By: Alex Kuhn @magaman28
Before you read this, I will warn you there are spoilers. If you absolutely want to watch The Church on Ruby Road, go right ahead. And then come back to this review.
THE GOOD:
The episode is a sort of homage to the Gremlins movie and also goblins in general. It’s enjoyable if you enjoy that sort of thing.
THE BAD:
So many things went wrong in this episode.
First, the mavity gag from The Wild Blue Yonder episode returns. It was a stupid gag in the first place and continues to be pointless now.
This is the first ever Doctor Who episode to feature a musical number, and it was atrocious. The best one can say about it is that the performance at least managed to weave itself into the story.
The sonic “screwdriver” that the Doctor uses looks more like a buttplug than it does the traditional sonic screwdriver. I don’t understand why the BBC went with this design (though their recent fixation on homosexuality, as discussed in our previous Who reviews, may have something to do with it), but it’s certainly not faithful to the series.
And speaking of the BBC’s homosexuality obsession, this episode features the Doctor dancing with a man at a bar. Why? Why do we have to emphasize the Doctor’s sexuality? The show has never before addressed this topic because it simply isn’t relevant. What happened to just entertaining the masses? The BBC have totally lost their minds over the DEI agenda, and it’s going to cost them fans. It could also be that the BBC is trying to attract more women to the show, thinking that inserting a gay Doctor will make women feel welcome to watch the series since women, in general, feel less threatened by gay dudes than by straight dudes.
Personally, this is the last episode of the 15th Doctor that I will ever watch. By pushing so much DEI into this series, the BBC is clearly trying to pander to people who are not actually interested in sci-fi rather than serving the devoted fan base it has spent the last 60 years cultivating. We can actually expect viewership to decline due to so much DEI inclusion, which is the end of Doctor Who as we know it.