He's probably manifesting Picard through his own and Sarek's shared Katra. Like a Katra ghost... Because that's the sort of dumb shit the SNW writers will make up on the spot for no good reason.
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Four words, "The year of hell". It was 90 minutes and immediately reset by the end of part 2...
I agree, Locarno at the con would have significantly upped the ante for Voyager. We did see a hint of it in the pilot when Janeway bails Paris out of the penal camp, but the over the course of the first season they pretty much shrugged it off and he is such a Milquetoast character for most of the show.
If we were in the Doctor Who community I'd have a meme ready for you.
On a visual note,
The titles are presented on a series of retro-styled trading cards, an homage to Star Trek's colorful 1960s-era merchandise, with a portrait of one of the show's stars on each card.
Sorry Collider, these reference a set of 1976 sticker cards (with the colour scheme keyed up for 2026). You were off by a decade 🙂
[BBC director general Matt Brittin] said the exit of showrunner Russell T Davies, producer Bad Wolf, and co-producer Disney+ was an opportunity for creative renewal.
No offense, guys 🤣
Yuck, SNW was all the nostalgia tripping I could take. More boldly going, please!
It certainly lowered my enthusiasm for SFA s2, knowing they went hard with a cliffhanger finale... That show had a lot of spirit and promise, I wanted to follow those kids through the academy.
SNW — I know I'm in the minority here, but I couldn't get into the show's tone, and especially the way it's leading doggedly towards TOS. It feels like a dead man walking, and even more so now. This is actually the first time I've looked for ward to a Trek show ending.
In terms of wall to wall far out aliens, Earth's future, Rose all giddy traveling with a new Doctor, and of course Cassandra, my mind went to The end of the world, but that was probably too in the nose.
I quite agree about The beast below, also a companion's first space jaunt, right? And boom, Amy get to walk away from Omelas, but it's future UK in space. Can we just stick to Moffat episodes?
We may both rag on the silliness and threadbare stories in this show, particularly in this episode — but I don't need any more detail on Jack Harkness turning into a giant head in a fish tank. You die and revive enough times, that's the end result 🤣
I think that's the sort of gaps that could never be filled satisfactorily on screen. They're much better as a space where viewers' imaginations roam wild instead.
I was going to rewatch this, but reading @ 's rundown soured the memory of it a bit. It's an episode I've watched a bunch, and it has some elements I really like:
- The cat nun nurses, terrific makeup, crazy concept!
- The face of Boe, another wild and well executed idea.
- Cassandra! Probably the most iconic ~~trampoline~~ recurring villain in the early show. Even now, fans post cookies and embroideries in her likeness, even though she's visually and thematically horrible!
- Let's just add the Duke of Manhattan, too. What a throwaway character. And I like how his neck grates when he moves.
- And I like Chip, for some reason. In this bonkers rogues gallery, he's just a dude in scrubs with some paint on his face. Somehow that, a silly gait and the earnest, wide eyed acting is enough.
The allure of the body swap has worn off the more I watch this, though. Not a lot of actors can pull it off, much less so when the person they're impersonating is Zoë Wanamaker at her peak of campiness.
By now when I think back on this episode, I remember Billie Piper complimenting her own arse, and skip to the one with the werewolf instead. Oops, spoilers for next week's throwback discussion!
This is honestly not a terrific story as a whole — VS has already pointed out the biggest pratfalls — but at least it's so full of wacky characters and running away from human guinea pigs, you won't have time to say "that's not how medicines work".
Big caveat up front, I have no illusion that this was ever planned out, or that it's ever going to be made. I just connected some dots from Eccleston's season to our current mess. I do think that if the BBC had Pete McTighe make a 15 minute special along these lines and put it on Youtube, the fans could rest easier and the next production team might start on a blank slate.
To summarise, the last couple of seasons had a convoluted arc concerning a companion's parent issues. She was saved as a baby through time travel intervention, but not without a lot of temporal disturbance in the process. In fact, babies have been a throughline in both Ncuti Gatwa's seasons, a pattern that culminates in the Doctor rupturing the Time Vortex in order to save one child's existence. For just a probable moment there, that child is his own. Succeeding in his mission, the Doctor is then replaced by somebody looking suspiciously like Rose Tyler.
- Church.
- Baby.
- Rose.
- Temporal paradox.
- On what could be considered the Doctor's Father's Day.
Bring on the Time Reapers to sterilise the wound in time! That's why the Doctor regenerated into this face, à la 12 looking like Caecilius from "The fires of Pompeii". She needs to channel Rose as a catalyst to heal the reset 15 did to save Poppy. Besides, where Pete sacrificed himself to sort the timestream out, this time around the Reapers are attacking the Doctor and their police box. And the Doctor's current face has a very special relation to the TARDIS' living heart.
To be fair, the rest of the story doesn't really matter, this is only meant to resolve the Billie Piper twist of "The reality war". It doesn't fix fan quibbles over the Timeless Child or the Doctor being half human on their mother's side for a hot minute in 1996. Pretty much everything other than that latest regeneration cliffhanger can be ignored or picked up upon by future writers. So end this minisode on a regeneration without showing what happens next, or just leave it open ended.
Now, would I love for Susan to pop up for no other reason than to ease her "grandfather" into the credits crawl, and a future season where neither actress are seen again? Maybe an exchange to echo the Seventh's exit monologue to Ace at the end of "Survival"? Absolutely, but this could well be a one hander between Piper, some 2005 archive footage, and the janky old low-poly CGI monsters from back then.
[made a few edits for clarity(?)]
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I'm grateful it isn't going to be legacy characters. There has been a certain fetish for recasting the TOS crew as nauseam, and I'm optimistic that it won't be more of that.
Still, after the Section 31 ~~show~~ TV movie, I'm not too confident that it isn't going to be about a bunch of "lovable" space pirates doing un-Starfleet-like things because that seemed to work for Star Wars and the DCEU...