Scaredy Cat

The epitome of middle-of-the-road, it's boring, overly reliant on uninteresting lore drops, does nothing interesting, tries nothing interesting, but at the end of the day, it fills the time and nothing in it (perhaps other than The Doctor referring to Davros as a "cripple") made me hate it in any way. It's really just sort of there.
I got the sense that it was trying to me an homage/adaptation of The Silence of The Lambs, because, well, it lifted a scene directly from the film, but as I have not seen it, I can't comment on whether it succeeds in that endeavour, or is even attempting it.
One of the more negative parts for me is that Paul McGann, who usually gives amazing performances, kinda seems like he's phoning it in at certain parts, which is always sad to hear.
The ending is predictable, if overly convoluted, and nothing about the setups paying off is satisfying because of said convolution.
The story "attempts" to continue C'Rizz's "arc" by having the same scene we've had. What? 7 times, now? And it's about as interesting in this story as it has been the past 6-or-so times. Dear lord, I hope they do something with him. At some point. Ever. At all. Like thinks of an arc. Or a point. Or something. Anything at all. I'm not picky. But, please just not this "You're a killer" "Yes, I'm a killer" "No, you're not a killer" scene again, anything but that!
Frankly, the best thing I can say about this story is that it doesn't overstay its welcome. The writer realized how much story they had to tell, and ended it at that without dragging it out to 2 hours for the sake of format.

5/10

Why does everyone always dunk on this one? It's got almost everything you could want in a good doctor who episode - an interesting setting, a creepy atmosphere, a moral dilemma based off of time travel, and development for C'rizz. I've seen reviews saying that the main cast are off their A-Game this week and I couldn't disagree more - the team felt like a team here a lot more than they did in a lot of divergent universe stories. (That yowl from Paul near the end when he was being tortured by Flood caught me way way off guard!)  Eight was wonderfully eldritch here, and having C'rizz - the more overtly alien of the pair - questioning him was a neat parallel. Charley sadly didn't get as much to do this ep, which I've gotten the vibe will become a theme in this stretch of main rang stories, but it wasn't glaringly obvious here.

The idea of a planet having a subconscious is tried and true, but it being a creepy little girl singing nursery rhymes is a fun new take on it. Flood was a fun villain and a definite highlight - despite being your garden variety murderer, the actor playing him was clearly having a good time. Planets being more malleable early in their evolution is really cool; concepts that even the Doctor doesn't want to mess with always hit different.

Overall a really fun episode with a cool mystery and good development for the rest of the team. Scaredy cat! Scaredy cat! Scaredy cat!