Genderless: Girly Robots and Geek Backlash

Girl robots. Confusing, apparently.

Back in my childhood, The Transformers: The Movie introduced something new and a bit baffling to the Transformers universe. Not that double definite article, although that was a head scratcher, but Arcee, the first (I think, more or less, anyway) female Transformer.

Why should that be confusing? Well, I suspect that it's closely related to the reason why the new Doctor is such a hot button topic for many people. The Transformers, like the Time Lords, are alien beings, and many would argue that they are, effectively, genderless. The thing is, by 'genderless', they – perhaps unconsciously – mean 'all dudes.' I suspect that many of these critics are legitimately weirded out by the fact that suddenly the Transformers are split between boy robots and girl robots(1), but the reason that a female transformer brings this to the fore is that they – that we – had been, consciously or not, screening out the fact that every other Transformer was coded male. Even if we never heard them speak with a male voice they had traditionally masculine proportions – broad chest(2), narrow hips, big arms – if they were largely humanoid, and were universally referred to as 'he' within the narrative.

 

"We're going with pink then?"

It's confusing, people argued, because robots don't have sex. Well, probably not; it's essentially a kids' toy line we're talking about. It's certainly true that, wrecking ball scrota aside, Transformers are as sexless as a Ken doll, but that doesn't mean that they don't have gender. They do, and almost all of them are coded male (12 in 13 in the current Unified Continuity, I believe, reflecting that only one of the 13 Primes was female(3),) both in voice acting and in their physical and character design. What people usually mean by arguing that the originals don't have gender is that, as long as all of the Transformers on screen are coded male, we can kid ourselves that actually no, they're genderless. We just use he for convenience; Optimus Prime isn't a dude(4), honest. As soon as one of them demonstrably isn't a dude, however, all of the others are. A distinction appears on screen and now you can't deny it; they're all dudes, except her.

Strongarm. Not pink.

The other problem in Transformers, of course, is that the original female Autobot was Arcee, who was pink and very, very girly, and basically killed any chance of increasing female representation in the franchise for the next ten years, before Blackarachnia and Airazor made their debuts in Beast Wars. She made a brief appearance in Revenge of the Fallen, in which she was unceremoniously killed off. Outside of the live action movies, female Transformers are becoming more prevalent (at least 1 in 13) and less... femme. Arcee returned in Transformers: Prime as a two-wheeled badass with a heart of gold under a forbidding frown and a crisp, dark blue paint job. She wasn't in the follow up, Robots in Disguise, but that had Strongarm, a tough and eager, if somewhat by the book, cadet with a much more conventional Autobot frame, including four wheels, angular body panels and those narrow, gunfighter hips, and just a hint of lippy (and a female voice actor) to code her as feminine. The nature of representation is, however, a completely different topic, for another time, perhaps.

The dissonance caused by the sudden presence of a female exemplar in a formerly all-male world doesn't just annoy your actual, card-carrying chauvinists. It also means that those fans who self-identify as liberal feminists while they nestle snuggly into their male-dominated media are suddenly confronted with the fact that, as much as they may not be active sexists, they live in a world filled with passive, institutionalised sexism. People deal badly with discovering that something they love is riddled with ingrained prejudice, and pointing it out to them – whether actively or as a side-effect of casting against that prejudice – tends to get a defensive reaction. In the former case, they will often angrily defend the intentions of the creators, which is all well and good, but good intentions only go so far. The latter is viewed as a betrayal, because the beloved itself is telling them that it was sexist before.

It's a manifestation of the backlash effect, of course. "If we cast a woman as the Doctor now, then all the times we didn't might have been - gasp - sexist. Well, I'm not going to stand by and hear Doctor Who derided as sexist! If the other Doctors were men, that must have been right and proper, because that means Doctor Who was never sexist." (And then there are your card-carrying douchebags, but what can you ever do about them except proper education funding?)

I mean, does this look like someone with two hearts to you?

Female Transformers still mess with people's heads, and the female Doctor raises the same issue in people's minds, with some arguing that making the Doctor female is wrong because the Doctor is an alien and has no gender. The same argument is advanced whenever someone suggests casting a person of colour in the role of the Doctor. It's political correctness gonne madde! The Doctor isn't a white man, he's an alien, so why do you have to drag race/gender into it? If the Doctor is black, they argue, you're corrupting the alien purity of the character with a racial agenda. They argue thusly because black is a race. Likewise, if the Doctor is female, then the Doctor has gender, because female is a gender. White and male on the other hand are not a gender or a race; they're a default. This is, of course, why it is important to cast a woman as the Doctor, or a person of colour(5), because unless it is challenged then white and male will continue to be viewed as the neutral setting, and they just aren't. I for one am glad to see Doctor Who finally stepping up on this.

They're also dark skinned, by the way.
I couldn't find this image attributed; if you can point me to the artist, I will
acknowledge.

It's this perception that makes the Imperial Radch series so interesting. The Radch is an ungendered society, not differentiating at all between male and female. Citizens of the Radch are somewhat androgynous, but also do not code for gender cues, so that they struggle to recognise gender even in outsiders. In the text of the novels, this is represented by using female pronouns for all characters, save for a few instances in the first novel in which Breq, the narrator-protagonist, has to communicate with non-Radch in a gendered language(6). The impact of shifting the default setting is profound, not least in that it barely affects the narrative, but provokes the reader to examine their own expectations. It makes no difference to the story if any given character is male or female, but you catch yourself assuming they are all women until you realise that is... if not impossible, given the setting, then at least unlikely.

A similar effect can be excited in white readers by any novel in which black is considered the default, and only white characters are referred to by race. (White) authors Neil Gaiman and Ben Aaronovich both use this deliberately, in Anansi Boys and the Rivers of London series respectively. It's always a bit of an eye opener when your brain parses the dissonance of someone actually being described as a white man, instead of just a man. To my considerable shame, I don't think I've read enough black literature to know how prevalent this is there; I'm taking steps in that direction as part of this year's reading challenge, because there's no worth in identifying a lack and allowing it to continue.

You know you'e reaching when Michelle Yeoh isn't tough enough for you.

For further proof of the blinkered insistence in white male normalcy, one need look little further than the reaction to the early trailers for Star Trek: Discovery, which angrily denounced the idea of putting a woman in charge of a starship, let alone giving one the lead in a Star Trek series, and never mind a Chinese woman! Do these showrunners not understand Star Trek? Do they think that Gene Roddenberry created the original series in order to show women and non-white characters fully integrated into a multiracial, egalitarian society(7)? Honestly, I suspect that the only reason we don't have record of a similar outrage over the casting of Avery Brooks as Ben Sisko is that DS9 came out shortly before the internet exploded, so he was an established fact by the time a critical mass of aggrieved white men had access to proper forums.

I hope that the new Doctor will challenge the concept of genderless. She shouldn't be the female Doctor, or even 'the Doctor as female' particularly. She should simply be the Doctor, and like any other Doctor 90% of her lines should work for any other Doctor with minimal rewriting(9). If her personality has feminine affects, they should not be in any form so tangible as to be easily describable. She shouldn't be markedly more empathic and nurturing, at least not outside the usual bounds of regenerative variation. She should be compassionate, as the Doctor always should. Even the 12^th Doctor, who has been broadly characterised as an insensitive ass, is compassionate. She definitely shouldn't be getting into a relationship with a companion, male or female, any more than her predecessors did (and less than some of the more recent ones,) and the same definitely goes for crashing the TARDIS(10).

I suppose what I really want the show to prove over the next few seasons is that in the last 12-14(11) regenerations the Doctor was truly not defined by his gender, by not defining the new Doctor by hers.

No regeneration posters with 13 yet, given that she doesn't have a look, so let's finish with some ponies.

(1) And what is the purpose of sexual dimorphism, indeed of sex, in robots? Don't ask, and definitely don't Google.

(2) Optimus Prime's truck windscreen has always turned into his pecks.

(3) The one who died of a tragic love story, incidentally. They're trying, but with mixed results. In fairness, she was also the weaponsmith of the 13.

(4) I love Optimus, but he is so a dude.

(5) Full disclosure, I am still committed to British, but I'm trying to escape that.

(6) Which incidentally means that the only major character whose assigned biological sex is known is Breq's defrosting ice queen sidekick; who is male.

(7) I'll be the first(8) to admit that Roddenberry was often hamfisted and misguided in his attempts to depict his post-scarcity, post-prejudice utopia, but he certain wasn't deliberately creating white man adventures in space. It just... came out that way sometimes.

(8) Okay, I won't, because this subject is waay old and loads of people have already done it.

(9) When Colin Baker took over from Jon Pertwee in The Ultimate Adventure, they basically changed one 'polarity of the neutron flow' and made a fight scene less aikido-y.

(9) Although, fair play, I've played LEGO Dimensions and I've stacked the TARDIS into just about anything and everything in the world.

(10) YMMV.

Doctor Who - Jodie Whittaker, the 13th Doctor

I'm actually a little sad this is just a placeholder outfit. It's got a lot going for
it.

"You know the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don't alter their views to fit the facts. They alter the facts to fit the views. Which can be uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering."

- The Fourth Doctor predicts the internet

So, there's a new Doctor in the TARDIS, and it's a woman. Naturally enough, the internet has exploded with comments ranging from 'the Doctor has always been male' to 'BBC PC liberal agenda' to 'I look forward to seeing this fail the way Ghostbusters 2016 failed'. Particularly popular, with each commenter presumably imagining themselves to be original, are: 'What next, James Bond as a woman(1)', and 'I'm not sexist, but...'

Special mention to the individual who expressed the hope that now that the lead in this family show was a woman, the Doctor would be flashing her bits in the TARDIS. Keeping it classy, internet.

So anyway, as an outspoken would-be superfan, here's my take on the casting decision that has propelled Whittaker past Foster as 'most frequently searched Jodie on Google.'

A female actor paying the Doctor(3), and why not? Seriously, the only even slightly convincing argument I've seen is that the Doctor was one of a small number of positive, non-violent role models for boys on television, although anyone who's been paying attention lately would have a hard time mistaking the Doctor for a role model as Steven Moffatt set out to remodel him as a dangerous, amoral, petty lunatic. Besides, if we don't have the Doctor, there's always the companions, as I'm sure women who have complained about the lack of a female Doctor have been told for decades.

I have no problem in-universe either. Based on regenerations that we have seen, it's apparent that Time Lords tend towards a given gender, but can fluctuate (the Master always went male except Missy, the Doctor always male until now, whereas the General in 'Hell Bent' is clearly relieved to be back to her more accustomed female form. I get the feeling that the Corsair was more fluid than most, but we really have no evidence. No, there is no in-universe issue with the Doctor being a woman.

"Everyone hates her. Not because she's a woman, but because she sucks."

The main worry I have now is the same one I had about Wonder Woman. Jodie Whittaker is now the test case for a female Doctor, and by extension for anything outside the white male mould. After several seasons of hit and miss stories and twelve years of the still problematic 45-minute single-episode story model you didn't see anyone protesting the casting of Peter Capaldi on the grounds that 'no white man could ever be the Doctor', but if they fuck up Whittaker's freshman year that's the takeaway re casting anyone else. This coming season needs to be gold, and that's a tough demand when you consider that this must surely be the aim every year. On the upside, we have a new incoming showrunner, and traditionally the first year of a nuWho showrunner's residency has been a humdinger. RTD gave us the Ninth Doctor, and Moffatt the excellent freshman of Eleven. It wasn't until later in their runs that the good began to be overtaken by the self-indulgent claptrap(4), messianic bullshit or incomprehensible deconstructive assassination of the main character. If Chibnall can come in with an equally strong opening, with good writing by good writers, then we could be looking at something to convince all but the most diehard naysayers(5).

And what about the Doctor herself? Well, that's going to be fiddly. The fact that the 13^th Doctor is a woman can neither be the be all and end all of her characterisation, nor a purely cosmetic thing, although for my money it should tend towards the latter. At all costs, they should avoid the route taken by Exile of making the female Doctor a joke(6). She needs to tap into a previously underexplored node of the Doctor's core personality, but whatever her script is, it should on some level work for almost any Doctor, give or take a few mannerisms and catchphrases. She needs, above all, to be the Doctor, as difficult a thing as that is to get hold of in these days of Time Lords Triumphant and self-loathing hissy-fits. They should probably steer clear of making her the empathic Doctor or the nurturing Doctor, and conversely avoid anything too cold and prim.

"It's someone else's gun. Loophole!"

If I were going to write this(7), I would go for something in a compassionately pragmatic Doctor, willing to go the extra mile for a stranger, but able to make a hard choice when needed(8). I'm inclined towards the Bakers for a characterisation guide, big and bold, yet capable of quiet intensity and introspection, but that might just be the coat in the trailer. Oh, but definitely not RP. It's well established that lots of planets have a north, so let's stick with that. She should be physically able, but non-violent. There's precedent for a violent Doctor from Pertwee and both Bakers, and even Davidson a little, but nuWho has – I think wisely – steered towards a characterisation that avoids physical conflict most of the time. The 13th Doctor should stick to that. I'd like to see problem solving and improvisation; quick wits and incisive intelligence, and the kind of understanding of people that you should have after millennia moving among them and involving yourself in their lives. And less sonic, but definitely still a screwdriver(9).

And most of all, I want them not to fuck it up. I want for this incarnation of the Doctor to be as beloved as any other; more so than some, I dare say.

(1) Or as we like to call it, Atomic Blonde. Now, I have an idea: James Bond as a decent excuse for a human being(2). Now there's radical.

(2) Male or female; there are women called James.

(3) I prefer this to 'a female Doctor', as the latter suggests a gimmick.

(4) There is a definite case to be made in probably all art for not allowing the creative mind to get comfortable. I'm sure I'd write more if I didn't have the day job. On the other hand, I have a daughter to support, so the day job isn't going anywhere.

(5) And let's be honest, you're never going to convince someone whose stated position is 'I have never watched Doctor Who, but this is a betrayal of all the series means and another sign of the liberal PC rot in British society.'

Now there's an idea for the next round of Start to Finish...

(6) Exile was the sixth Doctor Who Unbound audio play, and saw the Doctor switch gender after committing suicide to force a regeneration and avoid the Time Lords at the end of 'The War Games'. As a woman, the Doctor hid out on Earth, numbing her mind with alcohol and working at a Tesco. That she was a woman wasn't the core of the joke, but we still ended up with a female Doctor who was a joke. She finally got to become the Doctor she should have been all along at the end of the play, moments before it was heavily implied she was tricked by the Time Lords into triggering her own destruction by seeking to evade imprisonment within her own TARDIS, which was one hell of a tonal whiplash.

(7) Chris? Chibbers? Email, yeah?

(8) And, vitally, to make a hard call even when it impacts on her companions. Being able to sacrifice strangers is callous; being able to sacrifice yourself is noble; being able to sacrifice a friend to save strangers, and to live with it, is heroic. Not that I'm saying they ought to throw a companion under the bus, but to show the Doctor willing would not only emphasise a different aspect of the character than nuWho's more typical irrational, overriding love of the companion, it would also create an interesting new Doctor-companion dynamic if they knew what had almost happened.

(9) Okay, I could live with a variation on the 11^th Doctor's used-once sonic cane made from the handle of Missy's umbrella, but if they switch the sonic to a 'girly' accessory then I'll rage quit. Sarah Jane's sonic lippy was her thing, and was something that no-one would think to confiscate because she was a sneaky, undercover journalist. The sonic screwdriver is a tool, not a spy gadget.

A Brief History of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

The shiny brass plaque of
professionalism.

"Let us think the unthinkable, let us do the undoable, let us prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all."

- Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, Douglas Adams
In his brief half-century of life, the writer Douglas Adams produced both less than one might imagine given the depth of his influence on western SF culture, and more than a lot of people know. A good fifty percent of his actual published writing and at least ninety of his enduring legacy is encompassed by the multi-media, multi-canoned Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy franchise, and a good deal of the rest (of the former, if not the latter) by the two novels and incomplete fragments of the third in the Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency series.

An odd beast, the original novel is a mash-up of two Doctor Who scripts - Shada, which was never completed due to industrial action, and City of Death, which was filmed in Paris as a cheap holiday for the cast or something and is remembered as one of the all-time classics - with all-new characters save only for Professor Chronotis, an eccentric and possibly immortal Cambridge academic whose rooms are in fact a time machine. Central to the narrative is Dirk Gently - originally named Svlad Cjelli - a self-styled holistic detective whose method of solving crimes by seeking the interconnectedness of all things closely resembles a mixture of grotesque emotional manipulation and dumb luck. He returned in a sequel, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul and a third novel, The Salmon of Doubt was at the work in progress stage when Adams died, although it is telling of the weight of his own legacy that he had expressed doubts as to whether it wasn't actually another HitchHiker novel.

Thus the entirety of the Dirk Gently series was a pair of modestly received novels with way, way more ideas than either story or character. Not to say that they were bad, although in truth I've never got on with Adams' novels as well as I have his screen and radio writing; something about the pace of reading makes the flaws in his characters - and especially his female characters, although fair play, Kate Schechter in Tea-Time is one of his better efforts - that little bit more glaring perhaps.

The Electric Monk is one of many key concepts dropped from
most other adaptations.

It took a long time for Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency to get adapted, but by heck it's making up for lost time now. First up, namesake Dirk Maggs came off his adaptation of the remaining Hitch-Hiker novels on a high and went straight into producing a radio adaptation of the two novels starring Harry Enfield as Dirk Gently (and the late Andrew Sachs as Professor Chronotis, which is slightly disconcerting as he played the villainous Skagra in the audio revival of Shada, who murders that version of Professor Chronotis, a retired Time Lord.) Debuting in 2007, twenty years after the publication of the novel, to a mixed reception, I personally felt that they did an excellent job of capturing the feel of the novels, and in fact it was only on listening that I really understood how the end of the first novel worked(1).

It was intended that the same crew would then tackle The Salmon of Doubt, but for Reasons(TM) it never happened. Either causally or consequentially, Dirk Maggs left Above the Title Productions to found his own production company, and I guess that Above the Title was left with the rights to the third series, but not the driving force.

The property then languished for all of two years, before BBC4 hit us with Dirk Gently, a pilot for a proposed series starring Stephen Mangan as Gently. This series departed dramatically from the novel in a number of ways, not least by making the bemused everyman character Richard Macduff almost as much of a dick as Gently himself, as well as removing Professor Chronotis, the Electric Monk and about eighty percent of the hardcore weirdness and front and centering Gently's secretary's pathological fixation on her employer in a way that, astonishingly, resulted in a worse-written female character than the one in the novel. There was also a bleakness to it that seemed at odds with a certain sense of wonder, or at least the search for wonder in a life that insists on making marvels commonplace, that feels key to Dirk Gently as a character.

In the series Dirk Gently, Dirk Gently runs a
holistic detective agency.

Once more speaking purely from my own perspective, I was not a fan of the pilot, although I felt that the series was improving before it got canned after three episodes, pulling in ideas from the two novels and removing some of the antagonism from the Macduff/Gently relationship to make the characters a little less abrasive. The overall response was positive, but not enough for BBC4 to overcome the BBC's natural and deep-seated aversion to producing non-Doctor Who SF programming. There's something fundamental in the BBC psyche that seems to insist that SF and fantasy programing is intrinsically silly and shouldn't be taken seriously, with the result that the Corporation produces almost nothing in these fields that is not on some level parody, and if it does will ensure that such programmes are derided as 'trashy fun' at best in their official listings magazine.

But you know who isn't ashamed of making SF? That's right; America. Thus it is that Dirk Gently has been exported, courtesy of IDW Publishing, who began running their Dirk Gently comic strip in 2015 and collaborated with BBC America and Netflix to bring him back to the screen in 2016, this time played by jobbing thesp Samuel Barnett. It is notable that in both media, Gently remains unassailably British (of possibly Transylvanian extraction,) although they are set in the US. Apparently something about the character resists characterisation as anything but a middle-class white Brit. Fair play, Barnett manages to combine wholesome and creepy to great effect. The rest of the cast are right at home in the new territory, however, and the original supporting cast are gone along with the matching plots.

That hair though...

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency is an eight-part serial, in which Dirk teams up with Todd, a downtrodden bellhop played by Elijah Wood, to investigate the murder of a billionaire, the disappearance of his daughter and all manner of associated weirdness. It has time travel, body-swapping, gunfights, a holistic assassin who follows the same pattern of beliefs as Dirk, but is possessed of a deep certainty that the world guides her to kill those who need to be killed in some way, and a shark in the body of a kitten. Once more then, the original story is jettisoned, and the writing style is sufficiently different to that of the original that it is really glaring when they drop in something lifted directly. The series casts Gently as one of a number of individuals with a unique and erratic connection with fate, which is rarely of any great advantage to him, but which he hopes may be of help to others. He's younger in spirit and less cynical than earlier incarnations, with his constant manipulation due more to deeply flawed social skills and possible autistic tendencies(2). Todd is an intensely dislikable character, which provides little contrast with Gently, but is worked for an effective antagonism as both work towards their eventual redemption.

Of course, I'm not sure that redemption really suits Gently; it sort of hinges on a sense of shame that the original character certainly never showed much sign of, given his struggles with guilt in The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. I'm also dubious as to whether British absurdist SF benefits from gun battles, and vice versa. I didn't hate the series, but it feels as if - and the same is true of Dirk Gently - it's not actually Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency so much as a very different thing using a lot of the same ideas.

In the series Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective
Agency, Dirk Gently does not run a holistic
detective agency.

I miss the original storylines in the TV versions, and what replaces it never has quite the same timbre of weirdness; that is, they're weird, but it's their own kind of weirdness, in an adaptation of a novel whose native brand of weirdness feels at least as intrinsic to the work as any of the characters. Neither series has been terrible, but neither series has been, deep down, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency because neither of them has, deep down, really had a Dirk Gently to its name.

Dirk Gently was born as a human expee of the Doctor, and perhaps as a result is almost as hard to get a solid handle on as the Time Lord himself. It's hard to say why some Doctors work for us and some don't, but we all(3) have distinct ideas about when a Doctor 'isn't quite right'. I'm not sure that there is yet a definitive interpretation of Gently. They all have something, but none of them have everything. Enfield was excellent, but ultimately lacked a final quality of essential vigor, perhaps a consequence of picking a proven comic talent over an untried youth. Mangan's Gently was as coolly manipulative as any Sherlock, but more obsessive in his pursuit of answers than driven by an often-inappropriate joie de vivre in discovery. Barnett's is more of an enigma, even to himself, and probably the most complex of the bunch, possibly even including the novels, which are as I say notable move for complexity of ideas than of character. The thing of it is... Dirk Gently is not a character who is an enigma to himself, at least not knowingly so. Anyone who can pursue investigations by following random strangers and have the neck to charge for it can't be consciously harbouring any serious doubts as to their calling.

For myself, and for what it's worth, I would rate the various media as follows:

1. The radio series. I like audio, and I like Adams on audio especially.
2. The novels. I know it may be sacrilege, but see above re me and Adams' novels.
3. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.
4. Dirk Gently. 

(1) It helps to know that 'Kubla Khan' is a fragment, but Adams himself has admitted to not being able to quite fit the end together when he went back to it.
(2) It's not explicit, and there are few people - even fewer in fiction - who don't fit one or more criteria or definitions of autism.
(3) All encompassing here the particular subset of Doctor Who fans.

What's on the Box?

So, with about 65% of my Sky Box storage currently used up, I thought it was about time to review the contents. I'm not obsessive enough to work out the precise percentage of each show or category, but as a broad exercise it feels worth doing.

The first two categories - current programmes and long term keepers - aren't too bad. It's the backlog that's worrying, especially as the current shows (here and on Netflix) take up most of my viewing time. If I'm ever tempted by Sky Q I just need to look at this and ponder when in the hells I would ever be able to watch all the TV it offers me the chance to record simultaneously.

Current
These are the shows I am watching as they come in, or intend to get onto quickly.

• The Exorcist - first 2 episodes
• Westworld - current only
• Supergirl - current only
• The Flash - current only
• Arrow - current only
• Legends of Tomorrow - current only, as of the series start (aptly enough) tomorrow

Long term/Permanent
These are shows that don't get deleted because I keep them on for Arya.

• PAW Patrol - 7 episodes (because Season 3 isn't on Netflix)
• Sarah & Duck - 5 episodes (again, just Season 3 episodes, in this case because we have series 1 and 2 on DVD)
• Melody - 39 episodes
• The Clangers - 23 episodes
• The Pajanimals - 25 episodes
• Alphablocks - 88 episodes
• CBeebies Bedtime Stories - 23 episodes
• CBeebies Prom - 1 episode

Lingering
These are shows that have been on there for a while, waiting to be watched Real Soon Now. They are the ones that are going to be culled if I ever need the space.

• Bitten
• 3 episodes of Season 1
• 7 episodes of Season 2
• Humans
• 2 episodes of Season 1, the remaining 6 queued in Box Sets
• 1 episode of Season 2
• Agents of SHIELD
• 2 episodes of Season 3, another 13 queued in Box Sets
• Neil Gaiman's Likely Stories - 1 episode
• The Musketeers - Last 2 episodes
• Powers - 4 episodes
• The 100 - 16 episodes
• Sleepy Hollow - 6 episodes
• The Night Manager - 4 episodes
• Doctor Thorne - 2 episodes
• Beowulf: Return to the Shieldlands - 7 episodes
• Lip Sync Battle - 5 episodes
• Dominion - 8 episodes

Choices - Hooten and the Lady and Hunters

Meh.

So, I talked a bit before about the fact that the current golden age of TV drama is actually a glut of product which not only allows, but requires that the viewer make choices. Or if I didn't then I meant to and just got distracted. It happens. Anyway, my latest choices not to watch are Hooten & the Lady and Hunters.

Hooten & the Lady is okay, but it's a show of another era. He's a lovable rogue, she's a posh academic; they fight crime, or at least retrieve antiquities. It's not the central dynamic I object to, not that she is comically inept in an actual fight, nor even the forced and unconvincing sexual tension. It just feels kind of weird to be watching a modern set show that is so... colonial. Our leads, a posh white Brit and a rough and tumble, mercenary Yank, travel to exotic locales, meet locals who mysteriously need a British Museum researcher and a raider of tombs to do what we will generously call archaeology for them, and retrieve priceless cultural artefacts in a quippy and irreverent fashion. Egypt in particular has a very established archaeological community and little need to bring in freewheeling, site-dynamiting dilettantes to do for them.

Yick.

On the other hand, at least it isn't Hunters, which tried to win me over to the side of its unlovable 'heroes' by introducing a heavy who puts women in cages, lures prostitutes into gratuitous threesomes in order to drill holes in their spines and makes out with his alien baby-mamma on the corpse, then murders his own child rather than allow it to be held by the humans. It's just plain nasty, and lacks the weighty substance needed to validate the unpleasantness. And, however vile the villain, our heroes are still jerks.

Sometimes you wonder why a series has been cancelled; not with Hunters. I might watch Hooten & the Lady if I found myself at a loose end; I'd have to be at my wits' end to go back to Hunters.

Choices

"Please forgive him. He only drinks to forget."

I remember a time when I used to watch every even vaguely scifi show going. For the rest of the week I'd read in the evenings.

Babylon 5 was a revolution: TV space opera that wasn't Star Trek! The X-Files spearheaded the rise of 'cult TV' to become a sufficiently broad church as to outnumber all of the non-cult shows and usher in the ingenuous catchall term 'genre programming', as if mainstream programming didn't have a genre at all.

But the world has changed since 1990, and as the percentage of space remaining on my Sky box plunges towards single digits once again and with Amazon Prime's offerings lagging - the excellent Mr Robot and diverting Into the Badland unfinished, and The Man in the High Castle not yet begun - it's time to face the facts: I can't watch everything, and that means that hard choices - well, choices anyway - have to be made.

The main Japanese character in this series is actually called 'Katana Girl'.
There's an aspect of not trying here.

The X-Files revival didn't make it past the first episode for me, and I'll remind you that I'm still watching The Shannara Chronicles. In a similar vein, it seems likely that I won't be going back to Heroes Reborn, although I've not yet deleted it. Much like The X-Files, I think my problem is that I didn't see the last series of Heroes - I basically got fucked off with them killing off characters I liked in order to focus on the amazing Peter, the unsinkable Sylar and the latest incarnation of interchangeable hot blonde - and I simply can't be bothered to go back and catch up on the backstory that I'm missing. Also, despite the removal of my major bugbears from the series, they're still killing off characters I like.

Channel 4's Humans was a tougher call, but it had got to the point that I wasn't going to have anything new to say about it. If I get a chance I may binge it as a box set, but for now it's on the back burner. True Detective season 2 is looking like going the same way - it's as nasty as Season 1, but nowhere near as compelling - although I still hope to get back to Dominion at some point.

I figure if I want American fascists, I'll go to The Man in the High Castle.

More recently, I've decided that I'm still watching Blindspot, but not reviewing it (as with The Blacklist and Elementary I'm not sure I have enough to say, but may do a write up for the season once I finish.) New series Colony failed to grab me; likewise event miniseries 11 22 63, largely because JFK is almost as spent a time travel focus as Hitler, but without the comforting moral absolutism conferred by Nazis. It is my contention that literally everyone in Dallas on that day was a time traveler, probably including JFK who had to be cloned and taken back to replace his original self after he died from temporal wear and tear. 11 22 63 is also based on a Stephen King story, and I've never really been into King's work.

'But wait,' I hear you say. 'Are these things really worse than The Shannara Chronicles or Beowulf: Return to the Shieldlands?' Probably not, but I find them less entertaining, and less fun to write about. I personally feel that this is a sure sign of a golden age of entertainment - that we no longer feel pressured to watch things just because they're good.

I leave you with this thought: In Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End - which I only recently read after the broadcast of the event adaptation - a character bewails the fact that in the Golden Age of Humanity, people are so indolent that they are watching anything up to three hours of television per day.

The Tomorrow People

So, I said I'd talk about some of the cancelled series I started watching. One of these was The Tomorrow People, which I think calls for a little background.

One of the original Tomorrow People
was black. In 1976, this was pretty
huge.

The Tomorrow People first materialised in the 1970s. Created by producer/writer Roger Price, it featured a group of young people (mostly early teens) who had special powers, due to their being part of the next stage of human evolution; Homo superior, and an underground base with a supercomputer called TIM because... reasons. Their powers manifested (broke out) at puberty, and were primarily telepathy, teleportation (called 'jaunting') and telekinesis when the budget allowed, although various other powers were displayed throughout the series, as the plot demanded, some of them quite consistently (one character had a particular affinity with machines), but others at random (in one episode a character brought a dead man back to life, but healing abilities were erratic.)

The series itself was also rather uneven. Early episodes were focused on saving the world plots, but the series had a strong moral message; along with their powers, Tomorrow People had an intrinsic inability to cause harm, and they also struggled to fit into normal society, their secret identity standing in for the almost universal teenage experience of feeling isolated and misunderstood. Later episodes used time travel as a device and revealed a utopian future, in which all of humanity were Homo superior and lived at peace in the Galactic Federation, an interstellar alliance of TPs which was introduced as a current concern in the second series.

Later seasons saw things get sillier. There were still some serious episodes and topics, like the story of a young Russian TP being manipulated by the KGB who was ultimately killed by her handlers, but there was also the one where Peter Davidson wore a bubble-perm wig and tried to kidnap the leader of the Tomorrow People to be his sister's mate, not to mention 'Hitler's Last Secret', which accidentally put forward the lesson that Nazism is wrong because Hitler was a shapeshifting alien, rather than because it is a noxious ideology founded on hate and prejudice. A general trend to use actors for good aliens and costumes for bad also gave an inadvertent air of racism, which sat ill alongside plots in which Caribbean dictators tried to use alien tech to take over the world and Chinese cults practiced child sacrifice.

The series eventually kind of unravelled and ended. Things went quiet.

The one in the middle is future Moneypenny Naomi Harris,
and remembering this show made it even more uncomfortable
than it was already watching her be raped and murdered on
stage in Frankenstein.

The first reboot of The Tomorrow People came in the 1990s. Kristian Schmidt off of Neighbours was the stunt casting as 'Adam Newman' (not layering the symbolism there at all), although the future big name was Naomie Harris, and guest stars included Christopher Lee and William Hootkins. There was a lot less about evolution and no Galactic Federation, and overall the characters stumbled into stuff rather than seeking it out as in the original.

Their base was a spaceship that 'called' them somehow, but otherwise the only aliens were the pods in the episode 'The Living Stones'. 'The Ramesses Connection' actually suggested a more mystical universe with a battle between forces of evil (represented by Christopher Lee as an ancient Egyptian) and forces of good (who danced around in plastic raincoats, and not in a sexy way).

The 1990s Tomorrow People was kind of weird, but then so was the original.

Older and darker.

Noted producers of Doctor Who audio plays, Big Finish were the next to throw their hats into the ring, beginning with The New Gods in 2001. They followed the continuity - such as it was - of the original series, with a nod to the existence of the 1990s variation, and had original TP John (Nicholas Young) as their central character, along with the original Tomorrow People supercomputer, TIM.

The overall theme of the audio plays seemed to be the nightmarish onset of entropy. Faced by enemy after enemy, the Tomorrow People saw their relationships collapse, their families die, their unassailable moral stance destroyed as TPs were manipulated into killing, and ultimately the entire Galactic Federation crumble under the onslaught of the very first enemy from the original series, the shapeshifting android Jedekiah.

This series ended with the Federation destroyed and Earth invaded, and the planned future episodes - some partly-completed - vanished after an unsuccessful license renewal in 2007, which also saw all the past episodes withdrawn from sale.

The Tomorrow People, sponsored by sassy hair-care products.
No, seriously; it really was.

Which brings us to the recently-cancelled attempted US remake. In the attempt to find an approach that none of the previous versions had mined, they went with sexy tweenagers with perfect hair. Three character names were recycled - TPs John and Stephen, and Jedekiah, who is recast as Stephen's resentful Sap (Homo sapiens) uncle - and the term 'Tomorrow People' limited to the Utopian movement fostered by Stephen's father and then by John and Cara, the third point on the inevitable love triangle (which in this case is actual at least two, maybe three, interlocking triangles; despite being a whiny git, Stephen has no fewer than three hotties trying to get in his pants, while all the boys go gaga for Cara, despite the presence of many, many attractive women who are more emotionally available, more overtly affectionate and less in a relationship.) The Tomorrow People had the underground base and TIM, and were opposed by Ultra, Jedekiah's shadowy telepath-hunting (and also employing) agency.

By the end of the first and only series, several of the telepaths (the generic term, although they retain the 'three Ts' of telepathy, telekinesis and teleportation) have been surgically altered to remove the prime barrier which prevents them killing (although they can use brutal levels of sub-lethal force with abandon), and Stephen is able to stop and occasionally rewind time.

The Tomorrow People has been through a lot of variations. The original was sombre, yet hopeful, but descended into silliness; allegedly as a result of executive meddling as ITV couldn't sell a serious children's SF series and wanted more wacky antics. The remake had some ambitious ideas, but was plagued by budgetary limitations. The audio plays were honestly a little too grimdark, although I would have been interested to see where they went in series 6 and 7.

And then the 2013 remake came along, with its generic sexy tween shenanigans and slick psychic combat. Its sin, I think, was in trying too hard to be accepted, which as the successor to a series which was basically about the teenage experience of not fitting in, is kind of ironic.

Doctor Who - Deep Breath/The Twelfth Doctor

Oh, nonono! You do not get around me with a giant dinosaur and a zeppelin!

I think I'm going to review new episodes of Doctor Who a week behind broadcast. That way, I can be spoilery (because if you've not seen it yet, you probably don't care), and I can dodge the worst of looking like a pill by making predictions which are immediately proven wrong. Also, I failed to write this one at all during the past week, so I may as well make best practice of my failings.

Deep Breath is the debut episode for the Twelfth Doctor (Peter Capaldi), previously glimpsed as a pair of eyes in Day of the Doctor and then at the end of Time of the Doctor. In his first full episode, he kicks off in full-blown manic mode and ends up throwing a machine out of a balloon; or talking it out, perhaps.

We open with a giant dinosaur in the river next to Westminster palace, a sight that will not be seen again until the inaugural World Energy Conference. When I say giant, I mean it's colossal; an almost ludicrously oversized T-Rex, scaled as it is so that it can have tried to swallow the TARDIS, an error which is lampshade and dismissed in-text by Madam Vastra (Neve McIntosh) - a Silurian from the time of the dinosaurs - who just knows better than the fossil record, so nyer. It coughs up said TARDIS and out spill Clara (Jenna Coleman) and the new guy, who is in the midst of an ever so exciting Regeneration crisis.
Later that night the dinosaur asplodes, and the rest of the episode is spent tracking down the perpetrator, a clockwork android from a 51st century spaceship which crashed in the primeval past, which has been harvesting human parts for millions of years to repair its spaceship and make a journey to 'the Promised Land', and incidentally creating an army of zombies.

Behind the main action, Madam Vastra tries to help Clara come to terms with the fact that regeneration is not always what you might expect (she has seen three versions of the Doctor, each younger than the last, but the new one is older), Clara help the Doctor to stay on an even keel and defeat the robot, and Jenny (Katrin Stewart) and Strax (Dan Starkey) be... kind of endearing. The arc plot of the series comes in when the 'dead' clockwork is taken to 'Heaven', an over-exposed English garden type of deal overseen by Missie, a weirdly made-up woman (Michelle Gomez) who calls the Doctor 'my boyfriend'.

The Good

1. The interplay between Vastra and Jenny, and between Strax and Clara, is as delightful as ever.
2. Capaldi is a great actor and there was some sparkling dialogue ('What's gone wrong with your accent?'), although I'm not sure any of that was particularly meaningful.
3. The central idea of the Companion adapting to the change in Doctor is a good one, and highlights what seems like becoming a running theme of the Doctor's reliance on external perception to judge himself. If Ten was about the Doctor's over-estimation of himself and Eleven was about the legend that the universe made of him, it looks like Twelve is going to be about the identity that the Doctor constructs for and with the input of his Companion (Vastra: "He looked young. Who do you think he did that for?") If nothing else, it makes a change from the Companions struggling to be seen by the Doctor.
4. The Doctor and Clara recognising that each considers the other an egomaniacal control freak.

The Bad

1. Clara's difficulties with the Doctor's regeneration are largely spurious. They don't make a lot of sense to the character, and as a result are dealt with primarily by her dismissing them, leaving a huge question as to why she freaked out in the first place.
2. Capaldi spends a little too long running manically around, essentially burning off the last of the Matt Smith incarnation, and not enough establishing himself.
3. Jenny and Strax are wasted.
4. With the 51st century clockwork, Steven Moffat seems to be determined to do as he did with the Weeping Angels and ruin a perfectly good monster by overuse, except starting out from a less interesting monster.

The Ugly

1. As with so many nuWho episodes, Deep Breath is very rushed. It's especially disappointing because The Eleventh Hour was so effective in its introduction not just of a new Doctor, but of a new companion (Amy) and a future companion (Rory). As a result, the good ideas and dialogue are kind of lost in the scramble.
2. The Doctor mind-melds with Vastra and falls asleep with a comic boing. Aside from the fact that a Silurian shouldn't be able to overcome a Time Lord telepathically, or at least not so dismissively, A COMIC BOING? What is this, a 1970s sitcom?
3. Oh, yay! Daleks. Again. And Cybermen ahead I see. Good to see we're not overusing our classic monsters.

Theorising

• Who is Missy? I've seen it suggested that she is the Rani, or a female Master (Mistress). I hope not, because I have had it up to here with villains who want to jump the Doctor rather than kill him. My own theories are the ship's computer of the SS Madame du Pompadour and the TARDIS, neither of which inspires me much.

Top quotes

• The Doctor: It’s covered in lines, but I didn’t do the frowning. Who frowned me this face?
• Clara: Nothing is more important than my egomania!
  The Doctor: Right. You actually said that.
  Clara: You never mention that again!
• The Doctor: I don't know, but I probably blame the English.
• Doctor: Clara, I’m not your boyfriend.
  Clara: I never thought you were.
  Doctor: I never said it was your mistake.

The Verdict

Deep Breath was a pretty so-so episode, which wasted the opportunity to showcase Peter Capaldi's Doctor with giant dinosaurs for sight gags and a plot device recycled from an episode that I for one didn't rate that highly in the first place. I'm also mildly despondent at the thought that in the same episode that the Companion flatly dismisses the notion of romantic attraction to the Doctor, we get a villain who calls him her boyfriend. Call me old fashioned, but I liked my Doctor mysterious, my companions in it for the adventure, and my sexual tension unstated and unresolved.

On his good days, Moffat writes a bloody good episode, but this wasn't a good day. Most of the elements were there, but the mix was unsatisfying, even to a jaded, squealing fanboy like me.

5/10

And the Doctor...

Actually, I'm going to have to get back to you on this one when I review Inside the Dalek next week.

Sarah & Duck Redux

Apparently some people consider Sarah & Duck to be 'appalling', on the grounds that it has no educational content (I'm paraphrasing; I was told that the precise complaint was that it doesn't teach children sign language, which is as criteria go is pretty absolutist.)

And I was thinking about this, and I don't even think that it's true. It certainly doesn't teach you sign language. It lacks The Alphablocks strong literacy content, or The Numtums mathematical slant (and, by the by, the newer series of the latter are shockingly bad, with the numeracy bits sandwiched between some uninspired 'story' segments), but there is more to life than literacy, maths and sign language, and as far as role models go, I would rather Arya turned out like Sarah than pretty much anyone else on Cbeebies.

Sarah is thoughtful, considerate, compassionate, intelligent, independent and enquiring. She never mocks the eccentricities of others, is boundlessly patient with Scarf Lady's ramblings, and seeks always to make others happy without becoming some sort of pushover. When faced with a puzzle, she seeks information, using the library and the internet. She unhesitatingly gives up her day to show the Shallots around town, or one of her wellingtons to keep Umbrella's handle dry in the rain, and rather than blaming or avoiding the pump that lets tyres go down, tries to find out what is wrong with him and help.

She's hard working, loves cooking, but always lets the narrator deal with the hot oven. She's active, riding a tandem bike with Duck, and responsible. When her friends are faced with fear or sorrow, she does all she can to cheer them up, and she looks at the world with a pure and rapturous wonder.

So, yeah; Sarah & Duck. It's not just fluff.

The Time of the Doctor and the Fall of the Eleventh

And so we come to the end of Matt Smith's run as the Doctor, with the frankly divisive trilogy of Name, Day and Time.

The Name of the Doctor wrapped up a season of speculation about Clara, the impossible girl, and had both good and bad aspects. I liked that Clara's specialness was based on something she did, rather than on being just super special, but the involvement of the Great Intelligence felt rushed. After their appearance in The Snowmen, it felt as though they were somehow supposed to have been a recurring menace like the Silence or Bad Wolf, but in fact they never showed a snowflake until popping up to be the Doctor's great nemesis. That was a failing.

Now, unlike many people, I didn't think Name ended on a cliffhanger; Clara chased the Great Intelligence through the Doctor's timestream, undoing the damage it caused by becoming a succession of short-lived Claras throughout his lives, and the Doctor fished her out into a conceptual space where she caught a glimpse of the War Doctor.

The Day of the Doctor I have discussed elsewhere in great detail. Again, I was less troubled by it than many people.

And that brings us to The Time of the Doctor, which wraps up the entire Eleventh run from the crack in Amelia Pond's bedroom wall onwards. There is a story in there that I really liked, about the Doctor giving up his final life to defend something that, in many ways, doesn't need defending, except for the handful of lives in danger. He's not guarding the Time Lords, or the door to Gallifrey, but the people of Christmas/Trenzilore, and that I liked. I also liked the resolution of the name plot: "His name is the Doctor." Well, of course it is.

But... And what a characterisation of this trilogy that word is. But, in this case, and as with the others in many ways, what it doesn't do well is tie up the loose ends. It's as if the last Season (and two specials) has been struggling with two or even three Seasons worth of plot ideas, and doing none of them well because they won't do without any of them.

The Papal Mainframe is yet another not-entirely-matching view of the Church marines, and why it's led by a flirty chick in heavy eyeliner is unclear, except that apparently everything in the nuWho future is run by flirty chicks in heavy eyeliner who fancy the Doctor.

The Doctor tricking the wooden Cybermen was something I liked a lot. If felt very Doctorish, and we don't get a great deal of that some days.

I liked Handles, but again, I really wanted to have seen his genesis; even if it was just as a piece he'd picked up at the end of Nightmare in Silver. That would have made a connection and made the eventual 'death' of Handles more affecting (although it kind of would have done already).

Finally, I'm not sure about the ending. It was a bit token for the end of the Doctor's final lifetime (and I'm leaving aside here that I would have liked to have seen at least a nod to the Valeyard somewhere) and I've never been a fan of the regeneration of mass destruction.

All in all, I think it was probably time, but in the end the series didn't tie together enough to earn this ending. It's a shame, because Eleven opened with such promise.

And now Twelve, or perhaps Doctor 2.1. I guess we'll see what they manage with him.

The Last Great Time War - Executive decisions and omnipotent incompetents

When Doctor Who was revived, Russel T. Davies made the decision to scrap the bulk of the Classic Series' shambolic continuity through the device of the Last Great Time War, a conflict between the Daleks and the Time Lords which tore through the universe, and ultimately left the Doctor the last of his race, and their destroyer. It was a bold step, and one which was largely successful, at least until the pressure to continually reuse the Daleks meant that the Doctor's sacrifice of his own people seemed increasingly pointless, but it did mean that our hero was a war criminal of unimaginable proportions, especially when The Day of the Doctor made it clear that the death of Gallifrey was not just a knowable consequence of the Doctor's last action against the Dalek, but that action's explicit purpose.

So, why make your hero the perpetrator of an act of unrestrained genocide?

In 1963, no-one knew what a Time Lord was. The Doctor was a nameless alien who traveled in his Ship, which looked like a police box, with his granddaughter (who was essentially the only one to call it a TARDIS); it was as simple as that.

The Time Lords only appeared at the end of Patrick Troughton's run in 1969, when he summoned their assistance to deal with the War Lord and was forced to face the consequences of his own transgressions as a result. They appeared as beings of tremendous power and vast technological supremacy, thwarting the attempted escape of the War Lord with dismissive ease before condemning the Doctor to a reduced budget, albeit in full colour.

As time wore on, the Time Lords appeared several times as mysterious figures; non-interventionists, but willing to use the 'renegade' Doctor as a catspaw to nudge events that needed nudging, and even instructing him to smother the Daleks in the proverbial cradle. This was all well and good, but then... but then came The Deadly Assassin, the first serial predominantly set on Gallifrey itself, and the show began to shine a light on the msyterious and powerful Time Lords, revealing them to be a pack of ineffectual incompetents in desperate need of the Doctor to solve any problem not encompassed by past experience.

While many media have since sought to restore the race to their former role, the need to conform to the levels of bureaucracy shown in Assassin and in the almost painful The Invasion of Time, in which Gallifrey is seen to be largely and randomly furnished with inflatable plastic things, meant that they could never be so mysterious again.

In an attempt to restore some of the mystery, showrunner Andrew Cartmel introduced the so-called 'Cartmel Master Plan', but with the cancellation of the series, this was never completed, leaving only hints at Gallifrey's darker past and the Doctor's role in it to be explored by licensed spin-offs. The web production Death Comes to Time made another stab at it, suggesting that the reason for the Time Lords' principle of non-intervention is the ability to destroy planets with their own personal power, if left unlimited, but it never took.

By the time the new series rolled around, the Time Lords had been explored by books, audio plays and webisodes. There was so much conflicting information, so many theories, that untangling them would have been an epic task, and one which new viewers would have little time for. The classic series Time Lords were pretty much exploded, reduced to pointless bureaucrats who couldn't achieve anything without the Doctor, and the spin-off versions had so much baggage - genetic looms which 'wove' children for a race rendered sterile by an ancient curse, living houses, the vaguely defined structure of Chapters and the triumvirate of Rassilon, Omage and 'the Other', the CIA - that they were all but unusual.

The Last Great Time War was the way around this, and also made the Doctor a unique figure. Unfortunately, the way it was done left a bad taste for many. The Doctor had been responsible for many deaths in his time, but to slaughter his own people was for many a step too far. In retrospect, it is beyond a bold move for a family scifi show to present us with a hero who killed his entire race, but it was oddly soft-pedaled in many ways, although usually only to be brought up and thrown at us by an episodic villain; Davros in particular dubbing the Doctor 'the Destroyer of Worlds'.

On the other hand, it really had to be the Doctor, in order to explain how he was the sole survivor. The destruction of two races was a terrible thing, but to have run off and let someone else do it perhaps more so.

As I have mentioned before, I always envisaged the death of the Time Lords as an inevitable consequence of the destruction of the Daleks; that rather than deliberately burning Gallifrey, the Doctor had been forced to burn the entire Time War out of history in order to preserve what remained of the universe. The End of Time then suggested that he might have done what he did because all that remained of the Time Lords was a corrupt and power hungry High Council, in their own monomaniacal fashion just as bad as the Daleks.

The Day of the Doctor however presented not only a very mundane sort of war, but also a very domestic Gallifrey, along with a very deliberate act of destruction which made the Doctor's actions seem far less justifiable, much more monstrous. I much preferred the Time War in my mind.

Do I have a conclusion? Not really, save to say that I understand entirely why the Time Lords had to go, and why the Doctor had to have done it, and that overall, I liked it better the less they tried to pin it down.