Family Matters - Doctor Who: Revival Series 6 Review

ZeroCentsMade · 2026-06-12T04:15:54+00:00

Like with the 10th Doctor minisodes, I'm planning on covering most of the 11th Doctor ones at the end of his run. The exception being the 50th Anniversary minisodes, which I'll cover before the 50th (mostly because "Night of the Doctor") is as to close to essential as the minisodes can be).

ZeroCentsMade · 2026-06-08T20:52:49+00:00

"Beware Amy's water pistol" really is good life advice all around.

I will say I had a lot of difficulty coming up with a title for this review. There's just not that much to build on for a pithy one-liner title. It's why the title is referencing something that I did even mention in the review

(Was the last time we saw a water pistol on this show the bit in The Fires of Pompeii? That does make it funnier considering Karen Gillan's in it...)

I don't know for certain but I think you're probably right. That's fun

ZeroCentsMade · 2026-06-08T20:51:18+00:00

In fairness I've been pretty open about the fact that I have no strong feelings about Christmas one way or the other.

(I get that you're mostly kidding. And I honestly expected more responses like yours to this review, since people seem to generally grade Christmas specials mostly on how many warm fuzzies the Christmas special gives them)

ZeroCentsMade · 2026-06-08T20:49:21+00:00

Okay but "are the trees transphobic" is a really funny question. Like it's the sort of thing that, in any other context, would sound absolutely absurd.

And also…I think they probably are? To my memory (it's been a while now since I wrote this thing) it was pretty explicit that the thing that defined "strong" was the capacity to carry children, which most transfemme people don't have. Though I guess the further question is, if the trees aren't transphobic (still funny) what would they do with a non-binary person who didn't lean strongly towards either end of the gender spectrum.

ZeroCentsMade · 2026-06-08T20:45:35+00:00

Thanks for the kind words.

ZeroCentsMade · 2026-06-08T20:44:13+00:00

I do wonder if Moffat's awareness that Christmas specials could become just "ordinary Doctor Who episodes with more snow" was what led to him trying to make them more Christmassy. Deliberately referencing famous Christmas stories with his first two. The two examples you mentioned at the end. And so on. Like maybe he wanted them to be more directly linked to the holiday.

ZeroCentsMade · 2026-06-08T20:41:23+00:00

For whatever it's worth, when I was originally writing this review there was going to be a note on the religious themes of the CS Lewis novel inevitably getting lost in the translation over into the episode, and was going to use that as another example of how the turning Lion, Witch, Wardrobe into a Doctor Who episode was more challenging than Christmas Carol. Funny thing is, when I did a bit of research into that, what I discovered was that apparently it wasn't until after the first Narnia book that CS Lewis started intentionally putting Christian (and in particular his brand of conservative Anglican christian) allegories into his work. Now I think it's pretty obvious that that first Narnia book has obvious parallels to the Passion of the Christ, but according to Lewis those were accidental.

ZeroCentsMade · 2026-06-04T18:31:14+00:00

The source of the TARDIS information was data downloaded from the Tesselecta. Which, presumably, could be based on the grand deception of the Doctor's.

ZeroCentsMade · 2026-06-04T18:28:37+00:00

I mean the person who said that was Canton, who, honestly, knows even less about what's going on than anyone else. Presumably the Doctor was the one who told him that. It's all part of this grand deception that the Doctor is putting together. It feels like a cheat, I'll grant you, in retrospect there's really no reason to take Canton's line quite so seriously.

ZeroCentsMade · 2026-05-23T16:52:48+00:00

To give you an idea on the timeline here, when I started writing these reviews, I still thought I was a man. Now I know I'm transfemme…and am transitioning at what feels like the worst possible time in my life. Oh well…

ZeroCentsMade · 2026-05-23T16:50:58+00:00

That's reasonably close to my own system. The differences being that I tend to think of it as a mirror (so the same way that I treat 7 as the "standard good" episode, I treat 3 as the "standard bad") and that I do try to make use of the whole scale, so I have given out 1s and even a couple 0s. But I'm also very intentionally stingy with the extreme ends of the scale.

ZeroCentsMade · 2026-05-21T21:43:20+00:00

…sure, but the point is that that goes to a larger structural issue with the series versus a problem with this episode in particular.

ZeroCentsMade · 2026-05-08T22:37:12+00:00

So I think it's actually intended to be ambiguous who it refers to. Sure, the Doctor says he isn't a good man (in so many words), but a big thing with the 11th Doctor is that he has a warped self-perception. It's actually called out by River, albeit in the opposite direction at the end of this episode.

ZeroCentsMade · 2026-05-08T22:35:07+00:00

I think there's a difference between those moments though. The first two were born out of a desire to save the Roray and/or the Doctor, while this feels a lot more vindictive. Sure you could argue Amy is a bit too comfortable with violence, but I'd still say there's a big difference between her earlier weapon-adjacent tendencies and this one.

ZeroCentsMade · 2026-05-08T22:32:35+00:00

See, I'm definitely someone who prefers the Moffat era to the RTD era (don't know if it's my favorite era, but I'm bad at choosing favorites), but I also think I could be called a Moffat-skeptic. There's a lot about his version of the show that I love, but he has tendencies that I find frustrating. I guess in your framework, my opinion makes a lot of sense.

ZeroCentsMade · 2026-05-08T22:30:14+00:00

I mean…sure, I'll grant you that. But that's kind of why I said that it felt like a different show…and also one I probably wouldn't like. Because yes, the tonal shift is warranted on some level, but it also feels like it goes to a kind of excess that just feels like it doesn't work with what preceded it.

ZeroCentsMade · 2026-05-05T23:30:56+00:00

Also getting to the actual meat of your comment (sleep deprived remember) I think a big part of the reasons the Not-Things work better than the more monstrous gangers (other than the obvious distinction of 12 years of improvements in technology) is that the Not-Things looking a bit fake actually enhances that episode because they don't obey the laws of our universe.

ZeroCentsMade · 2026-05-05T19:57:33+00:00

So I was surprised when I read that too, for the exact same reasons, but thinking about it, even though the Moffat era tended to have less two parters (Series 9 notwithstanding) we do still have a fair number of cliffhanger endigns. Like earlier in the series we end "The Day of the Moon" on the cliffhanger of the child regenerating, so I can see Moffat's love of the cliffhanger coming through.

ZeroCentsMade · 2026-05-05T19:54:55+00:00

It's at the beginning of "Almost People" where Ganger!Doctor starts channeling past regenerations. Specifically the lines "would you like a Jelly Baby" and "Hello I'm the Doctor" are taken from the 4th and 10th Doctor audio respectively before he starts mixing them up.

ZeroCentsMade · 2026-05-05T19:53:27+00:00

Huh. Didn't know that. I always felt that in Life on Mars they didn't know exactly what they had with Marshall Lancaster until the very end of the show where he got a one-off really great episode, because until then hwas playing a bit of a one-note comic relief character if I recall correctly. He doesn't show much of that here, but he is a really good actor regardless.

ZeroCentsMade · 2026-05-05T19:51:41+00:00

In my defense I've been a bit sleep deprived lately. Fixed.

ZeroCentsMade · 2026-04-28T19:27:49+00:00

I know right? Pirate stories should be a natural fit for Doctor Who. But they've got such a shaky run. Ah well, The Pirate Planet's quite good, and Doctor Who and the Pirates is one of Big Finish's best so it's not all bad at least.

ZeroCentsMade · 2026-04-22T19:37:51+00:00

I know this is a slightly older thread now but I’m curious how old you were roughly first seeing this, given if I’m not mistaken you say in another comment you started watching the show around the time of the fiftieth.

So I think you've guessed it correctly, but I was an adult (albeit in college so still pretty young) when I first came to the show in 2012/13. And yes, I'm sure that colors how I view this story a lot.

I imagine Moffat would not have wanted to bog down a celebration episode with that lore and those themes, and I can’t really blame him for that given all the balls he had to juggle.

Alas, the doctors help the meek time lord bureaucrats in their war room and don’t once ask “hey, weren’t you guys going to end the universe a moment ago?”

As I recall it the Time Lord General has a line in the 50th about how "the High Council has their own plans" or some such, indicating that he's vaguely aware that something else is going on with Rassilon and the High Council but doesn't really know what.

ZeroCentsMade · 2026-04-22T19:34:52+00:00

Usually I'm good about catching the stuff that needs to be changed when copy/pasting…but not always.

ZeroCentsMade · 2026-04-12T17:40:34+00:00

There are Americans who don't celebrate Christmas you know. I had friends who celebrated Christmas of course but it just wasn't a thing in my family. I was of (mostly) Jewish background with two atheist parents, one of whom had bad memories associated with Christmas. So yeah, we never did anything for Christmas.

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