New Who

Episode 21: Aliens In London + World War 3

/ Kari / Leave a comment

Jumping back to 2005 (or 2006, depending on your point of view) the Daleks Aren’t Robots crew meets the Slitheen for the first time.

How do Kari and Justin react to the fat, flatulating family of felons? Find out! (Badly. We react badly. It’s bad.)

Podcast Contents Include

Editor’s Note: The following are my original notes for the podcast, slightly edited for readability. They’re very far from the full contents of the pod, though.  – Kari

SUMMARY

The Doctor takes Rose back to visit her mom, but it’s been 12 months and not the 12 years they thought it was. Rose has been missing 12 months, and her mom is glad to see her but very worried, and unimpressed with the much-older Doctor. Mickey has been under suspicion of murdering Rose, too. Why can’t they just pop back in the Tardis and go back a year? Anyway, an alien ship crashed into Big Ben and then into the Thames in London. We see three fat politicians meet in 10 Downing Street, one of whom is farting, and they all laugh evilly over the briefcase with the alien invasion emergency plans for Britain in it.

It turns out that the fat people in these two episodes are the Slitheen, a family of evil exhibitionist fat gay incestuous hunter capitalists who want to, get this, irradiate the earth with our own nuclear weapons and sell the radioactive bits as spaceship fuel. The farting is because they have to compress down to get into even fat human skins, and Mickey saves the day by launching a missile, stopping others from intercepting it and blowing up 10 Downing Street with the aliens in it. After so many “farts.” So. Very. Many.

OUR TEAM

The Doctor is right most of the time in this one, which is annoying, but he does have some good moments. At one point the Slitheen vivisect a pig into a bipedal creature to fake an alien crash landing, and the Doctor legitimately tries to help the pig, by just bossing Unit around like a King Karen. It works but ultimately he’s unable to save the pig from the gun-happy UNIT. He does care.

He also does legitimately have concerns about putting Rose in danger. REMEMBERING ADRIC ARE WE. He calls Mickey Ricky whenever he’s around and Mickey when he isn’t, but in the end he does invite Mickey to come with and help keep Rose safe (Mickey says he can’t). He also is kind of a brat about taking Rose with him in a few hours rather than waiting a day after the crisis is over.

Rose is OK in this one but unfortunately, she’s more of a sexy lamp than anything. Her return influences the plot a lot more than she does–Jackie was devastated by her disappearance, Mickey was accused of murder and had a very difficult time. Rose is brave, though.

Mickey shines the brightest in this episode. Last time we saw him he was having an anxiety reaction of exaggerated cowardice. In the past year he’s done extensive research on the Doctor and UNIT, and he’s become very level-headed and good in a crisis. He’s the one who successfully bombs 10 Downing Street to kill the aliens. He’s upset about the Doctor but he does not hesitate to work with him, or to save Jackie’s life even though she hated him. When the Slitheen come for Jackie and him he grabs a baseball bat and gets ready to fight.

It’s a shame about the actor. >.<

Jackie is also great. She slaps the daylights out of the Doctor at one point, which is well-deserved, and she consistently expresses concern about Rose throughout the episode, worries about her relationship with the clearly older Doctor and then about the safety of her journeys with him. She’s clearly compassionate, but opinionated and fierce too. Jackie is the one who gathers the vinegar solution to throw on the alien. Which explodes with a fart sound. Siiiiiiiiiigh.

THE OTHERS

Harriet Jones is the principle one, a politician from a British backwater who gets caught up in events. She figures out that there’s something off about the Slitheen politicians and approaches Rose about it. She’s very upset but keeps a cool enough head to reach out to Rose and the Doctor for help. She even distracts the Slitheen away from Rose in a pinch. The Doctor says she becomes Prime Minister and ushers in a golden age for Britain.

The Slitheen: A family of evil aliens who can wear human skins as a suit, provided they’re the skins of fat humans. They’re evil and stuff. With extra evil, fat and farting. They’re capitalists and want to irradiate the earth so they can sell the radioactive bits. They’re all evil. That’s it. This is definitely a downward trend from previous NuWho and previous Classic Who where a lot of aliens have good and bad people in their groups. The Slitheen are the worst.

A bunch of boring politicians and others we don’t care about.

THE SETTING

  1. Earth in 2006. Why did they put in an alien invasion attempt in 2006? They had to know that would make the show out of date in a year.
  2. It’s London and some of it is in Downing Street. Is it filmed on location? It looks good but I don’t know how close it is to the real Downing Street. At the end it gets blown up.
  3. Obviously nuke access doesn’t work that way.
  4. Pretty sure British elections don’t work that way either.
  5. The Slitheen plan is a very underpants gnome plan. That’s not how nuclear fuel works normally, I guess they could have some sort of magic alien tech, but it’s dudmb.
  6. THe Doctor has a corded phone.
  7. There were a couple of good comedic beats, like when the cop evacuating the building opens the door to see a bunch of the Slitheen and then just apologizes and closes it again.

THE PRODUCTION

  1. The special effects on the Slitheen are… not great. The zipper on their foreheads are stupid looking. The babydoll faces are icky but not as creepy as the original autons were, or in fact, as actual baby dolls. The discrepancy between the men in suits and the CG aliens is vast and awful.
  2. Evil fat gay people who fart constantly, huh. Thanks. 😦 And the main actor had an eating disorder at this point.

General

From Davies’s Book – The Writer’s Tale: The Final Chapter

Eccelston and Boak

Contemporary reviews and news articles

Reviews

Muriel Frost

Girl’s Aloud Influence

Homophobia Analysis

Interviews

The Noel Clarke Situation

Locations

The Whoopie Cushion

The Original Slitheen Design (?)

Episode 18: The Unquiet Dead

/ Kari / Leave a comment

The Daleks Aren’t Robots team return to the Ninth Doctor in our first modern Who episode not penned by Russel T. Davies.

How do we feel about the new writer, and can Kari handle the story’s portrayal of Charles Dickens?

Find out!

Daleks Aren’t Robots!? is a podcast in which two Whovian friends take two non-Whovians on a deep dive through the show from the very beginning.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/daleksarentrobots

Twitter: https://twitter.com/daleksrntrobots​

Find us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8ngosXDOzVLrJe4KIcW8Qg

Look for us where all podcasts are found.

See more at https://daleksarentrobots.com/

Theme: Garage – Monplaisir

Podcast Contents Include

Editor’s Note: The following are my original notes for the podcast, slightly edited for readability. They’re very far from the full contents of the pod, though.  – Kari

SUMMARY

We see a dead old woman come to life and escape the undertaker and his maid, killing her grandson; the undertaker and maid The Doctor and Rose aim to go to Naples in 1860 but end up in Wales in 1869. They meet Charles Dickens and stumble across an undead woman, who then falls over.

Rose is kidnapped by the undertaker and the Doctor pursues with Dickens. They get to the undertaker’s house.

Rose learns the maid, Gwyneth, can read her mind and has “the sight.” The specter appears and says they’re the Gelth and they can’t exist properly there, and if Gwyneth opens the way for them they can possess dead bodies and survive that way.

They were all killed in the Time War.

There’s a brief argument about whether allowing them to possess bodies would be OK and Gwyneth opens the way. The Gelth turn out to be evil, they kill the undertaker and Gwyneth explodes the house with her in it to stop them, the second woman to immolate herself on behalf of the Doctor in a row.

OUR TEAM

Rose:

  1. I like Rose in this one. She stands up to the Doctor as much as she can, and doesn’t let him bully her. Her misgivings about Gwyneth helping the Gelth prove correct.
  2. Her hair looks really period appropriate in this one. The dress isn’t quite right, but that might be more in the way it’s worn than the dress itself.
  3. We learn her dad is dead.
  4. She does get locked in a room and menaced again, this time by zombies, and the Doctor saves her by grabbing her hand and yanking her five feet or so, just like in the first episode.

The Doctor:

  1. The Doctor is kind of a jerk in this episode. He wants to give people’s corpses to the Gelth without their consent, and he’s also kind of nasty to Rose about it.
  2. He DOES apologize to Dickens though, which was nice.
  3. I have no idea how he knows the stuff he knows. He just seems to know things intuitively for some reason.
  4. He does seem to have ADHD or something as well. Is this a non-neurotypical Doctor?

The Tardis:

  1. Still sounds hungry, and was referred to as a “shed” in this ep. 😦

THE OTHERS

  1. Charles Dickens is a main character in this, but I’m not sure why. It’s a ghost story and it’s December 24th but Christmas doesn’t come into the story at any point. Dickens is portrayed as a skeptic, how close is that to reality?
  2. Sneed is the Undertaker, he’s sort of an ordinary person. He is killed.
  3. Gwyneth is the maid who lived in the house on the dimensional rift that the Gelth “haunted.” She’s a nice ordinary girl but she grew up tied to the rift and her mom told her she had The Sight. She can communicate with the Gelth, has a strong sense of morals and is very Christian. She believes the Gelth are angels and she helps them, then sacrifices herself to save the world.

THE SETTING

  1. The Doctor says that history can be rewritten in a snap. So they CAN change things? Or is he lying. Or was First lying? Or is Doctor Who continuity a laugh and a half, amIrite.
  2. Cardiff in Wales. Which apparently is a terrible place or a joke or something? The dialogue twice implies “ew, Cardiff,” and as a nonBrit I don’t know why, it seems perfectly nice to me.
  3. Generic Victorian.

THE PRODUCTION

  1. How accurate is Dickens?
  2. “What the Shakespeare”? Why the weird fake swears?
  3. “Prevaricate”?
  4. Do the Gelth come back? At one point I said “Because the Doctor killed them!” Then they said it was the Time War so… DID the Doctor kill the Gelth?
  5. How many women have immolated themselves for the Doctor? Is this gonna be a trend?

General

Lawrence Miles “Review Issues”

Reviews

BTS

Phantasmagoria

Ghost Club Dickens

Dr. Who Confidential

Too Scary

Mark Gatiss Interview

Cast Information

Mark Gatiss Video Diary

Episode 14: End of the World

/ Kari / Leave a comment
CONTENT WARNING: Discussion of transphobia, body dysmorphia and eating disorders

We jump back to modern Who with the 2005 episode End of the World.  As Rose jumps 5 billion years into the future to witness her planet be consumed by fire, we witness the continuing attempts of Russell T. Davies to make Doctor Who work in modern TV.  Does this attempt work better for us than his pilot episode? WILL ANYONE SURVIVE? ARE THERE KITTENS? (There aren’t.)

Daleks Aren’t Robots!? is a podcast in which two Whovian friends take two non-Whovians on a deep dive through the show from the very beginning.

You can find special guest, Ilana on:

TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ilanapon47?lang=en

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ilanapon47/

Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/shop/RoguishRelics?ref=search_shop_redirect

And you can find us:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/daleksarentrobots

Twitter: https://twitter.com/daleksrntrobots​

This Episode on Buzzsprout: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1612663/8515417-episode-14-end-of-the-world

Look for us where all podcasts are found! Also in the hearts of children everywhere. Their dark, evil and wicked hearts of darkity-darkness and ravenous TARDISes.

Podcast Contents Include

Editor’s Note: The following are my original notes for the podcast, slightly edited for readability. They’re very far from the full contents of the pod, though.  – Kari

SUMMARY

The Doctor takes Rose to the End of the World, 5 billion years in the future, which is the worst idea for a first date ever. A bunch of rich people are watching the sun go nova, but one of them sabotages the space station they’re on. Rose gets stuck in a room while the Doctor saves the day.

OUR TEAM

  1. The Doctor is the star of this episode… to the detriment of every other character in it. It seemed super familiar to me but I couldn’t place it, and then I realized what it reminded me of: Twilight. In this episode specifically, the Doctor is Bella Swan and the other characters only exist to develop his character, to tell him how great he is and to flirt with him, unless they’re bad guys. Then they exist to be killed by him.
  2. I think it’s from the way that they basically hired fans of the Doctor to write the show. And they were fans of the Doctor, so at least in this episode, they did a fanfic, putting their OC version of the Doctor center stage to show off how cool he is. Like Twilight, it’s basically a canon fanfic, and not a good one. Every version of the Doctor I’ve seen has been arrogant, but the show KNEW it and didn’t frame it as a good thing, and allowed him to get his comeuppance from time to time. This show or at least THIS EPISODE doesn’t know it.
  3. I do like the characterization here of the Doctor as childlike and a bit giddy. He does murder someone on screen though, with nary a lampshade to be seen…
  4. After a whole episode setting up Rose as our POV character, in this episode she gets damseled hard at about the halfway mark and is reduced to lying down and whimpering while she waits for the Doctor to save her and everyone else. It’s not just that it’s kind of sexist, although it is, but it’s also bad writing. You spent that long setting up a POV character for the audience and then sidelined her to create a second POV character who is then incinerated? Sure, Ian. Sure.

THE OTHERS

This episode seems to have issues with women.

  • Jabe, the tree, exists to flirt with the Doctor, to feel sorry for the Doctor, and then to sacrifice herself so the Doctor can be a hero. It’s a shame, because her design is neat and she seemed like an interesting person. It almost seems like Rose was supposed to help the Doctor at the end but they replaced her with Jabe at the last minute or something.
  • Raffalo, the plumber, chats with Rose a bit but then is killed by the plot.
  • Cassandra, the “Last Human,” is heavily female coded but says she was a “boy.” She is racist. Her main trait is that she’s vain and has gotten plastic surgery so many times she’s just skin stretched on a rack with some makeup on it. On the bright side she did convince me to up my moisturization regimen, so there is that.
  • Jackie only appears for a few minutes but still manages to talk about how Rose should get her money back for something and tell her to pick her up a lottery ticket, because the greedy poors want the moneys, I guess.
  • The Steward is not a woman, but the plot kills him off pretty quickly to show that the spiders are a murder weapon for sure.

THE SETTING

  1. The Setting IS the characters in this one, mostly, and they are actually pretty great designs. Some of them look a bit silly, yes, but the designs are different and interesting, and it’s good to see the show taking advantage of its newly-acquired budget of more than pocket lint. The trees look really cool, and so did the giant face. One thing–Rose says they’re very ALIEN aliens and I just thought: no they’re not, they’re just people who look a bit funny. The plumber in particular was just like anybody but bluer.
  2. The observation room set Rose gets stuck in looks cool, and so do the images of the exploding earth and the sun. The engine room is a little bit dodgier, as it seems to be mostly composed of bad CG. It’s not bad enough to hurt my suspension of disbelief though.
  3. They do mention that there was a war and the Doctor’s planet was destroyed, and he’s the last son of Krypton I mean the last Time Lord. (Doctorgirl is gonna be a thing, right? Is there a Bottle City of Gallifrey?)
  4. The future is SUPER classist, and plumbers have to be given permission to talk even after being asked a direct question. And the motive for the crime here is money. Somewhere Marx is crying. They could imagine a future without religion but not without capitalism? Religion predates capitalism, guys.
  5. The three songs they bring up as “classical,” which are meant to be a joke? They’re all three actually really good pop songs. Sorry, but Tainted Love, Toxic and Disco Inferno are all pretty great songs in their own right, so that doesn’t read as a joke anymore.
  6. They explain the Tardis translation thing, which is nice.
  7. Psychic paper is stupid.

THE PRODUCTION

  1. Is Lady Cassandra a trans woman or what? What’s with the boy stuff? Queer coding villains, bleh.
  2. Were those dwarves or children?
  3. What WAS the budget on this?
  4. Do any of these alien groups come back or were they one-shots? I liked the trees a lot, I hope they come back. (Editor’s Note: The trees do not. 😦 )
  5. How much of this was Giant Rat of Sumatra stuff? It’s an incident mentioned as an aside in a Sherlock Holmes story and then never brought up again–are they going to do a fanfic thing and backfill it for continuity porn? I hope not. I don’t mind a little of that but sometimes a giant rat is better not explained.

Sources Include

General Info

Short Crespallion Actors

North/South England Material, Accents & Class Issues

Trans Issues in Doctor Who: Cassandra

Rose and Jackie’s Character

Russell T. Davies and Religion

Episode 11: Rose

/ Kari / Leave a comment

The DAR team explores the first post-reboot Doctor Who episode, “Rose,” the reboot that made the show more popular than it had ever been before.  But, is it as popular among the DAR Crew?

Daleks Aren’t Robots!? is a podcast in which two Whovian friends take two non-Whovians on a deep dive through the show from the very beginning.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/daleksarentr…​

Twitter: https://twitter.com/daleksrntrobots​

Follow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8ngosXDOzVLrJe4KIcW8Qg

Theme: Garage – Monplaisir

Podcast Contents Include

Editor’s Note: The following are my original notes for the podcast, slightly edited for readability. They’re very far from the full contents of the pod, though.  – Kari

THE TEAM

THE DOCTOR:

  1. The Doctor. He’s a worthy successor to the First Doctor, but seems as reluctant to kill sentient creatures as Eight was. He definitely does not seem as deft as Eight, though–he tries to do a card trick and sprays the cards everywhere. And he’s EXTREMELY happy to blow up the building.
  2. He’s very acerbic. He’s equal parts totally flippant and completely earnest. He does seem a bit more self-aware than First and is aware that he thinks the world revolves around him.
  3. He does seem to still be capable of First’s level of bulls***. I assumed that he was bluffing on the “Convention 15 of the Shadow Proclamation” thing he cites but apparently not. We do not understand the Nestene Consciousness’s, the molten plastic thingy’s, words during their conversation so who knows. There’s a great line of bulls*** he slings when Rose asks who he is, about how he feels how fast the world is turning.
  4. He says at one point that he’s been in a war and it’s implied that a lot of worlds died during it, and he “couldn’t save any of them,” including the one that the Nestene Consciousness is from.
  5. This gives the Doctor a more sinister tone–conspiracy theorist Clive says that death is his only constant companion, and that the Doctor only shows up when a disaster is or has occurred. Clive is then proven right by being shot in the face by a mannequin. The Nestene Consciousness, which apparently is legitimately terrified, is also killed, along with a TON of bystanders.

ROSE:

  1. Rose does not seem to be afraid of much, to an almost concerning extent at times. It’s good to be brave but it works better at the beginning when she’s legitimately frightened of the mannequins but keeps asking questions anyway. It’s great that she only screams once in the episode and it’s a very reasonable reaction.
  2. She does react well to crises. She pulls the fire alarm and gets everyone to evacuate when a mannequin impersonating Mickey gets violent in the restaurant.
  3. I like the look of Rose. She’s very pretty, yes, but she’s built like a normal woman and wears normal woman clothing, and her hair looks pretty disheveled a lot of the time.
  4. When her mom calls her during the crisis she hangs up without telling her she’s OK, which is bad. Maybe this is bad editing?
  5. Her associated characters–Mickey and her mom, who is so far nameless–are awful. The mom is the worst, some sort of caricature of a poor person–she doesn’t want her daughter getting “airs and graces,” is implied to be promiscuous and is clueless to the point of stupidity. She’s also careless, doesn’t listen and wants to get money from Rose’s work exploding.
  6. Mickey is annoying, but seemed a little less annoying on the second watchthrough. However, he does want to leave the Doctor behind TO DIE. Even Rose calls Mickey a “stupid lump.” At one point a plastic trash can eats him and I wished he’d stay there. He clings to Rose’s waist and is a coward, is there some racism here? Is this a racism?

TARDIS:

  1. The Tardis has clearly gotten over its indigestion from the Master, because it’s making the “I’m hungry Seymour, feed me!” noise again.
  2. The Tardis looks great, but it is definitely not as large as Eight’s Tardis. It’s also not as liveable, and lacks the homey feeling of the previous one, with its cushy chair and side table and ottoman.
  3. It still has the plasticy tube in the center, but its dome is bronze-looking, with lived-in wear, and green light comes down from it and onto the console, which has a flatscreen monitor attached (must have been fancy back then). Green light shines on the console.
  4. The Tardis has not been spoken of as a person as yet.

THE GUEST STARS/VILLAINS:

  1. Apparently the Nestene Consciousness and the mannequins were in this in previous interations of Doctor Who? But you didn’t need to know that to watch the episode, the Doctor doesn’t explain things a ton anyway. So it’s fine.
  2. Clive is a conspiracy theorist who shows Rose images of the Doctor through history and says he shows up before catastrophes with big death tolls. He is vindicated and then is immediately shot to death.

THE SETTING

  1. The Sonic Screwdriver, what is.
  2. Gay people exist.
  3. Did Genghis Khan really try to get into the Tardis and fail? If so why can Rose just open the door without a key?
  4. The color is fine but unremarkable. No artistic use of color like in the Cushing movie, no unique shots like the TV movie.

THE PRODUCTION

  1. Who decided to reboot the show? Why, what prompted that?
  2. The violence, did it get complaints? There’s a mass shooting at a mall in this episode.
  3. Pacing is too fast. I feel like the right length for this stuff is somewhere between 45 minutes and 2 hours.
  4. Accents and weird class stuff. Why do we hate the poors?
  5. Icky editing, like the part where it cuts a bunch of times on “babe,” “darling,” “dear,” “sweetheart.” That and the “wacky music” makes it more like a children’s TV show than the original, even though that was also a children’s TV show. Like a crappy Disney channel show of this era. What’s with that?
  6. The effects? The show has a budget suddenly?
  7. The novelization, Josh read that, anything from that we haven’t talked about already?

Sources Include