Gen of Deek.

TV Den of Geek has a reaction filter article for the eighth season of Doctor Who trying to capture (a) what went wrong and (b) why people thought that wrongness occurred, as well as the good things. It's a good survey clarifying how I also eventually rationalised the thing which is that its the usual post-regenerative torpor playing out across a whole season, giving us all the usual beats as seen in Robot or The TV Movie or The Eleventh Hour stretched across ten of them. You could argue that if they'd signposted this earlier on somehow we (well, ok, I) might have been a bit more forgiving but nevertheless ...

Anyway so the Gen of ... Den of Geek piece covers the astonishingly objectionable gender politics in The Caretaker as a reflection of the show shifting towards the right wing and somewhere in this paragraph ...

"Then there’s the subject of gender. Granted, Moffat has long been accused of misogyny because of the way he is said to write female characters. However, this is more specific than that. Although this could be said to be typical of the season as a whole, consider "The Caretaker." Clara might be shouldered with the dramatic weight in this story, but she is still subject to the two men in her life (i.e. the Doctor and Danny). She is forced to explain her life choices to them as well as her decisions. Eventually, these two men assert their custodianship over Clara – something she accepts as positively endearing. Indeed, some have observed that, in this light, those of a more liberal disposition might see the very title of this episode as objectionable."

... they link back to my review which is nice of them. The phrase I've emboldened here.  Two things: (a)  I agree and (b) that its interesting that what I said would be considered as an expression of my liberal values because as we've all discovered recently it's one thing to say you're a liberal, another thing to be it and this seems like confirmation, albeit from someone reading a Doctor Who review written in desperation close to midnight that I'm not just a self-labeling liberal but display them in my writing too.  Oh well good.

Also on Den of Geek this week is a really rather good listicle of twenty-one stories which are better than their reputation suggests to which I'd add Robots of Sherwood from this series, which was in the end my favourite episode.  So there.