guess i'm diverging from the fan consensus on this one too. turns out that a two-handed character drama doesn't work when i don't care about the characters. very much a wasted opportunity, pointless cold open, very little in the way of actual character drama because there's very little to actually explore there. you can tell, from this point, that rtd is intending the 60th to summarise everything the doctor has gone through since 2008 and attempt to provide some form of a conclusion to it, through just plain acknowledgement that is not well-integrated with the story at all. it's a great concept in theory, but in practice it's written as the middle episode of a trilogy that should not have happened, with characters that should not have returned, and a writer who listened to scherzo once a decade ago and is trying to recreate it from memory.

the primary character moments of the episode are donna being distressed at not being able to go home, donna being sullen over how her family would wait for her, the doctor opening up about flux, and donna almost getting exploded. one of those lands (acknowledging the consequences of the flux), but it's never followed up on, with the viewer supposed to understand that 15 has gotten over being responsible for the death of half the universe. the other three feel generic, moments that could have happened with any other companion and had the exact same impact. any character would be distressed about the tardis disappearing. any character would think about their family - in fact, it's a carbon copy of a character beat that existed in 42 with martha. and there are no lasting consequences for donna almost being blown up in the giggle, so what's the f**king point? what's the point of having a two-hander without developing your two characters? cool sets? weird monsters? so intensely frustrating.

it would be a great character drama, if it had well-developed characters, and drama to back them up. incredible wasted opportunity. welp. at least he wrote 73 yards to prove that he could still write this type of episode. into the echelon we carry on.

having watched his entire run now, i would characterise planet of fire as the most underrated fifth doctor story. it's a story, at its core, about how harmful religion is as the basis of a society. on the planet of fire, they sacrifice to the flames their own people when the machinations that control the fire turn on, they turn at each other's throats, and pray to a god who does not exist, simply a man in a hazmat suit; gears and wires beyond their understanding, beyond their comprehension, because they cannot understand that man to be like themselves.

it's a deeply interesting story, one which presents a quite radical, marxian view on religiosity as a whole, and i'm unsure exactly why other stories like the awakening and warriors' gate, which i found middling but have been thoroughly and convincingly deconstructed by people smarter than myself, have received such analysis when this one has gone untouched. it's a compelling episode, in which a carefully designed overton window is crafted, of those who disbelieve in their god, of those who don't think non-believers should be killed, and those who do so. in this spectrum, the centre is looked at as the rational middle-ground by many in the story, leaving the viewer, to whom it is obvious that there does not exist a fire god who will cause volcanic eruptions if he can't eat a spicy twink for breakfast, wondering exactly how religions, not exactly differentiable from superstition as can be assumed, work towards humanity's progress.

i cried when turlough left. he's among my favourite companions of the show as a whole, and this story gives him a comfortable conclusion to a character arc that has been brewing since the very beginning. since his introduction, he's been a character who's paralleled the doctor in many ways. his introduction in mawdryn undead showcased him, a seemingly high-born private school twit, stealing a car and running away. very literal metaphors here only. throughout, he's been tackling his desire for expediency and his growing compassion towards others. there are so many layers on which this works, not least of all the metaphor of his various fashion choices, stripped from a black suit down to a white one in enlightenment, down to his shorts here, becoming more comfortable in expressing himself without the weight of the expectations of trion or earth. the decision he takes here, to return to trion, sacrificing his own pleasure to help to rebuild after the regime, directly follows on from his decision to reject the reward offered in enlightenment. whereas then, it was out of compassion for his friend, here, it is out of compassion for people overall. it's beautiful. i love it. i love him. i want him.

and it's the best master story i've seen in the classic series by a long-shot. he is written exactly as he should be, taking advantage of hierarchies to further his own ends. and the end, of him burning to death at the hands of the doctor, is the catalyst for a very interesting change in personality towards the end of season 21 that results in the admittedly fantastic the twin dilemma.

the only downside being that this, tied with 5 nyssa tegan as the hottest tardis team in history, is only a single-story affair. damn.

vengeance on varos is a story that aims for a lot of lofty, inherently political messages, which are hard to unpack from each other. it's a story inherently tied to a critical take on the shape of modern liberal democracy by presenting an extreme example of the form in which they take in the modern day. taking swipes at how the media (or, in this case, just any source of information) sways the democratic process, even when the voting populace are convinced that they are making decisions of their own free, anti-establishment will. varos itself is a directly democratic state, in which every decision made by the governor is put to a simple yes-no vote, but the unrelenting stream of information coming solely from the screen everyone has installed in their houses means that they can, quite confidently, present a range of alternatives that is acceptable to them. the inherently non-participatory nature of this voting system, in which the complex nature of voting is stripped down to "we should accede to the demands of galatron" or "we should hold out for better terms", because they are not aware that there is an alternative. at the end of the story, the television is switched off in our perspective characters' house. the people are left to make their own minds up, rather than being told what the options are from their television screen. one could even extend this concept to a future where new sources of information pop up, outside of the control of the economic elites, allowing for a broad range of ideas to make their way to the top.

it's a story that, also, takes aim at punitive justice, looking at it how it is, how it is portrayed in the media. vile torture porn, graphic in nature and not tied to the goal of reducing offending, but rather of fulfilling some twisted, animalistic sense of justice rampant throughout varosian society, eventually cut off when subversion becomes normal and the decision is made to destroy the injustice, torture, and executions of the government. it goes after how poor decisions are made when decision-making is distant, with the death of the chief officer due to his unfamiliarity of the very torture dungeon he himself administers.

perhaps most interesting are the elements of metatext throughout, this deep rumbling as the story cuts to the two people watching the show from their own home, reacting, cheering on the rebels just as the viewers themselves will be. alongside sleep no more, it's one of the only stories whose metatext criticises the viewer, and the very nature of the story itself. the subversion on display in the dome is meant to excite citizens, but not incite them to rebel accordingly. it is subsumed into the capitalist superstructure, just as the story itself would undeniably be.

it's a fabulous episode, and, alongside perhaps a pantheon of snakedance, enlightenment, the face of evil and the ambassadors of death, among my favourite classic stories. well-executed, well-scored, well-dones all around. genuine tension at both the cliffhanger to part 1 and the hanging scene, some great horror with the transmogrification machine. fantastic sets that, even on a bbc budget, makes the story feel expansive.

I understand why the Girl in the Fireplace is a well-liked episode. It's one chockful of entertaining Moffatisms, some nice and entertaining dialogue, an interesting time-bending concept, some body horror (that is much too underexplored), and a neat, tragic end. But I'd be lying to myself if I was to say that an interesting concept makes for a good episode. I'd rather characterise it as the worst Moffat-penned story of the entire show, and a horrid indictment of the failure of the show to fully come to grips with the reality of the hierarchies it depicts.

Central to my disdain towards Girl in the Fireplace is what it chooses to avoid discussion on. The setting of the majority of the episode, the place where the fireplace is located. It's .. never mentioned, it's never critiqued, nothing about the horrendous, crushing hierarchy of the ancien régime, the abject poverty that the tens of millions lived under so that these walls can be glossed and painted gold. It's just completely absent from the story. Madame de Pompadour is not shown in any moral terms. Her actions are not shown. We only see her with a few glimpses, none of which tell us anything about her character or her behaviour at all. She's just accepted by the story as self-evidently important, someone who we must fall for because the Doctor does too. We never see her take an action, we never see her prove herself to the audience. Her status as a person from history, and as a direct enabler of the brutal absolute monarchy of pre-revolutionary France, is wiped clean. What we get is akin to looking at a portrait of her. Adding insult to injury, the Doctor makes the decision to lock himself into pre-revolutionary France, so he can save Pompadour. He didn't know that he would get back, and didn't bother to give Rose and Mickey a way back to their time, potentially locking them on a lonely spaceship in the far future. It's stupid, it's callous, and it shows a vile disregard for the importance of their characters in favour of the glamour, spectacle, and prestige of the aristocracy. Even the suggestion that they have been waiting for five and a half hours for him (!) is played off as a joke. Rose and Mickey get very, very little to do in the story. Because the story thinks it self-evident that they are less important than Pompadour. Because the palace is fun, because the fantasy is nice to imagine.

And that's what it is. The palace is a set, a fantasy world in which the Doctor can snog important people and charge through to save them from the evil robots. The blood splattered on its walls is just out of frame.