this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2025
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I really enjoyed that. Going into it blind, it was very fun to watch. Not quite as good as Midnight, but then sequels rarely are. But I think it was a good choice to revisit it - if the humans have vanished, then the doctor wouldn't have been able to go to midnight and play a part in defeating the monster first time around, so it would still be there. The final ending scene was a bit cliched though, the episode would have been better to just end with the Tardis dematerialising.
The inclusion of a deaf character was done well, and the use of live subtitlers is a really great "future gadget" to invent and then explore in a sci-fi context, from how it can offer help, and how it can be used to exclude people easily.
The idea that civil servants that interact with the public must know a sign language makes sense to me - it might indicate that something about the Lombardy population has a high population of deaf people. Maybe a side effect of the war. That would also explain why they were all equipped with subtitlers available as a backup for everyone else. SLs are not universal though, so I guess the translation matrix can help "translate" gestures as appropriate to the local context just as it does text and speech (and BSL to us watching). A side effect of this is it would have been illegible to any American signers watching.
Exploring the wider plot about how humanity is gone makes me think we're facing a planet out of time situation, as we saw in season 4 (another callback?). Though if the lombardy are that similar to humans, they must be related in some way. I guess whatever that link is would have to come pre-2025, because we're not out in space yet, and we won't have any time to do so afterwards.
I really enjoyed this episode, this season is going very well.
I really liked this one, too. I was pretty cool on series 1/14 outside of Gatwa being excellent, but so far series 2/15 has been more enjoyable. The signing was very cool to see; I don't know any BSL so I have no idea how Gatwa did but it looked natural.
The subtitle tech does raise some interesting questions around what has led to it becoming so ubiquitous. I suppose it could also serve as a live translation tool, so it may not be exclusively to support deaf people and instead sort of a low-tech version of the translation matrix. That said, signing being mandated for all medical staff does seem to indicate that accommodations for deafness are strongly favored in Lombardic society.
Yeah, how I feel about that part will probably depend on whether it actually gets revisited sometime soon. If it's just for the sake of a sting ending with no concrete intention to do anything with it, then it's just doing the thing because it's a horror story and that's what they do.
EDIT: One thing the ending did leave me wondering was whether the monster simply jumped off Shaya to Mo, or if there are more than one of them. If Shaya's sacrifice meant nothing at all, that's pretty disappointing to me. But if she took it from two escapees to one, that at least gives her death some meaning.