Elizabeth Sandifer

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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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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It’s strange, in many ways, to be back, or at least back under these circumstances, watching Doctor Who tick down to the first time since Time of the Doctor  that an episode will air when the next episode hasn’t been shot. And that was a two week period towards a commissioned episode—Deep Breath shot in January. Here we head towards the great unknown, perhaps even the wilderness. It’s faintly unsettling—I’ve not written about Doctor Who in a moment where it might not come back before.

What’s interesting, of course, is that this was all shot and prepared with no knowledge of that—this entire season was in the can before 73 Yards aired, and so is not in a position to respond to the anxieties about its own performance. As far as the show knows, Davies is still the triumphant returning hero. In the latter stretches they’ll know the 60th Anniversary stuff landed. This is, I suspect, to the series’ benefit—it’s in no position to second guess itself. It doesn’t know it’s going to be going out under cancellation fears as the global economy collapses and the United States succumbs to fascism. So it just comes out swinging.

The result has pleasing Cartmel vibes. “Planet of the incels” is the obvious line to point at, and Davies is plainly fishing for praise with it, but the point remains: Doctor Who is aiming at the right fascists here. It’s angry and has a head full of steam. This is good and as it should be. On top of that, it’s pretty well assembled, especially by the standards of the Gatwa era to date. Obviously it’s gorgeous, with a lushly camp 50s retro-future. The basic idea of a star registry certificate being a real and valid document is great. “Belindachandrabombs” has a delightful frisson of comedy and barbarity. There’s lots to love here.

It also doesn’t bottle the ending as badly as much of Series 1 seemed to. In some ways this is me in the odd position of praising the show for the fact that the Alan reveal and the use of the star certificates to defeat him were both extremely obvious, but in an era where the episode resolutions have so frequently been off it’s nice to have everything successfully telegraphed. To some extent this is accomplished by moving the duff bit of pacing to the midpoint instead—the beat where Belinda reactivates the polish droid so she gets captured doesn’t feel entirely earned. But the middle of the episode is a good place to bury your sketchy beat.

And yet there’s a sense of the episode as a bunch of parts in search of a whole. The moment I find telling comes at the beginning. Davies does a quick set of establishing beats for Belinda—stuff we’ve seen a thousand times, and that he does as well as ever. We get her harried at work, then straight to a flatshare situation, and with that we’ve efficiently sketched a skilled career woman in a world where that gets you fuck all.…

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Just wanted to give the note that the Patreon is currently slightly short—about $20—of the threshold where my Robot Revolution review will be posted publicly. I’m reasonably confident that gap will be bridged some time in the next five days, but it’s where we are.

In any case, reviews should go out Saturday mornings/afternoons at some point. With episodes dropping at 3am my time, I expect to watch them when I get up on Saturday. The exact shape of this is going to be a bit tricky, as Saturday is also the Ithaca Farmer’s Market, where I do my shopping, and also I have prior commitments for the first two weeks that were on my calendar before we had a launch date, but I’ll figure out the routine that works best, and getting reviews out as fast as possible remains a priority for me.

A final note that this is the last season whose “post publicly” threshold will be $2850. That number’s always been keyed to my rent, and that’s going up at the end of the summer, so by the time The War Between the Land and Sea airs, the public review threshold will have jumped to $2920.

In addition to helping reviews be public, of course, my Patrons already have access to the first chapter of Last War in Albion v4, early chapters of my Blake book, the magical zines Penn has been working on, and will be getting a pair of politics/AI/fascism essays in the near future.

Thanks for reading, and I’m sure I’ll see you all on Saturday.

And here’s that Patreon link again.…

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