New Doctor Who Season 2 First Impressions: Episode 1 (The Robot Revolution)

OOOOOOOOOOOOOORB

God damn it, I went and did it again. Two solid damn months of procrastinating on writing anything. I had this really neat show that fascinated me I was going to write about, and after than an anime, and then after that another anime for the summer. Now look at me, in goddamn April with five months of time left before the double fall whammy of Screams marathon and Non-Specific November Writing Month take up all my spoons. Frezno Inferno, you dingus. Well, at least I played some good computer games. Oh yeah, and also time has forced me to get back into the writing mode because there's a new season of Doctor Who, so let's talk about the opener to that for a while like we do. I have taken to joking around whenever this season comes up, calling it The Last Ever Season Of Doctor Who because of all the doomscrollers and naysayers who didn't like Empire Of Death and are thus convinced that that big dumb Welshman RTD has run this time travel show into the ground, that Gatwa is leaving at the end of this, that we're not renewed into 2030 so the show is clearly cancelled forever, and that we'll all have to go back to reading Wilderness 2 era books and hearing Big Finish plays while yelling loudly that Doctor fucking Who has been worse than it's ever fucking been. DON'T YOU JUST FUCKING LOVE MODERN FANDOMS? I fled to Quantum Leap to get away from shit like this, Christ.

All of this bitching about Doctor Who fandom's collective of Chicken Littles is because there isn't anything to bitch about with this season's opener. The Robot Revolution fucking slapped, y'all. Let us be quick and surgical in our analysis, like a rushed nurse at a busy metropolitan London hospital. Y'see what I did there with my simile? Pretty clever shit, right? It's why you keep coming back to hear Frezno Inferno's takes on the phone box show. Fittingly, given that comparison, I want to start with the highlight. New companion pogchamp, new companion pogchamp. Varadu Sethu as Belinda Chandra fucking rules. This is a killer introduction to her, and over 45 minutes you get a sense of the type of person she might be and what sort of character arc might emerge from seven more episodes of her zipping around time and space with Ncuti Gatwa. It's much better than the introduction trip for Ruby Sunday with the Space Babies (and I would like to add that 1, I kind of had a fondness for Space Babies and 2, I have a thing involving Ruby and the new era slow cooking in my head. More to come.), and I like Belinda a lot. An overworked and stressed girl thrown right into the deep end of outer space, into a world of robots and malicious AI and suffering rebels, who does her very best to help and tries to pull a noble self-sacrifice when she sees the full macrocosmic scope of the suffering happening on the planet named after her. Giving herself up to the robots is simultaneously something I understand a person like this would do as well as a "Girl what in the fuck are you thinking?" moment.

To say nothing of that ending in the TARDIS. The point is made that Belinda looks an awful lot like that Mundy Flynn girl from Boom, the Doctor is very excited at the prospect of a mysterious mystery surrounding this girl... and Belinda gets to tell him off for it. For scanning her without consent, for somewhat objectifying her by making her out to be a big cosmic mystery... now where have I heard that one before? That's right, motherfuckers. In RTD's second go-around, he appears to be giving us... Clara 2. I am naturally fucking ecstatic about this, and I do hope we get to see more of that feistiness and self-agency evident in Belinda. She has the potential to be my favorite companion since Clara, and my fingers are crossed that we get more of this. Even if we don't, the dynamic put forth thus far is fascinating. There's a dash of Tegan Jovanka in there as well, with the mouthy companion who just wants to go home but can't because the TARDIS is acting up. Granted here it's acting up because of season arc horseshit involving THE EARTH BEING DESTROYED OH MY GODDDDD, but we have seven more weeks to play with that. Let's instead play with the kind of bullshit a companion like Belinda has to stand up against in this episode.

There's nothing quite like a bit of RTD social commentary that has all the subtlety of a brick slamming against your head, and he gets to pull a real one-two punch of bricks to the fucking head here. In the first place you have the bad robots oppressing the planet at the behest of the AI Generator. There's not much said here, given that it's a red herring before we get the reveal of who's really running the planet, but RTD kind of has a slam dunk here for me. All he has to do is show an evil fucking thing called an AI Generator attempting to subvert humanity, and the social commentary satire practically writes itself. It would be nice to get a full episode railing against the death of creativity at the hands of a robot that can't render hands right, but all of this is to hide the true villain. That's right, baby, it's a takedown of shitty incels! Belinda's shitty-ass boyfriend from the opener, who gleefully took his place at the throne of this planet and started killing people like it was a big computer game! The asshole who met his proposal with immediate ultimatums for what Belinda could wear and do, claiming her as his property immediately, and now engineering an entire scheme to fuse together in some dark forbidden MRA-tinged transhumanism where she will forever be a part of him, a possession. So Belinda says fuck that and drops a temporal bomb on him, resulting in a trippy-ass sequence which I love. You love to see gross incels getting owned. Alan Shithead, I forget his last name and I don't give a fuck, gets absolutely wrecked and I love to see it.

Oh yeah, and Doctor Who is in this. Gotta praise Gatwa just a bit. Love his skirt in the opener. Love that we once again have him taking the long way round, and being an established part of the planet's revolution for months. Love him once again being in touch with his emotions and truly mourning the loss of Sasha 55 for a good moment there. I said on a podcast recently that my favorite Doctors are the Scottish ones, and Gatwa continues to prove this is true. He's got an emotional vulnerability, a sense of adventure, but also in this one you do get just a hint of the old "Doctor Who can be a real bastard" mentality at the end, and Belinda gets to call him on it. Many people have critiqued last year's companion dynamic, and how 15 and Ruby were just besties who had all the friction of a slick frozen pond. I hope we get a little more of that friction going forward, that Belinda continues to be a strong companion who can push back a little, and that she and Doctor Who become the very best of friends. I have a good hope for this season of the show, and we'll see if it's misplaced or not. We'll even see if it's The Last Ever Season Of Doctor Who. For now, seven weeks of fucking around and finding out.

But next week? Cartoons or something, I dunno.