It’s striking to think that it was just two years ago that Gretchen Felker-Martin was an enfant terrible debut author. Now here we are with her third book, and a fourth on the way for 2026—a striking pace that’s rapidly turning her into a major horror writer with a serious body of work. But a crucial step in such a transition—in many ways the hardest—is getting out from the shadow of the debut. As long as your debut is also your best work you can never really have a body of work. You can have a career, certainly—even a successful one. But it will never be a corpus if it consists only of failed efforts to recapture the initial high. Thankfully, with Black Flame, Felker-Martin puts this problem to bed; the book is her best yet, and an absolute triumph.

Where both Manhunt and Cuckoo employed sizeable casts of viewpoint characters—in the case of Cuckoo perhaps slightly too sizeable—Black Flame remains tightly in the mind of its protagonist, Ellen Kramer (periodically and unsettlingly referred to as El). This quickly proves, in key ways, a deeply unpleasant place to be, although I would balk at calling this a criticism of any book, and certainly of a horror book. Ellen is, as the promotional copy notes, a “pathologically repressed” lesbian, and the absolute focus on her perspective gives the book a pinched, claustrophobic feeling. But this suits the larger structure, which is classically gothic—repressed libidinousness pushing into the protagonist’s world until it comes crashing down.

The specific mechanism for this is a film—a queer 1930s German film, believed lost, which Ellen is tasked with restoring the recently rediscovered print of. She finds the task unpleasant—”The Baroness was ugly,” she thinks at one point. “Disturbing. Men in drag performing bizarre occult rituals. Beasts and devils of paper mache and rubber cavorting on sound stages made to resemble wooded glades. Lascivious bodies grinding and touching.” But she soon finds these images bleeding into her life, which quickly unravels along with her sanity. 

Comparisons to I Saw the TV Glow are, of course, inevitable, although the resemblance is coincidental, and revealing only inasmuch as it highlights the way in which art serves as a mirror through which we recognize desire. But Black Flame is not primarily about how we relate to art; I’m not even sure Ellen expresses a single emotion about liking film anywhere in the course of the novel. That would be far too much of a chink in the wall of deadening repression. And that’s the novel’s real theme and subject—the ways in which we drown ourselves within our own lives, and the stupid, pointless reasons we do it.

This suits Felker-Martin. There is perhaps no writer in the English language more adept at describing wet things, a skill that means that she is never better than when describing squalid decay or erotic fervor. The stifling numbness of Ellen’s world feels like the rotting Potemkin life it is, while the lascivious alternative that haunts her feels unspeakably horny.…

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It’s always useful to take stock of where you are, so hey. It’s May 31st, 2025. I think I read that Morgan Wallen is at number one. But never mind that. On television, Doctor Who has just lurched into an uncertain non-existence, there’s a trailer for the Sea Devil spinoff, and we just Introduced Billie Piper, though pointedly not as the Doctor. The episode was wholly embargoed for a genuine world wide premiere, and so I’m reacting in real time with the rest of the world in attempting to process this hourlong piece of television that just happened to me. 

Broadly, in terms of this precise moment, I think I liked it. I could not begin to predict what I will think about it at any other time in my life. But that’s future El’s problem. I’ve gotta get a review out, and I broadly liked it. If it is, in fact, the last episode of Doctor Who, it ended like I feel about that: in a sense of subtle wrongness. I even, perversely, find myself liking Wish World more, in that it extends the wrongness. There’s a fractal perfection to it—here we are, trapped in an apocalyptic hell world in which the rotting soul of the twentieth century genocides trans people, just like on TV. 

And like, I can do so much with this. Cause, see, the fascist on TV peers out from the screen just like Patrick Troughton, and the Underverse is Narnia, and there’s fucking Susan. I’ve not gone frame by frame through, but I think Yasmin Finney disappears from the episode once reality starts breaking, and then we get the Doctor regenerating into Rose. Like, my conspiracy wall on this shit is huge. I’m gonna Eruditorum the shit out of this someday.

But right now, in the moment, all I know is that I’ve definitely never seen anything like that. Up to the halfway point or so, it is simply the sugar rush thrill of Journey’s End—the repeated fireworks as bits of continuity and fanwank are rolled out in perfectly escalating order. Bonnie Langford’s entrance to UNIT HQ is particularly immaculate, and delightfully paid off in her sneering hatred of the Rani, which she plays with startling intensity. ”We meet again” is clearly a line Bonnie Langford has waited her career for. The story fragments into three well-defined arcs for the three credit-level characters. Each strand gets some great moments: that sharp cut to Belinda in the zero chamber, the furious precision with which Ruby dismantles Conrad’s defenses, and the Doctor’s delighted “fuck yeah” to seeing Omega (because of course he does), all of them just starting points for some great sequences.

Then at the halfway point the Doctor smoothly plucks the Vindicator out of his bag of unresolved setups and shoots Zombie Omega, and we enter the far more puzzling back half—a series of “gosh, there’s sure a lot of episode left” cliffhangers that gradually drift askance, repeatedly not quite getting reality back together into a configuration that can possibly feel like a resolution.…

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Well that was fucking rubbish.

It’s entirely possible that next week, and by extension the story at large, won’t be. There are component pieces here that are lovely, after all. The basic premise “the Rani destroys the world trying to bring Omega back” is… OK, I mean, yes, that sounds like a bad Big Finish plot, but it could in theory work. Maybe next week it will, and I’ll get to write a giddily excited review about the brilliant use of Susan or something. 

Unfortunately, it’s this week. 

Much of the problem is the rigid structure of the modern two part finale, in which one entire episode has to be spent being a breathless trailer for the real episode, culminating in a cliffhanger reveal of what the actual premise is. Even when there’s no shock reveal, as in The Stolen Earth, the cliffhanger is still generally just getting the Doctor to where the plot can begin.  This does nobody any favors. The actual finale is left to still be an overly packed single episode, while the first half is left with strangely little to do. This problem can be successfully worked around, and sometimes even triumphantly so. The core trick is just to have the first episode be a mad sugar rush. The best ones—and they are to be fair some of the best episodes of the series—develop a clear identity of their own by just running around and audaciously breaking things. Think The Pandorica Opens, Bad Wolf, or World Enough and Time, or even The Sound of Drums. But it’s always navigating around that central problem of having a first episode that’s structured around waiting for the climactic reveal.

Here, however, this problem intersects another one: the numerous pitfalls of the “illusion world” trope. These can—indeed often are—lightweight affairs, because nothing actually counts. Often—as here—things are outright not quite real; in any case, it’s all going to get undone. But the even more fundamental problem is that your story is structured around ostentatiously withholding the core pleasures of your larger show. Whatever characters you tuned in to watch this week, they’re not here, replaced by wrong versions who are almost necessarily defined by being less fun. This is, once again, a navigable problem, Human Nature/Family of Blood being perhaps the most triumphant example. 

But it is two significant problems for this episode to overcome, and each amplifies the other. The result is an episode that simply fails to have anything happen. FIfteen minutes in all we’ve managed to do is introduce the false reality. At thirty we get John Smith arrested so that he can actually interact with the plot. Up to this point no character has actually demonstrated meaningful agency. The Doctor gets to notice the tables thing, but that’s only a trigger for the move into act three, not a development in our or his understanding of the world. Act three, meanwhile, consists of nothing save for Archie Panjabi vamping and half-explaining the plot.…

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Shooting on this season began on October 23rd, 2023, by which point five thousand people had already died in Gaza; Israel’s actual invasion of the territory would not even begin until five days later. Doing the math, you figure this must have started shooting late March. Somewhere around, say, the 28th, when the death toll was at 32,552. Seventy-one more people died that day, eight when Israel bombed a refugee camp. 

But Juno Dawson’s script for this must have been ages earlier. Most of it would have been locked in before shooting started on Joy to the World. Despite the fact that the allegorical reading is about as tight as saying The Monster of Peladon is about the miners’ strike, this legitimately was not written to be about the Palestinian genocide and the subsequent controversy over Israel’s inclusion in the Eurovision song contest. It’s just that Die Hard at Eurovision—the apparent starting point of this episode—can’t really be read any other way an hour before the finals start in 2025. 

I’ve got my Discord server open (btw did you know the invite link is one of the rotating taglines on the site?), and I just watched a bit of dialogue whiz by in the thread for this episode of people who loved the episode wondering if this’d be the one I’m shockingly out of consensus on because they all love it. And fair enough. Between the authorial intention problem and the fact that it doesn’t do anything as clangingly fascist as “the systems aren’t the problem,” you can probably justify giving this one a pass if you want to.

But why? I mean that. There were five months where they could have redone the script, whether because of Davies’ evident desire to create television with some sort of moral rectitude or because they realized it was a bad look. There was a year of post-production in which an ADR session could have been scheduled. But more to the point, they could have just not done “his cause is good but he goes too far” again. Sean Dillon messaged me just as I was getting ready to watch the episode wondering what the last time they actually did “the Doctor starts a revolution.” Which, the answer is kind of “the season premiere,” but in a more traditional sense, it’s really The Lie of the Land. It was actually a relatively common move in the Moffat era. But it’s just not been where the show’s head is, and instead it pointedly does this “fine people on both sides” shit and it ends up feeling like a kinda bullshit parable about Palestinian violence. I don’t actually have a lot of sympathy. 

But equally, I love Kill the Moon. The political reading is good for four hundred words or so, but it’s not the whole review; I haven’t even talked about the Rani. What we have here is a curiously on edge piece of television. On the one hand, thousands of bodies exploding out into space.…

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 “I was turning 40 and thinking, Oh dear, I’m probably going to have one of those midlife crisis things which always just bore the hell out of everybody. So it would probably be better if, rather than just having a midlife crisis, I just went completely screaming mad and declared myself to be a magician.”[1]

–Alan Moore

“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.”^[2]

The prophet Aleister Crowley once claimed to begin all his writing, even letters to his butcher,^[3] with this mantra. It is, in eleven words, the heart of Thelema. This affectation, of course, took, and so it’s also the first eleven words of anything written on the topic by a Thelemite. So it’s really the only place I can begin.

Since it’s a religion of wizards; there’s a lot of writing about Thelema, much of which will begin by telling you that this core tenet of Thelema is widely misunderstood to be a call for endless self-indulgence. It is an understandable anxiety, what with their prophet being perhaps best known for being an Old Guarde Edgelord. That said, I have yet to meet anyone with this misapprehension. I have, however, met a lot of people who don’t know what Thelema is in the first place. I’m not sure how much of an audience there is to be misunderstanding this vaguely obscure occult religion. But that’s fine; having one foot in the shadows is a necessary and important part of occult societies. Thelema, as a matter of principle, doesn’t evangelize, or reach out to new prospective members.

That’s not to say that the practice of regularly disavowing this “common misunderstanding” is meaningless, or an act that exclusively belies a community that is unaware of its obscurity. No, the phenomenon is perhaps best thought of as a cumulative banishing ritual—by the time you’re deep enough in esoteric nonsense to be reading the Law, you’ve already been told what it’s not.

So sure, I’ll do my part: Obviously, “do what thou wilt” doesn’t mean “yolo.” Wilt is the key here. The word “Thelema” itself is derived from the Classical Greek for “divine will,” and the work of the Thelemite is all about discovering and following one’s True Will—capital T capital W—the thing you are meant to be doing at a celestial level. Find your true spiritual calling and do whatever it takes to achieve it. There exists no moral or legal code that supersedes this mandate.

Given this, one must assume that Aleister Crowley’s True Will was to be a giant asshole.

No, really; stories to this effect abound. My favorite is how, in addition to being an occultist and poet, Crowley was an accomplished mountaineer, and in 1905 he and a small team made an attempt to summit Kangchenjunga^[4]—a feat that would not be achieved for another fifty years. The group had a spat over leadership and several of the climbers attempted a retreat. There was an accident, and Crowley, alone, stayed in his tent when their cries reached the camp.…

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The problem here—if you even want to call it a problem—is that absolutely none of the plot beats are earned or make a goddamn lick of sense. Abena is almost wholly swallowed in the mix, the Barber is wildly too complicated a premise to justify in the time allotted, none of the characters in the barbershop are fleshed out, and the plot is little more than a bunch of themes gesticulating wildly. I’m sure that, if I were to bother looking up other people’s reviews and reactions, I’d see loads of complaints about the plot holes, just like last week when an unusually large number of people apparently noticed that UNIT stories don’t make any sense for the first time.

The truth is, I have any amount of sympathy for this view. As an actual watch this was uneven; I’m not actually sure I enjoyed the experience more than last week. But reviews are about more than whether or not you liked something. Really, they’re barely about that at all. Honestly, my brain forms the thought “what will it mean to like or dislike this” as quickly as “do I like this.” I’ve got ideological positions to establish. So what do I want to think about this episode?

I find myself going back to Ghost Light. The complaint with that episode is that it doesn’t actually cohere. And I largely dismissed that complaint back in the day, pointing out that all of the components of the story were pointing in the same aesthetic direction, and that this helped paper over the gaps—an argument I’m pretty sure I stole from Miles and Wood. You can flesh that out a bit by saying that Ghost Light has too many ideas for three episodes, and so doesn’t quite manage to join all the dots, even as it’s clear the dots can be joined. Indeed, that’s part of Ghost Light’s charm—the way the story is bursting at the seams with ideas. Here we have something similar, except that instead of cramming too many ideas into a seventy-three minute container we’re doing forty-eight minutes, leaving everything even more jammed in.

Is that a bridge too far in terms of compression? Probably, actually. But it’s where we are on Doctor Who these days. It’s certainly not interesting to take ambivalence about the current format of Doctor Who out on an individual episode, and even if I were going to do that, I wouldn’t pick the one by a Black writer set in Nigeria with an almost completely non-white cast to suddenly do it, even if it does offer a clearer illustration than most of just how overstuffed the show is these days.

But look, what’s the alternative? A show that doesn’t take big conceptual swings, doesn’t tap playwrights from diverse backgrounds to write scripts despite their lack of TV experience, doesn’t treat its apparent limitations as challenges to meet? We could have a nice tidy procession of bases under siege and alien invasions and land comfortably within the realm of what the show can do.…

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Looking at the episodes this season and what we knew about them, this one was very much the one you least knew quite what was going to be. Big dumb robot premiere was dumb, Lux always had promise, and the Midnight sequel always sounded desperate. If you’re wondering, next week should be absolutely great, the one after that has promise, and then it’s all just Russell T Davies narrative collapse finale unknowns where the joke is that the series really does go on hiatus after. But this one, this one was enough question marks to make a sweater vest. Doctor lite, clearly going to set up the finale somehow, by Pete McTighe. That’s what what we had. And now, having watched it, it turns out I still don’t know what the fuck it’s gonna be. 

For the most part, over its forty-five minutes, that works to its advantage. It’s a marvelously off-kilter thing, never settling on a single coherent tone or identity. It comes in on a Love and Monsters thing, does a quick bit of folk horror, and then just runs around breaking things for the latter half of the episode before just ending in a cliffhanger. It has the kind of manic energy of a Baker/Martin script—a kind of underlit Claws of Axos. 

The glue that holds it together is Conrad, who is both written and played with a kind of magnificent heel energy. The initial relationship with Ruby is just sort of a pile of red flags on every side—he’s coming on too strong, whereas she’s got the fucky power dynamic of having all the secrets about the weird thing he’s clearly obsessed over. By the time he doesn’t take the antidote because he “wanted to be brave like the Doctor” we desperately want to yeet him into the sun, and once he goes full supervillain he’s just absolutely awful every time he’s on the screen. He’s abrasive to every status quo the episode alights on, which drives a lot of the episodes forward-toppling momentum. It pays real dividends for Kate’s “going too far” bit, because honestly you’re kind of on team “eat the bastard” until Kate goes properly unhinged with her taunting of him. And just when the episode seems to have resolved into something you get that properly odd coda of him mocking the special effects and getting his arm bitten off. By the time the Doctor reappears for the final confrontation in the TARDIS it’s not even clear whether this is supposed to be a “gone too far” beat the Doctor gets punished for. It’s heady, thrilling stuff.

I suspect, however, that I’ll never enjoy it quite as much again. Once its Mrs. Flood jailbreak resolves itself into the thematically similarly named Wish World and the nature of this mishmash does, in fact, have to resolve, this is going to get stuck as a collection of scenes and rising action with no self-contained payoff. There’s a faint absurdity to the inevitable question of deciding if it’s better or worse than Tooth and Claw or Planet of Evil in that vast shrugging middle of a Doctor Who ranking. …

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More than most episodes, it pivots in the middle, at the Midnight reveal. I knew it was coming, because that’s how life is, and was sus. And I can’t say I liked it. I stared bitterly at the sequence of mounting realization. Especially because it’s so unprompted. “We don’t know what it is”? Seriously? That’s what tips the Doctor off and starts the “do you recognize the plot of Midnight” run, saying “XTonic” and “diamond mine” before doing the title drop and running the quick clips of a, and I’m sorry to do this to you, seventeen year old piece of television. Now, admittedly that seventeen year old piece of television was seen by more than twice as many people as The Robot Revolution, so maybe it’s fair enough to do a throwback seven years longer than bringing back Omega for Arc of Infinity, the previous benchmark for “wait, seriously?” in sequel reveals. 

But, to quote the trolls on GallifreyBase, this is cancellation shit. I mean for gods’ sake, it’s even a fucking Saward homage. By the time we’ve gotten to this reveal absolutely nothing in the episode had come close to “something I haven’t seen before,” and my memory only really needs to go as far back as Flux for that to be true. After a cold open TARDIS scene recapping the season and doing an arbitrary needle drop on “Toxic” (I suppose that I need to go back to The End of the World for) it’s just twenty minutes of standard issue sci-fi gubbins—running around on a video game set pointing guns at things. It’s clearly working its way towards horror because modern Doctor Who only uses military sci-fi for a few things, and besides it’s called The Well, but it hasn’t even gotten around to being scary yet. The only interesting material comes in the grace notes around Aliss and her deafness, another example of his determination to virtue signal leading Davies in a useful direction by reminding him that some human drama might be worth adding. And then we get this bland callback reveal. Reader, I am making a face.

It’s not even the same monster! Midnight is vocal repetition; the thing that’s behind you is Hide, which you’d be hard pressed to do a callback to. I’m utterly unsurprised that what’s happened is they belatedly threw out Sharma Angel-Warfall’s actual script, which was an attempt at giving Gatwa his “Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Orisha” request, and just subbed the Midnight explanation in, because it’s an absolute fucking nothing that reeks of a desperate 48 hour rewrite. There’s no reason for it other than giving them something to hype in the behind the scenes footage. Which, I suppose once again making episodes with legs for streaming is a sound strategy. If we get a third season out of Disney it’ll probably be down to the long tail numbers. But I am still just not vibing.

Ironically, then, the back half is rather good.…

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Well it’s nice that Gatwa gets a perfect episode. He’d not really had one yet, save perhaps Dot and Bubble. But here we’ve got one that it’s legitimately hard to see getting unseated as my season favorite. More to the point, we’ve got one you can just unapologetically hand to your lapsed fan friend and go “look, it’s good again.” It’s probably even worth doing—boosting the Disney+ numbers can’t hurt lolsob. Just a stone cold classic, everything you want from Doctor Who episode. I’m still grinning. Best episode since Hell Bent. 

In terms of actually reviewing it, let me take a moment from my notes document and unpack it for you. I’ve just transcribed the we just end/but that is death deadline, which I followed with, and I quote, “RUSSELL WHAT ARE YOU DOING.” I stress that this is entirely affectionate—a fannish love of the writer of It’s a Sin and Cucumber taking his stock imagery of death and doing a speed run remake of Love and Monsters with it. On the television, the tempo kicks up a bit for our promised third act change, and I’m all but liveblogging: “The Doctor crying, Murray Gold having a nervous breakdown, Penn cackling on the sofa.” It’s absolutely ecstatically good—the triumphant capstone to a fifteen minute showpiece of ostentatiously clever bullshit reaching back to a Scooby-Doo pastiche animated Ncuti Gatwa fretting that he has a two-dimensional brain. Technically, if I wanted to be a complete hardass, I could complain that I have, in fact, seen this before, but come the fuck on. I’m not going to complain about burning up another pile of Disney money on a Mind Robber remake. I’m going to cackle with my husband.

Literally everything about this episode is great. Mr. Ring-a-Ding is simply one of the greatest visuals in the history of the series, and I cannot wait to get to Doctor Who Confidential and watch Russell use a bunch of superlatives about how they did it. From his opening appearance, casually rendered in pitch perfect Ub Iwerks loops to him facing off with the Doctor in the lush art deco cinema to his ascension into the realms above Kether he simply always looks good. The script dances through its set pieces with a nimbleness not seen since at least The Giggle, if not World Enough and Time. Gatwa and Sethu absolutely kill it in every scene. It does not remotely make it look easy, but it oozes with casual confidence at every turn. 

It is in fact four perfectly executed acts. A cold open establishing the villain in the bonkers poetry of moonlight reflecting off a silver spoon, a tight investigation of, as Gatwa delightfully summarizes it, “literally an old caretaker in a haunted cinema,” the metafictional ecstasy of the middle, and then an nicely paced denouement in which the guns on the mantlepiece go off in well-structured sequence. Each one could be unpacked at length, and I look forward to going back and doing so in the context of Gatwa Eruditorum, whenever that may be.…

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