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Varada Sethu

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

Wish World: Everybody Is Happy and Something Is Very Wrong

by Hutch Morzaria June 2, 2025

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.

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.

June 2, 2025 0 comments

Doctor Who Television

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

by Hutch Morzaria May 25, 2025

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.

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.

May 25, 2025 0 comments

Doctor Who Television

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

by Hutch Morzaria May 20, 2025

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.

May 20, 2025 0 comments

Doctor Who Television

The Well: Something Is Standing Right Behind Her

by Hutch Morzaria May 6, 2025

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.

May 6, 2025 0 comments

Doctor Who Television

Lux: A God of Light in a Miami Picture House

by Hutch Morzaria April 27, 2025

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.

April 27, 2025 0 comments

Doctor Who Television

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

by Hutch Morzaria April 21, 2025

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.

April 21, 2025 0 comments