Doctor Who 8.10 reaction

[eloriekam]

Look, okay, no, I'm sorry, the Ice Age did not work like that. You can't just go comparing 'almost instantaneous on the geological timescale' to 'almost instantaneous on the human timescale' that way.

Yes, because obviously mental illness is such a trivial issue and everyone is secretly just that special. Look, I'm not opposed to the idea that some humans have ESP, or that we once had it, or may have it in the future, but FFS mocking medication (twice!) for what are usually very serious problems is just too flippant. If you want to have a lesson about how the current state of psych treatment is bad, go ahead, but treat it seriously.

OK, yes, fine, the writer read the wiki or whatever on how tree rings are formed. I think. Well done.

Guys. Guys. Magnetic field, helloooooo! The Van Allen belt actually does exist, you can't just ignore it for reasons. Have you even read what happens when we lose that stuff? No, wait, please don't, another episode like this might happen.

Tunguska was an explosion. Good grief. I have never heard it seriously described as anything else (in classes, textbooks, etc.), and it was far too localized to be anything like what was shown in this episode. I'm not quite sure what the Brazil thing was about, and there's an impact crater in Brazil, but an impact is not a solar flare or coronal mass ejection or what-have-you from the Sun. NOT. THE. SAME. Look up mineral dust and impact breccias and the frakking K-T boundary. Wait, don't.... we might get a story about remanent magnetization in impact breccias and shocked quartz after the Sun gets sabotaged and its fusion flips out and suddenly starts forming uranium in the core, leading to a supernova that only sheds a teensy weensy bit of stuff with a crapton of energy and leaves the Sun intact, or something, but leaves us with layers and layers of really freaking cool purple dust. (Spot all the shit I just made up in that sentence.)

Oh and also the Sun suddenly switched back to being well-behaved when the camera was panning in the TARDIS. I just facepalmed because at that point I just wanted the episode to end. BTW, not sure but they might have called it a solar flare and a coronal mass ejection interchangeably? NASA assures me they are in fact different things.

Also, yelling at each other does NOT equal true love. Bleurgh. Sorry, schoolkid, but no.

Basically, my bad!science! alert went off and unlike some other episodes of Who, especially classic Who, there wasn't enough other stuff to distract me or sufficiently outdated knowledge behind it for me to laugh it off.

Next week, Trial of a Time Lord meets Logopolis, apparently.