E0024 The 15th Doctor - Xmas 2023

In our final episode on the 2023 Dr Who specials, we take a look at the 2023 Christmas Special and the introduction of the 15th Doctor as played by Ncuti Gatwa.  We'll take a quick take at some of the larger themes of the show, and how it connects with the past and the (possible) future(s) of Dr Who.

Dr Implausible can be reached at drimplausible@implausipod.com

Our guest Dr. Aiden Buckland can be reached at doctoraidenwho@gmail.com

Recommended Reading:
Cornell, P. (1995). The discontinuity guide. Doctor Who Books.

Booth, P. (2010). Digital Fandom: New Media Studies. Peter Lang.

Booth, P. (2012). Time on TV: Temporal Displacement and Mashup Television. P. Lang.

Booth, P., & Jones, C. O. (2020). Watching Doctor Who: Fan Reception and Evaluation. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Transcript

DRI: Happy holidays, everybody. It's time for our first impressions of a very special Doctor Who episode, the first featuring the 15th Doctor, Ncuti Gatwa, in the 2023 Christmas special, The Church on Ruby Road. Join us as we see if the Doctor can rescue a Christmas orphan from Naka-gnomey Plaza in this episode of the Implausipod.

Welcome to the ImplausiPod, a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I'm your host, Dr. Implausible. And I'm sorry about that gnome pun, but only a little. In keeping with the spirit of the season, we'll try and keep things lighthearted and get right to the meat of the matter.

I'm going to cut a few minutes of my first impressions and we'll be joined once again by our guest Dr. Aiden Buckland to talk about this episode of Doctor Who. This will be our last episode of Doctor Who coverage for a while as we wrap up the season of specials from 2023 and the transition from the 13th through the 14th and 15th Doctor.

Yeah. Let's get into it. Here's my thoughts. And on a snowy Christmas evening in the past, we see a young baby being left in a basket in front of the church. And this is witnessed by the new 15th doctor that we've just been introduced to in the most recent special. And this is The Church on Ruby Road written by Russell T Davies.

And we cut to 19 years later where a young woman is being interviewed and appears as being filmed. She has somewhat of a resemblance to Baby Spice, though she has a scar on her eyebrow and I'm wondering if that's a reference to another long running British franchise that we're not going to mention here, because the author is horrible.

But we get a near miss with The Light Stand, which cuts the interview short, and we follow our viewpoint character for a little while, and a number of other accidents seem to be happening in their life, whether it's at the band performing, or at the coffee shop, or what have you. And in a couple of those, you see some claws in the background, and I'm wondering if it's like Gremlins, like a Twilight Zone reference or something to that effect.

On December 23rd, we find her in a bar, and the doctor arrives and asks her a few quick questions. He says he's from the Department of Gin and Tonic, or something to that effect. And I'll admit, he's very charming in this role. And he asks if she's been having a lot of accidents. So, given this, and the few previous scenes, I wonder if she's a bit of an accident magnet.

Like there's a character in DC Comics from back in the day: Blue Devil, who, you know, weird things would happen to him. And it's happened in other comic properties as well, like I think we mentioned Longshot a few episodes ago, or Domino from the recent Deadpool movie as well. There was a character in one of the Marvel comics back in the day called Jinx, I thought, and I thought they also had luck powers, so I'll track that down too.

Quick note here, I'll just insert that one was in G. I. Joe the comic book, and I guess she showed up in the movie, so there we go fragments of a memory from back then, but I don't think she had luck powers. 

Regardless, when a luck power is presented, there's like a repercussion or something to it. Like, you know, good luck for the person, bad luck for everyone around them, or bad luck for them as things get drawn to them. So it's weird that we're getting this kind of trope within Doctor Who. And my impression here is that As I'm seeing this, the Doctor Who is like "TV tropes the TV show". Everything is included.

There's so many references within this, but also so many things that get shown up and who have been referenced elsewhere. Like Rick and Morty and so many other things too. I'm not that familiar with Doctor Who to see where it's the source of these, as we've mentioned before, where it may have inspired some of those tropes, but there's a very recursive element to it, where pop culture continually feeds back in upon itself.

I'm getting a feeling there's a lot of other things that are getting drawn in here from the opening reference to the luck powers to whatever comes next. So we see these creatures, these gremlins. With the snowman incident where they're actively looks like they're trying to push the snowman off And it was really cute the way that was done he was able to use what looks like to be the new sonic screwdriver or something to that effect to change the stoplights and Get the car going and then we had another near miss and as he chats with the policeman He does definitely introduce that it's the new sonic screwdriver.

It's a device that goes ping I guess for any Monty Python fans that we might have and I'm sure the crossover of Monty Python fans and Doctor Who fans is very close to a perfect circle. During this interlude with the policeman, we get a sense of how much this doctor cares, and he passes on the information about the policeman's upcoming events.

And then we cut to the next scene, which is in daylight, and we have people arguing and I wonder if this is like a leftover from the giggles in the previous episode where people are arguing about stuff on the street or if it's just regular arguments that happen in person and it appears what's a police box is in the middle of the road.

We see some more gremlins moving around and we meet Ruby who I guess has been our viewpoint character up to this point. I might have missed if they mentioned her name earlier and we're introduced to her adopted family as well. It seems like there's a real length to this house but it's all up in one attic.

It's mostly just one long corridor and from there we learn that they have a new baby coming in which is Lulubelle They argue a little bit about the name and it's from something called Section 20 or and there's gonna be five or six days So I guess it's just from like a placement agency or foster care agency And then we see like a physical version of the Instagram logo where they actually take a picture. So like a live action Instagram, I guess.

And they comment on the, if you wait long enough, it becomes fashionable again, which I guess is probably true about Instagram as well. Now viewing and listing purposes, maybe being what they are, we can almost, almost say that this is like a Oh, Metacommentary on Doctor Who, given a 60 year time frame, it's gone on long enough for it to become fashionable, like, two or three times.

And from there we have some frantic stuff happening within the house, and Davina McCall, who was the TV executive from earlier, calls that there's no trace of Ruby's mom or dad, which is the whole plot of the television show earlier. Devena's also been having bad luck every day since she's been trampled by a moose, even.

And I thought those were rare in England, so I don't know if that's she's jet setting into the wilds of Canada and they happened upon a moose, or one just happened upon her in England someplace. But during this frantic activity, we have a baby that gets stolen. And they're up on the roof, and the goblins are, they're clearly goblins, not gremlins like I thought earlier.

But they have very much like a Games Workshop aesthetic to them which has been clearly defined over the ages, over the last 40 years or so. It goes back and forth with Dungeons and Dragons, World of Warcraft. And it's a kind of cultural aesthetic for goblin creatures in, within the Geekosphere at large.

And these are very close to them, but with our earlier mention of say the Harry Potter franchise. And I'm a little concerned because a few years ago on. His show on Apple The Problem with Jon Stewart, he called out J. K. Rowling for, like, the anti Semitic tropes and the portrayal of goblins within the Harry Potter universe.

So, I'm not sure if this is a point of concern specifically with having goblins as the antagonist in here, but in any event, we're, Ruby is pursuing the goblins to the roof and wants to rescue the child and the Doc and hops on the ladder and off they go, and here he says directly to the camera, I'm the doctor and he returns to it a couple times as if he's declaring in a way that, you know, people can like screen cap and show it.

It's a very framed way and he's restating it to the audience that he is the doctor. Then they can use this for like a clip show later or an advertisement or something. But in any event, we get this clear indication that he is the doctor and he brings out these intelligent gloves that he's able to hold on and transfer the mass and once again we get a reference to various elemental forces including Mavity.

So continuity between the shows, between the specials is clearly taking place. So from there, Ruby and the Doctor pulled up the ladder into the sky following the Goblin Sky Pirates, which is, again, like a Games Workshop Age of Sigmar kind of unstated faction within the background, or again, a World of Warcraft reference, the idea of steampunk goblins with tech that allows them to float and travel throughout the sky.

So, through chance and coincidence and luck, I'm wondering if the goblins are the Legion that the Toymaker was referring to in the last episode in the third of the specials. But. Perhaps they're related, perhaps not. At least we have the sense that there's this army here, and the doctor is talking about how coincidence is what stitches you in, it weaves you in, and he talks about like a tapestry or the threads.

Within culture at large we have this long association of the norns and weavers and how they control the fates, and we could almost say that this whole idea of goblins and the way they're incorporated here is a quilting point, to expound in length on another term that's used on a different philosophy podcast, but the doctor says here that he's looking at the tapestry, it's gorgeous, and he's talking about a brand new science, the language of luck, and he's busy learning the language.

And here, as in Wild Blue Yonder, he's mentioned that he knows like a billion languages or whatever, and now he's learning a new one. And it's associated with this other thing, which you don't normally think of as a language. 

I think we can tie it into, like, Kenneth Burke's ideas of 'terministic screens', that we all have these sciences, all these fields of knowledge that humanity has. Each kind of has their own lingo, their own way of communicating, the way of understanding their own lexicon, and their own language. And we have this idea replicated here as well. 

Now, the doctor states the goblins are able to escape through time, and then goes on to correct Ruby that, no, they're not time travelers, but they are able to kind of skirt through time.

He's soon able to escape due to some skills he picked up in a long, hot summer spent with Harry Houdini, which, again, kind of drops a thread or two there. And he learned how to do this there, but Here, in the land of knots, the screwdriver's no help, so he has to learn the 'vocabulary of rope'. And in doing so, he's able to find the key knot, or accordion knot, for this particular room, and that allows him to find an escape path.

Now, this is a Christmas special, after all, and this is probably my favorite moment of the whole episode. And perhaps it is for other people as well. This is where we're at Nakanomi Plaza. The gnome is, I guess, another derivation of the Goblin in popular culture or fantasy literature at least and you know kind of traditional folkloric sense that they're these kind of small mischievous creatures but what we're talking about here are the goblins as they're presented going through the ventilation shafts i laughed out loud as we have this shot by shot remake of the ventilator scene from the original die hard which is of course a christmas movie And it's quite fun.

So they crash land into a goblin dinner party with another musical number, and they're working on creating baby scones. Not small scones, but scones made from babies. And the doctor passes off the glove and says, "Love the glove", which is, I guess, cute. And then they're able to escape with the baby after a bit of a dance sequence.

And I'm kind of cutting through. No, this isn't supposed to be a note by note recap. Just the same things that kind of come through. And after escaping with the baby, they're able to land back at the apartment. The doctor meets Cherry Sunday, who's the grandmother there, and he just describes it as a tasty treat, and she's waiting for her tea.

And again, the 15th doctor is incredibly charming, I gotta admit. In every scene or every interaction he has, he comes across as just delightful. And, I'll admit, it was kind of a joy to watch some of the episode here, as he talks about how accidents are how the goblins get us. It's not magic, it's kind of like physics.

It's another form of language, he quotes. And again, we have this idea of communication being an underlying theme here of language and knowledge. And we get back to Lulu Bell being the 33rd child of Clara, who I guess is Ruby's foster parent mother. And the Doctor claims that he's adopted as well, and I don't know if that's real, or if that's like a deeper part of the Doctor Who lore, if as a Time Lord he's adopted, or if that's just a way, something he's saying to kind of participate in the conversation, or to redirect it away from all the coincidences that are happening.

We see that the house is split, and the goblins arrive once more, and we get a little back to the future moment with the Polaroid, where the goblin whose picture was taken has now disappeared, but they've also disappeared. Ruby has disappeared, and we have this little bit of a warp or time shift in the surroundings, and I notice the first thing is that the fridge is empty, that all these pictures of the 33 children that we were interest introduced to is now gone, and Clara, in this instance, is a little bit more sullen, a little bit more rude, and a little bit dour. And she says, well, she's done five or six times a foster parent, but only when she's needed the money.

And the Doctor states now that they, the goblins have cracked the timeline. So it goes back in time to Ruby's birthday from 19 years ago. And we see the viewpoint from the beginning of the show. He puts on the gloves and. As the goblins are escaping with Ruby and pulls the ship all the way down to impale the goblin king in the spire of the church and drops Ruby off just in time a moment or two before midnight strikes.

So she's still a Christmas baby and the timeline is saved. But the doctor is not pursuing the mother to find out who she is. He lets her walk away and my supposition, sure, I wasn't quite sure due to the silhouette or anything, if perhaps the mother will be revealed at some certain point and It's ambiguous.

It could be another time loop where the person dropping off Ruby, the child Ruby, is an elder Ruby at some point in the future. It sure seems like it could be some coincidence there. And then he goes back to save the life of the TV exec and the doctor states himself that I'm the bad luck and he feels like he needs to go.

But out in the street, he waits, the Tardis comes back and Ruby steps in and he states one more time, "the doctor" and we cut to the "new home, new who" in spring of '24. And following that, we have a brief denouement with Mrs. Flood, who turns directly to the camera and goes, what, have you never seen a Tardis before?

And I guess if you're following me here, we know that I haven't really, not much, but it's cute that the way that they brought that in, I don't know if they've ever played directly to the camera and broken that fourth wall before, but it's something I'm looking to see in the future. So let's bring in our guest and have a quick discussion about the 15th Doctor.

And we're back and I'd like to welcome once again, our guest, Dr. Aiden Buckland to talk to about some of the backgrounds and this episode of Dr. Who, the 2023 Christmas special where we introduced to the 15th doctor in a full episode this time played by the charming and immutable Ncuti Gatwa, right? Am I saying that right, Aidan?

AB: Pretty close as far as I understand it, Ncuti Gatwa. So pretty close and you know, I wish I could say I'm an expert on this, but he's very new. 

DRI: So all right, well we'll work on our pronunciation and we'll keep that going. So I've run through a little bit of my kind of overview of the show so far, but I'd really like to get your opinion about what stood out to you for the 15th doctor in his first full length appearance.

AB: It was a good setup, I think, for the next season. I think that one of our friends and colleagues has this idea that, you know, each doctor has to have kind of a thesis statement or, you know, what is the show about with this new character. So I felt, you know, the last special didn't really have that as much for the new doctor, especially with the bi-generation, that idea kind of eclipsed his appearance.

So in this one, we get kind of a full throated version of that thesis statement. And I think what's interesting here, and we'll probably get to it later in the discussion, is the things that Russell T. Davis is really aiming towards, which is interesting from the, the kind of meta-who perspective. 

DRI: Okay.

Well, why don't we just get to it right now? What is he aiming towards for the meta-who perspective? 

AB: Ah, so from your intro, actually, this was one of the things that stood out to me. The idea that So for every iteration of the Doctor, usually there's a driving mystery .For Eccleston and for a large part of Tennant's run, it was the Time War, this carried over to Matt Smith's time, and generally that's been the kind of driving force up until really the end of Matt Smith's run when Capaldi takes over. At this point in time, you know, the fan base of Dr. Who and the kind of creators have been dealing with kind of something the last show runner didn't introduced, which is directly addressed in this particular episode when the doctor mentions that he is also adopted.

This is from a storyline from the previous show runners tenure called "the timeless child", which does a little bit of retconning about who the Doctor is, where the Doctor comes from there, I suppose, relationship to the time Lords of Gallifrey. So it's interesting that Davis is directly addressing this because this was one of the more controversial, I think developments in the last 15, 20 years of this new who run. 

DRI: Oh, interesting. Well, for me, I mean, there's no retcons. It's all just continuity. See if I'm only been in here for about three or four episodes, but it's interesting to for that perspective. I mean, maybe looking at it from this point in time and looking backwards, maybe it evens out some of those rough edges where if you're participating in, as it happens, you see it as a retroactive continuity or retcon, so to speak. 

I don't know, but how did it work as like a Christmas episode as a whole? Like we have that whole, you know, Church on Christmas Eve kind of thing, starting this off in the past. And it feels like. Is that traditional for like a Christmas special?

Is that something they normally do? 

AB: It's the kind of kernel of Christmas elements that you see scattered throughout, I think, which really defines the Christmas specials in particular. So it is and I think you, you addressed this as well, this idea of, of Dr. Who being a kind of like TV tropes, the TV show it's very much embodies that.

So, you know, in previous Christmas specials, we've seen everything from, you know, the spaceship Titanic potentially crashing into earth, to turning into The Poseidon Adventure for most of the episode. Again with these loose kind of connections that it;s Christmastime here again. That was very in keeping, and we get this wacky Goblin airship adventure, which just happens to be happening at Christmas, and y'know those themes of family and connected and togetherness, you know, very much prevalent in this episode, so I think it fits in that pantheon, for sure. 

DRI: Yeah, I appreciated them referencing other Christmas movies throughout, that was fun.

But, seeing as we're in the Goblin Skyship right now, maybe what we need to do is just talk about the inclusion of goblins as an antagonist for this episode. There's long been associations of goblins in popular culture, but I'm not sure. How tied they are onto Doctor Who and given the state of the world right now, I know there can be some definitely some critiques based on the inclusion of Goblins.

AB: Yeah, so the Goblins in particular with Doctor Who you know, not a frequent character that I'm, I'm aware of, at least it might have been in the original run. I think what really stood out to me in this special is that it's very rare that a Doctor Who monster type villain ends up being purely monstrous.

And I thought that that was kind of the thing that was strange about the way that the goblins were depicted in here. So, you know, setting aside some of the more problematic cultural elements that seem to be surrounding this bit of lore in other properties, it usually Doctor Who is engaging with what is kind of driving the particular antagonist in any given episode.

So, didn't really address that. Other than you know the big, hungry goblin king. And you know the idea that the solution to that was just to end it, I mean again, in that previous special you saw the doctor offering the toy maker the ability to travel and have infinite games. This is the kind of solution that he usually reaches for didn't seem to be on the table this time, which was a bit weird.

DRI: Well, I mean, I noted that maybe the goblins were like the legions the Toymaker was alluding to in the prior episode that they were kind of working to him because they are mischievous as well. But the sense that the goblins were drawn by coincidence and that the solution was to go back in time where he realized that they were, they were enacting some change there.

We get a little bit of. Well, I guess every time travel movie ever from like Looper and 12 Monkeys to Bill and Ted's is kind of all rolled into, and I guess Back to the Future. But that's probably something that happens consistently through Doctor Who. The ability to travel through time means that we see changes that have long lasting repercussions as we're still dealing with Mavity, which I think came up in the Disney movie.

In the text in this episode still as well. So they're, they're, they're having that continuity, but that notion of coincidence is the quilting point, so to speak of the draws all these various threads together is kind of what was there. And I guess the other theme would have been the hunger that. They're hungering for these children.

I don't know if that's driving enough, but again, maybe this is like a one off to set up larger themes throughout in the way that, you know, we'd see sometime a monster of the week in X Files or something that was apart from the meta plot or only briefly referenced the meta plot that was going on. 

AB: Yeah, in that case, this is very typical in terms of an introductory adventure for a new companion.

So, usually there is some adventure that'll happen. He gets mixed up with someone and then he's drawn to them for some reason or another. And I think that they did a good job of establishing that for Ruby if she is going to be the companion moving forward, which seems to be the case. 

DRI: Yeah. At least for.

You know, judging by the trailer at the end of the show, I'm not one for usually watching any meta textual elements, but there's enough clips for the season ahead, it looks like, that she will be a companion for at least a significant part of it, or I don't know how many episodes they use to draw those clips together, but obviously we're going to see her coming up here in 2024.

With respect to Ruby, I mean, Did we get a sense that Ruby might show up again? Like the mother that, like at the end of the show, Doctor Who, decides not to find out who the mother is. Is that one of those mysteries left, or I guess a thread left for future exploration if needed? Or is that just something to allow fans to speculate and think about who might Who that might be, or could it even be Ruby herself dropping off the child?

AB: Yeah, I think that that, you know, is clearly the thesis statement for Ruby in particular. So that she's, the MacGuffin for her is always going to be this trying to fill in that blank. And I think there's also the notion that him not chasing after that person,

I think that's because he probably knows who it is again, Time Lord's perception. And I guess I should say the doctor's perception now that the timeless child is really being fully engaged with the doctor's perception is different than the rest of us. He seems to see things even that might be hidden to the rest of us.

So I suspect that this will come up in a future episode. Most companions get that. So this will be Ruby's MacGuffin. Okay. 

DRI: So, we'll leave the MacGuffin for now, but that idea of seeing other things comes directly into this episode where he's, obviously he's looking at the knots and he's saying it's another form of language again.

So again, this, I guess, underlying theme is kind of like catnip to at least me. But, Here we had, you know, he's able to read the goblin ropes, and what was your thought about that, that, like I say, that, because that ties directly into his sight, his vision, the way he was able to look at everything there.

AB: Yeah, he's always drawn to oddities or things that he can't explain at first, so I thought that the, the language of rope was really neat. Inclusion. And of course, you know, as, as communication scholars, we both know, you know, this is actually a form of communication that has existed in human history. So in the Andes, a number of cultures used to use a series of knots that you would tie into a string like material called the kipu, which would be used for actually recording information over time.

DRI: So it was nice to see the language of rope, but make an appearance. Likewise. Whenever they're reaching out that there's more than one way to know this, or more than one way to understand it, that it isn't necessarily physics, but it isn't necessarily magic, it's like there's a logic to it, and it's just, you have to work at it to understand what that logic is.

I really appreciate that. There's an underlying thread of exploration and learning and puzzle solving that seems to be drawn throughout these episodes. And I do appreciate it for that. It's, it's different than some of the other shows though. Admittedly, I don't want to watch a lot of like detective fiction or Sherlock or anything like that.

I guess we talked a few episodes of how this is kind of tied into perhaps the mandate back in the 60s and 70s to have, you know, television had to have an educational component to it. And we were stuck with that for a long time. So there's always a lesson learned or GI Joe would say, you know, the more, you know, there'd be a lesson at the end of it.

And then they'd get on with the laser blasters and explosions and everything else. But yeah, we're, we're seeing that. I'll maybe throw it to you. Is there anything else that really jumped out at you as a specific thing you'd want to look at as a Who fan for this episode? 

AB: I think for me, kind of the, the things that were remarkable about this Christmas special were really the things that were kind of missing or the missed opportunities.

So the awkward fumbling that the doctor always has whenever he gets a new body is kind of one of those tropes that is always there in the show. It, I can't think of a regeneration in the new era or even the old era where the doctor has been so sure of his self or herself in the beginning. So I thought that Ncuti's performance there was interesting and I think, you know, given their first interaction at the, The club where he's dancing, that to me seems to indicate that he's been kind of off on his own for a little while and he's just out there enjoying himself.

So that might explain that we might get a bit more of that, or we might not. This is one of the things with Dr. Who sometimes they just throw these threads out there and nobody ever pulls on them. Sometimes, you know, like the timeless child from the Chibnall era, you know, they go headlong at them. So this was one of the things, and this is always the thing about Dr. Who as a property: everything is canon until it's not so, you know, in the previous doctors regenerations, it was always a rule that time Lords could only regenerate about 12 times. So, you know, coming up to the end of Matt Smith's era, they had to figure out a way to explain away how it is the, you know, Capaldi and eventually Whittaker and now Ncuti Gatwa could be the doctor.

Because of course, at that point in time, he'd already gone through all of. the 13 faces that he could have been. So there was a, you know, a narrative device put in place for that. And then later on, Chibnall added to that with the Timeless Child, again, adding to the lore of this particular character. So it's interesting to see them taking a run at that in particular.

So, you know, with this new who era, we're really Diving deep into the Doctor as a, as a character, but even things like the crack in time. So during the Matt Smith era, one of his, I don't know if villain is the right word, but one of the problems I suppose he was always trying to solve was this crack that he found in time and space, which seemed to be caused by kind of a paradox created by his Tardis.

So the idea that the crack that shows up in their apartment didn't look like that crack kind of made me a bit sad because again, that. That would have been a nice callback to just a previous doctor's era and just, again, building that continuity. 

DRI: Yeah. So maybe it's this internal continuity then that we're getting the sense that this doctor is different.

He's rested or perhaps he's, you know, we'll, we'll have at some point during Ncuti Gatwa's run, we'll have that resolution of what happened with the 14th doctor and when the 14th doctor actually changes over. So maybe this rested doctor has worked out all those problems about learning the body, learning his tools and technology and, and is able, you know, we'll see the full capabilities of what a doctor is able to do when they're not continually stressed from bouncing around all the time.

And so. There may be like a resolution there in the future. I feel like just from my perspective, as again, somebody who hasn't watched much of this, I feel like there's going to be some connection in the future where that 14th doctor does get absorbed or transforms into like the 15th doctor and we get a loop back, but I, that's kind of, you know, I guess my first fan theory as a new Who fan about what we might see.

So we'll stay tuned to that one, I guess. Anything else? 

AB: At this point, I think, you know, with the, the specials we've pretty much come to the, the end of the sheet there, but if I could make a couple of recommendations so for those people who are interested in learning a bit more about Dr. Who 1995's Discontinuity Guide by Paul Cornell, Martin Day, and Keith Topping is a great attempt at really reconciling some of the strange things that happened in the first run of the doctor who show.

And of course, for new who, and really for contemporary takes on fandom and, and Dr. Who in particular, I definitely recommend Paul Booth from DePaul university. You know, he's had a number of books from, you know, digital fandom 2. 0 in 2016 to time on TV in 2012. And he's one of those scholars who's out there kind of taking on these topics in ways that could be interesting for some of the fan base.

DRI: Okay, awesome. So what we'll do is I'll make sure we can put those bibliography items up in the show notes. And if they are available, I know sometimes older academic books may not be quite as accessible, but if there are links to them, we'll find them and include them as well. That's yeah, thank you.

We'll include that for anybody who's listening and wants to learn more. And that includes myself at this point in time. So yeah, wonderful. I think for the new season, it's not generally or I haven't had a lot of success of trying to like live stream or capture episodes as they appear. My schedule doesn't necessarily allow for that, but I think maybe we can touch base during the season here coming up.

That might mean, I think if it starts in March, maybe we touch base sometime during that. So April or June, we can always get together and talk about new who again and see how our 15th doctor is doing. Once again, Dr. Aiden Buckland, thank you for joining us and explaining some of the deeper themes here with Dr. Who. 

I've been enjoying the 14th and 15th doctor, so I've gone through a couple already. I'm an old hand at this. And thank you so much for joining us and participating with us here on the implausipod. 

AB: Thanks for having me. 

DRI: Anytime.

Once again, we'd like to thank you for joining us on this 24th episode of The Implausipod. I'm your host, Dr. Implausible. You can reach me at Drimplausible at implausipod dot com. And our guest has been Dr. Aiden Buckland. You can reach him at DrAidenWho at gmail dot com. The show is licensed under a Creative Commons 4. 0 share alike license.

And with our Doctor Who coverage concluded, we're going to return to our mainline discussion. We have a number of episodes coming up, including the third part of our Sphere three parter, with an episode entitled Echange, that should be releasing within the next day or two, or probably at least available by the time you hear this.

We'll also follow that up with an episode titled Silicon Dreams, and then The Old Man and the River. So some more content will be coming out at you soon. Keep an eye out for it wherever you get your podcasts, except for Spotify. Cause again, we're not fans. Have a wonderful new year and all the best in 2024.

We'll talk to you again soon.