Sure but it’s like... the Doctor wasn’t even special before that, you know? He didn’t have a past that he was atoning for or a special secret origin. He was just a dude.

I don’t mind the Division bit that much, actually. I’d like it if it turned out she wasn’t the Timeless Child and instead was part of the people exploiting it. My issues are more with the origin and making the Doctor even more special.

(Clara didn’t tell 1st which TARDIS to steal - she undid the changes the Intelligence did. It was very unclear, though.)

I would like this era a lot more if they just did away with the adventure plots and it was a hang-out show set in space.

But at least it’s commitment to something!

Oh, I got that and I didn’t mind it on a character level. But as a viewer, after being teased with the Secret!!! for all season, it was an underwhelming secret.

At the same time, I have a bit of respect for Chibnall’s decision to go and mine the Cartmel Masterplan for ideas.

What did I miss? Nothing was truly new. We knew they mindwipe people. We knew they’re pompous, elitist, imperialist assholes. We knew they experiment on children. We knew that their stories about themselves were false. The secret was supposed to be so awful that it’d break the Doctor. So awful that it’d change…

S7 at least had some good stand-alone episodes.

Personally, I find that theme impactful - ‘do our past choices influence our future choices’ - if people... remember having made those choices.

His two series so far have lacked any sort of coherent theme, which impacts the character arcs which are all over the place, the tonal consistency and the big reveals.

That was already the Doctor’s backstory. The Doctor could’ve lived a life of privilege on Gallifrey, but chose to run away.

Yeah, what I like about the Doctor is that the origin story is the First Doctor. He wasn’t a hero, he became one during the series itself.

TBH; I feel like this makes the past less open ended, not more. It gave a more detailed backstory than the Doctor ever had on the show. It even gave the Doctor a Mysterious Significant Origin.

TBF, it could still happen! I thought it was all so pointless - like the big character moment about the retcon was the Doctor saying ‘it doesn’t matter’.

And the pep talk that solved was connected to nothing. ‘Is our past what makes us?’ wasn’t really there during the season, so it came out of left field.

Part of my issue is that, given what we know of the TIme Lords, ‘they might have repeatedly killed a child way back when’ is not dark enough a secret for me. They should’ve commited and Omelas’d it.

Yeah, my main takeaway is that what Chibnall’s interested in and what I’m interested in are... polar opposites.

The question is that, if there were more shocking things, why did they go for that shorthand? I don’t think they consciously thought that - but there’s an argument to be had about why we always feel the need to make atrocities worse in fiction.

It’s the complex question of whether the Holocaust itself needs to be depicted in a ‘pulpy grindhouse way’. A ‘human chess’ sounds more like a videogame villain than the Nazis, you know.