Space Babies Review
First off, a note on how I did these, given the oddness of the release structure. I’ve just come upstairs from watching Space Babies, and I’m writing this main section and putting it up on Patreon. Then I’m going to go watch The Devil’s Chord, and do the same for it. After that I’ll fill in bullet points on each, and see what’s going on with the Patreon level and whether these go on the main site yet.
There was a trend among the reviews that started popping up last week where they suggested Space Babies was a pretty by the numbers Russell T Davies story, and that things got more interesting with The Devil’s Chord. And you can see what they meant right away. Nothing in this is surprising, at least to people who have seen any Doctor Who. It’s not as strictly RTD-by-numbers as those reviews suggest—there’s a lot of Moffat in here. But it’s immensely standard. The uncharitable thing to say is that it probably is going to benefit from having a second episode released alongside it, and it might even be true. It certainly falls short of my usual standard from Doctor Who that I want it to show me something I haven’t seen before.
But that’s probably the professional Doctor Who nerd in me talking. This is making the same basic move as The Star Beast, catering to a UK terrestrial audience with a “look, it’s Doctor Who, that thing you like” episode. If it’s over-cautious, it’s at least deliberate in that. And you can see why they thought it might be a good idea. It’s a showcase for Gatwa and Gibson—forty-five minutes of trad set pieces to let them demonstrate their specific flavor of charisma. And more to the point, even though it’s their fourth episode together from a filming perspective, it’s an opportunity for Gatwa and Gibson to put their stamp on those basics. One of the standard things chefs are asked to do in job interviews is to make an omelet, because an omelet is an effective test of a lot of fundamental kitchen skills. This is much the same.
Gatwa and Gibson, at least, prove solid cooks. There’s a fizz to their charisma—a ricocheting energy as they amp each other up. Gatwa described the dynamic as best friends who love getting in trouble together, and it’s spot on. The middle of the episode runs largely on the quality of the eponymous visual, and much of what sells the bonkers charm of space babies is just how much fun the Doctor and Ruby seem to be having with the concept. And when the third act begins a chain of rapid reveals, they similarly sell each a-ha with a breathless urgency, so that the plot tumbles giddily through its explanation. This is clearly going to be fun.
Where things stumble is the first quarter, labored as it is with “explain the lore for all those Americans on Disney+.” Gatwa and Gibson’s energy is enough to keep it out of trouble, but you find yourself thinking that maybe “two hearts” could have been saved for later in the season. But that also might be the pro nerd talking again. We’re on the Star Wars and Marvel streamer—you can probably get away with a bet on the audience’s tolerance for exposition. And this is clearly marked as Season One, Episode Two, which is a familiar place for an infodump. Besides, what other Disney+ show throws a Bogeyman chase in the middle of its infodump?
Which is perhaps the other really interesting thing to note. This episode is a parade of 21st century Doctor Who standards, but the internal wiring isn’t what we’re used to. There’s a rhythm to it that reminds me of Series 7 of NewWho, where Moffat’s narrative acceleration started to get away from him. But this is NewNewWho, and that slightly juttering sense of moving on to the next thing before you’ve actually finished with the previous feels more deliberate than it did a decade ago. For all that it’s a rehash, this is not a tutorial in how Doctor Who works. Compare it with Rose, which was also a repetition of the previous version of the show’s hits, but which was also very much concerned with how much the audience would accept at any given moment, and with walking them through the show’s logic. Space Babies never worries once about that. The audience is assumed to be perfectly capable of handling Doctor Who. What we’re introducing is the flavors of pleasure it comes in, not how to go about watching it. The point of the episode is to simultaneously be goofy and scary and sci-fi and storybook, so as to set a range of tones.
But none of that changes the fact that it’s a bit “mission accomplished, on to the next one.” Which, conveniently, is right there next to it on the menu.
- Having now watched both, I’m glad I set aside the time to do a “clean” review of this, because it’s going to get pretty comprehensively outshined in discussion. Probably, as I think this review ultimately makes the case, slightly unfairly—there’s more going on here than it appears at first glance. But the release is practically designed to overshadow it.
- If I had a nickel for every time the new series did mucus-based monsters I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.
- The real headline in bodily functions, though, is the biggest fart joke in Doctor Who history. Robert Holmes would be so proud. Honestly, I’m tearing up. No, really, can we open a window?
- On a similar note, Davies gets an impressive amount of mileage out of the Nan-E filter and swearing. There’s a real focus here on establishing that Doctor Who is a bit rude and naughty—which is in keeping with the “best friends getting into trouble” take on the Doctor/companion pairing.
- One thing I am surprised by is the relative sparseness of Ruby’s home life. We get Carla and Cherry briefly, but there’s no substance–we don’t even resolve the “TARDIS wrecked the ceiling” detail. There’s no Mrs. Flood to re-cue that mystery. There’s the one “intrusive snow” sequence to cue the overall Ruby Sunday plot, but there’s a lot less arc here than you might expect, and wildly less “ground the companion in her present day” than you would.
- For all that this is an extremely comedy-leaning story, seething nihilist Davies is peeking out around the edges. The nature of the baby station—abandoned to save money, with a pro-life law being respected in such a way as to condemn a bunch of babies to an awful death—is absolutely horrifying. And the mournful account of the fate of refugees is similarly pointed.
- The actual babies effect was curiously jarring—the fact that the lip sync CGI never quite gels with the rest of the body remains uncanny throughout, in a way that serves to highlight the fact that the physical babies are human props, not actors. The show gets shocking mileage out of their resting expressions—the fact that Eric’s face appears locked into look of perpetual dismay absolutely makes the character. But for the first time not even the Disney money can quite do it.
- The Bogeyman, meanwhile, is great, in no small part because they use him sparingly for so long, with those glitchy monitor jumps being used to emphasize how much we’re not seeing him. But he holds his own into the airlock sequence, where he’s effectively reframed as vulnerable. Also, the trailing bits of snot venting out the airlock are gorgeously gross.
- I appreciate the butterfly compensation switch for its complete lack of making any sense. Like, OK, the TARDIS projects a certain amount of temporal stabilization around it? That makes a touch of sense conceptually, but it only makes the question of “does the Doctor change history” more vexed. Add in the Pyramids of Mars reprise in The Devil’s Chord and it’s even less coherent. All for an overly expensive throwaway gag! Beautiful. (I did find myself briefly wondering if the Doctor’s evident discomfort with Ruby turning into an insect was meant to suggest the butterfly compensation switch was just a lie he made up, but Ruby’s lack of awareness that anything happened makes that a hard read, and if Davies had meant that he’d surely have flagged it more explicitly.)
- Thank you so much to the 445 (!) paying patrons who made posting this on the site possible. I’m gonna go do the bullet points for The Devil’s Chord, and I’ll put those up on Patreon (where the main review already is), then post that to the site a bit later, just so that this post doesn’t get completely swallowed. But if you want to read it a few hours early, please do consider being number 446.
Rankings
- Space Babies
May 11, 2024 @ 3:31 pm
Not particularly insightful or erudite, but I read “Gatwa and Gibson, at least, prove solid cooks.” as “Gatwa and Gibson, at least, prove solid cocks.” This is why one does not stay up until four in the morning watching Doctor Who.
May 11, 2024 @ 4:17 pm
Was really surprised at how Moffat-y this episode was. It’s a bunch of little similarities rather than any direct cribbing, but a lot of this feels like RTD being heavily influenced by Moffat, and not really always in a good way. The part where he saves the bogeyman literally feels like RTD saw “The Beast Below” and said “I can do that better.”
But imo there’s also a bunch of subtle things in the script that stick out and make it seem Moffat-y. I’ll just make a quick list, but I’m definitely missing some things, and also probably understating how much RTD did these things in his original run.
The way that the technobabble was the big reveal instead of an interjection (RTD favored the latter approach in S1-4).
The way that Ruby played a super active role in the technobabble and puzzle solving (even when it didn’t necessarily make sense for her to be involved). The attempted sidelining of a companion followed by their (usually her) active rejection was also always more of a Moffat beat than a Davies one, not that Davies never did it.
The specific way the humor is emphasized as a key component of the episode’s pacing rather than a side product. Imo RTD1 usually had the jokes coming in between the lines of dialogue that propelled the episode forward, whereas this episode would use the jokes to push the episode along.
The doctor’s manic pixie energy is definitely closer to Smith than Tennant/Eccelston.
The way the companion is presented as a mystery the doctor must investigate (the ending where he scans her is literally straight out of the Amy Rebel Flesh arc).
The narrative acceleration that you pointed out in your review.
This really does feel like a Moffat-y Davies episode, and I’m both a little disappointed by that and excited to see what variations he’ll bring to it.
May 12, 2024 @ 8:48 am
Yes, agreed, there’s lots of this that it is really Moffatty – I’m finding post-Moffat RTD really interesting. Because then The Devil’s Chord, whilst including some Moffatty elements, is not an episode Moffat would/could have made.
May 11, 2024 @ 4:22 pm
El, given its sudden relevance to the subject matter of the show, will you be doing a Capaldi-book Pop Between Realities on the 2015 DTV film Baby Geniuses and the Space Baby, directed by Sean McNamara aka the auteur behind Bratz: The Movie, Casper Meets Wendy, Cats and Dogs 3: Paws Unite!, and the upcoming Reagan biopic starring Dennis Quaid, currently due for release on August 30 after sitting on the shelf for three years?
May 11, 2024 @ 4:28 pm
I think such a weighty topic would not fit well into a single Pop Between Realities. It really requires an entire project unto itself, which I tragically lack the time for.
May 11, 2024 @ 5:44 pm
Very understandable. It would completely pull focus from the Series 9 entries for sure.
May 11, 2024 @ 9:43 pm
Getting a lot of “Boss Baby” vibes from this episode…
May 12, 2024 @ 12:50 am
Now I wonder what Marla Frazee thought of the episode.
May 11, 2024 @ 10:22 pm
So, I wonder if the “stepping on a butterfly” bit was another example of superstitions becoming true? If so was the switch a lie invented by the Doctor or was it wibbly-wobbly Time Lord tech compensating for it even though its a new quirk of time travel.
May 12, 2024 @ 4:49 pm
Wasn’t there a whole thing in the BBC books where it had been the Time Lords that enforced time being stable enough not to go all butterfly-effecty, and in their absence, there was a lot more of that sort of thing going on?
May 12, 2024 @ 11:15 pm
I noticed that the de- and re-translated display was still measuring ‘mavity’. That could be something already butterflyish the Doctor doesn’t seem to have noticed.
May 18, 2024 @ 1:22 pm
It’s not really a superstition…
May 12, 2024 @ 4:40 am
It’s an interesting one. It felt a bit insubstantial for a launch – which this an amusing premise without much of a story to back it up. But as El points out this gives space for Gatwa and Gibson to really show off and establish their dynamic. And there’s some interesting stuff going on in the margins:
The babies being condemned to death by a pro-life order is very American politics, but the stuff about them being refugees who need to reach a safe shore is a dagger in the heart of the British Parliament. Excellent.
I wonder if the butterfly gag was, as well as a gag, establishing Ruby as a part of Earth? Someone who was found mysteriously as a baby in an episode about a sci-fi baby farm in the future might suggest that Ruby is a sci-fi person, grown in a vat and sent back in time or something. The butterfly gag shows us Ruby as a sci-fi person and says she’s not that?
Interesting that even with Disney’s money, this episode feels smaller than RTD’s traditional third episode trips to the future. Fewer and less diverse characters than The End of the World, less expansive than New Earth, Gridlock or Planet of the Ood. Even the solar system the station is in is only scene as a stylised map. No CGI and not a glimpse of the world the babies are going to. It doesn’t feel expensive, though I’m sure it is. But maybe the money has gone into making this closed world absolutely rock solid rather than a bigger world that might look a bit wobbly around the edges.
On this point, perhaps interesting to compare with Shardlake, a series I started on Disney+ after watching Doctor Who on the BBC. Absolutely stuffed with sets and locations, crawling with purposeful extras that build out a sense of the historical world it takes place in despite it ultimately being a locked room murder mystery in a closed, static location.
Not sure the production playing the revelation of what the bogeyman was made from as seriously bad with a straight face worked for men. My mind went to either shit or…frankly, dead babies. Not the comic bodily fluid!
May 12, 2024 @ 11:58 pm
“Not sure the production playing the revelation of what the bogeyman was made from as seriously bad with a straight face worked for men. My mind went to either shit or…frankly, dead babies. Not the comic bodily fluid!”
I feel I must apologise for my own thoughts leaking out and contaminating your brain, although the reveal did work for me.
May 13, 2024 @ 12:18 pm
Ah, glad I’m not alone in that. Had started to worry I was a bit weird. Also your quoting me has put that unfortunate typo front and centre – “it didn’t work for men”? Well, never mind. Screw ’em
May 13, 2024 @ 9:21 am
My wife objected when I pointed it out, but I felt the foreshadowing was done really well here: I believe the first time they name it as “the bogeyman” is IMMEDIATELY after the nose-blowing scene. Soon as that happened, I figured it out. (At least, the bit about what it was made of; the rest of it about it being the result of the birthing machine having generated it based on an overly literal attempt to recreate the plot of a children’s story I thought was really clever, and even with Ruby mentioning the children’s story angle, I didn’t piece the whole thing together until the Doctor explained it). The whole thing was a really well-paced reveal. Or maybe it’s just because we caught up on the Chibnall episodes we’d skipped last week and the bar for “Actually have your plot build up instead of piling on pointless plot twists for the sake of being surprising” is very low right now.
The theme of a children’s story becoming real makes me wonder if they’re building toward a return to the land of fiction – much as I hope they’d leave that one alone (I used the land of fiction as the season 4 plot arc in my “What if Doctor Who had been brought back powered entirely by commercially plausible bad ideas” art project), it feels kind of inevitable to me these days that the ultimate payoff of the Timeless Child is that they’re going to make the Doctor literally be the thing he’s always figuratively been.
May 12, 2024 @ 7:53 pm
I thought this was as good or better than Devil’s Chord at being what it was: DC was some callbacks to The Giggle and to the classic series but largely forward looking (apt for the “historical” that wasn’t), while this future story felt like it was jam-packed with references to earlier New Who episodes (plus Alien). That makes this episode a grand statement for new watchers about what the show is, while a reiteration for those of us who can catch all or some of the call-backs.
And on some level, it felt like where The Five Doctors opens with that Hartnell clip, this one should have opened with a clip of Andrew Cartmel talking about wanting to bring down the British government.
May 13, 2024 @ 9:10 am
The thing I noticed the most is that this is the first time we’ve had a Doctor with a rhotic accent and it’s making me super aware of the fact that for the first 60 years, they’d been pronouncing it “Tah-dis” instead of “TaRRRRRRdis”.
There is a LOT for those sorts of people to be upset about – the unsubtle “Our politics require that we force babies to be born but our capitalism requires us to leave them to die immediately after”, the stuff about found family, the refusal to kill the monster, and the Doctor’s big speech about how being different makes you special rather than “wrong”. There felt like a permeating queerness to this episode despite the fact that there’s nothing gay in the literal sense here. I somehow feel that almost all of this will go completely over the heads of the people most likely to care (insert King of the Hill “If they could read subtext they’d be very angry right now” meme), especially with the big shiny of Jinkx Monsoon in the next episode to be mad about.
One thing I note: Ruby is of the right generational cohort that I wish she’d explicitly pointed out that “The hero kills the bogeyman” is a LESS COMMON kid’s story trope – for at least a generation, modern kids’ stories are far more likely to do exactly what this story did, and have the hero come to understand the monster and ultimately befriend it.
May 13, 2024 @ 11:51 am
I took the butterfly bit as a variation on “introducing a new audience to the world of Doctor Who.” The butterfly question is always the first question that gets asked about time travel, so they bit was a “don’t worry about that, we’ve got it covered” to the audience, especially because the next episode is a sort-of historical.
May 13, 2024 @ 7:31 pm
Where things stumble is the first quarter, labored as it is with “explain the lore for all those Americans on Disney+.” Gatwa and Gibson’s energy is enough to keep it out of trouble, but you find yourself thinking that maybe “two hearts” could have been saved for later in the season.
I felt like RTD was almost making a joke of rushing through some of those welcome-to-the-show beats, with some winks to the audience by way of callbacks to 2005 and 1963.
May 14, 2024 @ 9:31 pm
Having just caught up with the episode, those first twenty minutes are rough. I’m not happy, at all, that we’re back at “last of the Time Lords” or having to be reminded that the Timeless Children happened…but, I think settling on “adopted, and survivor of a genocide” and the way Gatwa performs those beats are the best possible way to handle them, and make good on Gatwa’s goal of inhabiting a fictional hero with a background that touches on his own life story. (Hopefully we’ll encounter a community of fellow Gallifreyan refugees that the Doctor can help set up to take care of themselves and then just go on adventuring.) And the way the script threads together the themes of abandonment, survival, and forced migration is really quite neat. I quite enjoyed myself in the second half…once we got past the majority of the talking baby scenes.
Jesus Christ, I brought up the Baby Geniuses series as a bit above but I never thought they would actually go for the “babies speaking with digitally-tweaked mouth movements” effect. Just an absolutely horrifying experience and I cannot fathom why they thought it would work given the long, long history of media attempting similar visuals and plunging into the bottom of the uncanny valley.
Anyway, onto the Devil’s Chord.
May 14, 2024 @ 11:39 pm
Having replaced the abstract end of the timelords in war with a very straightforward and literal “a very bad man murdered every last one of them”, and having hired a Rwandan man to play the Doctor, you’d have to be Chris Chibnall not to write the Doctor with “survivor of a genocide” at the core of the character.
May 15, 2024 @ 8:52 am
Gatwa Is the worst doctor who there has been yet hurry up and fire him already and bring back the great show doctor who was
May 15, 2024 @ 10:09 am
Bad look, Chibnall.