WHOCHURCH: The Chris Chibnall era

maybe I just am not feeling this season but I found that one almost unwatchable
but I fkn hate DO YOU SEE sci-fi which is why I can't stand black mirror either

leee otm, this one left a particularly horrible taste

Clunky obviousness is the selling point of DO YOU SEE sci-fi, not the problem. Which is why this episode (or at least the ending) was so horrible - what were we supposed to actually see?

* Corporations are dehumanising, but dehumanisation is better than terrorism, because those are the only two choices we have
* Corporations who spy on their staff and murder people are really looking after their wellbeing
* As a society, we should be grateful to be exploited so we can feed our children
* People who fight for workers rights are easily swayed by violence
* HR people who let staff die should keep their jobs
* You shouldn't be racist to robots but it's okay to blow thousands of them up or hire 90% white men instead
* Inclusive casting is fine if you're a farmer or a cleaner or a soldier, but only white actors can play office workers and management
* Terrorists are too stupid to run away from an explosion
* Mops can clean grass

Still two weeks behind but rumors abound that chibnall is leaving after the next series (now in preproduction) already because he doesn’t enjoy it. Who knows.

i've been able to look past the badness of a lot of this season because jodie whittaker is such a delight. but hoo boy this was really an episode of black mirror. like actually, wasn't there a fulfillment centre episode of black mirror?!

xp chibnall out seems like the best outcome, as long as someone good takes over? tbh i have no idea who i'd want (aside from like, armando iannucci, but that might be because i am a hell person)

Rumor is also that she won’t stay without him

the set dressing and design in this episode was particularly shit - other than the attack of the clones-inspired cgi conveyor-belt sequence, at no point did it feel like the gang were working in a colossal shipping and packing facility and not in a dingy b&q storeroom somewhere outside sheffield

'here's a couple of rolls of bubble-wrap and some vents will this do'

also this is a frivolous nitpick but it made me IA:
every human worker they interacted with stood around & talked! if it’s so scary you’d be head down while talking AND working to make yr quota/whatever etc

that twitty girl in the packaging rm especially

ts: male pregnancy vs posh girl who's never had a present.

rumors abound that chibnall is leaving after the next series (now in preproduction) already because he doesn’t enjoy it

Oh he's not the only one.

lol

we’re ALL leaving

Last week was "colonialism doesn't kill people, angry young Muslim men kill people"

Young Hindu men in that case.

Clunky obviousness is the selling point of DO YOU SEE sci-fi, not the problem. Which is why this episode (or at least the ending) was so horrible - what were we supposed to actually see?

* Corporations are dehumanising, but dehumanisation is better than terrorism, because those are the only two choices we have
* Corporations who spy on their staff and murder people are really looking after their wellbeing
* As a society, we should be grateful to be exploited so we can feed our children
* People who fight for workers rights are easily swayed by violence
* HR people who let staff die should keep their jobs
* You shouldn't be racist to robots but it's okay to blow thousands of them up or hire 90% white men instead
* Inclusive casting is fine if you're a farmer or a cleaner or a soldier, but only white actors can play office workers and management
* Terrorists are too stupid to run away from an explosion
* Mops can clean grass

Otm

As I said upthread: the sci fi part has to be taken just seriously enough. This episode feels like it was written by an idiot that had looked at black mirror, and decided the pathological darkness of that show ought to be brought in, then undermined by Lee Mack, Hailey off Coronation Street, and a twist where the system's actually lovely even though it killed a girl but the critic is evil and a terrorist.

I think it's an absolute shame that the first series to have a female doctor should also effect a change in direction toward a younger audience and a half assed, rip off, not bovvered approach to science fiction stories, because this is exactly what misogynist troll critics said would happen.

I didn't like this one. It seemed like the writer wanted to do something on modern factory work and robots doing work humans once did, but didn't have anything clear to say about either.

Not saying making TV is easy, of course, but bloody hell: if you can't take an Amazon warehouse and some people and some robots and competently make a thought provoking story shd u really be writing Dr Who?

Post but sort of works as reply

Xpost

Lee Mack's inherent Lee Mackness ruined any pathos in his character being sent off to the warehouse to die. Also the variable manifestation of Ryan's dyspraxia is really annoying me.

Next week, a potted history of witchfinders. Can we not just have alien space romps, rather than History 101?

Next week: birds erupting from trees as Scotland repeatedly yells "and sixth!" as one.

So I'm seeing people interpret this last episode as conservative or anti-liberal, for instance on http://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/kerblam-review/ . I thought the episode was too muddled to send a political message.

Regarding the conveyor belt scene, I had blocked out that Attack of the Clones scene; I think Monsters Inc. and Toy Story 2 also had scenes like that. Oh and Minority Report, where it really jumped out as a scene that some hack added in for some McKee-required end-of-act-1 action.

It seems to set up a leftist critique against the Amazon stand-in, but then pivots to a neoliberal conclusion.

my kids (and i) were confused about charlie's plan/actions. he liquifies the human workers.. because..? and how did he do it? he hacked the delivery bots? and why did he kill the girl he loved? v confused

He destroys the co-workers testing that the explosive bubble-wrap he created works - the system killed the girl he loves as a last-minute attempt to dissuade him.

He's testing the bomb and... I guess it was a liquid bomb first? Or he dissolved the corpses to hide the evidence? Either way - kind of gross for a "this one's for the kids" season.

He didn't kill his partner - the "system" killed his partner as a lesson - the same system that the Doctor decides to keep alive at the end of the episode.

what?? i didn't clock that at all. so the system also feels that murder is a legitimate means of "instruction"????

also i don't think the liquification is the same thing as the green mist bomb? is it?

but yeah ending was bad not good. sometimes a globe-spanning dehumanising delivery service is just a globe-spanning dehumanising delivery service, as freud once said

it's very confused

i'm not such the ending is quite as right-wing as the writers meant it to be, it's just that they're dopey and don't pay attention

this is very bad timing for a "there's good people on every side" doctor, though! it reminds me of when marvel put secret invasion out... at the start of obama's presidency

*'im not sure

what?? i didn't clock that at all. so the system also feels that murder is a legitimate means of "instruction"????

The system has observed Charlie has a crush on Kira, so it puts her in a situation where one of Charlie's bombs would kill her, so that he would realise how the loved ones of all the people about to be bombed will feel, and this realisation would make him stop his plan. It doesn't.

also i don't think the liquification is the same thing as the green mist bomb? is it?

Didn't the Doctor explicitly state that it is, and that Charlie was testing the bombs on his co-workers?

And yeah, I hated how the episode changed its initial anti-capitalist message into an "soft capitalism is okay" one, seemingly for the sake of having a plot twist where the evil supervisor AI is actually a benevolent one, especially since the beginning of the episode showed us working conditions in Kerblam! were pretty inhumane, and nothing in the ending suggested that was about to change (only that there would be more human workers).

And, of course, there's the question why, in a post-scarcity world with FTL and teleportation, so many people would still need to do 8 hour shifts of manual labour? But maybe it's asking too much of this show (at least with Chibnall running it) to consider such issues.

And they're also a shit delivery service if it took them that long to get a fez to Matt Smith

(which was a pretty lame callback btw)

I didn't get the sense that the world was post-scarcity.

i'm not such the ending is quite as right-wing as the writers meant it to be, it's just that they're dopey and don't pay attention

I can buy into this, but you can be "apolitical" and still stumble into some bad ideology.

"why so many people would still need to do 8 hour shifts of manual labour"

It's possibly a straw man version of what the left wants -- "you don't like the changes caused by automation, this is what you must want". or maybe they just didn't think it through.

i'm not such the ending is quite as right-wing as the writers meant it to be, it's just that they're dopey and don't pay attention

is there information out there that McTighe didn't write this himself?

hey, they gave the organics two weeks pay while they shut down for a month to figure out how to be less evil

On watching, I figured this to be a deliberate, savage hand-tip that the story knew exactly how exploitative and empty the promises to do better were. Possibly even that McTighe was poking at Chibnall's recurrent tendency for the Doctor to reinforce injustice and inequality through her inaction, rather than restoring a balance. After a few days*, I think it's probable that he (or whoever?) really didn't think through anything beyond flipping expectations.

*also the indication that this was meant to go much earlier in the season, with Ryan's backstory being filled in slightly, and the Doctor not having figured out how to fly the new TARDIS, after flying it perfectly last week. nice accidental timing to reschedule it for the week of the HQ2 announcements!

I didn't get the sense that the world was post-scarcity.

yeah, it's hard to tell whether it's on purpose that the warehouse is so un-busy and the workers so slack because nobody can really afford to order loads of stuff from Kerblam, and it's the cloud services business, with loads of military contracts, that's keeping them afloat.

And they're also a shit delivery service if it took them that long to get a fez to Matt Smith

he probably ordered it twenty minutes before the episode starts tho

I didn't get the sense that the world was post-scarcity.

If there are enough robots to do 90% of all work, and FTL travel and teleportation are so common and cheap they can be used to deliver small consumer goods personally to each recipient, then it most certainly should be a post-scarcity civilisation.

It's possibly a straw man version of what the left wants -- "you don't like the changes caused by automation, this is what you must want".

Yeah, this is pretty explicit in the conversation between Kira and Ryan. The non-necessity of their jobs, that they were basically quota jobs, explains why it wasn't actually back-breaking labor.

If there are enough robots to do 90% of all work, and FTL travel and teleportation are so common and cheap they can be used to deliver small consumer goods personally to each recipient, then it most certainly should be a post-scarcity civilisation.

You've clearly given this more thought than the writers bothered with, though.

new board description

alan cumming was really savouring the taste of scenery is this episode huh

Yeah, that was magnificent.

such a gloriously camp performance squandered on a colourless teal-and-grey story

Ryan & James spin-off should have happened