The Rani

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.

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.

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.

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