MR 035: ...ish

Oh dear. Another incompressible one. There definitely was a point where I lost the plot and never got it back. But it was much later into the story than Time of the Daleks at least. Probably around the middle.

There's a linguistic conference with professors who are working to compile literally every single word spoken ever. Which is insane. That's an insane person thing to do. Thus they have created an AI called "Book" to compile the words and define their meanings for them. But one of the professors winds up dead by suicide and some rogue "anti-linguist" (lol wut) is stalking the conference seeking to cause trouble.

The Doctor is in his season 22 rude phase, like with Whispers of Terror. In a way you can kind of call this one a little brother to that one. It had a creature made up of sound and this one has a creature made of words. Only this is not as good and makes less sense. The Doctor is very weirdly obsessed with British language purity, going after Peri for using American English. Which is just bizarre and so petty for the Doctor. Why is he obsessed with saying one country on one planet's version of language is the best one? Aren't you someone who explores all of time and space? What are you on about? It's so colonial for no reason.

That said, this particular Doctor is known to use big words. There's a funny part where he says a bunch of flowery language and one of the linguists says "and again in words with more than one syllable please?"

It turns out the AI Book and the dead professor went to look for the longest word ever spoken, a myth. But they collected a part of it somehow. It's just a part of the word that says "ish" and it makes everyone else say "ish" all the time. For reasons.
There is a cute part mid way through where the Doctor uses something to censor "ish" so every time anyone says it or says a word with "ish" as a suffix it gets bleeped. That's kind of hilarious. There's another cute part where Peri and the Doctor go back and forth with British versus American ways of saying the same thing to confuse the bad guy.

It turns out that the rogue anti-linguist guy is also an AI but it's turned against its creator for some reason. This was past the point I stopped understanding what was happening so. He wants to destroy all language for some stupid reason I'm sure.

Yeah, I'm not a fan as you can tell. There's some cute stuff here, but I'm not a fan of how overly complex it is.