this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2025
6 points (100.0% liked)
Doctor Who Social Club
351 readers
8 users here now
A community for discussing all things Doctor Who.
Rules
1 Be constructive
All posts/comments must be thoughtful and balanced.
2 Be welcoming
It is important that everyone from newbies to longtime fans feel welcome, no matter their gender, sexual orientation, religion or race.
3 Be truthful
All posts/comments must be factually accurate and verifiable. We are not a place for gossip, rumors, or manipulative or misleading content.
4 Be nice
If a polite way cannot be found to phrase what it is you want to say, don't say anything at all. Insulting or disparaging remarks about any human being are expressly not allowed.
5 Spoilers
Utilize the spoiler system for any and all spoilers relating to the most recently-aired episode. Spoiler protection will not be granted to information that is out in the mainstream media.
6 Keep on-topic
All submissions must be directly about the DW franchise (the shows, movies, books, etc.). Off-topic discussions are welcome at c/Quarks.
7 Meta
Questions and concerns about moderator actions should be brought forward via DM.
Upcoming Episodes
| Date | Episode | Title |
|---|---|---|
| 05-10 | DW 2x05 | "The Story & the Engine" |
| 05-17 | DW 2x06 | "The Interstellar Song Contest" |
| 05-24 | DW 2x07 | "Wish World" |
| 05-31 | DW 2x08 | "The Reality War" |
| TBA | TWB 1x01 | TBA |
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I had completely forgotten Simon Pegg was ever on Who until last week's preview reminded me of this episode. I agree with ValueSubtracted that he's not used well here. Simon's only 35 here, and I was struck by the thought that he could have made a better Adam. We're really running short on reasons to care about our Adam, so casting somebody who could give us equal parts charm and smarm could only improve him. You'd probably want to lose any suggestion of a romantic subplot between them in a Pegg-centric rewrite, but I'm getting way off-track at this point.
Behind the scenes, Adam was originally given a more sympathetic reasoning for wanting knowledge from the future. His father was suffering from crippling arthritis, which he discovered had been cured by this time. His actions in this episode would have been all about alleviating his father's suffering. I wonder why that was removed. It doesn't really change much; maybe they felt the Doctor refusing to allow this relief made him seem too cruel? But it leaves us with no reason to like this guy. Oh well.
The look of this episode reminds me of nothing more than Roger Christian's quasi-Scientology epic, Battlefield Earth, adapted from the novel by founder L. Ron Hubbard. Couldn't you imagine this guy as the Editor?
That's really not the comparison you want to invite. In fairness, I've watched a couple of Christian's films, but only because they're bad. I'm not really opposed to bad sci-fi, but that's a separate (albeit overlapping) thing to cheesy or low-budget sci-fi, which is what I like to see in Who.
The cast really is stacked for this one, so it's such a shame that this episode isn't more fun. Almost everybody here is either just off the back of or about to do something seminal (Pegg's Spaced and Shaun of the Dead, Tamsin Greig's Black Books and Green Wing, Christine Adams's Pushing Daisies). Anna Maxwell Martin is a decade and change away from Motherland, but is nice to see in her early career retrospectively. If all I knew about this episode was the cast, I'd be really excited to see so many of my favorites in one place.
And yet, there's just no meat here. I just want a moment that I love somewhere in the episode and there simply aren't any. I'm a broken record but the snap fight once Adam gets back home could have been a lot funnier with Pegg. Overall, disappointing.