- "Stooky Bill" was a real thing, not aomething made up for the show.
- "You must be used to sunnier climes." "I was born in Cheltenham." The Toymaker being an ethnic stereotype and a racist is a callback to nthe fact that the original Toymaker back in the 1966 story "The Celestial Toymaker" was played by a white man (Michael Gough) who was dressed as a Chinese Mandarin, which would never go over today. According to the DVD extras, "Celestial" was an old British derogatory term for a Chinese person, which I had never heard.
- "Everyone started thinking they're right all the toime..." Ah, the Sledgehammer of Social Commentary.
- "How do we fight the human race?" Ssucker punch 'em!
- "Melanie, hello!" I'm happy to see her, but I would not have picked Mel as a companion that they would bring back from the old show.
- "I wasn't the first redhead?" "No, that was me." Turlough would like a word.
- The Zeedex: "An oinvention of the Vlinx." OK.
- Watching Kate go nuts was disturbing.
- There's Trinity Wells again, haven't seen her in a while.
- Good seeing Donna and Mel use their brains, figuring out what was going on.
- "If he burned himself into television itself..." This makes no sense whatsoever, but I suppose having a cosmic being as your heel excuses it.
- "I got a lift off a zingo and came bacl to Earth." Wasn't "Dragonfire" set far in the future?
- "My family are all gone. Remember?" Owing to the screwy ending of "The Tiral of a Time Lord", we never saw the story where Mel officially "met" the Doctor on TV, but from what I recall, she was supposed to have met him during an adventure where the Master tried to corrupt the world's banking systems, so maybe he killed them all.
- Donna gets herself hired to work for UNIT.
- "Don't wait for me. Fire when ready." You've got a time m,achine, why wouldn't you wait and make sure that everything comes out alright?
- "Donna, I'm a billion years old. " Referencing "Heaven Sent".
- "Ah, Tonna Noble. I wondered which one of you had ze balls."
- "Donna, go back to the TARDIS." Not something you hear often.
- Doogie's an interesting choice to play the Toymaker. It's stunt casting, but he's competent to play an "unreal" character like this.
- "I played a game and let him." RTD goes for the "magical thinking" too much for my taste.
- "Dice don't know what the dice did last time." Toymaker's dice might.
- The Marionette Man was sufficiently creepy.
- As were Stooky Sue and the Stooky Babbies.
- "Hello, Sooky. My name's Donna. Now I think that you're a goner." Donna frightens the monsters!
- "OH, WELL, THAT'S ALRIGHT, THEN!" Interesting commentary on the fates of the Moffat Era companions. Good thing all of Chibnall's "Fam" made it home safely.
- "Is all of this true?" "I challenge you to a game." He don't like answering the hard questions, do he?
- "I made a jigsaw out of your history. Did you like it?" RTD writing himself a "Get Out of Continuity Free" card.
- "I sealed him for all eternity inside my gold tooth." I don't know as I'd store the Master inside my mouth.
- "There's only one player I didn't dare face. The One Who Waits. That's someone else's game." Ncuti's, I imagine.
- "I made every opinion supreme. That's the game of the Twenty-First Century." There's that sledgehammer, again.
- The Toymaker can't cheat, but there's other ways to influence games than outright chesting.
- "Best of three." "Then let's make it 2023." OK.
- "We're using Triad." Which I happen to know is a bit of foreshadowing.
- The Spice Girls as a harbinger of doom. Interesting. Doogie's dance routine is both goofy and creepy. The screaming ball is extra-creepy.
- "Where are the staff?" "I think they're still falling." Damn, that was cold.
- "I have had many faces containing something far more." They both have.
- "We can be...Celestial." Arishem?
- "Handmaidens." I've read that this can mean "women who serve the patriarchy". Not sure if that's what's meant here.
- "Because every single one of you is fantastic." A callback to Eccleston?
- "Allons-y." And then a big anticlimax.
- "It feels different this time.," A callback to "The Caves of Androzani".
- "What?" "What?" What?" Oh, dear God.
- "Now, someone tell me what the Hell is going on!" How can he nnot know?
- "Bi-generation." I'm not wild about this idea, but that's a separate rant that I may actually get around to sometime.
- "My legions are coming." OK.
- "Take it to the deepest vault and bind it in salt." Isn't that just playing nthings his way?
- I don't know that I'd want to hug myself. It'd be weird.
- The bit with the tooth is a callback to "Last of the nTime Lords".
- There's a lot of callbacks that I'm too lazy to list, and then "Sarah Jane has gone. Can you believe that?" "I loved her" We all loved her.
- "What if the Toymaker's domain is still lingerimng?" Yeah, OK, this is BS.
- "This is completely nuts." Agreed.
- "You weren't going to leave without saying goodbye, were you?" You know he was.
- "Where's he going?" "Everywhere."
- "This species only communicates with their eyebrows." A callback to "Spearhead from Space".
- "The evil stepmother...and Mad Auntie Mel." Yeah, he's gonna put up with this sh*t for a month or so, and then he's gonna take off.
- "DESTINATION CHRISTMAS". OK.
- "The Toymaker created by Brian Hayles". Good to see the old-timers being recognized.
Overall: An OK episode. I'm interested to see where they go with Gatwa.
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