 6 arc is a mess, but there are a lot of phenomenal standalone episodes (“The Doctor’s Wife,” “The Girl Who Waited,” “The God Complex”) and even the early arc episodes are pretty great. There are a couple misses for sure, but overall it has one of the better hit-to-miss ratios. I think it’s probably the most…

I feel like a lot of people let nostalgia blind them to how uneven the Davies era actually was. There were a ton of gems for sure, but there were also a lot of clunkers. I am about to express an unpopular opinion here, but I actually think the Chibnall era is more consistent, but the resulting highs are a lot lower…

OK. You’re good. Kinja can be annoying.