strange_complex | New Who 12.2 Spyfall, part 2

That resolved out pretty well. I'm kind of glad the Alien Menace wasn't Cybermen after all. It's nice to have something new. I liked Yaz reprimanding Ryan for getting carried away and telling Barton's men the plan, and then it not just being a joke line but an actual step in the plot which helped him to find them again quickly. I liked that they acknowledged that a Master who looked like Sacha Dhawan would find it difficult to 'pass' as a Nazi general, and offered some kind of explanation for it, because that had been bothering me until they did. I liked the nods to City of Death (top of the Eiffel Tower) and Logopolis (reference to Jodrell Bank). And I'm up for a season driven by deep secrets in Gallifrey's past. I'm an absolute sucker for anything Gallifreyan.

I could have done without Ada and Noor Inayat Khan having their memories wiped at the end, though. That is a big squick for me in all fantastical fiction, and I know I've complained about it reviews of both Doctor Who (e.g. what happened to Donna) and other stories (e.g. Fantastic Beasts) before. It feels like such a huge personal violation to take someone's memories away, and it made it even worse that Ada was actively protesting against it. It doesn't even seem consistently applied, either. The Doctor has left hundreds of historical figures with their memories intact before, and I don't see that the fairly brief and confusing things they had seen would be that much of a historical problem anyway - especially since no-one was ever likely to believe them when they talked about it.

Anyway, basically OK, and I hope we'll be seeing more of Sacha's Master as the series goes on.

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Yes, I also have a memory removal squick, and I'm not pleased to see the Doctor doing it so casually. I thought she'd learned her lesson when she tried it with Clara, but never mind.

It seems from

sovay's comment below as well that a lot of us do! And yes, it was casual, wasn't it? She sort of apologised to them, but it didn't seem like a big, hard decision, and it wasn't really dwelt on by the script or the direction. I don't get the impression it's meant to be a significant story beat that we'll later see coming back to haunt the Doctor. Just a functional tidying-up of potential quibbles about what would happen to them after the end of the story. Grr!

Well, he did Torchwood and it happened every week there!

I could have done with Ada and Noor Inayat Khan having their memories wiped at the end, though.

I also hate memory wipes. I have to consider a friend's fix-it to the end of The Dark Is Rising canonical because otherwise I hate the series ending. Also I have a hair-raising reaction to the idea of it with Noor Inayat Khan, because she never gave up a single piece of information to the Nazis, her interrogator testified to it after the war: whatever she knew about the Doctor, she wouldn't have told.

Yes, that's a very good point about Noor Inayat Khan! It seems quite disrespectful to have included her as a character but (apparently) not to have thought terribly deeply about who she was and what she actually faced.

(Oh, and I'm now going to correct that stupid typo I've made in the sentence you've quoted, which you have obviously kindly read round!)

It seems quite disrespectful to have included her as a character but (apparently) not to have thought terribly deeply about who she was and what she actually faced.

It's Noor Inayat Khan, for the love of SOE! She's one of the people whose lives don't even need to intersect with speculative fiction in order to be improbable and amazing. I have strong opinions.

(Oh, and I'm now going to correct that stupid typo I've made in the sentence you've quoted, which you have obviously kindly read round!)

(I didn't even notice. Your intent so clearly came through.)

I agree with all of this. I really liked it, overall.

Yes, it had a lot of good moments. I liked Graham using the laser shoes, too!

I'm not sure what the problem is to which wiping those two people's memories is the (or a) solution.

What have they learned that causes a problem?

And the lack of consent is problematic. It's problematic even if there were a compellingly reason for it but I don't really see one.

Inayat-Khan died a year after we see her whilst being an undercover agent all the time. Lovelace doesn't seem the sort to blather on about strange ladies in a time travelling Australian house and if she did so I expect folk would put it down to her being Byron's daughter and a bit of a mad storyteller.

Quite! There was slightly more of a case for doing it to Ada, who shouldn't have anachronistic levels of knowledge of where computers are going. But while she saw a few devices in action, she never really had any chance to see how they worked. It could plausibly have just given her a lot of interesting ideas and motivations. In any case, Doctor Who has quite often had fun showing us the Doctor deliberately 'planting' ideas in the minds of historical characters - e.g. Ten and Shakespeare in The Shakespeare Code. While that's slightly disrespectful in a different way (in that it robs them of the credit for having figured those things out for themselves), it's definitely better than memory-wiping!

I'm not sure how much anachronistic computer knowledge Lovelace saw. Or how much of what she saw she'd have been able to link to the work she was doing for Babbage's Difference Engine.

A hardware rather than software example but eg a vacuum tube,a transistor and a microprocessor are all logically linked but I wonder if someone who was in the process of inventing a prototype vacuum tube would recognises that a 21st century CPU was the successor to the tube. Especially if they saw them briefly whilst being shot at by sociopathic aliens.

And yeah, Shakespear. Grrrr.

Also, the Doctor has a time machine. It's not as if there was any rush.

If there were genuine reasons the Doctor could have taken a few weeks in some quiet, calm location to explain the problem and persuade them that their memories were dangerous.

Yes, true - indeed.

New Who 12.2 Spyfall, part 2

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