this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2026
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"I like 'Love & Monsters'" might be the most unpopular unpopular opinion of all time, but...dammit, I like "Love & Monsters." You know, mostly.
It might actually be the most RTD episode of all time, for better or worse.
It's silly. I think the comedy works quite well, through a combination of the writing and the casting. I feel like RTD has a real knack for making the supporting characters of a story seem like real people, rather than plot devices. Every single member of LInDA seems like a living, breathing person to me, and I care about this band of weirdos almost immediately. Even Victor Kennedy has a slimy charisma to him. Marc Warren plays Elton perfectly as a dopey doofus stumbling through life. The madcap farce of it all works incredibly well for me.
It's tragic. The episode is packed with ideas about found family, and about not realizing what you have until you've lost it. The evolution of LInDA from a group of people with a single goal to a tight gang of friends, which is then disrupted by a newcomer with bad intentions, is great to watch play out. Elton stumbling through it all, realizing too late that he's become a villain in his manipulation of Jackie Tyler is great, too. The members of LInDA are eliminated one by one in a classicly bloodthirsty RTD fashion. It toys with the idea of people who touch the Doctor getting burned in general, and lays the groundwork for Rose's impending doom in particular. In the process, it gives Rose perhaps her finest moment to date, turning from furious to sympathetic as she begins to understand some of what Elton has experienced.
And then it's almost entirely undermined by the terrible decision to have Ursula...survive, I guess? And then tack on a pretty gross joke at the end.
Cut out the last three or four minutes, and I think we'd have a classic on our hands. In the end, it can be nothing more than a guilty pleasure.
The characters are definitely the stand-out of this episode. It's interesting as RTD explores the idea of fans-in-the-plot in the recent episode "Lux", but it was done a lot better here. The Linda portions of the episode are far better than I remember them.