you're listening to fusion patrol a listener supported podcast
each week we take a single episode of a science fiction tv series movie or
audio and overanalyze it to within an inch of its life welcome to the discussion
Hello and welcome to another episode of Fusion Patrol.
I'm Eugene.
I'm Simon.
And I'm Ben.
And, oh, hey, Ben, welcome back.
Hi to all the old-time listeners.
Holy crap, he's back.
And to all the new people, holy crap, who's that guy?
Well, Ben is an old, dear old friend of mine who has previously been a host on the podcast and not recently, but he is back here to talk with us about a very special episode of Doctor Who.
Aren't they all special?
Well, some are more special than others, I guess.
Yeah, this one's pretty special.
This is season 2024, episode 6, entitled Rogue.
And we're going to start off with, as usual, my episode synopsis, which for those who have been going through this season know are getting progressively snarkier.
Okay.
In Bath, England, in 1813, a man confronts the caddish Lord Barton over his indiscretions.
Barton is unrepentant, which suitably impresses his harasser.
Deciding he wants to play Barton's part, he kills him and takes his form.
The Doctor and Ruby are nearby at the estate of the Duchess,
where Ruby is fulfilling her Bridgerton fantasy of Regency dancing, courtesy of Psychic Earrings.
The Duchess takes a shine to Ruby and introduces her to suitors amongst the guests.
First up, Lord Barton, and Ruby does not take a liking to him at all.
Meanwhile, the doctor's pants start swelling when he spies a poor man's Captain Jack on the balcony, smoldering.
He confronts the suspicious lurker by flirting with him, proving even Time Lords with two hearts don't have enough blood to operate two heads at once.
Oh my god, they go outside.
Ruby has been spying on a lover's spat between Lord Barton and Lady Emily Beckett.
Ruby interrupts them. Lord Barton departs, but Ruby befriends Emily and begins teaching her the ways of the modern woman.
Outside, the doctor and the bargain basement barrowman, whose name is Rogue because he's a D&D nerd,
discover the body of the Duchess, who was killed in the same way as Lord Barton was earlier.
Rogue admits to being a bounty hunter searching for a killer, shape-shifting alien known as a shoulder.
They briefly compare sizes of their craft before deciding to go back to Rogue's place.
Inside the ship, Rogue traps the Doctor in his shoulder trap and prepares to incinerate him.
Rogue has convinced himself that the Doctor is the shape-shifting shoulder,
but with a little Kylie Minogue music, a downright embarrassing attempt to use the psychic paper,
which he might as well just burn at this point, and showing him his various faces,
the doctor somehow convinces Rogue to set him free.
They go back to the TARDIS,
where the doctor adapts the trap to be non-lethal by making it into a dimensional trap.
The Childers are intergalactic cosplayers.
They take on the bodies of their victims like costumes, and they play the part.
They love a bit of drama,
and they never leave living witnesses after their grand finale,
which, this evening, will be a wedding.
What the Doctor and Rogue do not know is that there is more than one shoulder.
Drawn to drama, the Doctor and Rogue scandalously gay it up on the dance floor,
culminating with Rogue proposing marriage and the Doctor running out the door.
Four shoulders follow and give chase.
Meanwhile, Ruby has been palling around with Emily, who finds Ruby fascinating,
especially when she tells Emily that she's from the future.
Emily reveals herself to be a Cholder, too, and decides she wants to be Ruby.
The Doctor and Rogue have escaped the Cholders, so the Cholders begin their wedding, with Ruby as Lord Barton's willing bride.
The Doctor, realizing that Ruby has been killed and replaced, traps them all and prepares to send them to another dimension forever.
But Ruby is Ruby. She used her psychic earrings to beat up Emily and take her place.
Now, she will be banished with the Childers, unless the Doctor lets them all go.
The stakes are high.
If he lets them go, the Childers will kill everyone on Earth.
Realizing that the Doctor cannot make that choice, Rogue kisses him, steals the banishment button,
knocks Ruby out of the field by replacing himself, and presses the button.
The End
Oh, suppose there was some touchy-feely stuff at the end, too.
The Actual End
Uh, okay. I'm gonna throw this one to Ben.
And what was your reaction to this episode?
Well, I felt my IQ drop several points.
It entertained me, but holy crap.
This was the most unintelligent episode I've watched in forever.
In that respect, I was disappointed.
A number of things wrong with it.
Simon, what do you think?
Well, I, yeah, I enjoyed it.
I enjoyed it.
It wasn't a perfect episode, but there was a lot of,
there was a lot that was kind of entertaining.
There were some nice details to the way the plot was crafted,
given its fairly kind of flimsy premise.
Okay.
And, yeah, some of the performances in this,
Yeah, I thought we're pretty good.
One or two nitpicks, but I'm still enjoying the run of episodes that we've had since boom.
Since boom? Oh, my.
Yeah, well, we all agree on Space Babies and the other one, Devil's Chord.
But, yeah, I'm going to say this had two strikes, two main strikes for me.
One was I can't stand Bridgerton.
I have to leave the room when Bridget is on.
I feel we are going to have to pause and educate me here.
And this is maybe one of the things where I feel I might have enjoyed this episode more if I knew what Bridgeton is.
So what is Bridgeton and why do they keep saying Bridgeton?
It's a Netflix series that was set in, I would call that late Victorian era.
It might be earlier, I'm not sure.
Maybe it is, but it's a Victorian show. It's a soap opera. It's a Victorian soap opera. That's basically it. It's in the Victorian era, but with all of the modern trappings of what contemporary soap operas are all about.
yeah i think the music is contemporary music but it's been converted to the style of the time
it's uh they've substituted uh they've substituted people of color uh in you know i think up to the
point of royalty um you know it's it's all very insanely popular with um a lot of people different
age groups i mean young people love it older people love it i refuse to watch it i i have to
leave the room when my wife watches it but she did have a comment because having watched this
she she did say um bridgerton is more interesting than people are just hot she said there are
multiple episodes and the bridgerton family is interesting it's a romance not a quote you're hot
let's hop into bed story and i think that was her putting on i can accept that there isn't much in
this episode there's not much in this except for wow you're hot let's what let's uh let's you know
go as close as we can to hopping into bed on doctor who and go yeah it it kind of has that
yeah um but i you know i don't i'm not a i'm not an extrovert i i absolutely detest listening to
the people what i don't like about bridgerton is listening to the people talk because they're just
always going on about their feelings or their social standing or their which is really indiscriminate
so yeah that's that that i mean i have no idea i didn't i don't have a tardis i didn't live back
in the time of the victorian era but everything that i've been sort of you know that i've learned
through history is that is you didn't do that that that was considered to be um rather inappropriate
especially for the upper classes i yeah i don't know but i you know i just i don't so scandalous
this episode i've been dreading this episode because i know that's what it was going for
well that was before we got to the episode and you know it's it it lowered the bar it it didn't
help to begin with yeah um i mean we cannot we cannot discuss this episode without acknowledge
the fact that this has overtly we it's it's been pretty obvious but it's it has a overtly
placed the doctor in a gay context in this episode and i don't know i think simon i have
to some degree been dancing around that in in previous episodes because you well there's a lot
of dancing in this one yeah there was a lot of dancing in this one and you know there's there's
there's a certain amount of you're you're an old straight white guy and so therefore
you don't necessarily get to complain um but i'm going to a little bit but i want to i want to
complain hopefully in a different fashion um i i i was thinking you know after this episode aired
i'd like oh i got to go back and listen to our podcast when girl in the fireplace uh aired
because I know that I had a lot of the same complaints about that episode.
Unfortunately, I remember that isn't that old, but the podcast isn't that old.
So anything we complained about was you and I been talking about it in private.
Yeah. So and that complaint is that, first off, I mean, the doctor is old and I don't care how you cut the rule.
You cannot take someone's age, cut it in half, add seven years and go.
That's the acceptable age gap between two people with, you know, a two plus thousand year old time lord, you know, their children.
And that bugs me.
But also they're ephemeral.
They're like they're like flies there.
But where I'm going to take the difference is that Moffat is a better writer and he at least put in some work to try to make it so that Madame de Pompadour, and this is irregardless of the gender of the person we are talking about, that Madame de Pompadour was an amazing human being.
she was accomplished she was intelligent she was intuitive she was beautiful and she was trying to
seduce the doctor she clearly was trying to do that so the doctor was being won over in this
episode the doctor was won over when he saw the cut of his trousers up on the balcony and that's
the thing i just am really not happy with the idea that you know the this plot is driven by
i tap that doesn't matter if it's a mad woman vegetable or collet mutant
i've got and not with it i'm not on board with it and this is yeah this is something that we've
seen rtd start to approach i think from the very first episode the very first full episode
with Shuri Gakba as the Doctor.
And the first time Ruby lays eyes on him,
he's dancing like a madman in that nightclub.
And I get the feeling that,
and in fact, I'm fairly certain about this,
RTD, he's completely redoing the characters
as we understand them in Doctor Who.
I mean, he's now made the Doctor sort of,
how can I say, he's now made him relatable
to the modern LGBTQ viewing audience.
It's like, now that's who he's going to write to.
He's not writing to the general Doctor Who fan base
that is out there and that has been out there
since the show began.
He's not writing to the Tom Baker fans.
He's not writing to the Davison fans.
He's not even writing to the McCoy fans
or even to the, I don't know about the Eccleston fans,
but he's certainly writing to his own perceived fan base.
And that is, you know, and he is, well, you know, I'm a gay man and I want to write a show and run a show that I as a gay man would like to watch.
Oh, so what about, OK, what about everybody else?
I mean, you and I, Eugene, yesterday we had a text conversation and I had said something to the fact of that.
And I really hate to say this, but it feels like that RTD's efforts to make the doctor relatable to the LGBTQ watching audience, to me, I am offended to a certain point.
And I am a very woke gay man. And I feel like that Russell is taking the doctor to a level that is now beginning to alienate everybody else.
And I was a fan of Doctor Who before I came out as gay.
So maybe I'm speaking from that particular psychological point of view.
But to see the Doctor now being written in this manner, to me, it grates on me in a very bad way.
And I have to keep, in order to be able to watch the show, I feel like I have to tell myself, I'm not watching Doctor Who anymore.
I'm watching something else.
I'm watching some phenomenal fantasy.
But it's not Doctor Who.
It's something different now.
Well, OK, I mean, I agree. I agree to agree in the sense that this is this is a this is not the same portrayal of the doctor that William Hartnell gave that I think that there's been a journey through the development of the character.
I think quite a lot of that occurred around 2005 because it had been off TV for such a long time and it kind of got a big update then.
But I also think in some sense, watching Doctor Who is always like watching a new show because it does need to reinvent itself.
And that's part of the genius, I think, of regeneration.
So there are a lot of points to hit here.
So, and the girl in the fireplace.
So, Eugene, you've already mentioned one of the three episodes of Doctor Who that I was linking this with.
This is like the girl in the fireplace.
Redux.
Yeah, it is, really.
It's definitely kind of playing into a lot of the same themes that we had there.
I think it's not quite fair to sort of assume that Rogue is a firefly in the way that Madame de Pompadour was.
But also, I think Moffat leant into that idea.
He was he was using time travel in a way to show how her life passed in a blink of a Time Lord's eye, as it were.
And that was part of that very, very, very, very brilliant story.
And also, I mean, one of the reasons I may be coming at this differently is because I loved that story at the time that, you know, each season that came along, Moffat just knocked it out of the park as far as I was concerned.
And I thought that was wonderful.
but I guess there are some different aspects to that point Ben about sort of the way Rich
Russell T Davies is now writing specifically I mean I don't know if it's to an LGBTQ
audience but it is definitely about representation I say now I don't think it is necessarily new to
him because when Captain Jack came along that was quite a sort of revolutionary character
for Doctor Who in the sense of having this omnisexual character.
That probably was the first time the Doctor had kissed a man.
But I think the difference here, the interesting thing here,
is that they're playing the Doctor as gay.
And I'm quite interested in a lot of the ideas around that.
And I'm not fixed on what I think about it yet.
But I guess part of that, right, is it's about representation.
Yeah, I mean, representation is important.
And I don't don't want to knock that in any way, shape or form.
It's done a lot of good by normalizing what people see and think is, well, I hate to say normal, but OK, normal.
So I can't I can't fault that there.
And that's why I am truly trying to dance around the fact that the doctor is is gay.
I don't actually care that the doctor is gay.
I care that the doctor is being led by his penis.
And that's a big...
I would also go so far as to say that I wouldn't call the doctor gay.
I would call him very bisexual.
I mean, let's face it.
He's had...
Yeah.
He regenerated into a female last time or two times ago.
So if they can do regenerations, then I would easily call them...
you were just like did i do that wow i don't remember that no no i did best and but that's
what it was it was a regeneration and um i think if that's what time lords are that i can i can
sort of see them as bisexual but i i'm going to go back to something that i saw um in some
interviews uh back during the run of classic who i think this might have been a i don't know if it
around the time of Tom Baker or maybe Peter Davison.
But somebody had written that one of the neat things about Doctor Who
is that he was not led by his penis
and that it kind of elevated him a little bit.
And it reminded us that he's an alien.
And I think that's what made the Doctor so fascinating
is that he was an alien.
He had an alien way of reacting to situations.
And the fact that, okay, I don't have a problem with updating the show,
but it's still called Doctor Who,
and there are still some things
that I think need to be constants.
You can be very flexible
with everything around it,
but with the core of the show
being Doctor Who,
the Doctor himself,
or herself, or itself,
however you want to,
whatever pronouns you want to use,
the Doctor has to have
a certain character distance,
if you will.
I mean, you can only relate
to the Doctor up to a point,
and that's what always made
the character interesting and why
the companions on
some levels were also
feeling a level of frustration because
it's like they could never bridge that gap
completely.
I'm going to just bring out Yaz.
I mean, there is our first
companion who ever came forward and
basically said,
how about you and me? And
they've been palling around
and best buds in the whole nine yards and
then in that moment it's like, yeah, I don't do that.
Well, there's a little bit with Martha Jones, too.
She did hint that she had an attraction for the doctor, but the doctor was more just sort of not really there for that.
Does that make sense?
He didn't actually specifically say, well, I, you know, if I did, I do.
You'd be great.
But I don't do.
I mean, we actually got the doctor saying the words.
I don't do that.
And which was odd, actually, considering what Chibnall had set up going through that that whole series that that kind of surprised me.
Let's let's ignore that, please.
I think I mean, I think there are a couple of things going on here.
And obviously, one of them is is the kind of behind the scenes thing of different different writers have treated the Doctor Six sexuality in different ways.
And I think it's fairly reasonable to say that pretty much every 20th century writer just ignored it or disregarded it.
You know, he set aside the Aztecs, if you like.
But I think that Moffat really leaned into it.
he he wanted to see or wanted to represent the doctor as being a sexual being a sexual alien
if you like i think that chibnall was the opposite he was quite explicitly sort of yeah as you say
he had his doctor say i don't do that i think russell t davis has been a little bit more
ambivalent about where he where he places this stuff but i think i think i think he's definitely
he's definitely leaning more towards the moffer end of the spectrum here but i think the other way
the other way of looking at it is in the show like and this is the idea i've been playing around with
the doctor and this partly has to do with whole thing to do with you know representation is
important because of identity and the things that define how you see yourself and how you see the
people who you identify with on screen and among the important things that you know you have that
you might identify with would be having a lead who is the the same gender as you or has the same skin
color as you but sexuality is is i think one of those things and what we've seen is the doctor
through regeneration their identity has changed in some regard you know going from being white
to being black going from being male to being female I'm wondering whether there is a way in
which regenerating actually changes how you experience your sexuality like you might go
from being essentially asexual to being gay or to being heterosexual or if you are you know as Ben
suggesting the doctor is is uh is bisexual but having sort of i mean i get i get it's a greater
libido this is the pon far doctor yeah it's i mean but but but some of some of that and and the idea
that you know in some way at least for some people they experience their sexuality as being more
fluid than perhaps others do and so if you're if you're talking about something as fundamental and
complete as a regeneration where every cell in your body is is changed and we know that it changes
your mind and your personality what would that do to the way in which you explored that kind of
sexual dimension of of yourself well i think you know if he if he doesn't pop that blood back up to
his uh his his controlling brain um you know he's he's closer to regeneration because he's
gonna make a mistake a bad mistake i mean this is what happens right this is this is why the whole
femme fatale genre exists is because you get led by your sexual drives to your destruction
i still feel we haven't had a decent film noir version of of dr uf say that's got to come seen
i want to put something out of here i don't know if simon if you have any i know when we spoke last
week you had never heard of kate haran uh i want to quote something because i was trying to find
out a little bit more about her and i found out where this all came from so by way of background
i want to read in a couple of things here so kate haran and her writing partner branny redmond
kate haran is a writer director producer she's a she's a not a polymath but a poly whatever uh for
television production and whatnot, including being basically the showrunner of the first
series of Loki on Disney+.
So she included a scene in Loki in which Loki was asked if he'd been romantically involved
with any quote would-be princesses or perhaps another prince, to which Loki replied, a bit
of both.
Now, this was, woo, more representation.
it was kind of a it was kind of a thing and in 2021 rtd was asked about that he thought he was
addressing students he was actually in some sort of an interview on the record uh and so he said
and it's you can find it online i've got links i said i think huge and this says cleaning but i
think they mean clanging huge clanging warning bells are ringing as the giants rise up with
Netflix and Disney Plus especially.
I think that's a very great worry.
Loki makes one reference to being bisexual once,
and everyone's like,
oh my God, it's a pansexual show.
It's like one word.
He said the word prince,
and we're meant to go,
thank you, Disney.
Aren't you marvelous?
It's a ridiculous, craven, feeble gesture
towards the vital politics
and the stories that should be told okay harsh words for mr rtd uh about disney which is kind
of amusing back in 2021 but at that time he did not realize yes he did not realize that that it
was on the record so when it came out kate heron was getting all this stuff hey rtd says you're
craving baronara on that so he felt really awful and he called her up to apologize and say i didn't
realize i i'm i'm so very sorry i would never it's very unprofessional of me i wouldn't have
criticized oh bs and they hit it off he meant every word of it oh i'm sure he meant every word
of it but he did not mean it he totally meant every every no no no he's not saying he didn't
mean it he said he would not have criticized another showrunner publicly like that is what
he is saying and and so he apologized to her for the position he put her in not necessarily that
doesn't disagree with the comments and the two of them hit it off and they became great friends
and this episode is the result of that great inviting her to and her writing partner to come
in and write for doctor who so i mean there was an agenda here from the moment they set this up
which explains why there is only this one other writer this season also this is this is rtd's
apart from moffett well one other apart from moffett i meant sorry well i would report moffett
moffett because he's his old pal and this person because they they've hit it off and and they have
uh because that is what that is what uh she wanted to do with loki she was introducing
bisexual representation she herself is bisexual uh and was uh that was part of her what she was
doing uh towards representation in in loki so small small small tangent on that but in terms
of bisexual representation i i don't i'm i'd be very interested what kate heron thought about
this or what she'd said to russle t davis about it but i remember he got criticized i felt
reasonably justly when um in so he introduced the character of captain jack in the first season of
Doctor Who when it came back in 2005 and Captain Jack was quite explicitly this I mean essentially
bisexual character and that was very obvious from the first episode. Captain Jack then becomes the
kind of central character in Doctor Who's first spin-off since Canine and Company which they
push towards breaking out in the US, at which point he plays down the bisexual aspect of Captain
Jack and makes him gay because he thinks that that will be, I can't remember how he phrased it,
so this may be kind of a bit unfair because he may have been more nuanced about it, but the
impression i remember having at the time was that it was it was more palatable to have a gay
character than it was to have a bisexual character which was kind of throwing the bisexual representation
thing under a bus at that point interesting see now i would have i would have thought
that because of other comments that rtd has made such as i would never hire a straight actor to
play a gay character that maybe he was trying to course correct because he had hired a gay actor
play a bisexual character and so maybe he was just like course correcting i i could i could
totally see that because otherwise he'd be a hypocrite and uh well i don't know he would be
a hypocrite because i don't think hiring a gay actor to play a bisexual actor is the same as
hiring a straight actor to play a gay actor yeah i agree i mean i'm i'm kind of i'm kind of interested
in this idea that you shouldn't have you shouldn't have non-gay actors playing gay actors because i
think there is a pretty widespread acceptance now that you know blackface is not good and
I think you know something similar is happening in terms of trans representation in terms of
disabled representation the first time I heard I mean it probably was Russell T Davies but it's
it's certainly a few other things that this this idea that um that that straight actors shouldn't
play gay characters i was a bit kind of taken about it hadn't really occurred to me and i guess
part of that is because i was very aware that there were few fewer parts available for trans actors
for deaf actors um even you know for for black actors because if if there's a part that calls
for a black actor you cast a black person if there's a part that doesn't mention their race
typically casting directors were casting white people so and and so it was making it difficult
for those actors to get to get jobs and i was and i guess part of you know to my shame part of my
kind of instant reaction to that was like seems like there are quite a lot of gay people in show
business but that's as you said there's hundreds of years of gay people playing straight characters
hundreds of years but i but i think that i think rtd hire one to do that my my point about my point
about saying you can hire a gay actor to play a bisexual actor is because if if the issue is that
there are not there there are not the same opportunities there are not same roles
for gay actors as there are for straight actors then you know you you do you you act differently
than if you were in a perfect world where actually everyone was up for an equal chance for any role
that came along which you know that is not reality i i i've i'm really glad you touched on this simon
because this this is still a very hot topic in the entertainment industry today i mean for years now
i've been seeing a lot of arguments going back and forth uh from uh both camps uh saying you know
But anybody should be able to play a gay role or only gay actors should be able to play gay roles. And I think I've had a lot of trouble trying to decide how I feel about it. But I think listening to you speak, I think I kind of boiled it down to this.
If I'm casting for a role and I've got, it's a male gay character, and I've got one actor who is gay and I've got another actor who is not, I'm going to give it to the actor who does the better job.
It's as simple as that.
And are you actually going to ask them whether or not they're gay or not?
No.
As part of your hiring process?
No, because to me.
It is a job to do.
It is a job.
Because to me, that's crossing a really unprofessional line.
If now the person wishes to volunteer it, that's one thing.
But if they don't volunteer anything, I'm not going to be pursuing it because that strikes as being really inappropriate.
So I would like to be working with as much of an even ground as possible and simply give it to the actor who does the better job.
Their personal sexuality should not be an issue.
And I know there's going to be a lot of people who are going to agree with me on that.
And there's a lot of people who are going to disagree with me on that.
Fine.
I don't know what else to say about that.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't know exactly what I think about that.
But what you say makes a lot of sense.
And I entirely agree about the kind of professionalism of there are some things.
I mean, you get an actor auditioning for a role.
You're not going to ask them, are you black?
Yeah.
in most cases i mean all right it's a zoom call you know and just yeah but but but you know i mean
i was about to make a tasteless joke and say unless you're robert downey jr oh yeah that
that yeah there are i probably need to be more careful about this but there are what i'm saying
is there are certain situations where you know the person you're casting you know something about
we're talking about different facets of identity and that and that that may be something that's
obvious but in certain cases it will be things it will be things that people keep privately i think
what's interesting and sort of slightly undermines both of the things that i've been
saying about the way i think rusted c davis has been going with this so you know one being he's
in shooty gatwa he's he's i think probably deliberately chosen to cast a gay actor someone
who is out yeah and i thought should he was by oh i may i may have got that wrong i i don't i don't
know but maybe i'm wrong i don't know i i thought he was but maybe he is gay i i certainly thought
put it put it this way i certainly thought that rusty davis was was making a point of
having someone in in the role who was not heterosexual right and i mean again point about
privacy i i guess even if every other actor who played the part had been put on the spot and
quizzed about it who knows who knows you know it's like you say it's their business but i also
i also think that part of partly because of this thing of of you know having having that identity
come through into the role and having a gay or bisexual actor playing gay or bisexual role that
that's where he's been going with it however however and this is the point that i think
likely undermines this he had ten and say that newton was hot yeah well i think he was already
foreshadowing this he was foreshadowing it and and and there's the other line where donna says
something to you know the doctor says do i say stuff like that and she said oh i it's always
been right under the surface something to that effect yeah i mean i like that that that was
fair enough but i i just i thought i thought it was interesting if if he is going down this this
line of it being very much about identity that he didn't he he didn't kind of embrace the that that
change so he had the previous regeneration not not saying things like that and then once
shooty gatwa is is playing the doctor he he starts to play it up but he doesn't he doesn't
He introduces it before the regeneration occurs or the bi-generation occurs.
And is he foreshadowing it or is he showing something that is left over from Jodie Whittaker?
You know, he could be playing that either way.
Just like when he shows the psychic paper and it says Mistress of the Knowledge or whatever the taxi thing is in London.
But is it left over from Jodie Whittaker?
Did Jodie Whittaker's doctor ever say, you know, any mail?
No, no, no, no.
I'm just saying that he has left over some what might be considered in a less enlightened time female characteristics.
Because this is right after Jody.
I surely don't know.
So that's all.
So, I mean, you could look at it either way.
Because he does do that bit in the Star Beast where the psychic paper is still showing the Doctor's gender as female.
And, yeah.
you could kind of i think different it could be but you could take it either way so he could have
cast anyone but clearly he was this is the way he was going so i i i also want to put this out there
about the story itself and which i think is kind of meh but to me it feels like the worst form of
fanfic which is all fanfic but uh and i'm gonna take hate for that it just feels like wish
fulfillment uh storytelling of the worst kind yeah um so but i want to ask this question because i
thought of this well after ben and i were chatting yesterday because you know you i've made my bargain
basement barrelman and cut rate captain jack comments but after i did that something else
crossed my mind take rogue out of this story and drop captain jack into this story basically almost
word-for-word replacement and does this work does it work a lot better because the doctor
and captain jack do have they have a history they have a history together they they're both immortal
more or less they both have you know we know captain jack is attracted to the doctor
and has been since the beginning um and you could see how the doctor now having changed his
his orientation or had his orientation brought to the forefront now suddenly finding captain jack
like actually he is kind of hot i can kind of see it and the ending would work too because
captain jack's immortal and he'd throw him down into the uh down into another dimension is like
it's like find me uh it could on some level uh because we already know who captain jack is
in the case of rogue we didn't know anything the only thing that that um we as viewers go
have to go on is that okay it's it's being played by an an out gay actor jonathan groff so i didn't
know that but i just thought his performance was okay in that respect it was understated uh jonathan
groff he gave a very understated performance had it been jack it would have been very over the top
because that's Jack.
That's who he is, and that's how
Barrowman likes to play him.
So I think in that respect,
as far as character dynamics go
and interactions,
it might have worked a little bit better
because I could better accept
the character relationship between the two
with the Doctor all of a sudden doing this
with this guy he's never met before in his life uh it it just felt terribly um uh gosh i don't i
don't know what to call it it it it just felt very type born dog yeah well yeah now it it just felt
very very wrong and for that for um our hero the doctor to be put in that position made it uh rather
cringeworthy well i was just gonna i was gonna chime in on the chat on the captain jack thing
because i i i'm glad it wasn't just dropping in captain jack and actually for two reasons you can
probably guess the obvious one which was that there were all these rumors that jonathan goff
was playing captain jack and i don't like the recap i heard that i didn't know that i hadn't
heard that i the the trailer had had that um at the end uh gawa salutes uh in the exact same way
that he's always the doctor has always saluted captain jack and it created all of this kind of
speculation around it and actually goth sounds quite like captain jack yeah and if you add to
that all the kind of trappings of you know captain jack time agent travels through time trying to
you know catch up with nerdy wells and here you've got rogue bounty hunter so intergalactic
bounty hunter you know trying to bring nerdy wells to justice or whatever and this kind of
dashing style there's a lot in in common but then i think if you'd actually put captain jack in this
story you would have taken away that girl in the fireplace dimension of the doctor having that
experience of falling in love and then losing his love which I kind of felt was fairly central to
this story I don't actually feel that this one was either in any way equal to the girl in the
fireplace which is just brilliant or that you know rogue was as good as or as interesting as
captain jack was in the empty child there you go there's the second previous episode i was going
to mention but on the other hand we're talking about episodes that were 18 or 19 years ago
and i don't feel like the show should feel it couldn't go back and nick some of its better
ideas to at least create something that mildly entertained me this season so i don't i don't
have a problem with uh nicking uh older ideas um my big problem is that i thought it was just
done really badly yeah well fair enough i mean fair enough if i thought it was done badly i
probably would have been much less sympathetic um where do we think the shoulders will be
in the pantheon of Doctor Who monsters.
Oh, God.
I like to forget about them.
Rampant bird cosplayers.
Yeah.
Who did cosplay a bad name, by the way.
At Gallifrey One, at Gallifrey One,
you know there's going to be a bunch of people
running around with bird heads on now.
All the more reason not to go.
I would actually say, where do they come?
I think they come somewhere.
This isn't one of the episodes I was meaning to mention,
but somewhere near the Slitin.
Oh, I feel like the Slitheen are something that RTD would not do now because there's a very strong kind of fat shaming dimension to that.
But these are a kind of slimline version of the same idea of stealing humans' identity in order to get on with their nefarious schemes.
I'm just waiting for a contingency of cosplayers to rise up with their pitchforks and saying, you know, we don't like how you just represented us.
I would never hire an actor who is not a cosplayer to play the part of a shoulder.
But then are all actors cosplayers?
I was going to say that.
If you're an actor, you're a cosplayer to some degree.
The cosplayers are going to rise.
You're just getting paid for it.
That's all.
gonna rise up and uh get that bird costumes on and go to comic-con i think um yeah absolutely
hi garen garen did the i mean i didn't wear it coming to pantheon the other you're not gonna
guess the final episode that i wanted to cast back to okay um hold on vengeance on fire off
oh my god you're right i wasn't gonna guess that but i i wasn't gonna guess that i was gonna pick
a sylvester mccoy episode just to be a smart aleck so might as well might as well have gone
with vengeance on baros no i just because they had the higher um dwarves for that part for the
for the those some of those roles uh well it wasn't that so much as the um turning into a
bird it's sort of reverse of vengeance on pharos vengeance of our turning into oh harry yeah
whereas in this the birds were turning okay yeah no yeah never never got that one would have never
got that one no no that one got passed by me yeah thank you i got one more question that i'm gonna
mostly put to uh to ben here because oh dear yeah it's one of those questions um was uh the willy
wonka song sung by the doctor the right choice should it have been somewhere over the rainbow
is is it seemed to have like it was some sort of significance but i just it was still so soon
after the scene where they were doing the kylie minogue thing where i just was shouting oh just
incinerating him already um i know somewhere over the way rainbow has a certain gay context because
of dorothy and and all that stuff right is there anything to the willy wonka thing is that you know
Actually, I was kind of amused by it, but I didn't feel positive or negative about it in either way.
I understood the context of it.
It made sense to me.
I was actually more pleased with the fact that, shoot, he sang it pitch perfect.
He can carry it too.
All right.
Oh, he sang it in the right key is what I meant to say.
He sang it exactly in the right key as it was recorded by Gene Wilder.
So I thought I was entertained on that aspect of it.
And again, I could understand the context of that little line there.
It worked for me in that respect.
I mean, I didn't have any problem with it at all.
We got our musical sequence for this episode.
I'm going to just put out here, I have always been, you know how the sonic screwdriver has become a magic wand?
The earrings.
No, no, actually, let's talk the psychic paper, which over the last few episodes has become completely and absolutely useless.
It's a joke.
It's always there just for a joke.
It's just for a joke.
Just to make a joke.
And I understand why it was there in the first place, because it opens doors and you get past.
It's just like the sonic screwdriver.
It opens doors.
You flash your badge and go, I'm the president of the country.
OK, you're in.
You know, it does that, but it's not being used for that anymore.
It's being used as a joke.
And I would prefer it to be used as a joke because you and I have had this conversation in the past about the sonic screwdriver becoming like the almighty magic wand.
Yeah.
And that the psychic paper became like a skeleton key.
It got the doctor into any kind of situation he needed to get into, and that made it too easy as far as I was concerned.
I liked the doctor having to struggle to get into a room or with a group of people or into any kind of a situation that he needed to be in in order for him to work his genius.
I preferred to kind of be old school about it.
I preferred it before he had the psychic paper.
So now I think the psychic paper is funny.
So I'd rather have it as a joke than have it be this universal, you know, past.
Interesting. Yeah.
That's get gets you into anything you need.
OK, well, let me ask this question.
If pretending this was reality for a second and you owned psychic paper and you had previously used psychic paper as a functional, useful thing.
And now every time you pull it out, it's a joke.
Would you bother using the psychic paper anymore?
That's my question.
I would end up throwing it away.
See, that's kind of where I'm going.
In the real world, I would throw it away.
But in TV world, I don't know.
I mean, it's right up there with South Park's,
oh my God, you've just killed Kenny, you bastards.
Kind of thing.
But then Kenny's back in the next episode
for a new way for him to be killed.
It's a very lowbrow type of humor.
All right.
Then I'm going to come out here and say, believe this one or not, I'm okay with the psychic earrings.
Well, and I will tell you why.
Well, I will tell you why.
If psychic powers were real, which we have many times on this show said psychic powers aren't real.
But in the Doctor Who universe, they are real.
The Doctor has psychic powers.
The perception filters are psychic.
And if psychic powers are real, therefore, you can somehow harness that through technology and science.
And if you could harness psychic powers through technology and science, absolutely having something you wore near your head to impart information or data retrieval, I can 100% believe somebody would make that.
Oh, and that would be much better than the gloves.
I agree with you on that.
I just don't like how it was done.
And how it felt like, I don't know, I think I would like it a bit more like how we got it in the Matrix, for example.
How the information is downloaded into you and you have it at your fingertips.
You know it.
Ruby had no idea what she was doing.
It was like she surrendered control of her body.
Fair enough.
That I didn't like.
But wasn't it Anton Chekhov who said, if in the first act you were wearing psychic earrings,
then in the following one, you should engage their battle mode.
Indeed.
Yeah, I need to see that quote.
I believe that was exactly what he wrote in his robots story.
Yeah, I think so.
Let's see.
Well, the only thing, believe it or not, that I have left on my list
and we have to bring up are the faces.
The faces of the doctor.
Oh, yes.
Yes.
I saw the Renegade Doctor in there.
Yes.
Okay.
But I don't remember seeing the War Doctor.
Yep.
The War Doctor.
Did they show the War Doctor?
I didn't see him.
Yeah.
They showed all of the Doctors, including the Fugitive Doctor, plus one.
I was primarily looking for her, the Fugitive Doctor.
Plus one?
Plus one.
I need to watch it again.
It's between, it's right before Baker.
Baker 1.
Yeah, between Hartnell and Baker.
It is between Hartnell and Baker.
That's right.
And it is a completely unknown doctor unless you look at it and go, well, it looks a bit like the Valley Art.
No, I need to watch it again.
I don't remember that.
It's definitely the Shalke Doctor.
It does look a bit like Richard Grant, too.
I will agree.
Except it looks like he looks now.
So it looks he's he's older than the on screen on screen, you know, the drawn version of of his face in in that animation, which, of course, we did.
We did review here on show, I believe you can add in the show notes to support what you're saying, Simon.
I've been one of my best mates lives in England and he's been sharing articles with me about Richard Grant as the doctor, how that's a big, big talking point right now.
So, like I said, I need to see it again.
I don't remember that because I wasn't trying to look for him.
I was looking for the Fugitive Doctor to see if they were going to show her.
So my focus was a little bit misplaced.
So here's my question about the Fugitive Doctor.
If, per the Chibnall timeline, the Doctor has lived hundreds of previous regenerations,
But the Doctor does not remember any of them prior to Cartmel.
Then either, how did the Fugitive Doctor show up in that narrative?
Or why didn't the hundreds of Doctors show up in that?
Oh, that's easy.
Because Jodie Whittaker met the Fugitive Doctor.
So it's a third-person representation of them.
I would think that's what I think it is.
I see. I wasn't I wasn't quite clear whether it was the ship generating the images or whether it was a kind of psychic thing that the doctor was able to use the ship's projection system to show.
I don't know. I mean, he flung those. I think he flung the psychic paper.
That's what I thought is clutch or something. I don't know what it was.
You know, whatever he flung over there, but it hit a button.
So it could have been hit a button. It could have been on the ship.
If he'd thrown a brick at it, it would have had the same effect.
I wasn't sure if it was significant.
It was the psychic paper he was throwing.
So, yeah, it does something.
It puts those faces up.
For some reason, that convinces, what's his name, that he's not a shoulder.
Okay, fine.
But floating faces, you're convinced.
Was it the case that he was recognized as a shapeshifter by the ship because he regenerated?
Yes, I think so.
Right.
See, the funny thing is I would not have been convinced if I were rogue at that point.
I'd be saying, see, see all those other faces?
You've been stealing all those bodies.
Exactly.
To me, that was not a qualification that the doctor is not a shoulder.
Well, yeah, no, it didn't.
See, my interpretation of that was, and the reason I asked the question is because I thought that the doctor was trying to say, yeah, okay, your ship is correct in saying that I have different faces, but it's not what you think.
And this is what it is.
I guess showing the faces doesn't really isn't isn't a way to convince because unless you actually recognize any of those faces, it's not going to mean anything.
OK, so let me let me throw this out because it is all the doctors that and because it is the fugitive doctor, it's only ones that the doctor in this life has met.
Right. So as opposed to all the lives that they may have had, that again would go towards.
And it can't be Michael Jaston as the Valyard because he died, I believe, in February of this year.
But if RTD is trying to shore up all the stuff, that is still an outstanding piece of Doctor Who lore,
of the Doctor Who came between his 12th and final regeneration, which we now know is all of them,
because there is no final regeneration.
There is no final.
There's no final regeneration.
But then I would also go out on the limb and say, if that is still some manifestation of the doctor that has yet to be manifested by the doctor, he is the one who waits.
I think there's probably some element of that in it, to be honest.
I'm a little bit disappointed by the idea, but then all this argument about Richard E. Grant's age and the fact that they kind of discussed the age of the tenant face and the other tenant face because there are two tenant faces.
It all seems a bit strange to me. I mean, partly the faces are actually rendered in a way that makes it sometimes difficult to recognize them.
But also, I was pretty sure that Pertwee was old Pertwee from The Five Doctors.
The Five Doctors?
It could be.
Could have been.
I did not pay attention to that sequence very closely.
I was specifically looking for one thing.
So now I have to watch the episode again.
Oh, God help me.
Well, you can also just...
I'm going to fast forward just to get to that one point so I can...
Just so I can review the scene.
you can google it because there are lots of screenshots of it on online ah well that'll
save me some time save you some time and some pain yes and and i should i should tell people
um oh hold on once one thing before i tell people the thing i'm going to tell people i will tell
people think uh uh twist twist's character in this episode was just a was just a portrait
it rather undermined rtd pretext that the reason that they kept using susan twist was because
there weren't enough actors available and then they go and do it's just oh it's just a portrait
of course it also undermines it that we see the trailer for the next episode if anyone what that
yeah where she actually has lines and stuff yeah significant lines but uh yeah i was just wondering
if it's cheaper to have a picture can can they do a portrait of a a jobbing an equity actor
and put them in the show and use their likeness is that cheaper than having them do a cameo
i don't know in the episode there was one there was one rumor at one point and i have no way of
knowing whether it was true that they couldn't use billy piper's image on the front of books
you know doctor who novels from that period because she hadn't licensed her likeness to
be used in that way but i get pop star i could see how she might not yeah i i mean i guess it
it probably depends i don't know so maybe they're just trying to cut corners there
um save a little save a little dosh for disney plus and their maniacal craven plans of
pansexual she might not have been available yeah there might have been no actors available
yeah just absolutely nobody's nobody wanted to be in this thing it's like no you got everybody
who can put on a bridgerton outfit and then we're we're off we're all out of the thing okay what i
was going to say was that um you know we try to record these as quickly as we can work out a
schedule after the episode airs and uh in this particular instance i gave ben exactly uh an hour
to an hour and a half's notice before
because we were chatting about it and I'm like,
hey, you know, perfect.
It's too late to invite you.
And then I said, oh, when are you doing it?
10.30-ish?
I was like, well, let me check.
So the question is, obviously, I doubt very much
that you had a chance to watch the episode a second time,
which we already have established
that you did not wish to do so.
No.
Or take notes with the idea of discussing it.
So I will throw it out here, though.
Do you have any other issues on this episode
that you would like to touch on?
And if you don't, because you don't have any notes,
you know i i want people to you know realize that i threw you in this very unprepared there's only
one small thing and this this is really a tiny thing tiny tiny tiny sticking point but it's one
thing that uh my husband and i commented on as we watched it and that is when the doctor and roger
dancing with it uh the music that we're listening to very inappropriate for that era right that's
not that's that's not victorian chamber music that's that was a bridgerton thing where they
changed and i and and i realize that this is a very silly thing for me to pick i mean this this
is uh this series i wouldn't even call the series science fiction anymore this is very much a fantasy
series now i and when when dealing with that you know all reality all ground-based stuff is just
thrown out the window you know we've got uh an immortal time lord time travel psychic powers
which we've already established just don't exist yet i am going to completely gripe on i'm gonna
gripe on that music is wrong for the period see i i had i had wondered about that music until
eugene you said that was a hallmark of bridgerton and now i'm like that is the only reason they've
done it isn't it that's my understanding it's a hallmark of bridgerton now there's no this is
evidence that there's a problem with the web of time or anything it's just no it's gag about
it's gagging about bridgerton i believe i believe so are there any um doctor i'm wondering uh uh
because we're seeing this on disney plus um uh and i'm i'm not catching this through um the bbc
iplay or anything like that i know that during the uh david tennant doctor who movies that we
recently had that there was some you know like doctor confidential type specials that were being
shown through the BBC.
Are there still being done
through the BBC?
And I'm wondering if maybe
somebody approached RTD
and said, hey, by the way,
are you taking a stab at Bridgeter or not?
I mean, because you kept bringing it up.
Doctor Who Unleashed, I believe, is the current
iteration
of that on iPlayer.
I
don't watch them.
I mean, I watched one of them
once. I've watched the ones
with that that involved tenant but i haven't seen any of the others i'm surprised they don't put
those out on disney plus but okay yeah i don't know baby baby uh i'll try to sit down and watch
it perhaps uh simon do you have any notes we have not covered i got well not uh a couple of tiny
couple of tiny things i want to hit um i guess um so some of the things about performances and
guest cast so
we had Susie
Costello in this
except it turned out she wasn't
Susie Costello but Indira Farmer
who played Susie Costello
in a couple of
episodes of Torchwood
18 or so
years ago
pretty unlikely that she was going
Who was she playing? She was playing the Duchess
Oh okay
So anyway
I she's great I was pleased to see pleased to see her in it um also really did enjoy Jonathan
Goff's performance wasn't familiar with him but you know that that was great more important
for me was that I much much preferred Shuti Gatwa in this to well I'm going to go back to
when he was last in an episode where he was actually in it,
rather than the last couple where he hasn't really been in it,
and the one before where he spent all of it standing on a landmine.
I think we're seeing more nuance to it.
We're seeing more layers, but it almost felt to me
like there was a specific reference to this kind of manic performance
that I guess, you know, started in the church on Ruby.
Well, no, started in the Giggle, actually,
because he had about 20 minutes running around
and dashing in and out of TARDISes in that, didn't he?
But certainly reached its Nadir for me
in Space Babies and The Devil's Chord.
And it resurfaces in this.
I kind of feel like there's more going on with him
in all of his interchanges with Rogue.
But at the end, that kind of manic grating performance
resurfaces in it when he's chatting on the steps with Ruby
and he starts doing the whole onwards and upwards thing.
And she literally says to him,
Doctor, you don't have to be like this.
And I'm like, yeah, that's right.
You don't have to be like this.
In fact, it's much better when you're not.
And when she tells him to shut up, I was like, yes, please.
Yes, yes, shut up.
okay so isn't this doctor supposed to be the one that's been healed of all his well that is my very
next line angsty what was all that going back to the tenant face thing so that he could be
purged of his sorrows and just lark around in space and time but the larking around in space
and time was annoying me so i don't care if they forget that yeah he clearly is just as deeply
wounded underneath and this is a front yeah or an opportunity to pick up some new scars but yeah
you know whatever i will add this yet again episode where the doctor didn't save the day
no he didn't true rogue did he rogue did although it's pretty lame that he can just jump in there
and knock ruby out of the way it's like that's not much of a trap but okay oh speaking of traps
I just realized, nice that the doctor would just leave that ballroom and leave all those devices that form the trap, just let them sit there.
Not too concerned about contaminating the timelines anymore.
No, apparently not.
Ruby was doing a heck of a job until we found out Emily wasn't a human.
She was a child, it didn't matter.
She was really causing problems if she had not worked out that way.
I think Ruby needs a little talking too.
about that but uh yeah by the way was that flashback to uh ruby's mom about making sure
she's not hurt was that a new newly filmed for this episode flashback or was that in a in one
of the previous episodes i've never seen it before i thought it was new it felt new i saw i remember
but wouldn't stress it i don't remember that scene at all but if they obviously they treated it to
make it look like it was old but no i've never seen that before i i i was sure i remembered
a scene where she says to the doctor you will keep him safe but then i did feel a bit surprised
when he said i'll keep her safe yeah yeah maybe there was more to it yeah i thought because i
don't remember the bit about mom saying uh you know i can't hold her down and i want to give her
the opportunities and and etc so i mean there was there was far more preamble so maybe maybe they
only just maybe they filmed that back when they were doing the church on ruby road and they just
haven't used all of that possibly material yet and then they've possibly doling it out as appropriate
um which means we may get more in the next episode you know it was a big gap where they
went from letting ruby go on after he landed in her kitchen and you know there was nothing he
landed ruined the roof and then they're just off doing their they're just off doing their stuff so
there was no uh one one other thing did anyone else think oh you hypocrite doctor when he tells
her to try not to get engaged like like he didn't do that in the aztecs true or in this episode or
yeah that too you know because that and that's gonna come back don't i mean i have every confidence
that russell's not gonna just let that one lie we are gonna see rogan again ah i'm i'm i
I don't know.
The writers did say they just left it open.
They didn't.
I'm not sure.
I'm not sure that plan, but the ring may be important.
Well, I'm going to say when the episode was written, they may not have intended to bring
Rogue back.
Russell T. Davis may not have intended to bring Rogue back.
I think that having seen Johnson Goff's performance and the chemistry in this, there is zero chance
they're not going to bring Rogue back.
I agree.
they'll have to kill him again.
Well, it's all going to boil down to his availability
because he is a very much in-demand actor,
especially on stage.
He's always doing stage work.
So if he's got the time,
and he is a nerd in real life,
so I wouldn't be surprised if he'd happily do it again
if he had the time.
But, you know, the problem with bringing in a character
that the doctor is spitting to the point
of wearing their ring um they're either companion or they die or you have to keep coming up with
increasingly more contrived all right like getting sent to another dimension uh rose which was a
problem with captain jack yeah yeah right too yeah well the tardis hates captain jack remember
that's true although they forgot that uh later on but uh yeah so you know they can always come
with rose too i mean how else would you have gotten rid of rose except to dump her in another
universe because she wasn't going to go anywhere and then and then she came back and then they
had to get rid of her again well but they dumped her in another universe again with her own paper
cut out doc yeah i believe was the term that someone may have coined on this very podcast
um do we have anything else i think i'm done i don't and next week is the legend of ruby sunday
I believe is the name of the episode
I think so
so Ben
you got anything you want to plug
anywhere you are
well
the 2K Geeks
still exist
we're what we call version 2.0 now
means we don't do episodes all the time
we do them whenever we have someone
interesting to talk to or something interesting
that we wish to talk about ourselves
and you can find that
chat on youtube just search for the two gay geeks we are also on uh facebook as uh uh tg um two gay
geeks oh god i'm not sure it's the two gay geeks or tg squared studios i can't recall anymore
uh but so check both of those just just uh search for two gay geeks on facebook and we're also on
instagram uh twitter and threads cool thank you for joining us ben oh it was fun thank you for
Simon, thank you for joining me.
It's a pleasure, as always.
Well, joining us, I mean, I'm not saying...
That was thoughtless of me.
Grumble, grumble, grumble, grumble.
At Listers, I do hope you'll join us all again next time on Fusion Patrol.
Cheers.
Oh, I haven't heard that in a long time.
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