Ok, so Britain isn’t a democracy, it’s a feudal theocracy with a parliament bolted on. Everything from the levers of power to who appears as an extra in the BBC’s latest drama about a morally grey cop on the edge, are all selected based on whether they knew some lord Sisterfucker or other during their time in boarding school. The private school nepotism is so endemic we have a slang term for it, jobs for boys.

Now Britain’s feminism has always been split into two opposing movements: grassroots, activist feminism and bourgeois, academic feminism. The latter has always been exclusionary whereas different waves of the former have had various degrees of intersectionality, for example bourgeois feminists during the fight for women’s suffrage supported the disenfranchisement of black people. During what’s referred to as second wave feminism, academic feminists in the UK got really weird about lesbians. You had political lesbians (who are too dense a mess to wade through in just this comment) but you also had what have retroactively been referred to as LERFs, because much like the TERFs of today, LERFs argued for the segregation of single sex spaces for the safety of women. LERFs would print homophobic zines about predatory lesbians in public toilets, claim lesbians were dangerous to their straight competitors in sports, any of the “protect women” moral panic stuff you’ve heard nowadays got its origins here.

As working class intersectional movements gained ground (such as with movements such as “lesbians and gays support the miners” causing unions to change their stance on homophobia and by extension drag the left of centre political parties with them), homophobia began to lose ground politically but still held ground within academic feminism. It’s at this point that intellectuals such as Germaine Greer began shaping modern academic feminism. Cliffnotes on Greer - she’s a pro-paedophilia, anti-gay, bourgeois feminist author, although her most famous work is about how the patriarchy structures the role of women in a way that denies their sexuality (it’s okay I guess but not particularly ground breaking). When she was doing a talk about that book “the female eunuch” she noticed a woman who’d asked her to sign her copy had hairy hands. Thus began Greer’s crusade against the existence of trans women.

Now former LERFs were having to disguise and tone down the intensity their homophobic views as they became increasingly marginalised, they found their target in trans people since they had not yet entered into the British zeitgeist outside of shitty jokes in sitcoms. Greer’s rhetoric was largely about trans women infiltrating and erasing womanhood and fit well into the transphobic milieu.

The kinds of privately educated failchildren who now fill the heart of this country’s liberal parties are the kindsa people whose views of feminism were informed by that milieu and hence these parties stance on social issues are shaped towards SWERF/TERF rhetoric. While the further right parties are filled with homophobes who’re using the destruction of trans rights as a wedge issue to attack the larger queer movement.

Opinion polls across the UK consistently trend towards a sorta live and let live attitude towards gender identity, but why step out of your insular bubble and see what people actually think when you can just do what you want and then yell “will of the people!” over dissenting voices?

Following off last week’s episode, Sutekh has killed all life in the universe. Will the Doctor be able to undo that?

Things I liked:

Using the time window to make a simulacrum of the TARDIS even if it was just an excuse to nostalgia bait.

Dragging Sutekh behind the TARDIS like he’s a medieval serf being executed for poaching his lord’s deer, was an unexpected way to unkill everyone. Just grinding that fucker along the side of the time stream. The sicko inside me was pogging the entire time.

They didn’t do any magical bloodline shit with Ruby (I was super worried where that was going). Also the moment she finally found her birth mother was really sweet.

The hopeless last stand at the beginning of the episode was goofy in a good way. The fucking Segway with the concealed machine guns got a chuckle out of me.

The Doctor parting with a companion on good terms for once instead fucking up and killing/stranding them.

Things I hated:

The nostalgia TARDIS. Repeated complaint of mine, won’t dwell on it this time. K9’s head was mounted on a plaque in there, so I guess it’s from the good universe were neither of those K9 themed Dr Who spinoffs never happened.

Mrs Flood, she had a minor part in this series as a whole but the kinda forth wall breaking meta-character she’s shaping up to be is rarely (if ever) well written and she exists as an indelible mark of Dr Who’s disneyfication.

As a finale it could’ve been worse. I actually really liked this one.

With all that outta the way, I can finally give my appraisal of this most recent series:

It’s good. Some of the episodes didn’t appeal to me personally and there’s too much of an emphasis on fan nostalgia but I liked it overall. Even the episodes I didn’t like were better than the worse parts of some series in recent memories. I’m happy that Dr Who is back to existing on a scale of mid-good instead of unwatchable-mid. Let’s see how long they can keep this up.

No, fuck you [insert family member] I do not want to hear another unprompted observation that my hair is “too pretty” and “wasted on a boy”. Fuck off. Why does my entire extended family have to be like this? Why can’t they be chill like my parents?

“In your dreams, were you an ambulance?”

In the first part of this series finale, the set up from episode 2 and also the Christmas special finally pays off. The Doctor and Ruby return to modern day Britain to seek UNIT’s help in finding Ruby’s mother and identify a mysterious woman who’s always popping up in the background of previous episodes only to accidentally help Sutekh, god of death manifest into reality. Tune in next week to see the Doctor fight a Dark Souls boss.

What I liked:

Sutekh’s new design. In classic Dr Who, Sutekh was just a bloke in a big robe with a funny helmet. This many-eyed jackal man thing is kinda rad if also a little generic in its own way.

That scene where the person at that speech turned to dust. Dr Who has been more restrained with on screen deaths for years, so even this was a “let’s fucking go!” moment for me.

What I didn’t like:

The return of Sutekh. I just don’t like Dr Who’s constant need to dredge up old villains from its history for the nostalgia factor. This new Sutekh seems completely different in terms of design and MO than Sutekh the destroyer, so just, why bring it back? You could just as easily have given them a different name. Who was eagerly awaiting the return of this long forgotten antagonist? Like, at least Beep the Meep is a popular character amongst the fandom. Who asked for this?

Rant over. I’m going to withhold my overall rating for this episode until next week when we get the finale. I’m cautiously optimistic though.

"I hope this post gets a lot of tankie comments. They’ll be flockin’ to a blockin’

Heh. See, cause. It rhymes. So.

The one yesterday had that commenter who was all “what’s this? Oh it took me a second cause I blocked all the tankies” and that’s when I realized I forgot to block lemmy.ml. Now that that’s done, it’s just onsie-twosies. It’s a bright, bright sunshiney day."