I want Doctor Who to be good and I want to be able to enjoy it in peace but the fact is that something is just deeply wrong here.

This episode had all the makings of being something great and then they completely threw it all away by going in entirely the wrong direction for something like Doctor Who for reasons I can't begin to imagine. I'm not sure how in depth I'm allowed to discuss the political ramifications of this episode safely on here but I feel like you have to be a pretty hateful person to think the Doctor pointlessly torturing Kid as punishment for trying to take revenge for his people and his home planet was acceptable - which the Doctor is actively being a complete hypocrite about by enacting revenge in that moment, not even on behalf of anyone that's actually dead! He's literally wasting time he could be spending getting those people back just to torment a young man for no reason. What were the writers thinking? There are so many times where the Doctor is excessively cruel that make sense and this is not one of those times. Worse still is Belinda's mild reaction to it. What happened to her challenging the Doctor? She doesn't even seem afraid of him which doesn't actually make much sense for her character to me, with the context she's given in that moment and her past experiences and her current situation where she's trapped with the Doctor as her only way home and just... Everything. I can't even wonder what's going through her head because her actions are completely taking me out of it and I can now only wonder what's going through the writers' heads thinking this was a good idea. They really fell off with this one, bad. It feels like a betrayal.

On the bright side the Rani reveal was so satisfying after waiting and theorizing about her for so long. I'm curious to see where we can go with TWO Ranis going forward. The production value was also great visually and the songs weren't completely unbearable this time, so, hey. Credit where it's due. I'm miffed that the Rani and Susan were wasted on such a disappointing episode, but I assume we'll be seeing more of both of them.

Plot wise I actually enjoyed this pretty well but I'm the kind of person that gets bored if a story isn't complicated enough, so maybe it is convoluted by a normal person's standards like the other reviews say. The dialogue is, like a lot of Chibnall era, very stylistically MCU-esque in a way that frequently breaks my focus and tempers my enjoyment of it somewhat. I don't know how else to describe it. Visuals were quite impressive while the soundtrack was a little over the top at times. Not bad.