The doctor who fan urge to transcend from this universe to that ship to fucking punch Tecteun's jaw until it's broken

what we learned today is 13 has violent mummy issues and yaz is 100% ok with lobbing bodies off ships. banger episode

love that they had that whole 'fetch your dog' side plot only to cut to karvanista saying 'i can't time travel you absolute soggy sandwich' jfhgg

thirteen trying to radicalize an ood was honestly one of the best parts of the episode

Lmao agreed

Logic tells me the memories in TTC were totally void of dialogue because, well, the point was the master was the storyteller and it streamlined the information for audiences, but i feel like a suitably depressing headcanon for the reasons for that In universe is that we’re in Tecteun’s memory and she quite clearly has no need for their child’s words, thoughts or feelings, so why would she remember  them? 

#‘she’s a ten year old girl. how much is there to know?’#the patterns in this season tho i mean omg (via @resting-meme-face)

OMG. of course. The thing with Gerald who never offered a kind word to little Peggy, who couldn’t be bothered to treat Peggy as a little girl whose parents died.

And there’s a pattern in this tapestry about parents, parental figures, parental neglect, and straight on abuse drawing a line to Tecteun and how she treated the foundling who eventually becomes the Doctor.

Holy shit this

The timeless children vs Survivors of the Flux 

insp @you-have-to-use-your-imagination

#SCREAM#we knew she was bluffing but this makes it so much worse oh my god#kinda wish the master could have seen that second scene#not intervened just seen#behind some two way mirror#i want him to see the way she asks ‘thousands?’ and Get It#pretty sure she says 'how much was lost’ also verbatim to him#gonna check#ha i opened the timeless children on my laptop and it’s ON that line perfect#but the parallel between him (presumably) genuinely not knowing and tecteun not fucking answering#hes sketchy when he says impossible to tell. im not totally willing to bet he didnt know something more#either that or he enjoyed it somehow. telling her that he couldnt tell her more#i hope he doesnt know anything more#i hope he really didnt find anything more#man i want him to have seen this scene sooo badly#theres no way hes ever gonna get it otherwise#'you think youve broken me? HA look how intact i am!’ *proceeds to fall apart entirely (via @you-have-to-use-your-imagination)

You know I love how Jodie has mastered the “this is a being that is thousands, possibly millions of years old” look in her eyes BUT ALSO the moment she is talking to Tecteun? She looks so, so young. Inside that age old being there is also still a very wounded child. And I love that she manages to bring that across the way she does.

Yesss this

also a lot has happened since but the angels using 13’s voice at the beginning? showstopping spectacular horrifying I loved it

Rewatching Resolution (again), I’m further convinced Chibnall’s bringing in UNIT in the coming series, maybe not in s12 but there will be a moment the Doctor will be in trouble and Kate Stewart will stride in like Big Damned Heroes. 

Especially since listening to the (very funny) telephone operator I realize she didn’t say UNIT was permanently shutdown but it was ‘suspended, pending review’. That’s like classic covert ops trope right there where the covert taskforce attempt to both do their jobs while justify their existence to a short sighted bureaucracy. 

This also has a bit of precedent in RL, since this isn’t just a Brexit reference, I think it’s also a NATO reference where Trump threatens to pull out from NATO. 

I 100% believe Kate Lethbridge Stewart is in Geneva right now fighting tooth and nail to keep UNIT relevant while covertly still running an underground Taskforce. 

UNIT audios would have so much fun with this, especially playing with this trope. 

(Also, I highly doubt Chibnall would bring up UNIT just the shutter it, I don’t know what happened to Torchwood post-COE but if I remember correctly save for the Doctor mentioning Jack and then the use of the Retcon drug in Face the Raven, it seems like it no longer operates in the main ‘verse. Spin-offs are such muddy waters for Doctor Who continuity.)

This also makes me wonder about MDZ Research, because again, I noticed Dalek!Lin didn’t get the weapons from the Black Archives but from MDZ Research. Mitch mentioned that MDZ Research has been collecting “non-terrestial weapons in the Black Market”. 

I feel buying alien weapons and showing the logo twice seems like foreshadowing. 

I wonder if that’ll be a relevant plot point in series 12, and I wonder if MDZ Research is the reason why UNIT lost its funding too? It would bring two storylines together if MDZ happens to be connected to whatever will happen in s12. 

(Also, what does MDZ stand for? Movellans, Dalek, Zygon??? I mean, if it is, it’s not the first time the Doctor’s enemies banded together to bring her down.)

I hope the Order of Custodians will also be a thing in s12 because they sound very interesting. I don’t think its a powerful or rich organization, I think it’s just a small group like the Knights in Buffy. 

The MDZ and Order of Custodians didn’t pan out (I think, I have to rewatch Revolution of the Daleks). 

BUT

FASTFORWARD TO 2021, DOCTOR WHO BTS

Christopher Chibnall in his flower print shirt: “UNIT in episode 5. I really, I was looking forward to bringing UNIT back, and we’d been planning this for a while, because you know the worst thing to happen to it is its been under threat and obviously has been closed since Resolution it was very deliberately so we could bring it back later on, and it would feel like what has happened to UNIT, and is the world safe without UNIT?’

Oh, I’m sorry, its not loud enough:

I’M GOING TO BE INSUFFERABLE, IN SU FFERA BLE ABOUT THIS.

people being like ‘damn she kinda made points tho’ about tecteun’s line about the doctor adopting and using humans like they’re experiments is actually insane by the way

i mean, she is very low-key right about the doctor using humans because we know the doctor has a thing of not liking to travel alone and having a human around keeps them grounded or whatever. 

but tecteun kidnapping and experimenting on a child and then that child by chance managing to get away and live a good life travelling the universe is nothing like the doctor making actual friends, taking them travelling of their own free will and there just being a small bonus that having people around is good for the doctor’s mental health. give me a break.

More thoughts about this episode, especially this:

So this is the holographic!Doctor looking off screen and saying “Oh, hang on, I think you’re calling me from the control room.”

So the Doctor had enough time to briefly process and repress the events of Planet Time and then had enough time to feel guilty about being an ass to Yaz. And is working to apologize to Yaz– LOL, no. This is the Doctor, they have the emotional maturity of a blueberry scone.

Instead of doing that the Doctor went on to do it in a round about way that she’s worried and sorry the Doctor makes this hologram and steals something from the Master’s playbook and puts this in Yaz’s pocket.

But before this, I really love this moment. They’re lives is so go-go-go (and having cut the episode order from 8 episodes to six… did not help). I’m just glad that we did have this moment.

Yaz’s tiny (sad) smile.

Before she replies: “I miss you too.”

And this little shit (affectionate) Han Solo’s Yaz. “I know you do.”

But it makes Yaz smile and when Yaz smiles, she lights up so much.

Mandip is so good.

Thirteen walks off screen and out of the hologram leaving Yaz

Someone posted– sorry I couldn’t find it! about the Doctor doing this to give Yaz at least something to hold on to, so she won’t be adrift like she was in Revolution of the Daleks.

Headcanon accepted! Because yes, Thirteen definitely saw all those notes in that poor Other Tardis and she didn’t want Yaz to be bereft again, which is aww.

But also I want to shake Thirteen and go: USE YOUR WORDS, DOCTOR.

I love the implication that the bargain bin Brax had to work to infiltrate UNIT, but, the other agency that predates them by close to a century that also focuses on the extra-terrestrial threats, Torchwood, is so dysfunctional that he didn’t even need to bother with them.

Lmaoooo

There’s just something So heartbreaking about 13 saying to the Ood that they both know that this all ends with Tecteun killing her. 

The Doctor doesn’t remember having parents, they’re an orphan. We see them cry in a barn alone. They do this frequently. Do you think that kid laid there wishing for a parent to come in and make things okay? Somebody they could actually trust?

And 13 discovers this whole vast history that they never remembered, ever, because of a violation done upon them. And she meets the mother she had and she Knows beyond all shadow of a doubt that this woman will murder her in cold blood. It’s not even said emotively. She knows this ends in her killing her. 

It’s just quietly upsetting in a series of scenes of Tecteun hitting every abusive parent red flag that exists. 

Nobody deserves that. 

Flux part 5: Survivors of the Flux

Spoilers within.

Copy and pasting from under the cut because yes:

Time Lords, what utter bastards.

Rassilon in the End of Time wanting to be beings of pure energy 🤝 Tecteun ending the universe to move to another universe because they Don’t Like it anymore.

So like, in terms of the Gallifreyan co-founders... Omega seems decent by comparison now. By virtue of getting assassinated earlier that is.

also, confronting your shitty foster-parent is a new theme to explore with the doctor and i’m absolutely loving it, despite the brevity of their interactions

also s/o to kate stewart who just Marches into a meeting with the guy she Knows has murdered a bunch of her predecessors. 

further shout out to her for keeping a flip phone in 2017 Just for the drama of snapping it in half if she needs to go dark

But also Kate keeping a burner phone up until 2017 because its the one that is least likely to be traced.

(Chibnall really does want to write a spy thriller).

Chibnall writes the best Kate Stewart IMO. Because she’s both intelligent and powerful and while her family’s legacy is important to her, she isn’t reduced to being The Brigadier’s Daughter as she so often was in the Moffat and Big Finish era.

I missed this Kate, the Power of Three!Kate.