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.
And I'm Simon.
And tonight we are looking at season of 2025 of Doctor Who, episode three, The Well.
Episode synopsis. The TARDIS lands 50,000 years in the future to get another Vindicator reading.
And with a little anachronistic music and another trip through the close Arraka cycle,
the Doctor and Belle step out of the TARDIS right into a military dropship and jump down
to a desolate, inhospitable planet, cut off from both the TARDIS and the dropship, which
will take another five hours to land.
Spotted immediately, the Doctor uses the psychic paper to impersonate a superior officer,
and they are accepted into the party as observers, testing the knowledge and operations of the
expedition.
This allows for a convenient info dump
They are on planet 6767
Which has a hostile environment bathed in lethal galvanic air radiation
There is a mining base on the planet with 35 miners
And all contact was lost with them 15 days ago
This is a rescue operation
Inside the base, everyone is dead
Half of them broken like rag dolls
The other half shot
One curious feature of note, all the mirrors have been broken
Did I say everyone was dead? Strike that. There is one survivor, alone, locked in a large,
empty, round room. Her name is Alice. She is deaf. She is terrified, wants to go home to her family,
and she's just sitting there, alone with the corpse of her best friend, whom she was forced
to shoot and kill. While Belinda treats Alice, the doctor and others go to the mine head and
discover an 8.05 kilometer deep mine shaft, which has been sabotaged by the mine crew.
Undoing the sabotage, they begin to retrieve information from the base's control systems.
Back in the conveniently round room, Belinda keeps thinking she's seen something behind Alice,
and then she says it isn't there. This makes the other troopers paranoid, and then the phenomena
spreads to them. They keep seeing something behind Alice and then saying they didn't,
because there's nothing there. In an effort to make sure nothing is behind her, one of the
troopers is killed when she is eclipsed by Alice. Observing the recordings from the mine, the doctor
realizes something is very wrong. And when he learns that this planet is the burnt-out husk of
the planet once called Midnight, he gets all worried and rushes back to the conveniently
round room. So, it turns out Alice isn't quite so innocent as she seems. Yes, she's currently the
host of whatever it is, and she knew that, and she didn't bother to tell them, but she does now.
There's this thing, and if someone gets behind her, it'll kill that person by smacking them to
bits. On the other hand, if you kill the host, as she did with her best friend, the creature
attaches itself to the killer. The doctor suggests not going behind Alice, and the command officer,
Shayla decides to heed the doctor's advice. Unfortunately, hot-headed second-in-command
Cassio, who took an instant dislike to the doctor when he called him babes, and I can't say I blame
him for that, is itching for some proper shooting. And he usurps Shayla's command authority and moves
around to a position where he and a trooper are in front and in back of Alice. The trooper dies
a horrible death. So Cassio keeps moving around and killing his troops until Shayla reasserts
her authority, has Alice force her, and kills Cassio with her back. Luckily, in the 50,000th
century, mining diamonds makes no sense whatsoever, so there's plenty of mercury at hand for something,
something, something to the 8.05 kilometer mine shaft. The doctor has Shayla shoot out a mercury
pipe behind Alice, causing a mirror to make the creature blast itself or Alice. I'm not entirely
sure, but she's knocked off the creature and they run back to the ship. Unfortunately, Belinda now
has the creature on her back. Shayla shoots her, taking the creature onto herself, then jumps into
the 8.05 kilometer mineshaft, imprisoning the creature forever, or at least until it can climb
back out. Fortunately, Shayla's a really good shot, and Belinda is only mostly dead, and they
revive her. The Doctor and Belinda go on their way, the soldiers report back to Mrs. Flood at
their HQ, and then they discover they've still got the creature with them. The end.
So, first shot, what did you think? I quite enjoyed this one, at least relative to recent
episodes i guess it had a kind of slightly more traditional base under siege kind of a feel to it
there were some things in it i didn't particularly like that will come to that felt like intrusions
into what were an otherwise quite entertaining episode for me but broadly speaking yeah not bad
I think I might be able to guess what those are, but all right.
Yeah.
I, I, you know, not only did I correctly cite Mark last episode that our patrons mark that,
you know, he just lets us watch the episode so he doesn't have to.
I have subsequently gotten more feedback from listeners that that's exactly what's happening
here.
So, so we're suffering so they don't have to.
And I'm just going to tell all of you, this actually is probably the best episode they've made since RTD took back over.
I was going to say JNT took back over.
Might as well be.
Since RTD took back over.
I also have some things about it.
Shocking.
Yeah.
I'm going to take a guess at what you're...
Anyway, if you want to watch one, Shuri Gatwa, that's not bad.
Not bad.
I'll go so far as it's not bad.
It's very tense.
It's kind of, as you say, it's got that base.
My complaint, my biggest complaint,
apart from the fact that it actually doesn't hold up logically
if you think about it for very long,
but is that this is a story that didn't need to be a sequel.
And if that story needed a sequel, this wasn't it.
Yeah, I'm not sure that's my biggest complaint,
but you've definitely hit one of my two complaints.
And just on that question of the story not standing up and not being logical,
and also it being the best shooty Gatwa story,
it's interesting because my friend who's seen all of the shooty Gatwas,
but not all of Doctor Who,
and I think has had a much more positive attitude towards this season,
her first reaction was like, that wasn't so good, was it?
Interesting.
I'm not quite in your camp of saying this is the best shooter Gatwa because I did enjoy Joy to the World a lot.
And I probably think Boom was better than this.
But I had been having a better time with it.
Just, you know, the whole kind of atmosphere, there being some good performances in it.
But when I sort of went into it, I mean, I guess part of it was she hadn't seen Midnight.
Maybe that was worse.
It really makes no difference.
I mean I think it makes no difference but if you haven't seen it and you don't know that it makes
no difference do you feel like true the rugs being pulled from under you is that but but also
quite sort of the complaints were the logic of it like how how was it I mean we started I started
trying to explain some of it which I thought I'd understood but I don't I mean I don't think I had
understood it properly or it hadn't been thought through properly one or the other but you know
things about things that should have been put it this way i think we could agree that things that
should have been signaled better around what it is that causes the entity to you know zip you
in terms of when you're behind alice and what counts as being behind alice and why you have
to be on different sides because there are times when she turns around and no one gets harmed and
then there's the time later on where what's her name the the commander shayla says do shayla
says do do a 180 in order to for casio to get it because until that point alice's been looking at
casio and everyone on this side as it were on the opposite side to casio is getting zipped as he kind
of flails around and when Alice turns around it's him who gets zipped but then earlier in the episode
when Alice had turned around there was no one on the other side everyone had been fine and you know
obviously there is a difference there's people not on the other side but it's still a bit right
uncertain to me then there's all of the stuff about you know whoever kills the person who's
the host gets the you know that didn't seem to be consistent so there were there were definitely
some plot holes that or if not plot holes there were some plot points that were not obvious on
one viewing let me put it yeah that way i'm gonna i'm gonna shock the listeners right now
i watched it twice so can you explain it well i watched it a second time to see if i could
understand what I couldn't explain the first time through. And no, it doesn't hold up, but
it doesn't, it doesn't stand the logic. It's not as bad as it seems first. And I think, you know,
you, you put a finger on it there. It, it's not, it's not signposted well enough or it's not.
My thought was it was incompetent direction at first because obviously people are behind Alice.
And then there's that scene where, which I don't know how this works, but the doctor hugs her and his head is way behind her.
I mean, it's a big old hug, right?
The hands, his head's behind it.
And Belinda's behind him.
So his head's eclipsed.
In fact, his head sort of eclipsed by himself.
So, I mean, why didn't his head get blown off?
I don't know.
But, you know, it didn't.
Yeah, she keeps turning around and people are getting not getting zapped when obviously they would if she had a thing back there.
But it doesn't work that way.
It is a it is the act of observing.
It is a person cannot see another person behind Alice that causes it.
Makes no sense.
But when Belinda tries to do the little thing with the nuts on the floor and go, see, it's
when it's this and it's this black, that doesn't make any sense.
But once you're in that position, you can see that they didn't violate that rule except
for the doctor hugging her.
And then, you know, maybe because it's only partially back there.
I don't know.
But that, I guess, I think that was what I kind of got a sense of.
And in my mind, when I was watching it, I had kind of, I'd kind of, I'd got the gist
of that without being able to explain it as clearly as you have now.
So when I had to explain it, I couldn't.
It sort of made me at the time, but it wasn't clear.
So the other part that is, I don't like, there's a term for that.
It's eclipse.
When someone is eclipsed by Alice, they get blasted, right?
They never use that word in this episode.
They, they refer to it like it's a clock and they say, when you're at midnight, you get
killed.
Yeah.
Except it's when you're at six that you get killed.
I mean, no, no, no, no.
Well, yeah, yeah.
It depends on where you are on the clock, right?
It depends where you are on the clock. And so it's relative to what? And actually, I've just said your explanation made sense. But it's the same thing that happened when I was watching it. I was like listening to your explanation, nodding along, going, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh. Okay. Okay, I can accept all of that.
And then afterwards, I was thinking, yeah, but why does it make a difference which way Alice is facing? Why does it make a difference which way Alice is facing? Because the eclipsing that you say is the bit that all makes logical sense to me. And it was then when she turned the 180, that was like, well, how do you decide who's eclipsing who? There has to be a...
Because it's on her back.
But it's not on her back.
The thing itself is, it is on her back.
When she turns around, we don't see it.
Correct.
But nonetheless, it's still there.
It's invisible.
I didn't say I agreed that this was there, but it is on her back.
I guess there is an explanation to be had there somewhere, which is that it's these two things.
One, it's on her back, and the other is that there's the eclipsing going on.
And it's some interaction between those two, at which point it does start to become a bit too complicated for a 45-minute episode.
Maybe they're related to the Weeping Angels somehow.
It's an observer thing.
I don't know.
It's quantum physics.
I thought, I was sitting there thinking,
this is a sequel to late season 30 episode.
I forget what it is, episode 10 or episode 11.
I think then the episode, is it immediately following it,
is turn left with the thing on Donna's back.
Yeah, that you can't see.
And I was there going, why is this a sequel to Midnight?
This doesn't fit as a sequel to Midnight.
It's looking like it's pretty much like the turn left thing,
so in the sense that it's a thing on your back.
Not quite the same, but...
Like I say, it feels like when they use the clock analogy,
which is bad, because as you say,
I mean, who's to say she's facing six o'clock at all times?
Why wouldn't she be facing midnight and it's people at six o'clock that get blasted?
But Belinda comes up with that and calls it midnight.
And it's like, oh, see, it's a joke.
It's telling you that this planet is midnight, death at midnight.
It's like, that's just terrible.
That's just loppy self-congratulatory.
I don't know.
It's just it's awkward.
I don't like it.
And then let's go, we might as well hit the other thing.
And I know I said I enjoyed the episode and I come back to that.
But the other thing about this is that not only does that not make very good sense, although
the doctor does say it's just toying with us.
So it's a game.
I don't know that we thought it was a game in midnight, but that's another story.
So it is, it is just, it's just screwing with them.
But what's the deal with Alice being deaf?
I mean, I know she's deaf, but they hear whispers.
The people who are the host hear whispers.
Does the whispers make them go mad?
Do they do things intentionally?
Why did they smash the mirrors?
Did they smash the mirrors because the whispers told them to smash the mirrors?
Because it knew it would get zapped.
Who did smash the mirrors?
The Midnight Entity.
Was it able to do that separately?
They don't explain it.
Who sabotaged the mind?
They just say that's why it smashed the mirrors, because of the resolution involving the reflections in the mercury.
But, you know, you break a mirror and you know what you have?
Two mirrors.
Yeah.
There were mirrors still on the wall.
So there were still reflective forces up there on the wall.
Why did the miners disable the mine?
What possible value is?
Were they mad?
It's more reflective.
And when you've got a curtain of mercury, it's not.
Okay, that one maybe.
Okay.
It's not a perfect image like an unbroken mirror.
It's much more like a broken mirror.
Okay.
That explains why they sabotaged the mine.
So that the mercury wasn't flowing.
So there wasn't a mirror in the mine ahead.
Don't explain that in the episode.
Don't even get close to an explanation of that in the episode.
But that's a reasonable assumption.
That's a lot of mercury.
I mean, that's a lot of mercury.
If you've got something that can send a blade of mercury down 8.05 kilometers down a shaft, that's a lot of mercury.
That's a prohibitive amount of mercury.
But then why disable the logs and the recordings?
It doesn't make any sense.
And, you know, why were the people killing them?
I mean, if they knew what was going on, why didn't the person who had the thing behind them just stand up against a wall and not kill anybody?
I don't get it.
It's a creepy setup.
And if you don't think about it very long, it's like, okay, but what really did happen?
Was just everybody so stupid that they're just like, oh, well, I see.
When you shoot them, it jumps onto you.
So I'll shoot you.
And she said her friend was coming to kill her.
How, if they were the last two people there, how would her friend have killed her?
There aren't three people to create the configuration.
Oh, I didn't even think of that until now.
It doesn't make any sense.
I think in broad strokes, the kind of strengths of the episode are that it's a creepy situation
in which for your not unjustified criticisms of the direction,
it does effectively create the tensions.
And the performances are good.
I really enjoyed the performances.
The characters are reasonably interesting.
The pacing, which I was criticizing a couple of episodes back,
is actually great in this.
I think apart from the complexity of the story not really suiting a 45-minute episode, they do well to make use of the time.
I think the big weakness is the complexity of the episode.
It needs there to be a much simpler, in the sense of conceptually simpler, form of jeopardy that you can then explore in interesting and complicated ways.
And because it's referenced in this, it immediately makes me think of Midnight, which is an episode with a bunch of excellent characters, great actors in a very atmospheric setting, perfectly paced.
But where, and this is the big difference, I think, where the jeopardy is related to a very, very simple but dramatically effective concept. It's instantaneous to grasp and yet what they do with it is amazingly effective. And I think that's where this episode is weakest.
Yeah, there is an over-complexity to how they everything in this episode.
So, for example, again, I was able to watch it twice, and it really doesn't bother me.
I mean, there are some things.
Toxic by Britney Spears, again.
Get over this, RTD.
get over it you come on get over it twice in 20 years and it is a great track it is a great track
it's too many i i you know i've i have the album i'm always very happy to to listen to toxic it's
the best song on it it's not a bad song i'm not saying that i'm just saying it's just not right
here it's not right here and it's not right back in the end of the world or whatever it was it was
exactly right in the end of the world okay here's the thing here's the strange thing and i i meant
to look this up so i'm going to see if i can quickly find out while i'm making my point but
the thing about it is that the way it's used in this scene is kind of incidental it's just a bit
of music to cover the costume change and it's not obvious why why that's wrong is it you know why
Why do you have it there? Whereas in The End of the World, there's literally some gag in the story about, you know, someone comments on the music that's being played and it's like, oh no, we can play classical music from Earth as well.
Okay, you're right. You're right. I forgot that part.
And the point about it is, and I have looked it up now, 2003, In the Zone came out in 2003. So to the audience watching this in 2005, this would still have been on the radio all the time. Everyone would be familiar with it. Everyone watching would be familiar with it.
Whereas the audience now, all the kids watching it are going to be, you know, oh, maybe, maybe that's in dad's record collection. But fundamentally, this is, this is music from a generation.
Another era.
This, this, you know, this is like the Beatles to, to me.
So, and it has no, it has no thematic tie as far as I can tell to this scene.
And there's no reason, you know, you shouldn't use, I think there's no reason you shouldn't use pop songs that go along with it.
There are episodes, I mean, RTD did this a lot more than any of the other showrunners in the 21st century.
He used pop music just because he wanted to give a scene energy.
Sometimes he used pop music, like in Father's Day, where you've got like Joy Division and so forth.
The point is to create that kind of 1987 feeling, but sometimes he just wanted to give a scene energy.
And that's kind of fine, but it just felt odd here, not least because it was only about five seconds of the song.
So I commented on it at the time because it just seemed so strange.
Okay, so here's the other thing that I'm just going to go out here that I am not liking.
I don't like the close Arrakacycle.
I mean, no, we've already said that.
But I'm going to carry this a step further this week because it makes sense.
Now, if you were the Time Lords and you were creating a time machine that can change into any shape to disguise itself and blend in in any background, you would obviously have a machine that would scan the exterior of the planet and figure out what you should be wearing.
so that you look and blend in.
Makes perfect sense.
It's an extension of the chameleon circuit,
which of course doesn't work on the TARDIS.
Yeah, and you've got to presume this didn't work
in the Sixth Doctor's time as well.
Maybe that's why he keeps getting his costume the way it does.
But, you know, it's just...
Colin Baker would have loved it if it had.
Yeah, so it is an oddball, but okay.
It puts them in exactly the right spacesuit they need
when they step outside the door into a dropship, which has a bunch of people in those exact same
spaceships and a rack of helmets for exactly the number of people that are in that room,
including the doctor and Belinda. It's like, neat trick. I mean, to me, I don't see the point.
I don't see the point. It's not like there is any plot reason for the Doctor and Belinda
to pass because almost immediately it's like, who are these people? And then the Doctor has to do
this paper thing and et cetera, et cetera. And so if they're going to stand out anyway, which
they almost immediately do, why not have them wearing something that looks a bit more Doctor
rather than a bit more alien yeah i i mean it's it's it's there strictly to serve
the hey wouldn't it be cool if we put them in there and kicked them out of a spaceship
and they didn't have the tardis yeah but yeah okay so they've they've got it they've got to be
they've got to get onto the planet but they could have just yeah yeah they've got it they've got it
they've got to get separated i don't i don't think
do that that is less clunky than this whole wardrobe thing would be impossible and we can
never have them go outside in silly clothes again well yeah but it's but it's also it's also the
case that when the other thing that the the the suits do is that they provide the subtitles for
the hard of hearing which are pretty neat i thought they did not actually and well it was
a separate device they put a button on it was a it was it was something that all the other suits
already had fitted but the doctor belinda's did not so it was literally like and yet conveniently
and again my friend pointed out this slightly illogical point they're carrying around like
spare buttons with them so they can just hand them over to the doctor and belinda
were the buttons on the other people were they on the part of the suit that the doctor and belinda
removed no idea yeah it's possible that they were on the you know they they removed their stuff so
they'd look a little different which i think is you know okay but it's still like we've just
removed yeah but this is why they got spare buttons yeah there was this whole plot contrivance
to put them in this.
I do think it was to visually
differentiate them
from everybody else.
Just so that the audience watching
would be able to identify Belinda
and the doctor from all the other people
wearing exactly the same clothes.
And I know that sounds terrible,
but I think that's why it was.
Because it didn't really add any jeopardy
to the story.
It didn't, but again, I'd be like,
they could have just
kept contrived a reason why they're still wearing the costumes from luxe if they were wearing
1950s american outfits they would have stood out even more i i just feel like they well of course
they wouldn't survive the drop if they'd stepped out there into the thing at that point but no they
need i think he should have been wearing a scarf the clothes aracocycle should put a scarf on him
every damn time oh scarf and he just like i don't know steps out like no i'm not wearing that takes
it off every freaking time that would be a good gag actually i would yeah i would like that yeah
it's just it's like this would be a cool idea yeah it's it is kind of a cool idea and it gives
you that that jeopardy in the opening part of the episode but it ultimately really has nothing to do
with with with anyway so i yeah it's also it's an interesting idea again interesting idea about
well, we put you on a ship and then we kick you off the ship because the ships can't land right
away. So it was urgent that we got down there five hours earlier than the ship could get there.
Really? Did the five hours matter that much when the mine has been silent for 15 days?
Would that be how I would send my troops in? Let's send them in without the backup.
Sure. No, that would not be how I do it. I just let them ride five hours down.
and go it's a necessary part of the process but there you go that's just that's health and safety
gone mad that's you know you've been health and safety by the blob send send them down into the
danger that's what i say yeah they don't need a ship whatever but well i was just gonna i was
gonna pick up on one of the one of the things that you mentioned about you know what what was
the significance of of having a deaf character in this which touches on i think conversation we had
around before the conversation that certainly went on around before the flood there is there
is a kind of there is a plot point in this it's like that she couldn't hear the the voices because
she couldn't hear yeah but but there was a nothing comes of it that's a kind of fairly incidental
point and there was a much bigger kind of the deaf character in before the flood it was
instrumental to the resolution of the story that she could not hear. And I remember at the time,
the discussions around, why can't you just, you know, why can't this just be representation?
We've had it in lots of other respects. RTD, obviously, hugely important the way he has
portrayed gay characters. And then since the show has come back, also transsexual characters. And
There's a lot of representation of different groups going on.
We haven't had any other deaf characters since Before the Flood, unless I have completely forgotten something.
I think you're probably right.
So in a way, I was kind of hoping there would be nothing about...
There's a slightly heavy-handed thing of like, oh, you're a nurse and you don't know BSL.
That's illegal, which I didn't see.
Wait, was that BSL or ASL?
Good point. It can't be either because neither Britain nor America exist.
It must be LSL, Federation.
Yeah, I was, and obviously I, well, not obviously. People may not know, but I'm not fluent in either.
I don't even know what the differences are. I wouldn't have been able to tell you what was being signed.
So I don't know.
I think the doctor repeatedly signed I'm hungry when he rubbed his belly.
But yeah, a little circle thing.
But sorry, I'm hungry.
But yeah.
I did quite like, as I said, I did quite like the buttons that provided the subtitles.
That seems like both quite a neat kind of implementation of the technology in terms of interface design.
But it is also something that is kind of coming into reality at this point.
I've been involved in various discussions around, you know, when you capture kind of teaching sessions, the kind of legal requirements that you provide different formats, which should include making it accessible to deaf viewers.
And one of the kind of useful, actually useful purposes of so-called AI, generative AI using large language models is the fact that automatic subtitling is becoming that much more accurate, but also that much more fast.
And so now there are apps available.
So not only can you kind of process videos on a server once they've been recorded and before you make them available to students that way, you can actually just get an app on your phone, have it sat in front of you in the lecture theater, so you're not having to wait for a recording.
You're there live and your phone is giving you subtitles.
Now they're not 100% accurate, whereas in the story, they managed to actually spell Alice, presumably how the character's name is spelt, because it wasn't how I would have spelled Alice.
So they're taking it to a point beyond where I think it is in common use right now.
But it's the five seconds ahead technology, but I liked it.
Let me ask this question. And this is just, does not have any, there's no intention behind this question. If somebody wants to try to read it into it, there's nothing in here. This is just me looking at the technology and saying, you know, as you say, generative AI is producing better and better transcripts.
They're still not good enough.
Otherwise, we'd have them.
But because it's I there are still too many times and get ready for the bleep button where one of us says something and the transcript says, oh, they said it.
And we didn't.
Not even close.
Nothing.
Nothing even close.
I mean, like, yep, can't let these go.
Can't let these go out.
And so it's not there yet.
And I have some pretty decent tools for it.
And we ask ourselves the question, and this is the part I want to say, how much time and
effort and money is spent accommodating what is the percentage of people who are afflicted
in this way?
And I think far more likely that we just didn't see it.
This technology is designed to translate languages for them.
So you go somewhere where you don't speak Chinese and you flip that on and it's doing
real-time Chinese translation, which also there's AI models can do.
Although obviously you have to speak an entire sentence before it can translate.
But the point about that, again, is very similar to the technologies that we're seeing now
in the sense that what they were originally developed for is not necessarily, you know,
They can be useful for those things, but they're finding other uses or people are finding them useful in ways that were not necessarily predicted.
And so one of the interesting things around this, again, kind of when I was looking into the way in which people are using subtitles for material like lectures, is that actually, you know, in a broader, more general sense, the numbers of people using subtitles is very high.
It's been literally in the news this week because Netflix has rolled out an option with subtitles.
So now they've had to differentiate.
You've got English closed captions, which is, I think, American for subtitles.
But you've also just got English.
And the difference is that the kind of standard version is intended for hard of hearing.
and therefore includes all of the sound effects.
Tune playing in the background.
Yeah.
Cats screaming, babies crying.
All of that kind of thing.
What they've discovered,
and I've seen research which shows the proportion of this is higher,
but I think it was done on a different user base.
It might have been the British TV viewers,
but from Netflix research,
they're saying that even so,
at least 50% of their audience,
are using the subtitles it's much much higher than the the non-hearing section of the audience
people find accessing the material using subtitles for various reasons something that they that they
want to do so i you know again it's the the technology gets developed for one reason and
used in another way that isn't expected. I have by default subtitles on everything.
And we could argue I'm getting older and there is some history of hearing loss in my genetic line,
but there is no measurable evidence that I'm suffering from hearing loss. Although I can't
hear the sounds, teenagers can hear those, those super high pitched noises.
I have to admit those are, I can drive the kids nuts with those, but I can't, I cannot
hear them.
But, you know, in the normal hearing ranges, not really any appreciable loss.
However, it is absolutely true that if I'm listening to a British program, it helps to
have the subtitles on.
Oh, yes.
And we'll come back to those terms in a second.
Well, sometimes.
Yeah.
Sometimes.
Not always, but also the speed that some British dialects speak at.
But it's not just that.
It's not that.
I can watch old British programs and I can watch old American programs and not have the slightest problem understanding what they're saying.
But modern programs, the mix is wrong.
The mix is wrong.
There's something wrong with the audio mix in current programs.
Maybe they think it's more realistic.
I don't know.
But it's harder, both American and British shows, to watch it without subtitles.
So turn them on and just leave them on.
It's fine.
I think, I mean, I'm not going to quibble with the mix.
I think you're right.
But I think it may not be the whole story.
I think there is a difference in technique, which probably owes something to the fact that a lot of, you know, the old TV that you're referring to would be from an era when most actors would also have been stage and would have been trained in stage acting.
And the kind of traditions and differences between stage and television would have been actually much less than the differences between television and film.
Whereas now it feels much more like television and film are much closer.
And so a lot of actors go straight into one or the other without having kind of been actors formed to an audience of a thousand people.
Well, it's a form of acting, but it's not it's not like declaiming.
Sorry, I was picking on Tom Cruise.
Yeah, it's not it's it's not the same.
It's not the same.
So I think in some ways, what you get from the kind of TV and film technique that has probably been honed by those people who have dedicated all of their craft to it is the kind of the realism that you get and the kind of intimacy of the performances.
The downside is you don't get people kind of really announcing their speeches in a way that mean that you will not miss a single word.
then I think that's a failure.
Because if a program is not communicating,
if the program is not conveying what it's trying to convey to the audience
effectively, then they have missed what they are attempting to do,
which is to reach the audience.
It may be more naturalistic, it may be more real,
But it's not doing the job of, and so if we have to augment it with these subtitles,
which by the way, I believe, because I read an article on this a while back, and maybe
it is strictly in Americanism, but people do get people, some people, I can't say all
people, people who are afflicted with forms of hearing loss, do get a little pedantic
about the difference between closed captions and subtitles not the same thing i think those
captions are the thing with baby crying and background music britney spears toxic playing
vorp vorp that's closed captions i think subtitles are just subtitles i think subtitles are not
necessarily closed captions i believe that the actual technical difference is that closed captions
are not displayed by default or are optional, if you like, as opposed to burned in subtitles,
which can't be removed. But I may be getting a bit technical.
Well, I think closed caption technically also has a specific or had a specific technological
component to it. In other words, there used to be a device that was a closed caption,
received the closed caption signal. So I seem to recall a time before TVs all had built in.
It was a device. It's the way in which you can include a separate text stream that does not
have to be displayed. But closed captioned, that term should include the descriptions of the audio
because that's its purpose.
I'm not sure that that's the original meaning,
but I get it.
I get that it has become that.
Yeah, well, words change.
Deal with it, people.
But that is my understanding.
I mean, why Netflix are using it?
Well, Netflix.
Actually, well, you see,
I think Netflix has always had
quote unquote subtitles.
It's not a question of whether or not
it's closed captioned or not.
It's whether they've got anything
to stick on the screen, which is why they just have subtitles on and off kind of thing.
So I think that's part of the gripey gripe is that sometimes it is what people need
and other times it is not.
And there was no clear differentiation.
So because it does.
But speaking of speaking of the closed captions.
So this week, the Doctor Who episode, when the TARDIS took off, it said vorp, vorp.
And last week, it said space engine or something like that, which I thought was really weird.
I just figured that was Disney somehow inserting their hand on it.
But anyway, neither here nor there.
Let's see.
So I wanted to bring up good things or things.
We can call them good things.
Co-written with Sharma Angel Waffle.
Waffle?
I'm going with Waffle.
But who apparently grew up a big fan of RTD era Doctor Who.
So this is the next generation of Who fans coming back.
And is it really surprising that they might want to do a sequel to an episode that they
remember for when they were?
Yeah.
Wish it had been more of a logical sequel, but yeah.
Well, I don't listen.
Actually, I don't care for Midnight.
I don't hate it, but it's a shuttle full of people talking.
Midnight.
I don't know if it's in my top 10 Doctor Who episodes.
It's one of my favorite things that Russell T. Davis has written.
I think it's superb.
It's probably one of my top 10 from that year.
I would go so far as to say that.
I don't hate Midnight.
I just like, yeah, right.
I don't know.
I don't get that.
I thought it was outstanding television, not just outstanding Doctor Who.
It's very, very good.
I get the fact that the fans want to write about the Doctor Who that they loved or that got them into it.
It's what happened in the wilderness years, the novels and so forth are kind of full of those sequels and nods and throwbacks.
It's what Russell T. Davis did not do when he brought the show back.
Well, he did bring in some of those writers, though.
Oh, he brought in some of those writers, but he was overseeing it.
It was two and a bit series in before in Gridlock we got the Macra.
in a kind of completely incidental appearance.
Pointlessly, yeah.
You know, it was just a kind of nod to it.
And he was very careful there, I think,
about not alienating the audience who hadn't seen it,
whereas what he's doing here is bringing something back
from 11 seasons ago that, as you've mentioned,
doesn't really, it doesn't add anything to this episode
to make it a sequel to anything.
It certainly doesn't kind of match up to what it's a sequel to.
So it invites unfair comparisons, I think.
I feel it would have been better if they had just stripped that out completely.
I don't know whether it was...
It feels like it's tacked on.
Well, I don't know.
Or it's something that came that was more kind of...
The original idea was somehow to do a sequel and it kind of evolved into something that
operated in a very different way to the way that the Midnight Entity did in the original,
in which case, you know, is the link really valid anymore? Whether that came from Sharma
Angel Waffle or from RTD himself, you know, kind of giving himself a nod, I'm not clear,
but he's the showrunner. He should have gone, this doesn't work.
my second viewing on this, I was kind of, you know, keeping an eye on it because that was the
other question is like, how is this a sequel to Midnight? And I think, I genuinely believe that
this story was written without it being a sequel to Midnight. And then for some reason, it was
shoehorned in. So all we needed, all we needed was a planet that had a Cytonic sun because we
have experienced planets that have life on them that of a type we can't understand,
like the creature on midnight. And the doctor, you know, this is a ex-Cytonic sun. And we're like,
no, I've been on a planet before where there was something. This could be related, you know,
not necessarily genetically related but in other words a similar process of evolution brings up
something like it if if that's what they wanted to do but it just it just doesn't but the number
of times have been similar stories in doctor who and they haven't linked them right right it's
unnecessary and it's it's another thing i think okay hold on the universe but i also think that
there's got to be something like this whole it's so it's there's so much of this going on there's
so much crowbarring in these kind of continuity references that I'm coming to the conclusion that
Russell T Davies is deliberately trying to sabotage the marketing of this as being
season two of Doctor Who. He's like, well, okay, Disney can call this season two,
but I'm going to refer to a story that happened 17 years ago so that the audience know that this
is part of a continuous show.
Okay, but he's also referencing something else.
And I think this is more meaningful.
Okay.
One, at the end of this episode,
do you get the impression that the creature got off the planet?
Yeah.
I mean, all Dom has to do is to turn the ship around
and smash into the planet and kill all of them.
And they're fine.
But since she already followed the orders to nuke it from order,
she knew what her commander did.
She knows what needs to be done.
she could just turn around and blast it.
Unless the whispering stops her.
See, again, that whole bit about why is Alice deaf?
They do make a point of it.
The doctor literally says, oh, you can't hear the whispering.
But what does the whispering do?
And they made a point of it and they ignored it and they just left it hanging and don't
like it.
But anyway, maybe, you know, maybe that makes them go intentionally kill.
That that's kind of thing.
OK, so she can smash it.
But maybe the creature got off the client.
But remember, what was this? It was galvanic radiation. Where have we heard galvanic radiation
before? The giggle, the beam that shot the doctor that caused the bi-generation,
galvanic radiation. Can't be coincidence.
Counterpoint. Yes, it can.
Well, yeah.
He does this all the time. He's like, I've invented some kind of...
So I am attributing actual plotting to RTD, which is a mistake.
And he likes the words.
He likes the words and he just wants to use it as much as he can.
So I don't know that you're wrong.
I'm just not convinced that he's planned this out that well.
Fair enough.
It's not planned out.
I'm going to go out there and say that also I am, you know, again,
I'm disliking the Mrs. Flood stuff.
I'm disliking it even more in this episode because now it's just Sue tech or whatever her name was again, just showing up wherever it is at the end.
And now, you know, here I'm a military commander and it was one thing when she's kind of a wacky old lady on earth that seems to be next door and you know, something's up.
And it's another now that she's now appearing like that woman did in Space Babies.
And in fact, this is very much like the way she turned up in Space Babies.
It's also very much like the whole forgetting the Beatles existed or not forget, you know, not knowing.
I'm sure we've I'm sure we've had this before.
And I'm now starting to get confused whether I'm thinking about Big Finish because I think they did this quite a while ago.
in the run-up to Time of the Daleks with Shakespeare,
no one remembering Shakespeare and, you know, why is that?
I think they did it last season with the Beatles
and why don't people remember the Beatles?
I just, I thought that, first of all, it's very heavy-handed,
all of the kind of, you know, everyone should know about Earth.
First of all, they have to establish that everyone should know about Earth,
which isn't like a consistent thing through Doctor Who.
They've got to establish that in this era, they're in a time and place where people should know Earth and should know the human race.
So they first of all have to establish that.
Then they have to bring it into conversation at points where it doesn't naturally fit into conversation.
That's all bad enough because that feels like, oh, the episode is just going to grind to a halt while we get a bit of series, you know, season plot development occurring.
But then when they actually get to resolving it in whatever way they do resolve it with the shooting of Belinda, they have to add in dialogue to like say, whatever these humans are, do they have a similar anatomy to Lombardo anatomy?
me and it's like oh my god you know similar yeah you wouldn't have yeah well it's just so it's
crazy it's crazy risky and also if you hadn't had this blinking plot point which presumably you
didn't when the episode was originally drafted you wouldn't have to have that stupid line of
dialogue they've had to go and add that back in because of whatever season arc is now crowbarred
in here so is the heart in exactly the same position that that line a little better than
is it similar to lombardic sure it's similar yeah similar yeah i mean yes the heart's on the wrong
side but yeah it's similar i mean we don't get any clarification there it's for my money a lot
more annoying and clunky than the midnight link although those were my two big kind of complaints
yeah it's it's not in the problem with this episode is fitting it in around everything else
the episode itself the story of them arriving mystery the it builds good tension it's you feel
like there's real jeopardy and there's a sort of satisfactory resolution except for the cheap
ending at the end and okay it's good and everything else the kind of
shutting it on.
Yeah, it just,
I'm afraid that that's the part RTD did
to get the co-credit.
I don't know.
I don't think you get a co-credit for that
because, well,
I mean, it's one of those things that we can,
I remember we had the argument
about the Zygon inversion
and the Zygon invasion
where I was absolutely certain
that Moffat had written
the big Peter Capaldi speech,
but I couldn't prove it.
And we didn't find the answer for like two or three years.
So who knows?
What was the answer?
I still don't have it.
Oh, yeah, he did write it.
He said he wrote it.
But at the time, there was nothing on record either way.
To me, it sounded like him, not Peter Harness.
Fair enough.
Let's see.
Another thing that's clunky, fitting things in, clunky.
All right.
This is a planet made of diamond.
Okay.
It's a planet made of diamond.
We established that in midnight.
And apparently diamond is very valuable, despite the fact that you've got a planet made of it.
Which we already know here in the 21st century that diamond will be not valuable in a very short period of time.
you know if we can take out De Beers but because we can make better diamonds for practical purposes
now already so 500,000 years in the future did they really need to remove the entire surface
layer of a planet but if the planet's made of diamonds why did they have to drill 8.05 kilometers
down I mean she did she did in second watch she did say they stripped the layer they stripped the
layer, the top layer of diamond off. It's like, okay, mining would be much easier if you just
went down and then went outwards, not straight down. It's like, why are we doing that?
It feels like, well, somebody's going to ask the question, why don't you just take the diamonds
off the surface? That's what the planet's made out of. But we needed a big well. But did we need
a big well? Did the creature actually climb out of the well? Did it? Is that where it came from?
It was living on the planet before. Assuming it's the same creature. Is it the same one or a
different one of the same race? How did it know the doctor's name? But we got two tears out of
shooty in this episode. Two. One in each eye. Not at the same time, but one each. That man has got
tear duct control let me tell you but we don't have to do every episode no i i i do think that
you know he is coming dangerously close to getting shot for calling people babes think
think that's a very real possibility at some point and and here's a really good example of
why you don't do it pissing off the military who have the guns i also think that the psychic
paper has now become
right it's a way to get you out of
it's a way to get you out of a locked
room the sonic screwdriver
is a way that you get out of a locked room the psychic
paper is a way to get you at a lot
of running up and down
but
now it's just kind of bad
now but now it's becoming
I'm pretty sure you said this like 20 years
ago overused and stupid
and it's getting worse
I thought you were saying it'd become the sonic screwdriver
but I always was the sonic screwdriver
It was a different version of the sonic screwdriver.
But it's just like this scene is so awkward and silly and not funny.
I'm not sure I have that problem with it other than it's just, I've seen this a number of times.
It's a bit like the first time a companion sees the TARDIS interior or whatever.
It's, you know, some writers are still surprising us with the way that they have these kind of essential plot elements that you've got to get through.
And they still find a kind of new take on it.
This is not, you know, the psychic paper and I'm sent from head office to test you is like, I don't know how many times in the last 850 episodes or whatever we're on now.
has been done, but it's probably several hundred. Yeah. Let's see. In the positive category,
although still a little weird, I definitely feel like Belinda has moved yet another step down the
path towards not Tegan in this episode. She gets her little bit at the beginning of the episode
of character growth with regards to why she wants to get home. And it's becoming more realistic
with each episode, which is good because I really was not liking her at the start.
Well, yes, you did mention that. And I had a slightly different take on her. And I guess I
have a slightly different take on Tegan as well. But I'm sort of also moving along the same path
you are it's just from a starting point where i was really much closer to liking her and i i was
kind of halfway through this episode when i kind of remembered hang on a minute weren't we told
that millie gibson was going to be in season two or how you know how come we haven't seen her yet
and spoilers for people who don't watch the trailer i did get an answer to to that but but
I didn't know that was coming at that point. I was just like, I'm so like, I'm so much happier.
I don't quite know why, but with Belinda as a character, then, then with Ruby,
I basically forgotten about her. So, all right, let's, let's ask the questions then.
When exactly do we think the doctor is, when and where do we think the doctor is going to meet up
with ruby in the next episode because isn't the earth like kaboom boom yeah we've got to get an
answer to that i think just based on that trailer that it's a dr light episode fair enough i think
that's i think eight freaking episodes and they still have to pull a dr light they did it last
season and i like a doctor last season was one of the best he had a job last season no shooty was
under contract to another production yes so they had to make two episodes this year should be solid
on them i mean it's long gone now but i mean so they still did it or it looks like they still did
it could be wrong yeah so i i'm not missing ruby i'm definitely not missing ruby and there's just
something how do i put this there was a complaint a fair complaint that between i don't know space
babies and the devil's
cord, which I think are
back-to-back episodes, that
they had jumped
to, Ruby had been traveling
with a doctor for months.
And obviously that's not happening
here, because we are watching
every minute of it, because we are going
from scene to scene to
scene. So,
kind of, I don't
know, the development of
Belinda does feel
a little jerky,
Because it seems to happen at the end of one episode before we open the scene of the next episode.
But I think that's just an artifice of the way it's written, right?
I mean, that scene where she's talking about her dad going down to the pub and singing songs and whatnot, that is so RTD, right?
That just, that feels like his bread and butter to me.
And because you're packing that in at the front end of the episode, because where else do you have time to put it?
I don't know.
It does feel a little jerky, but I guess it's part of her.
I just got I got saved from the cartoon guy.
I guess I'm a little.
Yeah.
And am I right that the doctor is still trying to hit Earth?
That's why every time he lands, it does the bouncy thing.
And he goes, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Like a little petulant child.
Or is he given up on the idea of, well, do you see my point?
It's like he went and got a Vindicator reading.
He said, we're going to have to go make a few more of these Vindicator readings.
And then instead, he tries going back to Earth and he gets bounced off of it again.
And he's like not expecting it.
Surely you just go to four or five places and get your Vindicator readings and then try again.
But it didn't feel like that.
It feels like he's going to hammer it again and then complain about it.
So even when, you know, the expected result happens every time you do the same thing,
something about a definition of madness in there somewhere.
I don't have anything else specifically about this episode.
The only thing I want to mention is Casio, you may have recognized if you watch Slow Horses.
Oh, I did hear Slow Horses.
I have not seen Slow Horses yet.
Oh, you've got a treat.
Is he an annoying jerk?
He does play an annoying jerk.
It's Christopher Chung and he plays Roddy Ho in Slow Horses.
And listeners, if you haven't watched Slow Horses yet, give yourselves a treat.
It's just about the best thing on telly.
It's on my list.
It's just, I've got a long list.
I'm going to throw something out here again.
Don't listen to podcasts until after we've recorded.
You're telling people not to listen to podcasts?
Oh, sorry.
No, no, no, no, no.
I don't listen.
I'm sorry.
I may have elided the word I
we'll just call it a sound drop out
but I think I elided the I
anyway
I don't listen to anyone else review these episodes
until after I
we've recorded these episodes
these podcasts so that
it's untainted
and every once in a while I'll listen to one after the fact
and I'll hear something and I'll go
I wish I'd thought of that
I don't have anything like that
but what I have heard
and a few other places is, and I'm going to stick with the land of fiction, but I have heard some
other places speculating that they're in some sort of fantasy world, not the reality that we
have been following Doctor Who for the first 60 years kind of thing. So I don't think they got it
from us or from me. Therefore, I'm pretty sure that either it's in the zeitgeist or it's more
obvious to people. I'm just going to go back and say, I think this will all be tied back now to
Wild Blue Yonder because I'm still pissed off that that name didn't mean anything, right?
Off we go into the Wild Blue Yonder. Why did the TARDIS say that? Is it because the TARDIS knows
they've gone somewhere else into the wild blue yonder you know did the doctor really let things
in by playing with salt at the end of the universe or did he actually just accidentally
kick them out somewhere i don't know but i think that'll be the moment i think that episode will
be the moment where the the unreality split occurred whatever it is at that point i think
that's what we're going to come back to we're actually going to come back to wild blue yonder
And yes, I am attributing RTD with planning, not saying good planning, just it's going to bug me
till the end of time, unless we come up with an excuse for that damn wild blue yonder music being
played by the TARDIS. Anyway, so when Shooty gets out of it, David Tennant's doctor will be left
behind in the fake reality universe. And we won't have to worry about them bumping into each other
ever again. And that's not what I was hoping for, frankly, but there you go. Let's just go find the
other doctor and follow him for a while. It seems a stretch to me, but okay.
What, did RG plan something? For long enough to point out that presumably that means that
the war between the land and the sea is also set in this alternative universe.
Fair enough. That's fair enough. That's not going to go anywhere, I don't think. But who knows,
Maybe.
We're going to have to review that, aren't we?
Surely are.
How many episodes is that going to be?
Five.
Do we know when?
Or is this a BBC thing?
Someday.
Thursday afternoon, we'll let you know it's coming next week.
Yeah.
Great.
Do you have anything else on this episode?
I don't.
All right.
Well, next week, the episode featuring Ruby Sunday?
Tuesday?
Wednesday? What day of the week is she?
Is it Sunday? It's Sunday, isn't it?
It's Sunday. Yeah.
Next time, we'll be looking
at Lucky Day.
And the question is, will it be our
lucky day? Simon,
thank you for joining me. It's a pleasure
as always. And listeners,
I do hope you'll join us all again next time
on Fusion Patrol.
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