Doctor Who: Series 25, Episodes 8-10 – “Silver Nemesis” (1988)

I think of classic Who’s 10^th and 20^th anniversaries as big events because of their always-fun multi-Doctor specials. But even though we don’t get anything like that in series 25, the season actually does highlight the 25^th anniversary pretty well. The season kicks off with the Doctor and Ace back at Totters Lane in 1963, nudging up against the fourth wall by almost alluding to the show itself, and now part of “Silver Nemesis” is set on November 22, 1988—the eve of the 25^th anniversary. Of course, it also threatens worldwide destruction, but what’s a Doctor Who anniversary without a little murder and mayhem?

Every 25 years, the orbit of the comet Nemesis takes it past the Earth, always bringing devastation with it. This time, the comet falls to the planet’s surface, and a race begins to seize it and control its powerful living metal. The major players include a group of Nazis wanting to usher in the Fourth Reich, a 17^th century noblewoman who combines time travel with magic, and a fleet of Cybermen. It’s up to the Seventh Doctor and Ace to keep any of them from succeeding.

At times, this story leans too far into the “super mysterious Doctor and all his special secrets” thing, which is a well that the Seven era draws from too often. I’ve always preferred the Doctor as a madcap adventurer who barely scraped a passing grade from the Time Lord Academy, someone who’s important because of what they choose to do, not because of inflated significance bestowed on them by the narrative. I can find the latter too trite and wannabe-edgy.

That said, there’s still plenty to like about this serial. There are a lot of creative ideas at play here, and even though they pull the serial in a few different directions, it hangs together pretty well and doesn’t just feel like two or three separate stories got smashed together. The mix of antagonists is good, with Nazis fighting Cybermen fighting time travelers from the 1600s—only on Who, am I right? I also like the concept of validium, both how the living metal works when it’s constructed into a statue and the comet’s malevolent impact on the human race. Oh, and after seeing Ace take on Daleks with a baseball bat at the start of the season, we now get to see her take on Cybermen with a gold coin and a slingshot. Fun times all around!

Y tu Luna también: Everything Will Be Fine: Season 1, Episode 7 – “The Night” (2021)

*Episode premise spoilers.*

It’s penultimate episode time! This is a big one, which I always appreciate. Major stuff going down here.

Andrea is angry and scared. She hates that their house is being sold in the divorce, and she does not want to talk to a therapist as a prelude to her parents’ custody hearing. After storming away from her lunch shouting, “I hate you, Dad! I want a divorce from you too!”, she decides to run away. Soon, it’s all hands on deck with the adults. Julia and Ruy, both frantic and upset, are forced to work together to try and find her, with Fausto doing what he can to help.

Before we get into the big stuff, I love this little scene at the beginning of Idalia showing the house to a couple—it’s evident she doesn’t want to leave, but while her sabotage of a potential sale is at first kept to subtle remarks, it quickly balloons into, “At night, a child ghost appears. Poor thing, they say he drowned in the water tank. We sprinkled holy water, but it won’t go away.”

Andrea is a pretty smart and resourceful kid, and even in the midst of dealing with some big emotions that make her act recklessly, she still has enough presence of mind to concoct of relatively decent runaway plan. She definitely makes it hard for her parents to find her, and she thinks to bring snacks. Still, she puts herself in a very ill-advised position here.

Ruy, to his credit, steps up in this episode. For once, he doesn’t make excuses for selfish or distracted behavior and instead just springs right into action. He’s not thinking all that clearly—at first, he just asks people on the street if they’ve seen a little girl, before it occurs to him to pull up a picture of Andrea on his phone—but he’s not trying to deflect or argue about why it’s not really his fault. He just tries to make it better, and when Julia comes in hot, ready to blame him for what’s happened, he just takes it.

It’s a crucible moment for both of them—the sort of high-stress, high-stakes situation that can either make them pull together or break any remaining positive emotions they have toward one another. And I like that, while of course there’s a lot of focus on how Julia and Ruy are dealing with this crisis, they’re not alone in it. Idalia is on the case, ready to do anything from checking Andrea’s room to confirm whether she changed out of her school uniform to clarifying details about Andrea’s distinguishing features when Ruy and Julia report her missing. And Fausto, who’s dating Julia but still likes Ruy despite everything that’s gone down, just wants to support all of them; he calls in family connections to get the police to listen to them, and he’s there for Julia no matter what she needs.

Strong episode overall. Season finale next week!

Neurodivergent (Headcanon) Alley: Coach Beard (Ted Lasso)

It’s been a while since I’ve done a Ted Lasso Neurodivergent Alley post—which is kind of wild, since there are so many characters on that show who feel ND as all get-out. But Wicked took over my brain, so I very much had to write about that, and then a couple other characters jumped out at me and I wanted to circle back to another while it was still fresh in my mind. But I certainly haven’t forgotten about Ted Lasso, so it’s high time I worked some more of these characters back into the rotation. Today, we’re looking at the one and only Coach Beard.

As I’ve said before, it took some thinking before I saw Ted Lasso through a neurodivergent lens, and none of the characters necessarily pinged for me at the start. But if they had, Beard would’ve been a solid starting point (along with Trent and Barbara—more on them on some future date.) Ted’s good friend, right hand man, and personality foil, a few things jump out about Beard pretty quickly.

First, he’s very even-keeled on the whole. Beard’s vocal and facial affect are both fairly flat, and even when he gets angry, he tends to yell in an even tone. When he is expressive, though, he dials it all the way up to eleven and legitimately shrieks. He’s just as likely not to make eye contact as he is to stare too intently.

Beard is frequently shown reading, especially in the coaches’ office. While Ted comes to AFC Richmond with more of a hearts-and-minds focus to his coaching, Beard is the one who begins hardcore-downloading football knowledge, immersing himself in studying the game. He doesn’t have the players’ skill or Nate’s intuition for strategy, but he knows a lot more about football than Ted and sometimes corrects his misinformed statements. But it’s not just football. Beard is a fount of random knowledge he’s acquired about various topics and will gladly give a short infodump or spout a quick fact whenever it’s relevant. (Also, he has a tumultuous on-again-off-again relationship with a woman he met playing chess, and the first time they break up, it’s because Beard is prioritizing the game over her.)

Beard is often a quiet observer. He’s part of a large social group, but he frequently stays more on the periphery of it. His life is peppered by bizarre adventures—we get a glimpse of one in the Beard-centric “Beard After Hours” episode, but we’re more likely to get absurd references or offhand sight gags that only hint at whatever he got up to. He’s into drugs and mind-altering experiences, and to many of the characters, there’s an air of mystery about him. On a rare occurrence when he and Jamie are alone in the coaches’ office together, Jamie confesses, “I don’t really know how to talk to you,” and Beard replies, “Then it’s working.”

Finally, Beard and Ted are wildly different from one another, and yet they operate on a remarkably similar wavelength. Despite their differences in temperament and how they present themselves to the world, their friendship is knit together with their rituals, wordplay games, and support for one another. Beard follows Ted across the ocean to help coach a sport neither of them have experience with—there’s very little one wouldn’t do for the other, and even though they wouldn’t necessarily look like natural friends on paper, it’s obvious when you see them together. It’s sort of a platonic version of Roy and Keeley, two other neurodivergent-coded characters who fit wonderfully well together even though it feels like they shouldn’t. And that’s something that feels very autistic to me: two autistics with very different traits who nonetheless recognize how they both resonate on the same frequency.

I really love this Twitter post that most autistic folks can be sorted into either Ted Lasso Autism, Roy Kent Autism, or Coach Beard Autism. The poster, @positr0nic, further explained their theory like this:

“Ted likes being perceived, and really cares about being perceived positively […] Beard does not give a shit whether he is being perceived or not, nor does he give a shit about if it’s positive or negative […] Roy is sensitive to being perceived and generally doesn’t like being perceived.”

That’s honestly a great description, and while not every autistic person presents just like Ted, Roy, or Beard, I think that metric would still hold true. Even though I do think I have elements of both Ted and Beard in me, by that scale I would be more of a Roy Kent autistic. Really interesting to think about!