Agreed to all of this. What makes it even worse is how horrified we see Belinda is during Conrad's wish: that gutteral screaming after she gets confronted by her mother and aunt seems to say "This life is making me miserable and I don't grasp why."

She's been rewritten in such an outrageous way: not only as a character but in her own life. We've seen companions die, get sucked out of their own time, turned into Cybermen, and more, but her "life retcon" is about as horrific as Donna's memory wipe but without the gravity of the situation being handled well at all.

The Doctor is so focused on Poppy that he just shrugs off the change in Belinda. That's pretty callous for him- especially this more sensitive version of him. It goes to show that for all his deep feelings, he's also an elephant waltzing among ants- messing things up without even paying heed.

This actually makes more sense than a lot of theories. It gives more believability to the idea that Yoda didn't think it would have been a forbidden relationship Anakin was worried about.

On a similar note, they just sent Obi-Wan on the mission to Utapau, and Anakin could have been having nightmares about losing him, for all Yoda knew. He WAS going up against Grievous, after all.

Well put, all of this! Any time you oppress people, *some* of them will go too far. He shows that the Rebels aren't this righteous monolith, it's a messy reaction to an even messier situation.

He was radicalized at a young age and trained to be ruthless- with one of his teachers being ANAKIN and another of his teachers being PAIN. Anakin himself is an example of someone who stoops too low in pursuit of a goal that's noble on the surface, and Palpatine weaponized that extremism to turn Anakin into Vader.

They even deliberately highlighted those parallels with Saw's prosthetics and gas mask. I disapprove of the way it paints people who were disabled by war as "more machine than man," but in their cases they embodied their pain to justify bulldozing over the galaxy for their own goals.

I had a lot of fun *watching* the episode, they did some decent emotional moments, but it was too much to go into any of them deeply enough. Belinda was sidelined and pretty much derailed, and she deserved to have more to do with saving the day than Ruby. Not that I dislike Ruby's part in the episode, but Belinda needed MORE. More than just "surprise, timey-wimey baby."

They left a lot dangling and it felt like "renew me" bait, as did Tyler showing up as the regeneratee. I wouldn't mind Tyler as the Doctor, but it felt cheap when lumped with the rest of the shallow moments. (Ha- Moments.)

One thing that will help with Anakin is if they keep Hayden's appearances to Force Ghost from now on, because the transparency and glow can help mask signs of aging. (Because he looked pretty old to be a Padawan in the Kenobi flashbacks.)

That was my thought! It was Conrad's way of diminishing The Doctor- as in "what doctor are we talking about? A nobody."

Plus it's a fourth-wall-break in the same vein as we saw in Lux- it could very well be that The Rani told Conrad of the World Where The Doctor Is Fiction, and that the name of the show was Doctor Who. I mean, she told him enough about her own rivalry with The Doctor, so it stands to reason that she might have even written that book as an instruction manual for Conrad.