A Regency house party, a string quartet playing pop songs, and a family of shapeshifting alien birds wearing the aristocracy as costumes. “Rogue” is a knowing spin on one very specific streaming costume drama, it’s clear about what it’s doing, and for a while it’s a lot of fun. It’s also the slightest episode of the run. The romance at the centre of it arrives, resolves and departs inside forty-five minutes, which isn’t enough time for any of it to land.
It does look lovely. The costumes are good, the house is used well, and there’s a lightness to the staging that this era does far better than the Chibnall years ever managed. The string quartet playing modern pop as period arrangements is a joke borrowed straight from the show being sent up, and the Doctor comments on the anachronism without labouring it. Ruby’s delight at being inside a costume drama is played well by Millie Gibson, and the episode is at its best when it’s simply enjoying the dressing-up.
The Chuldur are a decent joke
The monsters are birds who dress up as humans for fun. They’re not here to invade or to feed; they’re cosplayers, working their way through the cast of a period drama because they find it entertaining, and they kill people to get the outfits. That’s a properly Doctor Who idea, and the show gets some good comedy out of how petty their motives are. The scene where the Chuldur bicker about who gets to be which character is funnier than it has any right to be, and their bird-form design is nastier than the tone suggests. Indira Varma is good value as the Duchess too, playing a Chuldur wearing an aristocrat with visible relish.
The problem is scale. The Chuldur want to work through a house party and then move on to the wider world, and the episode gestures at that without ever making it feel like a threat. They’re a good gag instead of a good villain, and once the joke lands there isn’t much else for them to do. There’s a nice idea in shapeshifters dressing up as their betters inside a genre that’s entirely about people performing a version of themselves. The episode notices that once and then lets it go.
Groff and Gatwa are the reason to watch
Jonathan Groff plays a bounty hunter tracking the Chuldur, and he and Gatwa are immediately good together. The rooftop scene where the Doctor talks about losing people, and Rogue listens instead of deflecting, is well played by both, and there’s real chemistry in the banter beforehand. The dance is the highlight of the episode: two men in a ballroom, everybody watching, the score doing the work, and neither of them explaining what’s happening. It’s confident, beautifully shot television. Gatwa plays the Doctor’s grief at the end entirely straight, too, with a line about never getting to keep anyone delivered without a trace of self-pity.
What it doesn’t have is time. Rogue is introduced, becomes important to the Doctor and is lost to another dimension within a single episode, and the show wants me to feel that loss without having earned much beyond a nice evening. Compare it to The Girl in the Fireplace, which has the same shape but glimpses a whole life in fragments across an hour, so the door closing at the end costs something. This is one party and a dance. Give Gatwa’s final scene forty minutes of groundwork and it’s the best of the year, but with one dance and a rooftop chat behind it, it’s a nice moment I’d forgotten by the following week.
Ruby gets the better subplot
The strongest thread is actually Ruby’s. She’s the one who works out what the Chuldur are, largely by knowing how period dramas work, and there’s a nice running joke about her using genre knowledge as a detection method. Getting duplicated and worn by a Chuldur gives Gibson something to play, and the moment where the Doctor has to decide whether to trap the monsters while Ruby might be among them is the one beat with genuine weight. Rogue taking her place and going through the portal himself is a decent sacrifice cleanly done. Gibson is quietly doing good work all through this run, and she reacts well in an episode where reacting is most of the job.
It’s pleasant, and as pure confection it works, but this run keeps producing episodes that are light and weightless and then asking me to feel something big in the last four minutes. It’s also another ending where the monsters are sent somewhere instead of dealt with. Nobody is beaten and everybody is relocated. That makes for a gentle watch, and it drains the tension out of the run, because by now I’d worked out that the trap door was always going to be there.
Rating: 2.5/5. Not my favourite. It looks great, Groff and Gatwa are genuinely charming together, and the dance is the best-shot sequence of the series. The Chuldur are a punchline stretched thin, though, the romance has no room to become anything, and the loss at the end is asserted instead of earned. It’s enjoyable while it’s on and gone by morning.