Bad Wolf: The Game Station’s Reality TV Turns Deadly

Bad Wolf is the episode where Doctor Who stops teasing and starts paying off, and I was glued to the sofa for the whole forty-five minutes. The Doctor, Rose and Jack get pulled out of the TARDIS and dropped into three separate corners of the Game Station, which is what Satellite Five has turned into a century after The Long Game, and none of them has a clue how they got there. The Jagrafess is long gone and the whole place now runs on reality TV instead of news, which is a much nastier kind of mind control when you think about it. I went in nervous, honestly, because it sounded like far too many ideas for one episode, game shows and a season-long mystery and a cliffhanger everyone had been hinting at all week. It somehow pulls all of it off, which surprised me.

The first ten minutes are played completely straight, and that’s where a lot of the fun comes from. Three people wake up somewhere they shouldn’t be, nobody explains a thing, and each one has landed inside a show I recognised straight away. It felt like the old trick of dropping the Doctor somewhere strange and letting him work out the rules, except this time the rules turn out to be lethal. By the time the games kick off I’d stopped worrying about whether it could all fit together. It’s a proper Doctor Who opening, strange and a bit silly and quietly threatening all at once, and it had me hooked before anyone had lost a single round. And then it kept surprising me anyway, which is more than I can say for plenty of television.

Three Game Shows and a Body Count

The Doctor ends up in Big Brother, which is every bit as miserable as it sounds, with a house full of strangers, cameras in every corner and a voice in the ceiling telling everyone what to do. Rose gets The Weakest Link, hosted by a chrome Anne Droid with all the sneering of the real thing, and Jack gets What Not to Wear, where a pair of robot hosts strip him down and start planning a makeover nobody in their right mind would sign up for. What I loved is how quickly the show sets its rules without ever stopping to explain them. Nobody announces that losing means getting disintegrated, you just see it happen, and that’s a far colder way to tell it. The satire isn’t subtle, and it’s nowhere near as sly as Vengeance on Varos was, but I was grinning too much to mind.

Jack’s storyline is the funniest of the three, because he gets out of it by being Jack. He’s stripped, prodded and about to be made over, and then he pulls a gun he’s been hiding somewhere I won’t describe and the two robot hosts go up in sparks. He wanders off looking very pleased with himself. The Doctor’s stuck in the Big Brother house working out how to get out of it, and I could already tell whoever was behind all this had picked the wrong man to lock in a room. Because the three of them are kept apart for such a big chunk of the episode, the whole thing plays like a puzzle rather than a romp, with each of them holding one piece. I liked being made to wait before I got them all in the same place again.

Those Two Words Finally Mean Something

I’ve been wondering about those two words ever since they turned up spray-painted on the side of the TARDIS, and I half expected the show to shrug and move on. It doesn’t. The station is the same Satellite Five from The Long Game, only warped into something grotesque, and the Bad Wolf Corporation turns out to own every channel on it. All those little appearances of the phrase across the season suddenly look like pieces of one thing instead of a running gag. It even ties off some of the loose ends from that earlier story, which I didn’t see coming. Walking back into a place I already knew, now bigger and meaner than I remembered, gave the episode a weight it wouldn’t have had otherwise. I love it when a show trusts me to have been paying attention, and this one clearly did.

What I keep coming back to is how nasty the set-up is underneath the jokes. Nobody’s forced to watch or play, exactly, they’re just entertained into a coma while somebody quietly runs the whole thing from behind the curtain. Doctor Who’s been fighting people who think they know best forever, right up to the Time Lords themselves, someone always has their hands on the controls of what everyone thinks is normal. The Bad Wolf Corporation is a faceless company rather than a monster, and I found that creepier than any rubber suit. It’s the sort of enemy you can’t shoot, which leaves the Doctor with nothing to do but keep digging until he finds whoever’s behind it. And what he finds isn’t what I was expecting at all.

Rose Gets Voted Off

Rose’s game is the one I found hardest to watch. The Anne Droid runs the round exactly like the real show, all withering stares and that flat little goodbye, and when Rose gets voted off there’s a flash and she’s simply gone. The show doesn’t cut away or soften it. She’s disintegrated on screen and that’s that, and for a few minutes I honestly believed they’d done it. I’ve watched plenty of shows pretend to kill a lead and lose their nerve within seconds, so it says something that this one had me properly worried. Rose spends the whole round trying to keep her head, and I was gripping a cushion by the end of it. All that build-up over the season, and it looked like they’d ended her on a quiz show.

The way out comes from Jack being nosy rather than the Doctor being clever, which I enjoyed. He finds the TARDIS hidden away in a restricted part of the station, and using it he works out that the people being voted off aren’t being disintegrated at all, they’re being transmitted off the station to somewhere else. It’s a quick, tidy bit of detective work and it stops the episode tipping into misery. Christopher Eccleston is brilliant through all of it too, playing the Doctor as somebody who’s seen this kind of cruelty before and has run out of patience for it. When the pieces start clicking together you can see that patience wearing thin in every scene. I’d been worried the episode would turn grim, and instead it turned angry, which suits him better.

Who’s Been Watching All Along

Then comes the reveal, and I actually said something rude to the telly. The signal coming off the station has been hiding something out at the edge of the solar system, and when the Doctor and Jack cut it off there’s a whole fleet of ships sitting there, and they’re Dalek ships. I’d spent weeks thinking the Dalek in that museum was the last one and the war had taken the rest, and here’s an entire fleet that’s been running the game shows the whole time. It has the same creeping menace as The Power of the Daleks, where they spent a whole story pretending to be helpful before showing their hand, only on a much bigger scale. The pacing helps, because the episode holds them back until the very last stretch and lets the game shows carry the first half. I didn’t know they were coming, and I’m so glad I didn’t.

Rose wakes on the floor of a ship with a Dalek closing in on her, and the Daleks open a channel to the Doctor and tell him to stay out of it or she dies. He doesn’t back down. He tells them he’s going to get her back and wipe every last one of them out of the sky, and Eccleston delivers that with such cold, quiet anger that I believed him completely. If you want a villain that can end an episode on that kind of note, you can’t beat the Daleks, and this fleet is a whole other level of threat from the lone one in the museum. The last shot is one man in front of a screen full of Dalek ships, and I couldn’t look away from it.