Doctor Who
Doctor Who

Episode Report Card
Jacob Clifton: B+ | 508 USERS: B-
YOU GRADE IT
Explicate! Elucidate! Exposit...ate!

...and, in a series of cuts, he's got the Doctor stripped to the waist and crucified on some kind of device. Like somebody said, "You know, I like gay porn, but it's just not boring enough. Or gay enough!" Van Statten runs his scanners all over the Doctor's torso, and for some reason it's quite painful, and he wants to patent the Doctor's binary vascular system, and the Doctor finally twigs to how van Statten works: "You don't just collect this stuff, you scavenge it." Van Statten is like, "Duh," and then says that "broadband" came from Roswell, and that the cure for the common cold has been discovered in "the Russian Crater," but that of course he's not releasing it: "Why sell one cure when I can sell a thousand palliatives?" You know Americans say that word all the time. He smirks, and the Doctor is still trying to help: "Do you know what a Dalek is, van Statten? A Dalek is honest. It does what it was born to do, for the survival of its species. That creature in your dungeon is better than you." And van Statten replies in the best way he can, which is to say, "Fine, if you said it, it must be true, so I guess I'm a huge torturer, so here's a hot cup of torture." The Doctor screams again that the Dalek is going to kill everybody in the whole Vault, but this is van Statten's world, van Statten's Cage, and nothing can escape the Cage. Zap! And oh, the Doctor screams: "But it's woken up! It knows I'm here! It's gonna get out! Van Statten, I swear no one on this base is safe! No one on this planet!" I like how this scene does quadruple duty: it's telling us about the reality of "Exterminate," to which we might not have completely caught on before: that it means "everybody for real." And it's making the point that just because the Doctor is an instrument of beauty doesn't mean van Statten won't use him as a weapon, because he doesn't get it -- and continues to link the Doctor and the Dalek in ever more complex ways, including that one. And it's making the point that even while getting zapped by homoerotic pain rays, the Doctor still wants to save van Statten's innards. And it's making the point that as long as there's fan fiction, good guys are going to get zapped by homoerotic pain rays.

Doctor Who

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