Well, yeah, but so does Simba.

Yeah, but it was a plot point that this was a perfect, untouchable memory. Because it was a created one. The Doctor outright says it.

Yeah, but it's a discussion based on the idea that those commentaries already happened and were bad. I mean, I think the only topic Who should never ever touch again is the Falklands War and it's an interesting discussion, but at least I know that was the actual intent and I have arguments about why it was bad.

I didn't see it as commentary made by the Doctor - I saw it as… commentary by the writer.

Just because it's blatantly trying to define consent =/= it being a rape allegory or trying to deal with rape. Everything else about the episode completely and totally dispels that notion.

I know. I disagree with you about those two.

…. I really, really really, really don't think that Who was trying to have either an abortion metaphor OR a rape metaphor here. The consent bits were about how the oppressed, even when they're actually more powerful than oppressors, tend to forget that.

I think there was an interesting idea regarding power - that it's a lie we consent to and the moment people stop believing you're powerful… well, you're not - but it was really really undercooked.

I'd love it if her Big Heroic Arc was killing herself - but her other version!

I just want to see what those motifs coalesce into. I do think something about the nature of good will be there in the finale (specially since we have two Masters) - and probably Twelve's big arc, which has been a long meditation on what makes a good man. Maybe Missy will murder Simms!Master so he can regenerate into…

Bill, if there's any of you left in there, listen, you have to keep thinking about your mum, the memory you created.

Vincent and the Doctor was Moffat's, though. That said - Bill's sexuality has come up naturally, just like Rose sometimes flirted with men or Donna did. She had two dates in one episode, a love interest in another one and turned down a dude in yet another one. That's three out of eight and it was never a constant…

Ew, girls. Always ruining everything.

Actually, the comparison between S5 and S6 is exactly the one I'm making! There's no outright clunkers, but Vampires of Venice and the Silurian two-parter, for me, are not particularly outstanding ones. The main arc is nowhere as well done as in S5, but I agree it's stacked with outright classics.

I think there's two kinds of ways to measure Who quality: the episode-to-episode one and the… general one. So you have series with very good arcs or very good character work - like series 5 - that don't really have that many good eps. Series 2, for me, kinda fails in both measures, but I like S3 in the general sense.

My BFF is rewatching with her BF (a first time watcher) and we were talking about that today. There's very few great episodes, even if we remember the era fondly.

Ah, Dalek Dickhead's episodes. Ugh. I agree that the beginning is terrible and series 2 is… lackluster, but there's some classic and some 'good but not amazing' episodes..

… Human Nature/Family of Blood? Blink? The second half of series 3 is pretty good, down its last… fifteen minutes.

Oh, I took the whole 'perfect, untouched' to mean 'kind of a lie' but maybe I'm giving it too much credit.

Wasn't that the whole reason they couldn't 'touch' that memory?