A new Doctor’s first proper series opener has one job, which is to sell me on the era. “Space Babies” is about a space station run by talking babies, stalked by a creature made out of snot, and I spent most of it wondering who it was for. Ncuti Gatwa is excellent again, which is becoming the pattern with this run. The episode he’s in is the weakest series opener the revived show has produced.
I want to be fair about what it’s attempting. Davies has always liked an opener that’s broad and bright and easy to walk into, and there’s a real argument for starting the first full Gatwa series as gently as possible. Broad and bright doesn’t have to mean this thin, though. An opener still has to give me a reason to come back beyond the lead, and this one mostly doesn’t.
Gatwa is doing everything right
He’s genuinely wonderful in this. There’s a looseness to him the show hasn’t had in years, and he plays the wonder of the TARDIS as something he’s actively delighted by instead of something he’s performing for the companion. The butterfly gag is the best-written beat in the episode: Ruby steps off the path, kills a butterfly, and the world changes around her until the Doctor puts it right. It’s funny, it teaches the rules of time travel in about twenty seconds, and it does it without stopping the story to lecture anyone. Gatwa’s timing through the whole sequence is immaculate.
He’s also very good in the quieter beats. The scene where he tells Ruby he’s a foundling too, and that he doesn’t know where he came from either, is played with real restraint. Millie Gibson works well alongside him, with Ruby curious and unimpressed in roughly the right proportions, and the two of them have an easy rapport that doesn’t need forcing. Whatever I think of the writing around them, the casting of this Doctor is the best decision the show has made in a decade. The problem is never the people on screen.
The babies, and the tone
The premise is that a station was built to grow babies, the staff left, and the machinery raised them, so six years on the babies run the place and talk through a machine. There’s a decent idea buried in that about a system that made children and then had nobody left to care for them. The execution is where it comes apart. The talking babies are done with CGI mouths on real infants, which sits somewhere between unsettling and silly, and the episode plays them for cuteness while asking me to fear for their lives. Those two things fight each other constantly.
Then there’s the Bogeyman, a monster grown from the station’s accumulated waste, which in practice means it’s made of snot. The twist that it’s another abandoned creation that just wants looking after is a decent Doctor Who idea. It’s undercut by the fact that I’ve spent twenty minutes looking at a mucus creature, and the resolution involves the waste system being fired out of an exhaust port. There’s also a political aside about why the babies weren’t terminated, which arrives from nowhere, is stated instead of shown, and doesn’t connect to anything before or after it. That’s exactly what frustrated me about the Chibnall run: a position dropped into a scene instead of a story built to explore one.
What an opener is supposed to do
The comparison I keep reaching for is Smith and Jones, which had roughly the same job. It had to introduce a new companion, sell a new dynamic, and give a casual viewer a complete story in forty-five minutes. It managed all three by keeping the premise simple, a hospital transported to the moon, and spending the saved time on the person I was being asked to care about. This has the opposite instinct, with an elaborate premise and thin characters, so the runtime goes on explaining the situation instead of on Ruby. By the end I knew a great deal about how the baby station worked and very little about her beyond the fact that she was fostered and finds all this exciting.
It’s reaching hard for the 2005 template, and that’s the comparison that hurts most. That series began with plastic dummies in a shop basement, a London flat and a woman with a job, so it was grounded before it was strange. This begins with a mucus monster and computer-generated baby mouths and asks me to take the emotional beats seriously in between. The monster is soft and sad and in need of a hug by the end, too, which is a fair Doctor Who ending but leaves nothing to be frightened of. This programme built its reputation on scaring children slightly more than their parents thought wise, and this is the opposite instinct.
The one thing I’ll give it without reservation is the TARDIS. The new console room is a genuinely lovely design, all warm wood and brass and curved staircases, and Ruby seeing it for the first time gets exactly the right amount of awe. Ruby’s origin gets its first proper push as well, with snow falling indoors when she thinks about the night she was left, though it’s all atmosphere and no traction so far. After three years of Division and a Timeless Child, I’m wary of a show that opens on a mystery and then keeps tapping it instead of developing it.
Rating: 2/5. Not my favourite, and it’s a shame because the man at the centre of it is terrific. The tone lurches between nursery comedy and body horror without settling, and the monster is a joke the episode isn’t quite in on. The one political point is dropped in instead of earned. Gatwa and Gibson deserve better material than this.