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
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.
