Doctor Who 11x07 Edited Clean

Watching this reaction after reading your messages seemed weird because you did seem to be enjoying it so I was wonder how you were going to be harsh at the end. But I didn't think you were that harsh. I like the episode to, didn't even think about the flaws until seeing some comments and watching the episode again. I agree I think there is some confusion with the message it's trying to put across but I still find it an enjoyable story for the Doctor and fam.

If only the harshness rained down on this episode and this era was more like your harshness! You were pretty gentle. I think the writer (Pete McTighe) kind of wrote himself into a corner that he couldn't quite get out of. I suspect that the main idea behind this episode was making bubblewrap a deadly threat. One of the common jibes leveled at classic Doctor Who is about the low budget cheap sets and cheap monster design. There's a monster in one story -- it's really easy to see that they had actually used bubblewrap to make part of it. It's a little ridiculous. As a result, people came to say the monsters in DW are kind of a joke because they are bubblewrap. It makes total sense to me that a DW fan-turned writer would want to write a story in which it is the bubblewrap that kills you. The problem for the writer then becomes figuring out who the villain is going to be. It'd be really easy to make killer robots the villain. That's a pretty common (to the point of being stereotypical) move in sci-fi. I imagine the writer didn't want to take the easy route. People will typically think of robots and A.I. as scary, so the writer decides to use that common assumption as a mis-direct and make somebody else the villain. So, one of the workers is a revolutionary and the company's A.I. system has been trying to fight back even as that revolutionary has been hacking the system and subverting it. The other easy and expected move would be to make capitalism the villain as in the 12th Doctor episode "Oxygen." And our writer seems to really want to do something other than fall into these expectations because he wants to keep the audience guessing in order to make the episode more fun. But these days when we think about evil or oppression, we think of it not just as individuals behaving badly, we understand that evil and oppression and violence are systemically produced. Systems like capitalism, racism, nationalism, etc. do evil to people based on their race, gender, sexuality, class, etc., and systems like capitalism do evil to the earth and the environment. We've gotten very used to the idea -- the truth! -- that systems can be evil and dangerous and need to be resisted and undone. In this episode though, when people including the Doctor say "the system," they mean just the computer system that Kerblam! uses. They don't seem to be talking about the corporate capitalism system that clearly dominates the society. That gets blurred when the Doctor says that "The systems aren't the problem. How people use and exploit the systems: that's the problem." At the very beginning of the episode, the Doctor is complaining about the TARDIS, saying that she "can't get the hang of these new systems." So it's established right at the beginning that, for this episode, "system" or "systems" just means operational systems or operational mechanisms. But as much as the writer wants to contain what the word "systems" means for this episode, no writer can ever contain what words mean. McTighe seems to me to be a little tone deaf about our society and trying really hard to ignore how we generally understand things to be systemic now. We know that identifying individuals as the villains is never enough because it won't change the systemic forces that are producing violence and oppression. That's our paradigm for justice work now. So writing "The systems aren't the problem. How people use and export the systems: that's the problem" in an story taking place in a society where techno-capitalism is taking away people's jobs and livelihoods feels really tone deaf. Wanting so much to subvert our expectations as an audience, McTighe only lands in a bigger problem that he does't seem to be aware of.

I love this episode, mainly because one of my favourite comedians is in it. (Lee Mack - Dan Cooper)

"The systems aren’t the problem. How people use and exploit the systems, that’s the problem" = the automatization itself is not inherently bad. it's the way it's abused by people in power that leads to unjust society. and where is she wrong?

looking back i really like noticing the foreshadowing of charlie being the antagonist throughout the episode. for example, the system appointed the doctor to the maintenance role to lead her up to Charlie, but the doctor manually switched with graham, so that plan went up in flames haha. also charlie tried to discourage the team from persuing the right leads all the time

i really like the fam too! this era feels like home to me

every series has its flaws and a few of the downer episodes. but the nitpicking really picks up with 13th era. like, some people really make it their whole personality to prove everyone the era is bad. episodes like kerblam define the entire series in their mind, and they never treat other series by their least favorite episode, only when it comes to 13

9pm on Wednesday evening means one thing... Juliette Doctor Who time. I fully agree with you about the creepyness of the robots, and even though they weren't the main villains it was at least well done to be scary to the viewers. The ending was definitely weak, not helped by Charlie's motive rant taking the company having a 10% human workforce as meaning just 10% of humans were in work which isn't the same at all. This is probably the sort of episode that people have in mind when they talk negatively about this era of the show and why they think it's flawed.

I've not watched yet, but to reassure you based on your comments, we all had a lot of opinions about this episode, especially the ending.