Doctor Who: Kerblam!

This was a decent episode. There are a couple of things about it that I found very irritating, but mostly it was good. For a kids' show, anyway. The "twists" (such as they are) aren't going to surprise any adult viewers, but I doubt the target audience found it quite so easy to predict. My only major criticism is that it seemed like it was heading toward a particular message only to back off at the last moment, which made the point of the episode a little unclear.

Doctor Who: Demons of the Punjab

In some ways, this episode wasn't as bad as the last one, mostly because it was just kind of boring. And the aliens were completely pointless. If you cut them out of the story it would be exactly the same, you'd just save some time.

Lessons from Lone Wolf: Choice and Consequence

I've been running a group playthrough (or let's play) of the Lone Wolf gamebook series on the Something Awful forums, and I've gone over the books in some depth in order to provide extra information and to attempt to make some bits work a little better (eg. not letting us get into stupid dead-man-walking states). In doing this I've come away with a few lessons that anyone thinking about writing a gamebook should follow. Here are some of them, in no particular order.

Tell Me a Story: Loss

This show is slooooow. Barely anything actually happened in this episode. There's sort of some escalating tension but it's at a pretty low level. I think a big part of the problem is that we don't know any of the characters well enough to care about them. I'm not even sure who we're supposed to be siding with in the three pigs story. You'd think it would be the guy whose girlfriend was just killed (the wolf?), but the show seems to want us to care at least as much about the criminals (the pigs). And the three stories still seem completely separate, so it's not clear why they're all being told together.

Doctor Who: The Tsuranga Conundrum

This episode was about 50% mediocre and 50% bad. In fact, if not for the bad bits, it would be utterly generic and forgettable, so basically the only things I'm going to remember about it are bad and if I remember it at all it will be as a bad episode. So actually it's bad episode. I didn't like it.

Tell Me a Story: Hope

"The world's most beloved fairy tales re-imagined as a dark and twisted psychological thriller. Set in modern day New York City, the first season of this serialised drama interweaves The Three Little Pigs, Little Red Riding Hood, and Hansel and Gretel into an epic and subversive tale of love, loss, greed, revenge and murder." - TV Calendar.

I assumed, based on the description, that I was in for some kind of teen supernatural action romance. Something like Lost Girl or Wynonna Earp. Probably everyone would look like normal humans most of the time because of budget and there'd be a lot of love triangles and misunderstandings. This show is not that at all. I'm not sure what it is.

Doctor Who: Arachnids in the UK

Not a fan of this one. Kind of the opposite of last week's, in that I think the concept is good but the execution was bad. It's basically a Captain Planet episode, except that they forgot to make the bad guy actually bad. Don't get me wrong, he's a complete arsehole, but he's not actually wrong. About anything.

Doctor Who: Rosa

I liked the execution of this episode, I thought it was really well done. But I hate the underlying concept. The idea that the course of history is determined by the actions of particular "great men" (or, as in this case, women) is just dumb. If you're talking about events on a personal scale, "don't change the past" is a great rule, because something as unlikely as the existence of a specific individual would be really easy to affect. But if Rosa Parks hadn't been on that specific bus on that specific day then the whole American civil rights movement would have been derailed? Come on. I'm not buying it.

Doctor Who: The Ghost Monument

Like I said last time, this episode was better than the first one. I kind of hoped they weren't going to find the TARDIS so quickly, because a few episodes of them hitching rides to various places, following its trail, could have been pretty entertaining and would have been a good excuse for the new crew to stick around. A better excuse than "you know how sometimes the Doctor can't pilot the TARDIS accurately? Yeah, that."

Doctor Who: The Woman Who Fell to Earth

I haven't watched Doctor Who since, like, 2011 or something, but with a new head writer I thought it might not be so shit any more. At this point I've watched the first three episodes, and so far it's been mostly OK. Not great, not terrible. I've pretty much decided I'm going to watch the whole season, at least.