I have to say, I did not have “canonizing the Shalka Doctor” on my Doctor Who bingo card for this series

I’m not really into period costume dramas, so this one didn’t hit quite as hard for me as the last few episodes.

But Ncuti is very charming when he’s flirty, and Rogue was charismatic enough to make it believable. And the core idea of spacefaring ren faire types was fun.

I also appreciated Ruby being able to pull the Doc back from his typical “moving on” bullshit.

I’m not a bidgerton fan, I prefer my period dramas to be of the star trek variety. But this was still a good episode, I was getting echoes of “family of blood”.

Rogue is interesting, we’re given basically no back story but I was convinced they were going to tie the character somehow to Jack Harkness. I’m glad they actually followed through on the kiss and didn’t just leave it teased, that would have been very 2005.

The marriage proposal scene got me thinking - the doctor is already married to river song. We know that she has had interactions with doctors other than 11, so the marriage seems to go beyond regens. How does marriage even work. Is that polygamy? Parallel monogamy?

I like the inclusion of nerd terminology like cosplay and dnd - Get the kids watching radicalised early :)

Ruby was good in this - clearly a competent companion that can think on her feet. I was kind of hoping we’d make more progress on the twist by now, I guess we’re keeping all of that for the very end.

Lesson to take away - always build a backdoor into your deadlock seals.