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the reality war
Doctor WhoTelevision

The Reality War: A Finale That Wishes Itself Out of Every Corner

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

I really didn’t like this one. “The Reality War” has to resolve a wished world, a Time Lord villain, a child who may not exist, a companion’s year-long journey home and a departing Doctor, and its solution to nearly all of it is to decide that the problem was never quite real. The Rani is discarded. Omega arrives and is dispatched in under two minutes. A daughter is invented, mourned and un-invented. And the regeneration that closes it is the single strangest decision this show has made in twenty years.

There are good things in here. Gatwa is excellent throughout, Varada Sethu gets one genuinely superb scene, and the opening stretch has real momentum. None of that survives the ending.

Omega, and the shortest villain appearance in memory

The Rani’s whole scheme is to resurrect Omega, one of the founders of Time Lord civilisation and a figure the show has treated with enormous reverence since 1972. He arrives as a skeletal creature, consumes the Rani almost immediately, and is then destroyed.

That’s it. A season-long antagonist is eaten by a legend, and the legend is dealt with in the time it takes to describe him. Archie Panjabi was good value for one episode and is written out without a fight, which is a waste of a returning villain and of an actor who’d barely started.

It’s also the latest in a run of finales that beat an enormous threat with a gimmick rather than a cost, going back to The Timeless Children and its season of questions answered with something nobody could act on. The pattern is now unmistakable: the show builds something vast and then reaches for whatever gets it off the board fastest.

The waste is compounded by how long the show spent building to her. Mrs Flood has been appearing since Christmas 2023, turning to camera, dropping hints across two full series. That’s eighteen months of seeding for a villain who gets one episode as herself and is then eaten by somebody else’s cameo.

Poppy, and the problem with inventing a loss

The emotional centre is Poppy, the daughter from the wished world, who the Doctor remembers and nobody else does. He spends the finale trying to restore a child who was never born, and eventually sacrifices his own life to bring her back into reality.

Sethu is genuinely excellent in the scenes where Belinda is told she has a daughter she cannot remember, and Gatwa plays the grief without a trace of self-pity. As performance it’s the best material in the hour.

As storytelling it does not work, because the loss was manufactured one episode earlier. Poppy exists solely so the finale has something to spend, and I’m asked to grieve a character introduced in the previous episode in a reality that wasn’t real. Compare it to the ending of Journey’s End, where what the Doctor takes from Donna had four years behind it. Weight has to be accumulated. It can’t be declared.

Worse is what it does to Belinda. The entire season was built on getting her home to a specific date, and the finale reveals that her reason for going home was a daughter who did not exist until the previous episode. Her stated goal, her job, her insistence on her own life: all of it is retroactively converted into maternal longing she never expressed. It takes the most promising companion premise in years and rewrites it into something smaller.

Conrad’s ending is another loose thread. He spends two episodes as the engine of the entire catastrophe and is dispatched with a couple of lines, having learned nothing and cost nobody anything. For a character the series went to the trouble of establishing across two separate stories, that’s a remarkably quiet exit.

The good things, because there are some

Reality tearing apart in The Reality War

I don’t want this to read as a pile-on, because there’s real quality in here. The opening twenty minutes, with reality tearing and UNIT scrambling and the Doctor falling through a collapsing wish, are genuinely propulsive and the best-directed sequence of the series.

Gatwa is superb throughout, particularly in the stretch where he understands that saving Poppy means dying and simply gets on with arranging it. There’s no speech, no hesitation, just a man doing the arithmetic and accepting the answer. That’s the version of this Doctor I’ll remember.

Ruby and Belinda share a couple of good scenes as well, and Millie Gibson’s return is handled better here than in most of these ensemble finales. Kate Stewart gets one decent moment. The production, as ever, looks extraordinary.

But an hour can be well made and still not work, and the difference between this and The Well six weeks earlier is that one of them knew what it was about.

The regeneration

Then the Doctor dies and becomes Billie Piper, and the credits decline to call her the Doctor.

I have read the arguments. I understand there is presumably a plan. But as an hour of television it ends with a departing lead replaced by a returning actor playing an unspecified character, with no explanation offered, as a cliffhanger. That is not an ending; it is a withheld answer, which is precisely the habit this era has leaned on since it started.

And it cuts short a Doctor I liked enormously. Gatwa has been the best thing in every episode he’s appeared in, across two series of scripts that rarely deserved him, and his exit is a shrug and a question mark. Doctor Who TV’s second-opinion review calls the whole thing a narrative mess, and having sat with it for a while, I can’t construct a defence.

Looking back over two series, what frustrates me most is that the raw material was there. Gatwa is one of the best actors ever cast in the part. Varada Sethu and Millie Gibson are both good. The production is the most lavish the show has ever had, and when the writing holds its nerve it produces episodes as strong as The Well, Boom and Dot and Bubble.

What’s missing is follow-through. Every run under this showrunner has ended by declaring its central question void, spending a grief it hadn’t earned, or handing me a new mystery instead of an answer. Do that once and it’s a bold swerve. Do it three finales running and it stops being a choice and starts being a habit, and it trains me not to invest in the next one. That’s the real cost of this ending, and it’s why I came away from a series with three genuinely excellent episodes in it feeling like I’d been messed about.

I’d add one more thing, since this is where the era ends for me. Two series in, I still could not tell you what this incarnation of the Doctor wanted. Not what happened to him, which is plenty, but what he was actually after. The Ninth wanted to stop running. The Tenth wanted to be forgiven. The Twelfth wanted to know whether he was a good man. The Fifteenth is warm, funny, emotionally open and wonderful company, and across twenty-odd episodes nobody ever gave him a want. That’s the gap all the mystery boxes were filling.

Rating: 1.5/5. Really didn’t like it. A returning legend wasted in ninety seconds, a season-long villain eaten off-screen, a grief manufactured a week in advance, a companion’s entire arc rewritten into something she never wanted, and a regeneration that refuses to say what it is. Gatwa and Sethu are both very good and both are let down completely.

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wish world
Doctor WhoTelevision

Wish World: Everybody Is Happy and Something Is Very Wrong

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

A sunlit London where everyone is cheerful, the Doctor is a mild office worker called John Smith with a wife and a daughter, and a dinosaur wanders past the window without anyone looking up. “Wish World” has the strongest opening twenty minutes of the series and then spends the rest of its runtime arranging pieces for the finale, which is exactly the pattern this era keeps falling into. I liked a lot of it and I’ve stopped being surprised by the shape.

The premise is that Conrad, from earlier in the run, has been given the power to wish the world into the form he wants, and the Rani is using the strain of maintaining that fiction to crack reality open.

It’s the best-looking episode of the run as well, and the contrast between the sunlit streets and what’s underneath them is doing a lot of the work.

The false world is genuinely well done

The suburb is unsettling in the right way. Everything is bright, everyone is content, and the wrongness is in the details rather than in anything announced: the way people repeat phrases, the way nobody questions a dinosaur, the way disability has been wished out of existence and the people who don’t fit are quietly disappeared to somewhere called the Bone Palace.

That last part is the episode’s sharpest idea. Conrad’s perfect world isn’t a dictatorship, it’s a suburb where everything unpleasant has simply been wished away, and the machinery for disposing of the people who spoil it runs quietly underneath. The show makes that point through what it shows rather than through dialogue, which is the approach I’ve been asking for all run.

Gatwa is excellent as John Smith. He plays him as decent, dull and faintly unhappy, with a flicker of the Doctor breaking through whenever something doesn’t add up, and the scene where he looks at a crack in a wall and cannot explain why it frightens him is very well judged.

The recurring detail of everyone reading the same newspaper, with the same headline, every morning, is a nice quiet piece of world-building. Nobody comments on it. It’s just there in the background of three separate scenes, and by the third you start watching for it. That kind of patient visual seeding is what the opening act does well and what the back half abandons.

Belinda, and the thing that doesn’t sit right

Belinda is written as the Doctor’s wife, and the pair of them have a daughter, Poppy. That’s a strong, uncomfortable idea for a false reality: give the Doctor the domestic life he can’t have and watch him refuse to notice it’s wrong.

The problem is Belinda. She spends the episode as a contented housewife with no agency, and while that’s obviously the point of a wished world, the series has given her very little else across seven episodes. She began as a woman with a job and a firm intention to get home, and the run has gradually converted her into a person things happen to. Varada Sethu is good with what she’s given and she keeps being given less.

Poppy is the more interesting problem, because the finale is going to have to decide whether she’s real, and the episode is clearly banking on me being unsettled by a child who may or may not exist. It works as a hook. It also means the emotional weight of the finale rests on a character invented in the penultimate episode.

The visual of the Rani’s tower rising out of the middle of London, with everyone below carrying on as though it has always been there, is the strongest image of the two-parter. It’s the wished world’s whole logic in one shot: something enormous and wrong, and a street full of people who have been given no capacity to notice it.

The wished suburb in Wish World

A false world done better than usual

The show has form with rewritten realities and this is one of the stronger attempts, largely because it commits to the texture rather than the concept. Turn Left remains the benchmark: an altered Britain seen from a single kitchen, getting worse by increments, with the horror in the ordinary details rather than in a villain explaining what he’s done.

Wish World borrows that instinct for its first half. The wrongness accumulates: a repeated phrase, a neighbour who doesn’t blink, the dinosaur nobody acknowledges. Nobody sits Conrad down to have him describe his plan until quite late, and the episode is better for the delay.

Where it differs, and loses, is that Turn Left made its altered world a consequence of one small choice and kept the rules consistent throughout. This one is powered by a wish, which means the rules are whatever the plot needs at any moment, and by the back half that elasticity starts showing. If reality can be edited by wanting, then the resolution can be anything, and an ending that can be anything is rarely satisfying.

The Rani, at last

Archie Panjabi plays the Rani, revealed after a season of Mrs Flood appearances, and she’s good: brisk, amused, entirely uninterested in cruelty for its own sake. The Rani has always been the Time Lord who does terrible things for research rather than power, and Panjabi gets that distinction immediately.

The bi-generation business, where Mrs Flood and the Rani are the same person in two bodies, is the sort of continuity conjuring this era loves and I could take or leave. What works is her indifference to Conrad, whom she regards as a useful idiot and discards accordingly.

Then it ends on the Doctor falling from a great height, reality tearing, and roughly four unresolved threads pointing at the finale. Doctor Who TV’s second-opinion piece is pointed about how much this era leans on withholding, and it’s hard to disagree when a penultimate episode ends with more open questions than it started with.

Conrad’s return is better handled than I expected, too. Bringing back a villain from four episodes earlier and giving him godlike power is a neat piece of season construction, and the show is clear that the world he wishes for is exactly the world his streaming persona was always selling: everything simple, everyone content, nothing inconvenient allowed to exist. A man who built a career on denying reality gets to edit it, and edits it into a lie.

That’s a genuinely good idea and it’s the strongest thread connecting this run’s episodes to each other. It also makes me wish the series had trusted it rather than layering the Rani, the bi-generation, Poppy and the Doctor’s memories on top. There was a cleaner, angrier finale available here about a man who wished the world flat, and it’s buried under three other plots.

Gatwa deserves particular credit for the transition. When the Doctor starts breaking through John Smith, he doesn’t do it as a switch being flipped; he plays a mild man becoming steadily more troubled by his own reflection, and the change is nearly complete before anything overt happens. It’s a smarter performance choice than the script strictly required, which has been true of most of his work across both series.

Rating: 2.5/5. Not my favourite, despite a premise I liked a great deal. The false suburb is genuinely eerie, the Bone Palace is a properly nasty idea, and Gatwa is very good as a man who doesn’t know what he is. But it’s another hour of table-setting, Belinda is reduced to furniture in her own series, and the whole thing is a ramp rather than a story.

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the interstellar song contest
Doctor WhoTelevision

The Interstellar Song Contest: Eurovision in Orbit and a Doctor Off the Leash

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

Three trillion people watching a song contest from a space station above a ringed planet, and a man with a grievance who intends to kill every one of them live on air. “The Interstellar Song Contest” spends its first fifteen minutes being a broad Eurovision pastiche and then turns very hard into a hostage thriller, and the gear change is the best thing about it. It’s uneven, it’s occasionally silly, and it contains one scene that genuinely startled me.

Juno Dawson writes, and the episode’s real interest is not the contest at all. It’s what the Doctor does when he’s angry.

It’s an odd one to place, because the two halves would each make a decent episode and sit awkwardly in the same hour.

The pastiche is fun and disposable

The contest material is exactly what you’d expect and none the worse for it. Glittery costumes, ludicrous staging, a commentary booth, a running joke about the voting. Rylan turns up as himself, which will either delight you or not, and Graham Norton’s voice is used for a decent gag.

None of it matters much. The show is having fun for a quarter of an hour and the fun is genuine, but this is the third time this era has built an episode around a musical number, and the returns are diminishing. The Devil’s Chord did it, the Christmas special did it, and here it’s essentially set dressing before the plot arrives.

What is good is the sense of scale. Three trillion viewers is an absurd number and the episode makes it land, mostly through the shot of the transmission dish and the casual way everyone treats a galaxy-wide broadcast as routine. The production design of the station helps too: it’s all backstage corridors and technical galleries rather than a glamorous auditorium, which makes the later siege material work far better than it would in a ballroom.

The turn itself is the best-executed thing in the hour. One moment it’s confetti and commentary, the next the station’s airlocks open and the audience is gone, and the episode doesn’t ease you across. Going from broad comedy to mass death inside thirty seconds is a hard trick and the direction handles it cleanly, mostly by refusing to change the lighting or the music until well after the horror has started.

Kid, and a grievance the episode takes seriously

Freddie Fox plays Kid, a Hellian whose people were destroyed in a corporate atrocity that the contest’s sponsors covered up, and whose plan is to broadcast their deaths by killing the audience. He’s a terrorist with a real cause, and the episode doesn’t pretend otherwise.

That’s more nuance than this run usually manages. The corporation genuinely did commit genocide. The contest genuinely is built on it. Kid is genuinely doing something monstrous about it. The episode holds all three of those at once and doesn’t resolve them into a comfortable answer, which I respect.

Fox plays him with a jittery, unstable quality that stops him being sympathetic even when he’s right, and the sequence where he ejects the audience into space in full view of the cameras is properly horrible.

Mrs Flood’s appearances have become properly sinister by this point in the run, too. She turns up in the crowd, out of place and entirely unbothered, and the show has stopped pretending she’s a comic aside. Anita Dobson plays the amusement of somebody watching a disaster she arranged, and it’s the most effective the running gag has been.

The Interstellar Song Contest in orbit

Belinda holds the middle together

Sethu gets the best companion material of the run here. Belinda spends a large stretch of the episode separated from the Doctor, working the problem from the other end of the station with a handful of survivors, and she’s competent without being turned into an action hero.

Her nursing keeps being the thing that matters, which I like enormously. She triages. She knows what a body does in vacuum. When she talks someone through an injury, the show doesn’t stop to admire her for it, it just lets her get on with the job. A companion whose skill set is actually used is rarer than it should be.

She’s also the one who stops the Doctor, and the episode is careful that she does it as a colleague rather than a conscience. She doesn’t lecture him. She says his name until he hears her. That’s a better version of the “companion tempers the Doctor” beat than the show usually manages, and it makes the lack of follow-up more annoying rather than less.

The scene that startled me

And then the Doctor gets hold of him.

Having watched people die, the Doctor pins Kid down and tortures him. Not metaphorically: he uses the man’s own neural implant against him, deliberately, with a cold fury, while Kid screams. Gatwa plays it entirely without theatre, which is what makes it frightening, and the show does not cut away or soften it.

It’s the most genuinely dark thing this incarnation has done and it rhymes directly with The Waters of Mars, where a Doctor without anyone to answer to decided he was entitled to a great deal. The difference is that the earlier episode knew it was watching something go wrong and built an ending around it. Here Belinda tells him to stop, he stops, and the episode moves on to the resolution without anyone returning to it.

That’s the frustration in miniature. The show keeps producing genuinely bold character moments and then declining to spend anything on them. The m0vie blog’s write-up is good on how much the episode is straining between two moods at once, and the torture scene is where the strain shows most.

The coda is the arc business: the Doctor’s memories of Poppy, the Rani revealed as Mrs Flood, and a regeneration-adjacent moment played for a cliffhanger. It’s effective and it’s the fourth mystery this series has opened.

The more I think about the torture scene, the more I think the episode’s real failure is one of nerve rather than taste. Putting it in was brave. Having Belinda stop him was right. What’s missing is the next scene, the one where somebody asks him what he was going to do if she hadn’t been there, and he doesn’t have an answer.

This show has done that before and done it superbly. The whole point of the closing minutes of The Waters of Mars is a man discovering he’s gone too far and being unable to talk himself out of it. Here the moment happens, gets acknowledged in about four words, and the plot resumes. A Doctor who tortures someone and then has a nice time at a song contest is a considerably stranger character than the episode seems to realise, and leaving that unexamined is the most this-era thing about it.

There’s a decent argument that the whole episode is about spectacle built on something ugly, and that the contest and the corporation and the Doctor’s own conduct are all versions of the same problem: entertainment continuing while somebody pays for it off-screen. If that’s the intent, it’s a good one, and it’s most of the way to being well executed. It just needs somebody in the last ten minutes to say so, and nobody does.

Rating: 3/5. It was ok. The tonal shift is well executed, Freddie Fox is good, the villain has a cause worth taking seriously, and the torture scene is the boldest thing this Doctor has done. It loses ground for a Eurovision pastiche that’s fun and weightless, for a resolution that leans on a convenient reset, and above all for raising something serious about its lead and then not following it anywhere.

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the story and the engine still
Doctor WhoTelevision

The Story and the Engine: The Barbershop at the Centre of the World

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

The Doctor goes to a barbershop in Lagos where he’s been a regular for years, finds the owner replaced by a stranger, and discovers the building is a machine that runs on the stories its customers tell while they’re in the chair. Nobody can leave until they’ve given one. “The Story and the Engine” is the most distinctive episode of the series and probably the most distinctive thing this era has made. I enjoyed it a great deal.

It’s built around the rhythm of men talking in a room, and it feels like nothing else in the run. Doctor Who has been going to London, Cardiff and generic space stations for twenty years, and an hour rooted this specifically in a real city is genuinely rare. The show has done “abroad” plenty of times. It has rarely done somewhere in particular.

The barbershop is the point

The setting does almost all the work and the episode knows it. A barbershop is a place where men talk, where the same conversations come round again, and where somebody holds a blade to your throat while you tell them things you wouldn’t tell anyone else. Turning that into a literal engine barely counts as a metaphor. The regulars are sketched quickly and well, each with a story they’ve told before and a reason for telling it. The rule that a story must be true to fuel the engine, and that a lie stalls it, gives the whole thing a shape, and the moment a man realises he’s been telling his own story wrong for years is quietly devastating.

It looks completely unlike the rest of the series, too. Lagos is shot with real warmth and specificity, the shop is lived-in instead of designed, and the look of the engine, all web-like filaments and moving glyphs, is genuinely unusual for this show. The Doctor being a regular is a lovely touch. He knows the owner and has a usual chair, and the show rarely lets him have somewhere ordinary that he simply likes. It makes the intrusion land harder, because somebody has taken a place that was his.

The Lagos barbershop in The Story and the Engine

The Barber, and a god with a grievance

Ariyon Bakare is very good as the Barber, and he’s the best-built villain of the run. He’s a god who was written out of his own pantheon, reduced to a footnote in stories about other people, and his plan is essentially revenge for being forgotten. That’s a much more interesting version of the Pantheon idea than the show has managed before. The Toymaker and Maestro were enormous and arbitrary, while this one has a grievance I can follow, and it gives the episode something to argue about as well as a threat to survive. Abena is good value too, and the mid-episode turn where her loyalties shift is well earned.

Abena’s own story, when it arrives, is the best of the ones told in the chair. It’s short and unflashy, and it changes how I saw her whole presence in the shop. Because a story has to be true to work, every one we hear doubles as a confession, and she has the most to lose by telling hers. When the Doctor finally has to put something honest into the engine, the pause before he starts is the most revealing thing this incarnation has done. A man who talks constantly, stuck for something true, is a lovely idea for this Doctor.

Why the room matters more than the plot

What this gets right, and most of the run gets wrong, is that it builds a place before it builds a threat. I know who sits where in that shop, which chair is whose and what the arguments are about. By the time the engine starts pulling at people, I care because I’ve spent twenty minutes with them doing nothing in particular. Vincent and the Doctor works the same way, spending its time in a kitchen and a field with one man before anything invisible turns up. Nobody in that barbershop needs rescuing at the start, either; they need a haircut and somebody to talk to, and the episode treats both as worth forty-five minutes.

Gatwa is noticeably different here, and it suits him. He’s quieter and more deferential, a guest in somebody else’s space instead of the cleverest person in the room, and he spends a lot of the hour listening. Given how much of this era has him explaining things at speed, watching him sit in a chair and let other people talk is one of his better performances. A programme built on the idea that stories have power should occasionally make that literal, and putting the engine somewhere storytelling is already a daily ritual is far smarter than another cosmic library.

Where it wobbles

The mechanics get tangled in the last third. The engine, the god, the spider, the Barber’s history and the Doctor’s own story all need resolving, and the episode resorts to a lot of rapid explanation to get there. The resolution turns on a piece of business about the shop’s true name that I had to rewatch to follow. There’s a version of this that stays in the room and lets the conversation do everything, and it’d be a stronger hour. By the end the episode is juggling far more than it needs to, which is a shame when the room was already enough.

Rating: 3.5/5. Really enjoyed this. It’s warm, specific, beautifully shot and completely unlike anything else in the run, with the best-motivated villain of the era and a premise that turns a real place into a real idea. It only loses ground for a final act that tangles itself. Once again it leaves the Doctor explaining instead of acting.

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lucky day
Doctor WhoTelevision

Lucky Day: The Man Who Built a Career Out of Calling It All Fake

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

Ruby Sunday comes back, meets a charming man who says he met the Doctor as a child, falls for him, and discovers he’s spent the whole relationship recording her to launch a streaming career built on proving that aliens are a government lie. “Lucky Day” is the angriest thing this era has produced and it has far more teeth than I expected. I mostly liked it a great deal. The bits I didn’t are the bits where it flinches.

The Doctor is barely in it, which is the right call. This is Ruby’s episode, and Millie Gibson finally gets an hour built around her instead of around a question about her parentage. It’s the closest this era has come to an episode with something genuinely on its mind. It gets there by keeping the science fiction small and the human behaviour large.

Conrad is a well-observed villain

Jonah Hauer-King plays Conrad as likeable for most of the runtime, which is the whole trick. He’s warm, he’s interested, he listens, and the episode lets me enjoy him for twenty-five minutes before showing what he’s doing with the footage. The story is told largely from Ruby’s side, so I spent the first half enjoying him as a love interest and the second half going back over every scene I’d just watched. It’s the same trick Dot and Bubble pulled last year, and it works for the same reason: the information is all there and the episode simply declines to point at it.

What makes him work is that he isn’t stupid and he isn’t a true believer. He knows perfectly well that aliens are real, because he met one as a child and it terrified him. The lie is a business decision, and the episode is clear-eyed about the economics: denial gets more views than wonder, and a man who can perform righteous scepticism to camera will always out-earn one telling the truth. There’s no wound that explains him, either. Nobody hurt him and nobody abandoned him, and Hauer-King plays the confrontations with no rage underneath, just mild irritation at being interrupted, like a man with a content schedule.

The stream itself is well done, all jump cuts and direct address and manufactured outrage, and the bit where his followers turn on Ruby in real time is genuinely nasty. This show has handled disinformation badly before, usually by having somebody explain it. Here I watch him build the lie, watch it work, and watch what it costs the person on the other end of it. That’s how it should be done.

Ruby Sunday and Conrad in Lucky Day

Ruby, finally given something to play

Gibson is very good. Ruby isn’t the wide-eyed new companion any more; she’s someone who has seen impossible things, can’t talk about them, and is lonely enough that a man taking her seriously is irresistible. The scene where she realises what he’s done, and the camera stays on her while she works out how much of it was real, is the best acting she’s done in the part. The show lets her be angry instead of sad, which is the better choice. Kate Stewart is used well too, and the scene where she has to decide whether to confirm anything on the record, knowing it’ll be cut into the stream, is a genuinely modern problem for a secret organisation to have.

Underneath the thriller is the most interesting thing this era has said about its own format. Ruby travelled, saw impossible things, came home, and has been left holding all of it alone, with the Doctor moved on and UNIT offering a debrief and a phone number. Love & Monsters is the obvious ancestor, an hour about the wreckage the Doctor leaves in ordinary lives, and Conrad is that episode’s Elton turned malignant. Elton had a support group and a website nobody read, while Conrad has followers, a revenue stream and an algorithm that rewards him for the worst version of the story. That’s a genuinely current update instead of a fresh coat of paint.

Where it flinches

There are two problems. The first is the Shreek attack, where the creatures are decent puppetry and the siege at UNIT is well staged, but the episode clearly needs a monster in it to count as Doctor Who, and the plot bends to fit that instead of the other way round. The second is the ending, and it’s the more interesting failure. Kate effectively has Conrad locked up and, in the final scene, leaves him in a cell with an alien in it as a lesson. It’s played as a satisfying comeuppance and it sat badly with me, because UNIT is a military organisation disappearing a British citizen for embarrassing them, and the episode frames that as a win.

I don’t think the show noticed what it was doing. You could argue the intent behind that last scene is more generous than it looks, and I’ve tried to see it that way. The Doctor’s brief appearance at the end is the best part of the coda, quietly furious with Conrad in a way that recalls the cold streak in The Waters of Mars, and Gatwa plays the restraint as something that takes effort. Kerblam! took a swing at a contemporary target and lost its nerve in the final act, and this does the same thing far better right up until the cell door closes. The argument underneath it holds together, even if the last scene doesn’t.

Rating: 3.5/5. Really enjoyed this. It’s sharp, angry and well cast, and by a distance the best use of Ruby the show has managed, with a villain built out of recognisable behaviour instead of a plan. It loses ground for a monster subplot bolted on out of obligation. The ending also hands the good guys a win nobody should be comfortable with.

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the well
Doctor WhoTelevision

The Well: Something Is Standing Right Behind Her

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

Long after a shuttle got stranded on a planet nobody could name, a squad of soldiers lands on a dead mining colony there and finds one survivor who insists she’s alone. She isn’t. There’s something standing directly behind her, always, in the one place nobody can look without getting close enough to die. “The Well” is a direct sequel to Midnight, which is the best thing this programme has ever made, and the enormous surprise is that it comes close.

I really enjoyed this. It’s the best episode of the Gatwa era and one of the strongest things the show has done since the revival. It’s also the episode that best justifies this era existing. Two series of enormous budgets and cartoon gods, and the standout is a horror story in a dark corridor built on one rule and two good performances.

The rule is superb

A sequel to Midnight is a terrible idea on paper, because the original works by refusing to explain anything. What this does instead is take the one thing we know, that the entity attaches itself to a person, and build an entirely new rule from it. The creature stands right behind Aliss at all times. Looking at her from the front is safe, but looking from behind means you’re looking at it, and it takes you. That single constraint governs the whole episode, so every scene becomes a problem of angles, of where people are standing and who can safely approach from where.

It’s also brilliantly cheap, in the way the best horror usually is. The monster is a space behind a woman, so there’s nothing to render and nothing that can look silly, and the tension comes entirely from where people stand and where they look. The colony is all corridors, work lights and a lot of dark, and it turns out the show is still at its best in a corridor with a torch. The soldiers’ scanners report one person in the room when there are obviously two things present, which tells me whatever is behind her doesn’t count as alive. Nobody explains what that means, and it gets worse the longer I think about it.

The Doctor, Belinda and Aliss in The Well

Aliss, and a properly frightening situation

Rose Ayling-Ellis is extraordinary as Aliss. She’s deaf, and the story uses that as a practical fact with practical consequences: she can’t hear what’s behind her, she reads faces, and she notices people backing away before she notices why. Nobody makes a speech about it. The scene where the soldiers work out the rule and start retreating from her, and she can see them go and doesn’t understand, is genuinely upsetting. She’s been alone for a long time and is desperate for company, and Ayling-Ellis plays the loneliness first and the fear second, which is the right order.

The soldiers are drawn quickly and killed without ceremony. There’s no plot armour here: the episode sets a rule, and then people break it and die, one after another, exactly as the rule says they will. After a run of episodes where consequences kept being waived, a story that kills people according to its own logic is enormously welcome. Nothing about this hour is waiting for a finale to explain it, either. After two years of mystery boxes, the relief of watching something that simply happens is considerable.

The Doctor is frightened, and says so

This is Gatwa’s best work in the run. The Doctor recognises where he is well before he admits it, and the moment he says the planet’s name out loud and can’t finish the sentence is continuity used for character instead of fan service. He’s scared in a way this Doctor hasn’t been. He tells Belinda he’s met this thing before, that he never found out what it was, and that last time it got someone and he couldn’t stop it. That’s an admission of an old failure, and it gives the episode a weight that has nothing to do with the plot.

The choice to have him lose again is the bravest thing in it. The creature isn’t beaten or understood, and the Doctor leaves with the thing still out there. The sequel also declines to explain the creature, which is the most important decision in the episode. It could easily have filled in an origin, a name or a motive, and it takes real restraint to give none of them. A monster that stays unexplained after two encounters is far worse than one with a backstory, and it’s the opposite of this era’s habit of sorting everything into a pantheon with a grievance.

Rating: 4/5. Really enjoyed this. It’s tense, cleanly built and genuinely frightening, with a monster made out of geometry instead of money and an outstanding guest performance from Rose Ayling-Ellis. It follows the best episode this show has ever made and doesn’t embarrass itself, which is about the highest compliment available. Only the slightly rushed final act keeps it from going higher.

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lux
Doctor WhoTelevision

Lux: A God of Light in a Miami Picture House

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

A segregated cinema in Miami, 1952, where people have been vanishing into the screen and a cartoon mascot has become a living god of light. “Lux” is the most visually inventive episode this era has made and one of the strangest things the show has broadcast in years, and I came out of it genuinely unsure what I thought. Parts of it are terrific. One sequence near the end is either the boldest thing Davies has done or a serious misjudgement, and I keep changing my mind about which.

Alan Cumming voices Mr Ring-a-Ding, and the design is superb: a black-and-white rubber-hose cartoon that moves like a 1930s animation and behaves like something very old and very hungry. A cinema is already a place where people sit in the dark and watch light on a wall, so a creature made of light living in a projector needs almost no explaining. The episode trusts that and gets straight on with it. He’s strongest when the projector runs and weakest in darkness, and there’s a good sequence of people trying to decide whether to keep the film rolling or cut the power.

The animation sequence is a triumph

The standout is the stretch where the Doctor and Belinda are pulled into the film and drawn as cartoons themselves. It’s fully animated in period style, it’s funny, and it’s frightening in a way live action couldn’t manage, because the rules of a cartoon body aren’t the rules of a real one. That’s the best use this era has made of its budget. It isn’t spectacle for its own sake, it’s a sequence that could only exist in this story, and the gag about the Doctor’s cartoon physics wearing off at exactly the wrong moment justifies the whole idea.

Cumming is excellent throughout. Ring-a-Ding is playful, then petulant, then genuinely enormous when he drops the voice, and the moment he explains that he’s been trapped in celluloid for decades and simply wants to be seen has real sadness in it. He’s another Pantheon god, and by some distance the best realised of them. The horror beats are strong too, with the vanished people rendered as flickering silhouettes trapped in the film stock. What happens when the light goes out is properly unsettling.

Mr Ring-a-Ding in the Miami cinema in Lux

The 1952 setting has teeth

The cinema is segregated, and the episode doesn’t treat that as background. The Doctor’s reaction to being in Florida in 1952 is played with a tightness Gatwa handles very well. What I liked is that it’s concrete instead of declared, so nobody makes a speech. There’s a moment where the Doctor is stopped by a policeman and has to decide, visibly, how to survive the next thirty seconds, and Gatwa plays the calculation without a word. That’s the difference between a theme and a lecture, and it’s what made The Idiot’s Lantern work: put the horror in one household on one street and let people notice it themselves.

Reginald, who runs the cinema, is the best of the supporting cast, and Linus Roache plays him with a bone-deep weariness. His grief, and the bargain he’s made with the thing in the projector, gives the episode its one genuinely warm thread. Belinda is excellent again as well, and the double act is settling into something distinctive. She keeps asking the questions a nurse would ask: is anyone hurt, where are the bodies, what happens to the people in the film when it burns. Two episodes in, she’s the most immediately useful companion since Donna.

The bit I can’t decide about

Then the episode steps outside itself. The Doctor and Belinda are dropped into a living room where three fans are watching an episode of Doctor Who, discussing its flaws, and the Doctor realises he’s a fiction. I can see exactly what it’s for, since the whole episode is about people trapped inside films and putting the Doctor inside one completes the pattern. It’s also a decent joke at the expense of a particular kind of fan, delivered with more affection than mockery. It stops the story dead, though, and the fans are simply left behind with no consequence.

My real problem with it isn’t that it’s clever-clever. It’s the third time in two series that this show has reached for a get-out that sits outside its own rules: a god who can do anything, a memory that makes it snow indoors, and now a Doctor who might be fictional. Each one on its own is a fun swing, and together they add up to a programme that keeps telling me its own stakes are negotiable. I can see the case for the detour as a warm nod to the fans, and it’s easier to forgive in an episode this ambitious. An hour that turns into a cartoon for ten minutes and takes segregation seriously is at least trying something, and my reservations are about where the show is heading more than about effort.

Rating: 3/5. It was ok, and I admire a lot of it. The animation sequence is the best thing this era has produced, Alan Cumming is superb, and the 1952 material is handled with real care and no sermonising. It loses ground for a fourth-wall detour that halts the episode. The resolution, once again, involves the Doctor talking a god into leaving.

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the robot revolution
Doctor WhoTelevision

The Robot Revolution: A Planet Named After a Woman Who Never Asked

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

A nurse from London is abducted by robots because an ex-boyfriend once bought her a novelty star certificate, and the planet that grew up around that star has spent years worshipping a woman who has no idea it exists. That’s a genuinely good hook, and “The Robot Revolution” does surprisingly little with it. Varada Sethu arrives as Belinda Chandra and is immediately the best thing in the episode. The episode itself is a muddle.

After a Christmas special and a full series, this is the third attempt at a proper opener in this era, and it repeats the same habit. It throws a lot of ideas at the screen, resolves them at speed and hopes the charm carries. It mostly doesn’t. The last two minutes set up a better series than the forty-eight before them suggest, which is at least something.

Belinda is a strong addition

Sethu plays Belinda as a working nurse with no patience for any of this, and the difference from Ruby is immediate and deliberate. Ruby wanted to travel, but Belinda wants to go home, says so repeatedly, and treats the Doctor as an obstacle for most of the runtime. The scene where she tells him flatly that she isn’t his companion and has a shift to get back to is funnier and sharper than anything in the previous series opener. We meet her at work first, tired and competent and mid-shift, before anything science fictional happens. That small choice pays off, because every complaint she makes about wanting to go home has a real place to go back to.

The backstory is nasty in a useful way, too. The star certificate was bought by a controlling ex, so the entire planet’s worship of her is founded on a man’s gesture of ownership. Sethu plays Belinda’s discomfort at being worshipped as a direct extension of her discomfort at having been possessed. That’s a story about how casually things get assigned to women, and about being made into a symbol you never agreed to be. All of that is present in the setup, and almost none of it is present in the episode, which is far more interested in getting to the robot siege.

Belinda Chandra and the robots in The Robot Revolution

The plot never settles

The trouble is everything around her. There’s a robot uprising, a human resistance, a planet named Missbelindachandra, a tyrannical AI Generator, a twist about the ex-boyfriend and a time-travel fix, all inside fifty minutes. The AI Generator turns out to be Alan, the ex, fused with the machine, and the episode wants that to land as both a personal horror and a satire about artificial intelligence without building either properly. A man who wanted to own one woman ends up owning a world and still defines it entirely by her, which is a proper idea with a proper shape. The episode has about four minutes for it, plays it as a shouty confrontation, and blows him up.

The satire is the weaker half. There’s a gesture at AI as something that consumes people’s work and identity, which is a rich subject, and the episode raises it and immediately moves on to a corridor. The Sound of Drums handled a contemporary target far better, because the satire about a media-built politician was the plot instead of a coat of paint on it. Here the theme is a costume the villain happens to be wearing. The whole hour rushes past its own best material, and this is where it shows most.

The robots deserved better

There’s a decent design idea in the robots. They’re bulky, industrial, slightly agricultural machines instead of sleek killers, and the sound work on them is good, all hydraulic wheeze and metal complaint. They look like things built for a purpose by people who couldn’t afford anything better, which fits a colony world. There’s one properly good beat, when a robot hesitates before following an order and the humans around it don’t notice. That’s the whole uprising premise in three seconds, and the show never returns to it.

For an episode called “The Robot Revolution”, that’s a strange omission. There’s no robot character, no defector and nobody on the machine side with a point of view, so the title subject is scenery. Compare that to how much Gridlock gets out of giving even its most incidental background figures a life. Gatwa is good as ever, but he’s given very little to do beyond explain things to Belinda, and he resolves the climax by reversing a polarity. His best moment is telling her that a piece of junk her ex bought her has got thousands of people killed, and Sethu takes it without melodrama.

The closing beat is the interesting one. The TARDIS can’t get Belinda back to 24 May 2025, and every attempt fails. That’s a clean, specific arc, better than a mystery about parentage, and it gives the series an actual goal instead of another question. After two years of arcs built on withheld information, a run with a concrete objective is a genuine improvement, whatever this particular episode does with it.

Rating: 2.5/5. Not my favourite. Varada Sethu is a genuinely excellent addition and the premise underneath this is strong. The episode crams four ideas into one hour, though, wastes its robots, and resolves a planetary revolution with a reversed polarity. Belinda deserved a better first night.

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empire of death
Doctor WhoTelevision

Empire of Death: A God of Death Beaten With a Length of Rope

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

Sutekh kills everyone in the universe about fifteen minutes into this, which is a bold move, and then the finale has to find something to do for another forty. What it finds is a whistle, a spoon, a rope and an answer to the season’s central mystery that deflates it so completely I sat back in my chair. “Empire of Death” is the episode where this run’s problems stop being occasional and become the whole thing. I’d been looking forward to it, because the Sutekh cliffhanger was the best moment of the series. That makes the execution harder to forgive, not easier.

Killing everyone is a hard act to follow

The opening stretch is genuinely striking. The dust spreads, people crumble mid-sentence, and Kate Stewart and the whole UNIT cast are wiped out inside a few minutes. The show commits to it, with the death toll total and the universe emptied, while the Doctor and Ruby escape into a void. The trouble with erasing everything is that I know it’s coming back. There’s no version of this where the universe stays dead, so the middle act is spent watching two characters wander a grey nothing while I wait for the reset.

The episode tries to fill that with a scene about a woman and a child on a dead world, which is well played and completely disconnected from anything, and with a great deal of plot explained aloud to a spoon. The atmosphere is decent and the pacing isn’t. There’s a genuine charm to the Doctor assembling a way out of a void with junk, and the TARDIS built from his own memories is a lovely image. For a finale, though, an enormous amount of this hour is two people in a featureless void talking about what they might do next.

Sutekh unleashed in Empire of Death

The rope

Sutekh is defeated by the Doctor tying a rope to him and towing him through the time vortex, which forces him to spread life instead of death, and then letting go. I’ve thought about it several times and I still find it embarrassing. This is a god of death, set up across two episodes and one classic serial as an unstoppable force, and the answer is a lasso. There’s a version of the idea that might have worked, where turning the villain’s own power against him is set up properly and costs something. Here it arrives as an improvisation with no groundwork and it’s over in under a minute.

The comparison that keeps occurring to me is Journey’s End, which is also an overstuffed finale that resolves too fast, but at least pays for its ending with Donna. Here nothing is spent. Everyone comes back, the dead are undone and Kate is fine. Even the emotional cost is refunded, which makes the opening fifteen minutes feel like a trick in hindsight.

What Gatwa does with it

None of this is his fault, and he’s very good throughout. There’s a stretch in the middle where the Doctor understands that everyone is dead and that he brought the thing that did it, and Gatwa plays that as a man barely holding himself together while staying useful. The scene where he breaks down properly, then puts himself back together because Ruby is watching, is the best acting in the finale. Six episodes in, this Doctor is fully formed: warm, quick, quietly furious, more openly emotional than any of his predecessors and never sentimental about it. The casting isn’t the problem with this era; the problem is that a lead this good keeps being handed finales that resolve themselves with a rope and a shrug.

The mystery, and why the ending lands so badly

Ruby’s mother turns out to be an ordinary woman. She isn’t a Time Lord or a god or connected to anything, just a frightened teenager who left her baby at a church and went on to live a normal life, and the pointing gesture the season treated as cosmic was her indicating a street sign. I can see the intended argument, which is that the mystery mattered because people believed it mattered, and an ordinary woman is a deliberate rebuke to a decade of companions turning out to be special. In principle I like that idea. Millie Gibson’s scenes with her birth mother are the best acting in the run, too.

The show didn’t earn it, though. The season built the mystery with snow falling indoors, a memory that could rewrite reality, a god riding the TARDIS because of it, and characters repeatedly telling me this was the most important question in the universe. Those are supernatural signals, not human ones. Answering them with “she was nobody” doesn’t reframe the season, it voids it after the fact, because the strange things around Ruby are still unexplained. There’s a sympathetic case for the ending and I’ve tried to meet it halfway, but snow doesn’t fall indoors because a teenager was scared.

That’s the failure that links this run to the one before it. The Timeless Children answered a season of questions with something nobody could act on, and this answers a season of questions by declaring they weren’t real. Mrs Flood is left entirely unexplained, turning to camera to promise that the Doctor’s story ends in horror, so one mystery is voided and the other left wide open. I’ll keep watching, largely for Gatwa, but I’d like the next run to decide what it’s about before it starts planting mysteries about it.

Rating: 2/5. Not my favourite at all. The opening is genuinely bold, Gatwa is very good throughout, and Gibson’s scenes with her birth mother are lovely. A god of death is beaten with a rope, though, a universe of deaths is undone at no cost, and a season-long mystery is resolved by announcing it was never a mystery. This is where the Gatwa run lost me.

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the legend of ruby sunday
Doctor WhoTelevision

The Legend of Ruby Sunday: Everybody Stands Around Watching a Screen

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

Penultimate episodes have a job to do and this one does very little else. “The Legend of Ruby Sunday” gathers everyone at UNIT headquarters, sets up the mysteries the finale will have to resolve, and spends most of its runtime with a room full of people looking at a monitor and reacting. Then the last two minutes produce a genuinely great reveal, and I went into the finale properly excited despite everything I’d just sat through. That’s an awkward thing to rate, because nearly all of the good bits are in the final stretch.

Penultimate episodes are a thankless format and always have been. Their job is to arrange the board, and arranging a board is less interesting than playing on it. The best of them get round this with a complete story of their own that happens to end badly, which is the trick The Stolen Earth pulls: the Earth is stolen, the Doctor is shot, and it’s a satisfying hour even without the follow-up. This has no story of its own, just a search conducted indoors that produces a name in the last ninety seconds.

The Time Window is a slow device

The centrepiece is UNIT reconstructing the night Ruby was abandoned, using a machine that projects the past into the middle of a laboratory. It’s a striking visual, a snowy churchyard rendered in light with technicians walking around it. The trouble is that it’s a scene about people watching a recording. Everyone stands at the edge of the projection making observations while the plot moves at the speed of the playback, and the episode keeps cutting to reaction shots to find tension it hasn’t otherwise built. The moment the hooded figure turns and points is effective, but the twenty minutes around it are a lot of standing.

The UNIT material is better. Kate Stewart is used well again, Mel gets a proper role instead of a cameo, and the base looks like a real facility with a real budget. Carla being brought in while strangers dig through the worst night of her daughter’s life gives Michelle Greenidge something proper to play, and it’s the only thread that isn’t about plot mechanics. The Doctor’s behaviour is the other interesting thing, and nobody comments on it. He’s evasive with UNIT, snappish with Ruby and increasingly desperate about a question that’s strictly none of his business, and Gatwa plays the fixation well enough that I wanted someone to call him on it.

UNIT and the Time Window in The Legend of Ruby Sunday

Susan Twist, finally explained

The running gag of the same actress appearing in every episode gets its payoff, and it’s the weakest of the reveals. She’s Susan Triad, a tech billionaire whose company is about to give free software to the world, and the Doctor spends a chunk of the episode convinced she’s his granddaughter Susan. That’s decent misdirection aimed squarely at long-term fans, and it worked on me. The actual explanation, that she’s a vessel for Sutekh scattered through time, is delivered at speed at the end. As a season-long puzzle the answer is mechanical, because the recurring face doesn’t mean anything about her, it’s just a signature the villain was leaving.

Running alongside all this is Anita Dobson’s Mrs Flood, who has been turning up since the Christmas special, talking to the camera and clearly knowing far more than she should. Dobson is enjoyable and the direct-to-camera gag still works. By this point I’d started counting, though: Ruby’s mother, Susan Twist’s face, Mrs Flood, and the Doctor’s own reaction to all three. That’s four unresolved threads with one episode left, and the show is still adding instead of closing. Planting questions is cheap and answering them is expensive, and I remember exactly how it went the last time this show tried to land that many things at once.

The last two minutes are terrific

And then the figure on the TARDIS turns, Sutekh is revealed to have been riding on the ship since 1911, and the dust of death begins to spread. Sutekh is a genuinely great choice. He’s from one of the best serials the classic show ever made, he has an enormous physical design, and Gabriel Woolf returning to voice him is proper casting. The idea that he’s been attached to the ship the whole time, spreading through every world the Doctor visited, is the kind of huge retroactive threat a finale should be built on. Gatwa plays the recognition well, less fear than the specific horror of realising the danger came with him.

The image helps enormously. Sutekh is a vast jackal-headed thing perched on top of the ship, completely still, and the shot of him unfolding is the best the era has produced. After a run of villains who are essentially charismatic people in good costumes, a monster that’s simply an enormous ancient animal is a welcome change of gear. So much of the episode is throat-clearing before this moment, and it’s the moment that makes it worth sitting through. I just wish the hour had given me a story on the way.

Rating: 2.5/5. Not my favourite. The Sutekh reveal is superb and the UNIT ensemble is enjoyable, but this is an hour of people watching a screen and explaining what they’re seeing. The season-long mystery of Susan Twist resolves into a signature instead of a story. It’s a trailer for the finale more than an episode in its own right.

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rogue
Doctor WhoTelevision

Rogue: Shapeshifting Birds at a Regency Ball

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

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.

The Doctor at the Regency ball in Rogue

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.

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dot and bubble
Doctor WhoTelevision

Dot and Bubble: They’d Rather Drown Than Take His Hand

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

For about forty minutes “Dot and Bubble” is a decent, slightly obvious satire about young people in a walled city who spend every waking second inside a social media bubble, too distracted to notice they’re being eaten. Then it does something in its last three minutes that reframes everything preceding it, and I have not stopped thinking about it since. This is the best-constructed episode of the run and the one that most repays a second watch.

The setup is Finetime, a colony of wealthy young people who live inside a floating ring of screens, work two hours a day, and are attended by an automated system that does everything else. Slugs are eating them one by one and almost nobody has noticed, because nobody is looking at anything except their own feed.

The satire is good even before the turn

The visual conceit does most of the work. Every character is permanently surrounded by a ring of floating video windows, and they navigate the physical world by watching a slice of it between the panels. The sequence where Lindy has to walk down a corridor with the bubble switched off, and genuinely cannot do it because she has never learned to see, is both very funny and properly bleak.

Callie Cooke is superb as Lindy Pepper-Bean. She plays her as brittle, entitled and permanently mid-performance, and crucially she plays it without inviting me to like her. That’s a brave choice for a lead guest character and it’s essential to what the episode is doing.

The world-building around her is good too. Finetime is a company town for the children of the rich, where a two-hour working day is presented as a hardship and the parents back home are footing the bill for the whole arrangement. None of that is explained in a speech; it accumulates through what people complain about. By the time the slugs arrive I understood the economics of the place entirely, which is a lot more than most episodes of this run manage about their settings.

The nastiest beat in the middle act is her sacrificing Ricky September, the one person who has been kind to her and the only one in Finetime who reads books, by giving away his position to save herself. It’s a shocking little piece of cowardice and the episode doesn’t soften it or have her regret it.

The last three minutes

The Doctor spends the whole episode locked out. He’s on a screen, shouting advice, unable to get into the city, and Lindy is dismissive of him throughout in a way I read as generational contempt for an adult telling her what to do.

Then the survivors reach the edge of the world, and the Doctor arrives in person, and offers to fly them all to safety. And they refuse. Not because of a plan or a trap. They look at him and they say no, and they say it with an expression that makes the reason unmistakable, and they choose to sail off into a forest that will certainly kill them rather than get into his ship.

It’s the most quietly devastating scene the show has done in years, and it works because of the withholding. The episode has been showing me an entirely white city full of people who never once acknowledged the Doctor as anything other than an irritation, and I read that as satire about screens. The final scene tells me I was reading it wrong, and invites me to go back through every interaction and notice what was actually happening.

Gatwa is extraordinary in that moment. He offers again. He keeps his voice level and reasonable while it’s happening. And then he watches them leave, and the last shot of him is somebody absorbing an insult so total that anger isn’t available. He plays it as bafflement collapsing into hurt, and it’s the best thing he does in the whole series.

Lindy Pepper-Bean inside her bubble in Dot and Bubble

The Doctor locked out of his own episode

The clever move is keeping Gatwa on a screen for most of the runtime. He’s reduced to a face in a window shouting instructions at someone who barely tolerates him, which is a genuinely uncomfortable position for this character and the episode holds it for nearly the whole hour.

It also means the Doctor never gets to do the thing he does. He can’t arrive, can’t take charge, can’t be the cleverest person in the room, because the room won’t let him in. Ruby manages to get inside Finetime and is treated slightly better, which at the time looks like a plot convenience and afterwards turns out to be the whole point.

Gatwa plays the frustration beautifully throughout. There’s an edge of impatience creeping into the charm as the episode goes on, the sense of a man who is used to being listened to and cannot work out why he isn’t. And because the episode withholds the reason, that impatience plays as ego right up until the moment it turns out to be something else entirely.

Why this one works when the others don’t

This is the episode I’d point to as the answer to what’s wrong with most of this run so far. It has a point to make and it makes it through structure rather than dialogue. Nobody stops the story to explain the theme. The episode simply arranges events so that the meaning is unavoidable, and trusts me to get there.

Compare it to the aside dropped into Space Babies, which states a position in a line and moves on. Here the same instinct produces a scene that recontextualises fifty minutes of television. Elizabeth Sandifer’s write-up goes into considerable detail on how carefully the reveal is seeded, and the seeding really is meticulous once you know to look.

The slugs are the weakest element, admittedly. They’re a functional threat with a silly design, and the business about them eating people in alphabetical order is the sort of detail that’s clever on paper and slightly daft on screen.

The other detail I keep returning to is Ricky September, the one person in Finetime who has read a book and knows anything about the world outside. He’s set up as the exception, the decent one, the character the story would normally save. He’s killed off, and Lindy is the one who does it. The episode refuses to give me anyone to root for inside that city, and holding that line is what makes the final scene land as hard as it does.

One further thing this gets right that the run so far mostly doesn’t: the Doctor loses. He offers help, it’s refused, and he cannot make anyone take it. There’s no clever reversal in the last thirty seconds, no ship arriving to rescue them from their own decision, no softening. The people sail off to die because of what they are, and the episode ends on his face rather than on a solution. After several weeks of monsters turning out to be misunderstood and threats being waved away, an hour that lets the Doctor be defeated by something he can’t argue with lands like cold water.

Rating: 4/5. Really enjoyed this one, and I admire it more than I enjoyed it. Callie Cooke is excellent in a deliberately unlikeable part, the bubble conceit is a genuinely good visual idea, and the closing scene is the sharpest thing this era has produced. It only loses ground on a monster that never rises above functional.A city of people who cannot see past their own screens, and a man offering them a way out that they’d rather drown than take. That last look on his face is the whole episode.

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73 yards
Doctor WhoTelevision

73 Yards: The Woman at the Edge of the Field Who Never Gets Closer

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

The Doctor steps on a fairy circle on a Welsh clifftop, vanishes, and doesn’t properly return for the rest of the hour. What’s left is Ruby, alone, with a woman standing exactly seventy-three yards away who follows her everywhere and never gets any closer. Anyone Ruby sends to talk to the figure comes back changed, refuses to say what they heard, and leaves her for good. “73 Yards” is the strangest thing this show has done in years, and I mostly admired it a great deal.

It’s also the episode that best shows both what this era can do and the thing it keeps refusing to do, which is explain itself. Nearly everything in the first forty minutes is superb. The last few minutes close a loop without telling me what was inside it. I’ve gone back and forth on whether that’s a flaw or the whole idea, and I still haven’t settled.

The rule is superb

Seventy-three yards is a specific, arbitrary, unyielding distance, and the episode gets enormous mileage from it. The figure is always there and always at that range: across a pub car park, at the end of a road, on the other side of a field. In wide shots I found myself scanning the background for her before the camera pointed her out, which is exactly the reflex good horror builds. The cruelty is in what happens to anyone who approaches. They walk over, they listen, and they come back looking at Ruby with an expression she can’t argue with.

That’s a genuinely frightening idea because it makes the threat social instead of physical. Nothing hurts Ruby, everybody just leaves. The scene where Carla, who has fostered dozens of children and been the warmest presence in this run, looks at her daughter with total revulsion is the most upsetting thing in the series. The camera stays with Ruby every time, so each conversation happens at a distance, in silence, while she watches somebody’s posture change. Holding that for the full hour is what turns a good gimmick into genuine dread, and by the fourth time somebody walked over there I didn’t want them to go.

Ruby Sunday on the Welsh clifftop in 73 Yards

Giving Ruby a whole life

The middle act is the ambitious part. Instead of resolving the situation, the episode lets years pass, and Ruby grows older, moves, takes a job and learns to live with the figure at the edge of every frame. Millie Gibson plays decades across an hour and is very good in the later stretches, which isn’t something the series had asked of her before. The Roger ap Gwilliam section is the strongest. He’s a populist politician on course to become Prime Minister and start a nuclear war, and Ruby’s plan is to get close to him and then step aside, so the figure is seventy-three yards from him instead.

Whatever the woman says sends him running and ends his career in an afternoon. That’s a properly clever use of the rule, turning the horror into something Ruby can wield without ever understanding it. Aneurin Barnard is genuinely unpleasant in the part, and the brief sketch of how quickly a country can be talked into something ugly works better for being sketched instead of lectured. Wales does a lot of the work too. The pub scene, where the locals wind Ruby up about the mad woman on the hill and then abruptly stop finding it funny, is the best-written exchange in the episode.

A Doctor-lite episode that earns the absence

The show has made these before out of production necessity, and the best of them turn the constraint into the point. Turn Left is the obvious comparison: remove the Doctor and find out what the world does without him, with the companion as the lens. This is doing something slightly different and slightly bolder. Turn Left is about the Doctor’s absence from history, while 73 Yards is about his absence from one person’s life, and it never lets Ruby become a hero in his place. She doesn’t solve the mystery or find him, she simply gets older with a thing following her, adapts to it, and uses it once.

Then Ruby lives out her whole life, and at the moment of her death she finds herself back on the clifftop, seventy-three yards from her younger self. She is the figure. She waves her past self away from the fairy circle, the Doctor never vanishes, and none of it happens. As an image that’s lovely, but as a resolution it’s a closed loop with nothing inside it. Why the circle did this, what the figure said and why the distance are never addressed, and the episode’s position is that the mystery is the point.

I’m genuinely torn. There’s a strong tradition of folk horror that works exactly this way, and the ambiguity really is the whole substance of it, so an explanation would probably have been worse. This show’s basic promise has always been that the Doctor arrives and works out how the trick is done, though, and an era that keeps replacing mechanism with mood is spending something it’ll want back. I’d still rather the show made this than another safe runaround, and an hour of family television where the hero is absent and a woman simply grows old being followed is a brave thing to broadcast. I finished it wanting one more scene.

Rating: 3.5/5. Really enjoyed most of this, and it’s the most interesting thing the era has attempted. The central rule is superb, the social horror is genuinely upsetting, Gibson carries a whole hour on her own, and the political sequence is sharp. It loses ground for an ending that closes the loop without ever making the loop mean anything. That’s becoming a habit with this run.

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boom
Doctor WhoTelevision

Boom: One Wrong Step and the Doctor Goes Up With the Rest of Them

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

“Boom” puts the Doctor’s foot on a live landmine in the first five minutes and keeps it there for the rest of the runtime, and everything else in the episode has to work around that one immovable fact. It’s the best hour of the Gatwa era so far, and I loved it. It’s tense, it’s angry and it has a proper idea underneath it. It does all of that with the lead character standing still.

That constraint is the whole design. He can’t run, can’t fiddle with a console, and can’t do the thing this show usually does where the Doctor solves a problem by moving faster than everyone else. Take away the running and you find out what’s left, which turns out to be a man talking very quickly while terrified. It’s also cheap in the best way: one quarry, some smoke, a handful of actors and a glowing disc on the ground. The most effective hour of the most expensive series this show has made is the one that spends almost nothing.

The mine is brilliantly built

The rules are set quickly and never bent. Step off and it detonates, shift your weight and the tolerance narrows, and the mine judges the threat level of the person standing on it, so panic makes it worse. It’s a machine that punishes exactly the reactions anyone in that situation would naturally have. What lifts it from a gimmick to a premise is that the mine is a product. This is Villengard, an arms company that makes the weapons, the war and the ambulances, and the mine is governed by an algorithm tuned for casualties because casualties are the business model.

That’s a genuinely furious idea, and the episode never softens it. The war on this planet has no enemy, just soldiers fighting an opponent that doesn’t exist, kept going by a company that needs the conflict to continue. The moment the Doctor works out that nobody has actually seen the other side is the best single beat in the series. The ambulances are the nastiest touch of all. They arrive when you’re wounded, work out whether treating you is economical, and kill you when it isn’t, all while a calm synthetic voice offers reassurance, and I could picture exactly which meeting approved them.

The Doctor trapped on a landmine in Boom

Gatwa is extraordinary in this

Given nothing to do but stand and talk, Gatwa turns in the performance that proves the casting. He’s frightened, he’s furious about being frightened, and he keeps having to stop being either in order to think. He switches between those three constantly and none of it looks like acting. The scene where he talks a dying man’s daughter through what’s happened to her father is the best thing in the run so far, and it works because Gatwa plays the Doctor’s kindness as an effort instead of a default. He’s being gentle while standing on a bomb, and I could see what it cost him.

The supporting cast is small and used precisely. Canterbury is a young soldier who has never questioned any of it, Mundy Flynn is competent and out of her depth, and Splice is a child who has to be told her father is gone. None of them get much screen time and all three land, because each is given exactly one thing to want. That economy is what an episode with a stationary lead needs. It’s the kind of discipline the rest of this run keeps skipping in favour of another location.

Ruby gets something to do at last

Millie Gibson is finally handed material with weight. Ruby is the one who has to move, fetch, improvise and eventually get shot, and the stretch where she’s in danger while the Doctor can’t take a single step toward her is the tensest of the series. The episode is smart about their dynamic, too. He’s the one who can’t act, so she has to, and the reversal shows how much of the usual Doctor-and-companion rhythm depends on him being mobile. Give the companion the legs and the Doctor the words and you get a genuinely different two-hander.

The ambulances and the algorithmic cruelty rhyme with things this show has done before, and I noticed the echoes without minding them. Underneath, this is closest to Midnight: confine the Doctor, strip his advantages, and see what he’s actually made of. Midnight did it with a room full of frightened people, and this does it with one small metal disc. Both work because the rule never bends.

An argument that is the plot

The soldiers are the Anglican Marines, a fighting order who have been sold a war as a religious duty, and the episode has a lot of quiet contempt for the arrangement. That contempt isn’t for the men, who are decent and frightened, but for the machinery that recruited them. The Doctor doesn’t deliver a speech about organised religion. He just keeps asking practical questions the soldiers can’t answer, and the gap between what they’ve been told and what they can check does the work. When he asks how long it’s been since anyone saw the enemy, and gets a look instead of a number, the whole thing comes apart without anyone making a case.

That’s the difference between this and the political aside in Space Babies, which stated a position and moved on. Here the argument is the plot. You can’t separate the idea from the mechanism, because the mechanism is a company selling weapons to people it has convinced are fighting somebody. The resolution leans on the system being talked down through the dead man’s recorded personality and his daughter’s voice, which is emotionally satisfying and mechanically a bit soft after fifty minutes of hard rules. I don’t mind much, because the ninety seconds before it, where the Doctor works out what’s about to happen and there’s nothing he can do, more than pay for it.

Rating: 4.5/5. Loved this. It’s furious, frightening and tightly built, and it finally gives Gatwa a script worth his performance. The war-as-business-model idea is the sharpest thing this show has said in years, Ruby is properly used for the first time, and the whole thing rests on one immovable rule that never gets fudged. Only the slightly soft ending keeps it off a five.

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the devils chord
Doctor WhoTelevision

The Devil’s Chord: Maestro Eats the Music and Steals the Episode

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

Jinkx Monsoon is having a wonderful time and so was I, for about half of this. “The Devil’s Chord” drops the Doctor and Ruby into Abbey Road Studios in 1963 to meet the Beatles, and instead finds a god of music who has eaten every good tune on Earth. As a villain showcase it’s terrific. As an episode about the Beatles it barely exists, and the ending is the second musical number since Christmas, which is starting to look like a habit instead of a flourish.

This is where the shape of the new era gets clearer. Maestro belongs to a Pantheon, a family of godlike beings that includes the Toymaker, and the show is openly building a mythology of gods instead of aliens with technology. That’s a real change in what this programme is. This is the episode that commits to it, and I’m not sure I like the trade.

Maestro is a magnificent creation

Monsoon plays Maestro as a performer bored by everything except their own act, and every scene they’re in crackles. The design is superb, part music hall and part silent-film villain, with a constant physical restlessness that makes them genuinely unpredictable to watch. The best stretch is Maestro moving through the studio absorbing sound while the world goes quieter and flatter behind them. It’s a properly good idea done simply, and a piano falling silent mid-chord is more unsettling than any amount of shouting. The show has always been strong at making an absence frightening.

The rules are nicely judged as well. Maestro can be summoned by a specific chord and banished by another, and is bound by the conventions of performance in a way the episode plays with instead of explaining. There’s a moment where they have to stop mid-threat because a piece of music resolves, and the frustration on Monsoon’s face is funnier than any line. There’s also a lovely, nasty beat where Maestro senses Ruby’s musical ability and stops dead, hearing something in her that shouldn’t be there. It’s the first time the arc has felt like it’s doing something instead of being announced, because a villain notices it instead of the Doctor explaining it.

The 1925 cold open is the strongest few minutes of the episode. A piano teacher and a pupil sit in a cold room, a chord gets played that shouldn’t be, and Maestro arrives out of the instrument itself. It’s shot like a horror short and sets out the villain’s rules without a word of explanation. If the whole hour had held that nerve, this would be a different review.

Maestro at the piano in The Devil's Chord

The Beatles are a backdrop

Here’s where it thins out. The premise is that without music, John and Paul are dull men with no ambition and the sixties never happen, which is a strong hook the episode does almost nothing with. The Beatles get a handful of scenes as flat, incurious blokes and are then sidelined so the plot can happen elsewhere. There’s no real sense of what’s been taken from them, because the episode hasn’t got time to show me who they’d have been. Not using any actual Beatles music leaves a hole exactly where the emotional payoff should be.

The same thing happens with the bigger idea. Without music the twentieth century curdles and the world ends in nuclear fire, which is an enormous claim made in a single scene and then abandoned after a few seconds of grey, ruined London through a window. Compare it to how The Idiot’s Lantern handled a creature stealing something from ordinary people, grounded in one family on one street. That episode knew the theft only matters if you’ve met the person being robbed. Here it’s civilisational and abstract, and the stakes are vague to match.

The Doctor is properly frightened

The best character work is in how the Doctor reacts to Maestro. He doesn’t bluster, he doesn’t produce a plan, and at one point he actively hides. There’s a scene where he tells Ruby he’s met one of these things before and barely survived, and Gatwa plays it as a man who genuinely doesn’t want to be in this building. A villain the Doctor can out-think is a puzzle, but a villain he’s simply afraid of changes what he is in the story. Gatwa is very good at playing fear without playing weakness, and the two-hander at the piano is the strongest acting in the episode.

Then the Doctor and Ruby play the right chord to banish Maestro, and the episode ends with a full song-and-dance number on the street outside the studio. I didn’t hate it, since it’s well shot and everyone commits. Combined with the Pantheon business, though, it tells me where the show is going: away from the science fiction problem-solving that’s been its engine for sixty years and toward fantasy where the rules are whatever the story needs. I can see why you’d call that a bold and deliberate reinvention, and I remain unconvinced, because the thing being traded away is the bit I like most. What keeps me coming back is the two of them, who dress up for the sixties and plainly enjoy each other’s company before it all goes wrong.

Rating: 3/5. It was ok. Jinkx Monsoon is worth watching for on their own, and the sound-drain sequence is the best idea the era has had so far. The Beatles material is wasted, though, the emotional stakes never land, and the musical finish tips an already uncertain tone over the edge. Watch it for the villain.

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space babies
Doctor WhoTelevision

Space Babies: A Station Full of Talking Infants and a Monster Made of Snot

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

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 Doctor and Ruby aboard the baby station in Space Babies

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.

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the church on ruby road
Doctor WhoTelevision

The Church on Ruby Road: Goblins, a Song, and a Very Good New Doctor

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

Ncuti Gatwa is terrific, and I want to lead with that because most of what follows is about the episode around him. He’s charming and quick, physically loose in a way none of the recent Doctors have been, and he holds the screen from his first proper scene. On the casting, the show got it exactly right. “The Church on Ruby Road” itself is a Christmas special about goblins who eat babies, a foundling called Ruby Sunday and a plot that runs on coincidence by design. It’s likeable and it’s thin, and it points the show somewhere I’m not sure I want it to go.

As a Christmas special aimed at a big family crowd on the day, it does its job perfectly well, and I don’t want to be sniffy about that. It’s bright, it moves, the goblins are memorable and a lot of people met a new Doctor and liked him. Those are real achievements. My reservations are about what it signals for the run ahead, more than about an hour of Christmas telly.

Gatwa lands immediately

The best thing here is how quickly he establishes a distinct Doctor. He dances, badly and enthusiastically, in the middle of a packed nightclub, and the show holds on it long enough to establish that this Doctor is comfortable in his own skin. Capaldi’s Doctor was awkward on purpose and Whittaker’s was permanently busy, but this one is having a nice time, and that’s a real change. He talks to Ruby like a friend instead of a project, and when the episode gives him a moment to go still, the change of gear works. The scene where he tells her he’s a foundling too is the one bit of real character writing in the hour, and Gatwa plays it without pushing.

Millie Gibson is good as well, and Ruby is set up efficiently as a musician and a foster daughter in a household that keeps taking children in. Michelle Greenidge makes a real impression in very little time, and the Sunday flat feels like somewhere people live instead of a set built for a plot. Carla has fostered dozens of children, her mother Cherry is sharp and very funny about it, and the family scenes have real warmth. The stretch where Ruby is erased from her own family, and Carla answers the door to a stranger with no idea who she is, is the one properly affecting part of the hour. It works because the episode built the household first.

The Fifteenth Doctor and Ruby Sunday in The Church on Ruby Road

The goblins, and the song

The goblins are a decent design, all sinew and teeth and rope, and their flying ship is a nice bit of storybook imagery. The rope-ladder chase over the rooftops is well staged. Then they sing, with a full musical number about eating a baby performed by the goblin king. That’s the moment the special’s approach becomes obvious, because this isn’t a science fiction story with fantasy trimmings. It’s a fantasy story that says the word “goblin” without flinching, and Davies is signalling a change in what this show is allowed to be in the most-watched slot of the year.

I’m not against a musical number on principle. What bothers me is what it replaces. The goblins have no explanation and don’t want one: they feed on coincidence, they travel by rope, and they’re simply goblins. For six decades this programme’s basic move has been to take something that looks like magic and show you the machinery behind it. Removing the machinery isn’t a small change, and this episode is where it starts.

Coincidence as a plot engine

The mechanics are the weakest part. Because the goblins feed on coincidence, the episode is licensed to have things happen for no reason, and it uses that licence constantly. A ladder falls where it’s needed, a slip on ice arrives on cue, and a baby is saved by a chain of accidents the story has excused in advance. That’s a clever get-out, and it’s also a way of writing a plot without consequences, because nothing has to follow from anything. When the Doctor and Ruby go back in time and change one small thing at the end, it works on its own terms but lands softly, since an hour of engineered luck has already taught me that outcomes here are negotiable.

A Christmas special being light and silly is completely fine, and some of the show’s best have been exactly that. What’s different is the rule change underneath. When the goblins are simply goblins and coincidence is simply a force, the Doctor stops being someone who explains the universe and becomes someone who bargains with it. I can see the case for it as a deliberate reset, and I follow the argument. I just prefer the version of this show where the Doctor works out how the trick is done.

The mystery box, again

Ruby was left at a church as a baby by a hooded figure, her origins are unknown, snow falls around her at key moments, and Mrs Flood turns to camera at the end knowing what a TARDIS is. That’s four hooks planted in one episode. I spent the whole Chibnall run complaining about arcs that withhold instead of build, so I’ll say now that I hope this one pays off. The signs aren’t encouraging, because the questions are all about identity and parentage, which is exactly where The Timeless Children went. A mystery works when the character at the centre is chasing it, the way Clara kept turning up and being useful while hers ran, and so far Ruby is mostly reacting to other people finding her interesting.

Rating: 2.5/5. Not my favourite, and that’s despite a new Doctor I’m properly enthusiastic about. Gatwa is excellent and Gibson is a good foil, but the episode around them is a thin, coincidence-powered runaround with a musical number where a plot should be. It also quietly commits the show to a fantasy direction I’m wary of. Watch it for him.

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the giggle
Doctor WhoTelevision

The Giggle: The Toymaker Dances and the Doctor Gets Let Off

by Hutch Morzaria
written by Hutch Morzaria

Neil Patrick Harris is having the time of his life, and for about forty minutes so was I. “The Giggle” hands the show its best villain in years and gives him a toyshop, a string of accents, a music-hall dance number and a genuine sense of menace. Then it spends its last stretch on a regeneration that isn’t one. Three-quarters of it is terrific, and the ending quietly rewrites what this show has always been willing to do to its lead. It’s a frustrating hour for exactly that reason.

The premise is a good one. Every screen since the first television in 1925 has carried a signal that makes everyone certain they’re right about everything, and the world has torn itself apart as a result. It’s a nasty, funny idea, and the opening of ordinary people turning on each other in the street is properly uncomfortable. The 1925 prologue is a creepy start as well, with John Logie Baird demonstrating his invention in a cold London room while a puppet stares into the lens. It gives the special a real edge of horror before the plot has even started.

The Toymaker is superb

Harris plays the Toymaker as a performer who’s never once been bored, and the constant costume and accent changes turn a fairly thin classic villain into something properly unstable. He isn’t threatening because he’s powerful. He’s threatening because he finds all of it delightful and genuinely doesn’t care how it ends. The toyshop sequence is the standout, a long run through a shifting workshop while he narrates the fates of people the Doctor failed, and the show has the nerve to let it play at length. The moment he brings up the Flux and the billions who died in it is the first time any story has made the Doctor answer for that.

And the dance number works. It shouldn’t, but Harris commits to it completely, and the episode has already established him as someone who would absolutely stop a global catastrophe to do a musical bit. The final game is the right shape too, because it isn’t a puzzle the Doctor can out-think, just a game of catch. Deciding the fate of everything with a children’s game is entirely in character for him. It also turns the whole special into the show negotiating with its own history, and the Toymaker suits that because he’s the one villain who treats everything as a game already. This is the most fun a Doctor Who villain has been since Missy.

The Toymaker in The Giggle

UNIT and a genuinely good middle act

Kate Stewart finally gets real material, which is long overdue. Jemma Redgrave has spent a decade being handed a briefing and a corridor, and the stretch where the signal takes hold of her and she turns on the Doctor with complete conviction is the best thing she’s had to play. Mel turning up is a lovely bit of continuity handled lightly, and Bonnie Langford is used better here than she ever was in the eighties. She’s a competent adult with a job instead of a screaming companion, and the brief exchange where she and the Doctor acknowledge how long it’s been, without a speech, is the kind of low-key continuity the show should do more often. Shirley remains a good addition, and the middle act never stops moving.

The bi-generation is a cop-out

Then the Doctor is shot, regenerates, and doesn’t die. Instead he splits, with Tennant staying whole and alive while Ncuti Gatwa steps out of him as a second, separate Doctor. The Fifteenth goes off to have adventures, and the Fourteenth stays behind with the Nobles, gets a garden and a family and retires happily. My problem isn’t the new Doctor, it’s what’s been done to the old one. Regeneration has always been the show’s contract with itself: the Doctor loses, dies, and somebody else has to carry it on.

That cost is why the goodbyes land, and Twice Upon a Time is as affecting as it is because the man saying goodbye knew he was finished. Handing a Doctor a house, a family and a peaceful retirement doesn’t reward the character so much as take the stakes out of the mechanism. If one Doctor gets to opt out, every future regeneration has an escape hatch sitting behind it. I can see the argument for it, since Tennant’s Doctor died saying he didn’t want to go and there’s something to finally letting him stop. The show already told that story properly the first time, though, and telling it again with a happier outcome softens it instead of deepening it.

None of which is a complaint about Gatwa, who’s excellent from his first line. He gets about ten minutes and uses them properly: playful, physically expressive, and completely at ease sharing a scene with a predecessor, which isn’t an easy trick. The moment he tells Tennant to go and be well is generous instead of deferential. Wild Blue Yonder is the special I’d rewatch and this is the one that changes things, and I’d rather those had been the other way round. On the casting, at least, there’s nothing to worry about.

Rating: 3.5/5. Really enjoyed most of this. Neil Patrick Harris is magnificent, the signal premise is nasty and clever, Kate finally gets something to do and Gatwa’s arrival is genuinely exciting. It loses real ground for an ending that spares its lead the one cost this show has always insisted on. That’s going to be hard to walk back.

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