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.