There isn’t anything I massively disagree with here, just with the exception that I think it’s being a bit too kind to the episode to suggest it’s deep enough to do that, when depicting the other side it uses a sledgehammer. And if it’s like a sledgehammer with depicting one side but uses subtlety with the other, then it feels like the episode is taking sides.
It isn’t, I know full well that’s not the intention, but it’s how it comes across to me with it’s, like Lucky Day, immaturity in dealing with a topic it maybe should never have attempted.
The real world did slightly overtake when this was presumably originally pitched or written but it’s unfortunately the lens I had to view the episode through. With the parallels to Palestine, the exaggerated number of 3 trillion to overtly paint Kid as a monster becomes an obstacle in inviting you to imagine the plight of Hellia. We get it through Wynn and Cora but because there is no battering ram on the other side of the coin like there is with Kid, its positive message (and I agree it’s shooting for one) doesn’t quite come off for me because the bungling of the conceit ends up leaving a horrid taste in my mouth.
I don’t baulk at an insidious messaging behind the episode, but I do definitely despair at its seeming naivety.
I do love the idea of Cora’s methods proving more fruitful than Kid’s, I do. I really, I really do. It’s one of the stronger aspects and in an episode which I felt had handled Kid far more maturely I think it could have boosted this episode to being one of the best of the season, maybe the era. The message would have pierced through like a thunderbolt.
And there’s a slither of Cora outlining why Kid is called Kid which landed very well. But, like I say, the threat to 3 trillion people is an incomprehensibly high number which ends up feeling like a broad stroke the script makes to justify the Doctor calling him ‘filthy’, something which again doesn’t work at all for me given the real life parallels I cannot unsee.
As Delta says, this is Doctor Who so it’s really just meant to be a space adventure at its heart. But it can and has been more than that when making itself an allegory for real world and political issues. Doing a story like this invites the same analysis as allegory and more than just ‘space adventure’. It’s also a show with a social conscience as one of its greatest strengths and, for one that’s meant to be quite politically switched on, it isn’t half messing up a lot of its messaging recently, at least to me. It’s always well-intentioned these days, that’s not something I question, but it just messes up a bit too much.
Like, at no point do I think this episode is condoning Israel whatsoever, that’s not my issue, but I definitely think it attempted something it didn’t quite have the maturity or chops to pull off and so, unless it absolutely can, I think it needs to leave thin-ice topics well alone. Because it just crashes through the ice.
It also doesn’t help that Kid is dealt with really by not long after the half hour mark so no wonder he isn’t as well drawn as he could be. And no wonder why I feel like his character and motivations were too simplistic a take for what a story like this required.
The ending representing that the corporation can’t just be taken down would work so much better for me if Kid hadn’t been so cartoonishly boo-hiss. It invites deeper analysis for one side and offers up a caricature for the other and that isn’t it for me, not at all.
