I’m still gobsmacked, it was better than I was expecting. It was interesting to see the Doctor go off the rails a bit, just, chills.

I feel like this is an allegory for something that I’m missing here, so maybe this comment comes from a place of ignorance… but here goes.

There’s a species of people, the Hellions, who’ve had their planet and culture obliterated by The Corporation and have been slandered so thoroughly that everyone else believes only the worst things about them. There’s obviously a lot of overt racism around them, to the point where Kid and Wynn murder 100,000 people and the station manager’s response was “I knew I shouldn’t have hired a Hellion”. Like, she’s so racist she just thinks “yeah it makes sense that a Hellion murdered 100,000 people”. The band-mate of the singer Cora is so disgusted that she’s been deceiving him and is actually a Hellion that he initially refuses to help her save 3,000,000,000,000 lives by activating the lift – even though she has nothing to do with the terrorism and even though he’s just heard the horrible fate of her planet. This is the level of prejudice that exists here. And yet at the end, she sings one song in Hellionic, presumably a language practically no-one understands (not even the TARDIS translator apparently?) and this… solves the problem? In what world does she not immediately get booed off the stage when people learn her species?

Also, and maybe this is just my ignorance showing again, the episode put in my mind of violent vs. non-violent resistance to unjust authority. Obviously murdering the population of a galaxy just for watching Eurovision is insane. But like… singing a song doesn’t change anything either. I felt a bit like the episode was saying that non-violence and indirect action is the best (only?) way to solve political problems. I mean, they didn’t even take the time on the broadcast to explain what The Corporation had done wrong. Just sung a random song and peaced out, as far as we know…

My first guess as to what the episode is about was chocolate companies (famously Nestlé, but there are others) who make use of slave labour for their products. But maybe it’s about oil companies and the constant wars in the Middle East that have led to the rampant racism against Muslims where they are viewed as terrorists. Or maybe it’s just an episode of Dr Who and I don’t know what I’m talking about. Anyway, I watched it and it was ok. Not great, not terrible, kept me entertained for an hour. The cliffhanger for next episode looks interesting