The Interstellar Song Contest Review
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. Even if they’re quickly established as not dead, it’s a viscerally shocking image—especially because the audience doesn’t know about the mavity shell yet, and so it’s plausible that we really are watching something that gruesome. And it’s further emphasized by the starkness of the Doctor’s freezing body. It’s a genuinely weird episode, especially alongside the Doctor’s outright snapping and torturing the villain—an aggressive escalation of “he’s gone too far” stylings that stands alongside The Twin Dilemma in sheer unpleasantness. On the other, Eurovision.
The tension is worth thinking about in terms of the precision of its engagement with the television schedule. Obviously Doctor Who cannot do Eurovision. It certainly can’t do Eurovision the hour before actual Eurovision. For one thing, Murray Gold isn’t that good. Probably nobody is, but Gold certainly isn’t, and it shows in the songs, which manage to be neither good nor bad enough save, perhaps, for “Dugga Doo,” plainly his best work since “Heaven Sent.” And so instead Doctor Who works heel and does the disruption of Eurovision by having this unpleasantly violent gun episode muscle in on the nice frock episode so that Eurovision can serve as the restored order and be a lot of fun right up until some shitty ballad wins it again.
The details in this regard are largely spot-on—note how “Dugga Doo” is used to play over Belinda’s panic attack, or that glorious visual of the slushy cup floating past her sobbing. There’s always the sense of deferred camp—something sold by the bickering gay couple as the Doctor’s temporary companions. And the overall juxtaposition is used effectively—especially when Graham Norton is used to explain that the Earth blew up and the contrasting tones are briefly used to set up “Wish World” instead of Real Eurovision.
And then, of course, the Rani.
- I’m mostly going to leave her until the episodes she’s actually substantively in, and not just give a gut level reaction to the self-evidently trolling decision to actually bring back the Rani. I at least like the degree to which she continues the episode’s engagement with camp, and next week can be next week.
- I was at least right that it was all building to Susan. Still, what a genuine frisson of surprise when Carole Ann Ford appeared on screen. It’s clever to drop her an episode early, and so casually.
- “Hell poppy” is a really weird word, and sticks out like a sore thumb whenever it comes up. Although it’s part and parcel of the larger and also interesting decision to make the oppression of the Hellions so starkly propagandistic in nature. Loved the bitterness of Kid’s “I’m only doing what you expect me to.” There’s these fleeting engagements with misinformation and the illiteracy crisis throughout the Davies era, and I hope we get a story someday where they actually play out in a substantive way.
- “Hell poppy” is also interesting when you’ve got weirdo Captain Poppy teases floating around. Bet this will never get meaningfully expanded on, but I still like it.
- A cute fanwank detail—Kid’s weapon of choice, a delta wave, is the same one used in Parting of the Ways, whose underlying thematic juxtaposition of camp television and mass death The Interstellar Song Contest shares.
- Loved the opening beat of Rylan coming out of cryogenic suspension and just plowing right into hosting with no context. But why the fuck is he alive to keep in cryogenic suspension in the first place?
- The most chilling part of the Doctor’s going too far here for me is that it comes so close after his comments about Kid’s sadism and cruelty.
- I am allowing myself precisely one sentence of enjoying that Doctor Who has gotten its first transgender writer. I’m allowing myself a second sentence of enjoying that she takes Gareth Roberts’ old Space Eurovision premise and proceeds to scrawl gun graffiti all over it. Eh, I’ll give myself a third one for that.
- There’s a neat implication that bigeneration leaves the previous iteration somehow lesser than the new one—a Rani vs the Rani. This is implicit in how Tennant is treated once Gatwa shows up, but much more literalized here, and broadly sorts out some of the messier implications of the concept and Davies’s absurd “and all the past regenerations turned to bigenerations” nonsense.
- Somehow you don’t think Gatwa’s gonna bigenerate though.
- The decision to make the final song untranslatable is obviously necessary—no words can possibly work for what that song is supposedly doing. And yet it’s hopelessly facile. One wonders if it accomplishes a damn thing, or if the Hellion genocide just continues. Real-world parallels suggest the latter.
- It’s sweet that the Zygons get a new habitat though.
- Anyway. This was very good at what it did. I even, at several points, quite enjoyed it. But at no point did I actually like it, and I think that should probably matter.
Rankings
- Lux
- The Story and the Engine
- Joy to the World
- Lucky Day
- The Interstellar Song Contest
- The Well
- The Robot Revolution
May 17, 2025 @ 7:36 pm
As you say, the rare Doctor Who episode that feels like it can’t be separated from its cultural moment, despite that clearly not being the intent when written. Really not sure how I feel about it. Love the insanity of bringing back both the Ranis and Susan in an episode that isn’t really about either.
May 17, 2025 @ 8:02 pm
Re: ‘Hell poppy’ – there’s a 1940s movie called ‘Hellzapoppin’ which is considered one of the earliest and most flagrant examples of fourth wall-breaking in the history of cinema. It’s probably completely unrelated but…there has been a lot of that in these last two series…
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/Hellzapoppin
May 17, 2025 @ 8:18 pm
When Cora’s song was initially met with silence, I thought we’d get something more thoughtful – that the song would not, in fact, cure an entire audience of their rancid bigotry in under two minutes. The silence could have been followed by boos and insults being thrown, followed by a scene where a couple of people from the audience approach her and say that they were affected by it. A small victory; the very beginnings to a possible reconsideration of anti-Hellion bigotry, a few people at a time. Instead we got… slow clap. Which, yeah, you can tack on for yourself that maybe the clapping wasn’t sincere and nothing will change, but it also doesn’t seem like that’s what Dawson was going for there.
I enjoyed an awful lot of this, but that… ? Geesh.
May 17, 2025 @ 8:21 pm
I am pretty sure the authorial intent does not end with the script. The shot of burning farms during the genocide is such a strong image for anyone following Gaza and West Bank in the last two years. So I find it more difficult to not read any of this outside the context of the Palestinian genocide.
And I think the episode elevates itself slightly above “fine people on both sides” just by doing something it usually does not do: vilify the Doctor’s actions. It’d be pretty standard of the show if the Doctor stopped the kid, preached about how violence was not the answer and yada yada. But instead, it makes the Doctor part of that cycle of violence, by turning its hero into a torturer, someone to be appalled by. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that the revengeful kid is essentially whitewashed from his sins by the Doctor becoming his torturer in an uncharacteristic fit of rage. By making the Doctor commit to that violence, the show gave legitimacy to the position the villain found himself in. The gist of the episode was that violence begets violence, which is inarguably true even if it’s a basic messaging, and even a hero can be a part of that violence.
May 17, 2025 @ 8:48 pm
It’s a weird one where this episode is almost a dark mirror to The Story and the Engine for me. I didn’t find Story and Engine too enjoyable, it was a little too sloppy, but I am totally willing to give it a pass on that because it’s so nice the Doctor got out to Africa and we got that piece of a culture, from a writer aligned with that culture.
And then we have this, which I found more enjoyable all the way through (that shot of the bodies flowing up is so good…at first I thought it was debris, and then it dawned on me ‘Oh no, it’s all the people’. But you put in the light of the Palestinian genocide and the Doctor harming Kid but never having gone out of his way to stop the Corporation and it leaves a sour taste in the mouth, almost like I should feel guilty for having enjoyed it.
Finally, Panjabi rules and I’m excited to see her in action, even if I wonder how they will make the Rani work differently from the Master.
May 17, 2025 @ 10:19 pm
I’ve always been amused at how much Missy (at least to me) always made much more sense in her original debut as an interation of the Rani than as a female Master. Now, we’ve got the inverse of that. Mrs. Flood’s bonkers acting throughout this season coupled with the camp haughtiness of the new Rani itself screams more “female Master” to me than Missy ever did, but I’ll be interested to see what the next two episodes do with her.
May 17, 2025 @ 10:47 pm
While I’m curious and confident RTD will pull it off, “Mrs Flood was the Rani all along” makes sense only in the very fannish sense of “The Rani is literally the only recurring classic female villain and thus she is the obvious candidate for ANY female villain coded as Important”. The Rani’s only character traits were that she was a mad scientist and she was “What if Master but Girl?” breaking the fourth wall, being affably evil in the manner of a dotty old woman, or dressing up as past companions? None of that has balls-all to do with the Rani (Okay, yeah, she cosplayed as Mel for one scene).
The Rani is the least interesting thing for Mrs. Flood to be, and it makes me actively angry for them to prove right all the fans who assumed she was the Rani from the beginning purely BECAUSE of the whole “Only female villain” thing. But still, it’s something we can work with.
Does she, as a scientist, hold a grudge over the Doctor making the universe more supernatural? An angle of “She wants dominion over the natural laws of the universe itself” thing is a plausible Rani plot, and “As a scientist, what I want is to kill God” is at least a little amusing.
May 18, 2025 @ 1:11 am
“Then tell your maker I will come to storm down his gates of gold and seize his kingdom in my true name.” –Holy crap, your suggestion actually works with what we’ve seen so far from Mrs. Flood AND with The Rani’s original introduction as an amoral scientist who is also the deposed ruler of an alien world. Fingers crossed we get something like this and not just Missy 2 and Missy 3!
May 17, 2025 @ 10:38 pm
Quality and politics aside, I feel this episode would have been more spectacular if it had come out before 2018, when Catherynne Valente’s exuberantly inventive novel ‘Space Opera’ perfected the “Earth’s future depends on an interstellar Eurovision Song Contest” subgenre at the same time it invented it.
I’m not even criticizing the episode! Just, if you liked it, holy cow do I have a novel to recommend for you. Also, note to myself that I still need to pick up its sequel, ‘Space Oddity’.
May 18, 2025 @ 12:57 am
She didn’t invent it. As noted in the review, Gareth Roberts has a version of that premise from 2002.
May 18, 2025 @ 1:48 am
(Clay’s premise, Roberts’ details, iirc)
May 18, 2025 @ 1:56 am
Ok, so she just perfected it! It’s still marvelous. Did Roberts actually produce anything, or just spout the idea?
May 18, 2025 @ 2:45 am
There’s a 2 hour Big Finish audio with this premise at its centre called Bang-Bang-a-Boom!
May 18, 2025 @ 2:23 am
I haven’t read it since 2018, but the episode shared even less with the novel than I expected
May 18, 2025 @ 12:29 am
To compare these last two oddly bi-generated series, I think on balance I preferred last year’s take on “the Doctor gets pushed to an emotional extreme against a number of gay signifiers”
May 18, 2025 @ 12:45 am
I sure hope that the Doctor responding to “you scared me when you tortured a guy in front of me” with “Bel, I was triggered” was, like, supposed to be as darkly manipulative as it clearly is.
May 18, 2025 @ 1:26 am
I also thought it was a bit creepy how intent the Doctor was on making Belinda enjoy his adventuring. She never wanted to be there! She’s just a poor bystander who’s been abducted and tormented. Her time in the TARDIS has been a nightmare. The part where she seems to feel almost guilty for not having told the Doctor he’s wonderful… Is it me, or does Belinda almost sound like a hostage? On top of the stuff in Robot Revolution that seemed to draw some equivalence between the Doctor and toxic masculinity, there is a very weird vibe here. Is it deliberate? Is it going to be addressed?
May 18, 2025 @ 1:51 am
will it perhaps lead to the Doctor being disgusted with maleness and choosing a female form next? we can only hope
May 18, 2025 @ 2:38 am
I enjoyed it a lot. I did have that moment of thinking, uh oh we’re doing Kerblam again… and then the Hellions got to make a protest at the end speaking/singing out to the billions of viewers.
Okay fine, the Doctor doesn’t go and blow up the corporation at the end. But you’ve still got Doctor Who going out just before Eurovision suggesting that “umm actually the EBU doesn’t want certain people to be seen because capitalism.” An episode written by a trans author, nabbing an idea from a transphobe, and gaying up a contest which doesn’t allow pride flags.
Ok yes, reading it as a direct allegory, why is it necessary to bring up a representation of a violent radical group working within an oppressed people? I mean it does so to disprove it. But is it necessary in the first place?
Could Dawson have known where the world would be now? There were criticisms of Israel’s participation when she wrote it, so maybe this was supposed to be a critique of the EBU going under the radar (amidst the fireworks of Susan and the Rani) for those in the know.
Broadly the message of the episode seems moral, even if the Doctor’s focus is on protecting Belinda rather than finding out what is going on with the activist plight. There is an inbuilt critique of the Doctor’s nearsightedness here which helps to sell this idea for me. Something distinctly lacking from Kerblam.
I forget that ppl outside my bubble just don’t know about the Eurovision boycott. Like the gays and theys all seem to know, but then I talk to family or colleagues and they haven’t heard anything about it. Hopefully this episode causes people to research this topic, even if it’s just the Who fandom.