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Jemma Redgrave

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

by Hutch Morzaria June 10, 2025

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.

June 10, 2025 0 comments

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

by Hutch Morzaria May 11, 2025

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, 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.

May 11, 2025 0 comments

Doctor Who Television

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

by Hutch Morzaria July 1, 2024

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.

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.

July 1, 2024 0 comments

Doctor Who Television

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

by Hutch Morzaria June 23, 2024

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.

June 23, 2024 0 comments

Doctor Who Television

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

by Hutch Morzaria December 18, 2023

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.

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.

December 18, 2023 0 comments

Doctor Who Television

The Power of Three: The Year of the Slow Invasion

by Hutch Morzaria September 22, 2012

written by Hutch Morzaria

Here is an episode with a wonderful idea, a lovely heart, and one of the worst endings this show has produced in years, and I find I don’t mind nearly as much as I should. “The Power of Three” spends forty minutes doing something Doctor Who almost never attempts, which is sitting still, and then remembers with about four minutes left that it needs a monster defeated, and defeats it with a wave of the screwdriver. Everything before that is rather special.

Cubes

One morning, a billion identical black cubes appear all over the world, roughly nine inches to a side. They do not open. They do not hum. They cannot be cut, burned, dented or scanned. They simply sit there. And then they keep sitting there, for a year. It’s a genuinely brilliant premise, because it takes the standard invasion beat, where objects appear and everyone panics and it’s resolved within the hour, and stretches it past the point where panic is sustainable. People get bored. People put them on mantelpieces and use them as doorstops. Someone starts a Twitter account. There are cube-themed novelty items. Humanity, faced with an inexplicable alien presence that refuses to do anything, absorbs it into the furniture, because that is exactly what humanity would do. Brian Williams, alone, takes it seriously. Rory’s father has been quietly stealing episodes since he was dragged aboard in Dinosaurs on a Spaceship, and here he sets up a chair, points a camera at one, and watches it for days, recording a log of nothing happening at four-hour intervals. Mark Williams is once again the best thing in his episode, and the joke of a man diligently documenting a stationary object quietly becomes the most sensible response anyone in the story has.

There’s a genuinely unnerving thread running alongside it, and it’s the part of the episode most people forget. People are being taken from a hospital, walked out by orderlies who aren’t orderlies, past a little girl who watches from a doorway and says nothing. Rory, working a night shift, follows two of them through a set of doors that shouldn’t be there and ends up somewhere else entirely. It’s shot like proper horror, the girl is genuinely eerie, and the sequence has nothing to do with cubes at all until the episode abruptly announces that it does. Given more room it would have been the best thing here. As it is, it’s a strong idea sharing a runtime with a domestic comedy.

The Doctor, bored

Because the invasion is slow, the Doctor has to stay, and this is where the episode earns itself. He is dreadful at it. He repaints the living room, mows the lawn, reorganises the kitchen, plays keepie-uppie against a wall for hours, and lasts about four days before fleeing to do seven weeks of adventures and returning as though he’d popped out for milk. Matt Smith is very funny playing a man with no capacity for stillness, and the physical comedy is some of his best. But the reason he’s staying is that he’s watching them. Amy and Rory now have a life with weight in it, since she’s got work she’s good at and he’s been offered a full-time nursing post, and the show is honest that this is a competing offer rather than a consolation prize. They are being asked, gently and continuously, to choose.

There’s a beautiful two-hander on the Tower of London riverbank where he finally says the thing out loud: he doesn’t take people with him because he’s lonely, or not only. He runs to things rather than away from them, and he keeps coming back to these two because they were the first thing he ever saw properly. It’s the warmest the Eleventh Doctor has been about his own habits, and coming after the goodbye he engineered in The God Complex, it lands as a man admitting he was wrong to try. Brian gets the other great scene, asking bluntly what happened to the previous ones, being told the truth, and then telling the Doctor to take them anyway because they’re better with him. That’s a father knowingly signing a permission slip he may regret, and it’s played without a shred of sentiment. The title is doing more work than it looks, too. The power of three is the Doctor, Amy and Rory, a configuration the show has run for two and a half years and is about to lose, but it’s also the episode’s quiet argument that three is an unstable number. Two of them live here, in a house, with jobs and a father down the road. One of them doesn’t, and can’t, and keeps arriving through the wall.

The Power of Three: The Year of the Slow Invasion - Doctor Who episode still

The episode also quietly hands the show something it will be glad of: UNIT, rebuilt. Kate Stewart runs its scientific arm on the principle of science leads, and Jemma Redgrave plays her as calm, dry and entirely uninterested in being impressed. The reveal that she’s the Brigadier’s daughter is handled with real restraint, no fanfare, just a quiet acknowledgement between two people who both loved him, and coming so soon after the phone call to that nursing home in The Wedding of River Song, it’s a generous piece of repair work.

And then the ending

The cubes activate. They stop a third of the world’s hearts. It’s a superb, frightening turn, because the doorstop in your living room was a weapon the whole time and it was in your house because you invited it. Then the Shakri appear, explain themselves in about ninety seconds as pest controllers culling humanity before it spreads, and the Doctor reverses the entire thing by pointing the sonic screwdriver at a control panel and restarting a billion stopped hearts at once. Total elapsed time: under two minutes. No cost, no complication, no consequence, and the people who died of cardiac arrest simply get up. It’s not that the resolution is rushed, exactly. It’s that the episode spends forty minutes carefully establishing that the terrifying thing about this invasion is its patience, and then defeats it with the least patient solution available. A year of dread, undone by a gadget.

Rating: 3/5. Charming, funny, and genuinely moving about what it costs to live two lives at once, with the strongest domestic material the Ponds have ever had. The Shakri are a non-entity and the resolution is close to insulting after the build it follows. Watch it for everything that isn’t the plot. A billion boxes that did nothing for a year, a man who watched one anyway, and a Doctor who finally admitted he keeps coming back on purpose. The clock is nearly out on all three of them.

September 22, 2012 1 comment