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I agree that the "oh, but I was having such a good day, and these people are doing their jobs" is pretty far from the spirit of Doctor Who. Like, what? But the quality of many new series short stories and some of the novels is kind of bad anyways, unfortunately. I don't think it's much worse than any of those. It's just a bit more evident with this one bc it falls flat and OOC.
I haven’t read a lot of new series stories, but the quality of the EU in general is very mixed. The problem with this story is that it’s part of a larger trend of the era. It’s yet another case of the writers not thinking through the unfortunate implications (everything in Kerblam, Grace’s fridging, the Nazi stuff in Spyfall, etc.) and of the Doctor being strangely passive in the face of evil or suffering (having to stand back and let history happen in Rosa and Demons of the Punjab, which works in the context of those stories but is part of a larger pattern; preferring to let the spiders suffocate/starve than give them a quick death; letting Kerblam continue to exploit its workforce and not caring that the System murdered an innocent woman; insisting that killing Tim Shaw would make Graham as bad as him, despite the fact that Tim Shaw has committed genocide against multiple planets, will continue to do so, and wouldn’t have done it if they’d succeeded in killing him the first time (but then is perfectly fine with him spending eternity trapped in stasis even though that's no better than death and means he could theoretically escape and kill more people); refuses to activate the Death Particle to stop the Master and the Cybermen, but is quite willing to let Ko Sharmus do it, implying it wasn’t morality stopping her as much as a desire to simply not be the one to pull the trigger).
The Doctor’s always preferred the pacifist approach, but their pacifism is usually centered around avoiding senseless death and violence, not standing back and letting injustice happen, or refusing to do what needs to be done because they don’t want to get their hands dirty. As Two says to the rest of the Time Lords: “While you have been content merely to observe the evil in the galaxy, I have been fighting against it.”