OK so bear with me here - there's an episode of Black Mirror that this is kind of ripping off, but it isn't the one you think it is.

In Shut Up And Dance, a young man is blackmailed into performing a series of dangerous things like robbing a bank with one of the good actors from Game of Thrones. Through very effective, claustrophobic storytelling, we are forced to rapidly empathize and sympathize with our young protagonist - as far as we know, he's being blackmailed with a video of him jerkin' it taken through his webcam. Bronn from Game of Thrones is being blackmailed about gambling debts? An affair? I don't remember, it's not important.

What is important is that the Jonathan Frakes twist in this particular Twilight Zone is our likeable if strange protagonist, thrust into a f**king awful situation that hey, any of us could reasonably be put into, right? Yeah, the twist is that he's been whacking it to HIGHLY illegal material and we've been sympathizing and empathizing with him the entire while. And then at the end, the videos are released anyway, he's been forced to beat another equally horrible person to death with his bare hands, and nobody has really gained anything. We never even find out what the hackers wanted in the first place.

That's the episode that this is ripping off, and it does it to ASTONISHING effect. This is the bleakest Doctor Who has been since Children of Earth. This is the Russell T Davies who wrote Damaged Goods. Combine that with Disney money production value, one of the best needle-drops (honestly, it totally justifies however much they spent on it), rug-pull after rug-pull. Is it "What if Black Mirror but Doctor Who?" ? Yes, but Doctor Who has been crashing into genre television for decades now, and if this is what it looks like in 2024, then I am entirely for it. I was and am continue to be gobsmacked. I'll be thinking about it for weeks.