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.

Star Trek: Discovery - Runaway

Being so short, there's not a lot to this episode. It's fine, I guess, though it does annoy me that Tilly keeps the whole thing secret, because that's dumb and obviously only happened because they wanted to make the story be just about her - for both creative and budgetary reasons. The real problem there is that if they'd set it outside the ship, she could have had good reasons for dealing with the whole thing herself but it makes no sense on the Discovery.

Red Dwarf: Skipper

Maybe it's because I went into it with the lowest possible expectations, or maybe they just saved the best for last, but this episode was actually almost decent. There was even a funny bit. It was piggy-backing off one of the funniest things that's ever happened in this show, but it was a good reference and executed, well, acceptably. The rest of the episode's jokes were poor at best, but I didn't hate any of it. My biggest problem with the episode was that its premise was far too good to waste on a single episode and should have been the basis for an entire season.

Table For Three

On last week's episode of Raw, Roman Reigns fought Bobby Lashley for the position of #1 contender for the universal title. One of the commentators characterised this as an attempt to win "a date with Brock Lesnar". I thought that was a pretty funny idea.

Salad Girl

This is a story I wrote back in November 2016 that I apparently forgot to post here (because I can't find it now). I thought it was pretty good, so I definitely should have posted it.

Red Dwarf: M-Corp

This episode does that classic sci-fi thing of criticising a real-world issue through an incredibly ham-fisted and implausible analogy. You know, like Black Mirror. Only Black Mirror takes itself seriously and this is pretending not to take itself seriously. I think Doug Naylor wants to write for Black Mirror. Honestly, make a few minor adjustments to the characters and the pacing and this could be a Black Mirror episode.

A famous poem by an Australian author

Sorry I ate your plums.

They were real good but.