Anyway, for me this mostly comes down to the twist on the "ghost of Christmas future." As Alan notes above me, Scrooge is living alone and unloved and apparently okay with it, so why would dying that way bother him? I also disagree with the people who have ethical issues with it; old Kazran cannot give consent for his younger self as they are different people (this is why it's possible to change your mind about consenting–the consent you give in one time period is not binding in another), and anyway all the Doctor does to young Kazran is show him his future, which doesn't particularly seem like something that requires consent.

Elements of Paul Cornell's comic The Heralds of Destruction were inspired by Eruditorum's coverage of alchemy. (COMMENTARY: Heralds of Destruction) So this is where it starts. A mysterious Police Box, and a magical girl, and a mystery that two regular, unimportant people can’t quite get over. A mystery that brings them out on a cold London night to 76 Totters Lane to try to find out where this girl came from. There, they meet an old man. Smug, superior, and unfriendly, he does not want them there. This is his mysterious girl, and his mystery.There's a very uncomfortable removal of 'giving the baddy one last chance to do the right thing' here. The Doctor strips Kazran of that ability to make his own decision. This would have been fine if there was at least some suggestion in the episode that what the Doctor did was morally dubious, but if there was I don't remember it. Another volume of TARDIS Eruditorum, this time covering both the much contended Graham Williams era and the oft-forgotten "Bidmead" era that capped off Tom Baker's seven year tenure, another great insight and perspective on the merits (and demerits) of the various stories of Doctor Who. In terms of actually watching the Classic series, I find this series invaluable. Sure, at times, I find Sandifer's arguments a bit out there, but then, finding something interesting to say about a story as self-evidently good and well-trodden as "City of Death" is difficult and his interpretation is, at the very least, interesting and unique. The first part of this argument—the sitcom memoir—functions as a sort of “I used to be somebody” windup to the sob story. And he did—a level of prominence roughly akin to what Steven Moffat had pre-Doctor Who, which is to say that he was well known among UK sitcom fans who paid attention to the writer’s name.…

Within the innate conservatism of the Pertwee era, Malcolm Hulke remains one of the most interesting figures. At one point in his life, he was a member of the Communist Party, and while this membership at some point lapsed, he appears to have been a lifelong socialist and leftist. And yet the era of Doctor Who he’s associated with is one of its most resolutely conservative. More to the point, his stories are not the ones that most challenge that tendency. Three of his Pertwee stories are earth-based military action pieces that trend away from the era’s nominally progressive glam instincts. The other two are space-based stories displaying the most uncomplicated liberalism imaginable. The overall impression is of the sort of bland centrist who imagines himself to be progressive—a Buttigieg voter, to use a contemporary metaphor. It is difficult not to read an autobiographical bent in this. A former member of the Communist Party writing a story in which the leftists are all corrupt, megalomaniacal, and profoundly closed-minded is difficult not to read as a settling of accounts, with Hulke writing his own frustrations with leftist radicalism into the story. Certainly what he ends up with is a laundry list of standard leftist failure modes—indeed, not for the first time within Hulke’s Doctor Who career he’s ended up writing Doctor Who that serves comfortably as right-wing propaganda. The failures of Grover and Ruth are essentially the things that the Tories and Republicans accuse leftism of doing, whether silencing dissent or actually being mass murderers. Ruth, in particular, given that she’s played by Carmen Silvera, who would eventually become well known as a comedic accent from her appearances on ‘Allo ‘Allo, feels almost exactly like what Gareth Roberts would do with Doctor Who if he weren’t too much of an absolute asshole to actually get employment on it anymore.… As Phil noted, the timing of this story was essential. To modern eyes, Doctor Who is a show six years in. It is difficult for a modern show to run that long without its audience becoming jaded due to the second law of tele-dynamics (apathy increases). That's why so many shows that reach this stage feel the need to 'jump the shark' just to sustain interest. TARDIS Eruditorum is a critical history of Doctor Who and, more broadly, of British history starting in the latter half of the twentieth century. Its structure mirrors that of an episode guide, though this is not to say it is one. Essays on every televised Doctor Who story are presented sequentially, interleaved with various other essays. These include Pop Between Realities essays, which look at things that are not Doctor Who, Time Can Be Rewritten essays, which look at Doctor Who stories set in a different time period from when they were written, and both Outside the Government and You Were Expecting Someone Else essays, which look at things that aren’t quite Doctor Who.Due to the nature of the project, and how it was constructed with an emphasis on how events impacted the present, there were some similarities between it and a whig history. [4]