There’s a moment, back in Kieron’s first X-Men run, that has lived in my head for over a decade now. Cyclops has just formed a new team of X-Men, and is addressing it for the first time. He muses on the way in which mutants are viewed in the world, as a dangerous threat. And then he asks, “What’s the difference between Iraq and North Korea? Iraq didn’t have weapons of mass destruction. And every time this team goes into the field, we remind the world that we do.” 

There’s another one from his most recent run. This time it’s Professor X, who’s the narrator of the issue, in voiceover. “I have a secret,” he says. “There will never be a nuclear war. If the Doomsday Clock ever hit midnight, all those warmongers’ hands would hover over the red button and find themselves incapable of pressing it.” In both cases, I gasped when I hit the line. But as soon as I did, I also knew I was going to be disappointed. Because this was an X-Men comic. When Kieron finished with it he was going to have to dutifully put all the toys back in the box and let Bendis or Simone unpack them in a slightly different order. And that meant that there was no way that the searing, transgressive potential of those scenes was going to play out. The Marvel Universe has to remain “ours but with superheroes.” And that means it can never actually explore the question of what its premise would actually mean for the political situation of the world. Those lines are brilliant provocations, but they’re teases, and that’s all they ever could be. Except it turns out the thing they were teasing is The Power Fantasy. 

The comic opens with another one of those lines. It’s a gorgeous splash of a Brookyn brownstone in the 1960s. There’s a billboard on top of it calling for Peace and Love, in impeccably groovy lettering. There’s a big peace sign on the building behind it, and more as your eye moves down the building, to the lower-right hand corner, where two people stand outside a pizza shop. They’re leaning against the wall, relaxed, slices in hand. And one of them says, “Of course, the ethical thing to do is take over the world.”

A few pages later he sets out his premise in earnest, with a text page offering a definition of the word “superpower.” He starts with the familiar one—a country that is a major world power. Then he offers a second definition unique to his fictional world: “An individual with the destructive capacity of the nuclear arsenal of a major world power.” And finally, a third, marked as archaic: “Any extranormal abilities possessed by a fictional superpower.”

As you might imagine, I’m extremely here for this.

What unfolds from here is as effective and compelling a first issue as you’d expect from the triumphant return of Kieron Gillen to creator-owned comics. The lens is kept largely on Etienne Lux, the man who suggests taking over the world is ethical.…

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So here we are, I suppose.

It’s a pity (though an ironic one), that I already used “There Never Was a Golden Age” on Army of Ghosts/Doomsday. Because this was always going to be the problem. There’s only so forward Russell T Davies could move. The writer of Last of the Time Lords and the secretly terrible Waters of Mars was always going to show up. 

I remember this annoyance even. You can basically see it in the “End of Time” post, where my contempt boils over into calling it “an ending so absolute that it does not so much cut off the Davies era as it cuts off the abstract possibility of anything.” I felt it about every season finale of the Davies era. That frustration when the whole and the parts diverge. 

I think for me it’s “and now I must become a monster” being wasted on killing the same dipshit genocidal terror he was merrily killing last night on BBC Four. It’s not even that I mind the Doctor as this agonized raw nerve who weeps at every sparrow’s fall because he is, as this seems to ultimately conclude, secretly the god of life. It’s just that… that’s it. We spend a bunch of time doing “you made me into this” for the awful moral horror of cutting a rope and throwing the space balrog into the time lava. Like, sure,  evil bat K-9 looks better bouncing about in the title sequence than the Earth did in Journey’s End, but that’s fifteen years and a pile of Disney money for you. It’s still a scene where you don’t imagine Ncuti Gatwa would have had an easier time emoting to the actual visual instead of a tennis ball. It’s emotionally hollow. It has nothing to say about anything other than itself.

It even tells you as much whilst making its more successful no-sell of having Ruby’s mother be a perfectly ordinary woman. “She was important because we think she’s important.” It’s the season finale of midlist Disney+ cult series Doctor Who, and so it’s time to give the Doctor a long night of the soul. But it’s worth thinking about what makes that beat successful. We go from there to that stuttering beat of Ruby realizing she needs to stay on the other side of the magic door—those glances down to her phone, all of it absolutely magnetic. For one thing, this requires selling the mundanity of that side of the door. For another, it’s a genuinely new emotional beat. Which is to say that it’s interesting, a concept that, ironically, is far more important than importance. But more than anything, it is at least something we’ve spent time thinking is important. We’ve spent seven weeks with Ruby, after meeting her back at Christmas, and the whole time wanting to know who her mother was has been the most plainly important thing to her in her life. We’ve spent thirty minutes with Sutekh. Plus he’s a cunt.…

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This is, of course, the easy episode. Since the structure was developed with Bad Wolf, there’s yet to be a bad first half of a season finale. Even the Chibnall era couldn’t fuck it up. I’m not about to suggest that Davies broke the pattern, but there are plenty of grounds to accuse him of trying. That’s not a bad thing, inherently. Much of this season has comprised of efforts to reshape the rules of how Doctor Who works, which you necessarily do by breaking them. And let’s be clear, it’s had a winning record. Its weakest showings, however, have all come around the basic question of narrative cohesion and pacing, a situation that leaves us in the unfortunate position of having the TARDIS arbitrarily crash into UNIT tower so the Doctor can jump out and basically proclaim “let’s start the season finale.” 

Of course, the decisions that made that slapdash stumble into the concluding two-parter were generally cases of going too fast, which is a weird complaint to make about an episode that goes twenty minutes before it actually bothers having anything happen. The first ten minutes straight are spent standing around UNIT HQ explaining the plot. The amount of rehash this requires is significant. We have to reintroduce the UNIT cast, then introduce the rest of the UNIT cast, recap the Susan Twist mystery, recap The Church on Ruby Road, and run through the contents of Reddit for the last several weeks. Perversely, Davies manages to pile a regeneration explanation in there too. It’s not until that through the wall wipe to Mel that we actually move out of UNIT HQ, Mel’s previous appearances having amounted to standing around UNIT HQ watching Doctor Who on television.

There is, of course, great stuff in there. I mean, of course there is. Look at this cast. They have more than enough chops to let the story roll along merrily through this first act, wittily scoffing at the S TRIAD anagram, setting up a CCTV camera that’s 72.18 yards away, and generally ricocheting through what is, admittedly, a rather large pile of crimson-hued fish to strew around. But… yeesh. It sure is just declaring the commencement of an Arc Episode, as it were. 

And then the second ten minutes just has to accomplish the same thing with some set changes for variety. Gotta reintroduce Carla and Mrs. Flood, spend the actual time we need with Susan Triad, and then, well, return to UNIT HQ for seven minutes to recap Susan Foreman and invent the “Time Window” so we can actually get on with advancing the plot by turning the damn thing on. The plot, of course, is just the gathering cliffhanger reveal. Ten minutes drifting into horror and revealing our Gabriel Woolf voiced monster, then we split the party so we can cross-cut excitedly and just let Murray Gold crescendo for the remainder of the runtime. That’s it. The reason there’s no next time trailer, by and large, is that we just watched a forty minute one. …

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It was not what I expected, which remains inherently high praise for Doctor Who. Part of this was deliberate misdirection. Our eponymous character was previewed as menacing, the post-Ruby Road trailer painting him as a traitor. What we get is him hovering over everything until he’s deployed out of nowhere to defuse Face the Raven in miniature and allow the episode to have no finale set-up whatsoever. It’s sly. Roguish even. As the first script since The Haunting of Villa Diodati to be written by someone who did not write for Series Three in 2007, which is a problem, it makes a charming impression. Certainly it makes you wish Kate Herron had done more than just direct Loki. 

It’s anchored by a phenomenal cast—a fact it establishes by the four minute mark, with a one-two reveal of Indira Varma and Jonathan Groff, a duo prestige dramas from the days of HBO Go would have cut your throat for. Varma’s delivery of “a very difficult cheese” is a four course meal’s worth of old school Doctor Who acting from the days of KERA 13, where Jonathan Groff has blissfully never seen the work of Philip Madoc or Kate O’Mara and so comes to “can you do Captain Jack with less sexual harassment” pleasantly fresh. Gatwa, meanwhile, remains firmly from the days of Disney+, and is given acres of space to do it. 

“Acres of space” describes it in a lot of ways, in fact. Malevolent space cosplayers is an absolutely phenomenal conceit for a monster of the week—a genre in which we’ve not even had a sincere contender since, what, the Mire? They’ve even got a good name. But they’re a complex premise as these things go, and the episode wisely paces itself around that fact. The effect is to let everyone just vibe in their Bridgerton riffs. The way in which Gatwa is on Doctor Who Unleashed absolutely cackling at his chemistry with Jonathan Groff suggests quite a lot of fun was had with it. 

I keep coming back to that word. Fun is not my favorite concept, which I recognize is a me problem, but it’s nice to have it. Certainly it’s nice to see it had with such confidence. Bridgerton, notably, helped push Boom down to a season low 18th in the ratings with its four episode drop, half of which edged it out. Issuing a response episode in three weeks rivals “Meet the Grahams” in ruthless efficiency. This is stylish and knows it. 

As a viewer with fun issues who’s not actually seen Bridgerton I’m not quite its target audience.  I’m still too fussed on earning your emotional beats—selling the Doctor/Rogue romance better, instead of just bluntly tropesing in. But this is, again, a me problem at this point. This is plainly a show that’s got mojo. 

Let’s return to that notion of expectations. This was the episode I was looking forward to least on the whole. It had midseason filler written all over it.…

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