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 18, 2025 @ 5:03 am
I’ve seen a lot of people take the Doctor’s criticism that Kid “just likes killing” at face value, when clearly the torture that follows which is done purely for the Doctor’s satisfaction, is done along the same logic. It could have been more dressed up in the same way as Boom Town, but the implicit self-critique is there.
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 18, 2025 @ 6:51 pm
I fear I may be betrayed by the story here, but from a functional perspective, I think the Rani was a great choice.
The classic recurring villains – the Master and the Daleks especially (I’m omitting Missy who actually had something interesting to do) – have presented a problem to the show for a long time, because their motivation and character require an exponential increase in stakes with each appearance. The Daleks want to kill everything that’s not a Dalek, and the Master wants either domination over the cosmos or to destroy the Doctor or both, as long as there is sufficient scenery to chew. Each time, the threat needs to get bigger in order for the threat to the Doctor to be plausible, while at the same time making it less and less plausible for the viewer that anything is in real peril.
The Rani doesn’t have this problem, because the Rani – at least, what we understand to be the core of her character – just wants to muck about with things to see what will happen, without caring who gets in the way. She can imperil a stranded starship or a regency ball for an episode – she doesn’t need to genocide the Time Lords or erase the universe. And the idea of someone with Time Lord technology and intelligence just callously messing with fundamental science is an interesting conceit, and is a mirror to the Doctor in a more nuanced way than the Master – instead of “this is the Doctor if he were completely unredeemable mustache twirling evil but also somehow tedious,” it might prompt some questions about where the line of intent is drawn and what limits have to be adhered to with regard to the Doctor’s interference in time.
So to me, given that the fanbase has proven that they will over and over say they want new villains but find anything but a returning menace unsatisfying, I think the Rani is a good choice for a recurring villain – especially if you want a Time Lord, which I suspect RTD does. I’ve always thought “Time Lord diaspora” would be a great way to handle the death of Gallifrey, rather than bringing it back.
That said, yeah, however much I am loving this era, we’re probably getting a more traditionally villainous Rani and then he’ll be the last of the time lords again.
May 18, 2025 @ 6:56 pm
I’ve never understood this line of argument about Missy being much more like the Rani. The Missy of Series 8 (and indeed her later showings) is absolutely obsessed with messing with the Doctor. Her entire centuries-spanning scheme boils down to seeing how far she can drive him, how she can make him bend and crack, and possibly if she can present him with military power and make him perceive that they’re closer in kind than he thinks. She wants her friend back. She’s doing what the Master always does – yearning for her toxic ex and messing around with the universe in baroque and destructive ways to get his attention.
The Rani, on the other hand, just hates the Doctor’s guts because she finds him super annoying, he always gets in the way of her neat and tidy experiments & causes chaos. She wants to devote her time to her study, her scientific tinkering, and the like. The Doctor is a very irritating distraction. That’s not how Missy behaves at all.
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 @ 5:45 pm
Not to be that guy, but the most popular version of this idea in the current popular consciousness is most likely the Rick and Morty epsiode “get schwifty”
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 @ 4:34 am
Against the background of a TV sensation, no less
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 @ 3:12 am
Yeah there’s multiple ways this could pay off brilliantly. But if it doesn’t, then as of this episode I would say we have a serious problem. And I’m not confident enough that such a payoff will happen to not start worrying about this problem now.
May 18, 2025 @ 6:10 am
Oh, 100%. He’s someone who’s fully comfortable with being cruel sometimes but he doesn’t want his friends to see him in that light. He wants to be seen as fun and friendly and loving. Him using his genocide trauma to justify torturing Kid can’t NOT be intentional in my opinion given that Kid himself is using his genocide trauma to justify murdering trillions. And the Doctor’s excuse isn’t even believable because it’s clear that he’s doing this because he’s angry about Belinda seemingly dying. Him accusing Kid of just liking killing can be seen as the Doctor projecting his own issues.
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.
May 18, 2025 @ 3:20 am
By the way, something that I haven’t seen remarked upon this series but which I might as well bring up since it’s happened twice now: As an aesthetic choice, I loathe the use of cutaways during moments of emotional climax. First when we flashed to the captain as a little kid in The Well, and now again with the stock footage of poppy fields during the song in this. I can’t put my finger on exactly why it triggers such a visceral negative response in me, but I suspect it’s because it feels like something pulled from the visual language of advertising, especially American advertising. Granted this isn’t the only way this era talks down to its audience by a long shot, but it has been the one that has grated the most for me.
May 18, 2025 @ 5:17 am
I didn’t mind the cut-aways during the singing because it provided something of substance to what would otherwise be an impenetrable, untranslatable song. The burning fields were a particularly invocative image. Generally, though, I agree 100% that the RTD2 era’s obsession with flashbacks is insulting to the audience’s intelligence. The amount of times clips from the same episode are shown to provide context is maddening.
I wonder if it’s due to Disney+ notes? I’ve heard that streaming platforms write their shows with second screens in mind, so that people scrolling their phones can keep up too. That would also explain why characters sometimes just state the obvious. Like “Because of the horns” this episode, or when Cora says she’s a Hellion out loud before she even reveals her horns (And even then, she reveals them to the camera first, holding still for several beats, and then turns so the characters can see??). Sloppy, lazy stuff.
May 18, 2025 @ 3:47 am
Ugh, what was so good about Space Amazon that we needed that again? Every year I make the decision whether I am going to enjoy Eurovision and watch it or not and this year was very firmly ‘no’ so I knew I was going to struggle, I very nearly gave up on this until 10 minutes in when mass homicide mercifully broke out, which at least raised the tone of things.
Wasn’t it remarked upon how spiky Belinda was at the start of the season and it was hoped that would stick around? I think this was the episode where the last traces were gone and she’s now a fairly generic companion with no really distinguishing traits. When the story splits up the party the companion normally ends up as the most dominant and correct person in whatever group they end up in, I did like that Belinda does freak out and thought Varada played her very well.
It took a long time to get to the dark side of Gatwa’s Doctor. Two specials, a season and a half. I would have thought Belinda would have had some words to say about the man she travels with being prepared to torture someone beaten and captured, but no, we need holo-Graham Norton to remind us what the premise of the season is. And, because RTD seems to like re-using ideas so much I’m guessing the Rani will have used the data Mrs Flood has somehow been copying from the Doctor, despite the fact that she didn’t come to Lagos last week, to get to Earth before him and her plan will already be underway when the Doctor and Belinda arrive.
May 18, 2025 @ 3:59 am
you know what this kinda reminds me of? Charlie Jane Anders getting her television break writing for the Y: The Last Man show, having to hype up the trans representation while ignoring the transfemicide in the premise. idk. something about the way trans women are put on these weird politically charged landmines.
May 18, 2025 @ 4:08 am
To think I had $500 on Mrs Flood turning out to be the Terrible Zodan. That’s $500 I won’t see again in a hurry.
May 18, 2025 @ 4:13 am
Just as the Chibnall Era masked its conservatism with diversity, this episode pinkwashes absolutely ghastly politics.
Dr. Who says: oppressed people, stay in line! If you’re very well behaved and meek and sympathetic, maybe you can sing a song about how sad you are on a platform that enriches your oppressor. If you’re lucky!
The Zygon Inversion isn’t exactly perfect, but at least it doesn’t end with Peter Capaldi torturing Bonnie.
May 18, 2025 @ 4:56 am
A bit of a cynical read. You can also see the episode as saying “Oppressed people, just don’t commit terrorism, killings and torture. Even the Doctor does, when pushed to his limits, so you are right to feel the rage you are feeling, but it is not going to fix anything and will further the cycle of violence”. And while it sadly fails to offer an alternative, it most certainly does not make the oppressed villains monsters.
If Zygon Inversion tried to do the same thing, 12th Doctor would torture Bonnie, and Clara would have smacked the Doctor so hard he’d regenerate, and we’d still know that violence, even if committed by the Doctor, was wrong.
May 18, 2025 @ 7:13 pm
Or, “capitalism is a vast and faceless entity of malevolence, that requires oppression, violence, and death and pollutes all it touches, so that its end result is just violence and rage. Resistance to it relies on solidarity with all peoples.”
Not that the Doctor leaving the Corporation be was at all satisfying, or that the tedious condemnation of necessary violence and the tinge of both-sidesism wasn’t maddening. But it was at least a far cry from the clumsy fascist sympathy of Lucky Day. I do wonder if the Corporation is being set up to be a recurring villain, given how they talked about it.
May 18, 2025 @ 4:26 am
In Watching this, I’m reminded how far away we are from the radical politics of the war games, and have adopted a bland liberal centrism.
I also think it’s interesting to compare and contrast the introduction of the master in series 3 and the rani now, especially for new series viewers.
Utopia was an episode that really dialled up the tension in order to build up the reveal of the master, so that even if you hadn’t seen the classic series you would get a sense of how dangerous and worrying his presence is based on the reaction of the doctor.
the rani on the other hand seems to have been chucked into this episode as an afterthought.
May 18, 2025 @ 11:10 am
Yes, one starts to wonder if the show is simply so high-profile and commercially important now that it can’t be allowed to be … interesting.
May 18, 2025 @ 4:26 am
Morrocanoil have been sponsoring Eurovision since 2019, so it might have been written with that in mind (Poppy Honey seems like a direct parallel to that specifically, moreso than the EBU’s other terrible choices). (Though obviously it wasn’t as controversial/well-known when the script was written IIRC)
May 18, 2025 @ 4:32 am
“I even, at several points, quite enjoyed it. But at no point did I actually like it, and I think that should probably matter.”
That’s genuinely been my response to a lot of this season tbh. The messed up politics of this one really soured me on what was otherwise a quite enjoyable ‘campy frock romp invaded by grim depressing gun episode.’
What I can’t get past, other than the horrible tone deafness of the inevitable Palestine comparison, is that the Doctor crossing a line with torturing Kid should have been a much bigger deal for Belinda than it actually is in the episode. She walks in on that, looks horrified, then almost immediately hugs the Doctor? Maybe it’s a casualty of the compressed 8 episode season, but that felt like it should have been set up for an emotional reversal where all the gradual build up of trust over the season is swept away so the climactic two parter has bigger emotion stakes? I feel like that’s what RTD would have done with this kind of beat in his first go as showrunner, so for him to miss it now feels weirdly sloppy.
And the show’s been back for 20 years now, do we still need to keep beating the “last of the Time Lords” dead horse quite so much?
May 18, 2025 @ 5:01 am
I agree with your criticism for a lack of reaction from Belinda. The narration of the episode absolutely treated as an abhorrent act, but a RTD1 or Moffat companion would have given him hell for that. So I think the issue wasn’t merely the tone deafness of the episode because again the Doctor was shown to be succumbing to evil, but it was poor characterisation of the companion, which of course contributed to its politics being seen lacking.
May 18, 2025 @ 12:10 pm
She already had the reaction, but displaced the agency: “That’s not the Doctor” followed by I have to get there to stop him. I can buy her reaction as “thank God he’s back now” even if that shouls be an uneasy thing. This is all in line with the idea that the Doctor needs a companion to stop him (from RTD1’s Donna year).
But it does rather feel like the show is haunted by itself now, not just Susan but the no-longer First Doctor picking up that rock to kill someone (“I never use weapons; only when my life is threatened. Technically a rock isn’t a weapon.”)
May 18, 2025 @ 4:33 am
I’m loathe to come down against any story that makes an effort to be Actually About something but it’s hard not to call this a bit trite.
The revolutionary side of the Hellions are given the most escalated possible kind of monstrosity without any kind of interiority. The Asking Nicely Hellion gets a sympathetic audience to discuss her feelings and of course her asking nicely apparently works*
I don’t think we should ignore the attempt to complicate it by pushing the Doctor off the deep end and making him into a torturer, lashing out violently in response to a situation he only half understands. But it lets him off the hook for that immediately – without drawing any conclusions. Maybe there was an opportunity for him to see himself in this situation: about to unleash a Delta Wave on a broadcasting satellite, using a device that looks not unlike the moment? Apparently not. “Sorry I was triggered by the genocide” is an excuse for the Doctor but not for Kid Hellion.
Surely there were opportunities to complicate it further: to give the lead Hellion some of interiority. Or maybe Cora only gets her opportunity to perform that song because the attack ruins the contest. Perhaps she was going to do some blandly poppy number but events make her reconsider her use of her platform and the lengths she’s gone to to pass? Maybe she and Kid are aware of each other and in intense disagreement about what to do?
I can understand that maybe a mainstream BBC show under intense scrutiny had to structure itself like this to avoid anything that might appear to endorse terrorism. But if that means you can only treat a subject like this in such a broad fashion, maybe you shouldn’t?
*With The Corporation still unnamed and apparently with some link to the greater story via Poppy Honey (that must be a thing, right?) I’m open to reassessing this if the subject is returned to.
May 18, 2025 @ 4:40 am
To be fair, in the dress rehearsal footage Cora was going to sing a song about her feet being too big, so she does only perform that song because the attack ruins the contest. And there is a vague hint that she knows the other two Hellions personally, as she called the female one a kin sister iirc? So I guess an attempt is made to complicated the situation, but it kind of gets buried
May 18, 2025 @ 4:42 am
Further thoughts: I don’t think it’s quite fair to level “fine people on both sidesing” against the episode. It doesn’t at any point suggest the burning of Hellion is reasonable or justified. It has no defence of the corporation. The moral questions of the episode are levelled solely at people responding to it.
Secondly, I’m a little worried that in depicting the Radicalised Violent Man villain so regularly, the show’s maybe beginning to fall into some unfortunate implications. The character’s drawn from life for sure, but especially this week it feels like the theme is starting to walk backwards into biological essentialism – men are inherently prone to villainy and girls are not.
Sure we the Rani as our arc ending villain, but she exists on a different level to these characters the show is currently fascinated with. She’s huge and camp and cosmic. These guys exist in a more realistic register and at some point you have the address the real phenomenon of radicalisation – that this is a process that starts in the base level of culture and accelerates in subcultures that target isolated, vulnerable people to create villains rather than men having the villain gene.
May 18, 2025 @ 4:47 am
Lindy Pepper-Bean was a pretty realistic register as far as an awful, even radicalised, woman goes, even if she was last year rather than this.
May 18, 2025 @ 5:04 am
Yes, good point. But this is the year has acquired a fascinating with radicalised men. Maybe what really sparked that thought was having a male and female terrorist Hellion and the girl is visibly more sensitive and regretful than the man.
It’s not that these radicalised men aren’t authentically villainous. But to return to that well over and over without paying attention to the process of radicalisation you end up selling the theme short and actually it turns out you’ve been broadcasting a different theme all along.
May 18, 2025 @ 11:30 am
I don’t know that I personally would make the argument, but I do think we are living in a moment where it is reasonable to say that every moment you are not warning people of the dangers of radicalized (white) men is a moment that you are not doing enough to prevent the collapse of civilization.
May 18, 2025 @ 12:16 pm
Yes, it isn’t the ending of Oxygen where it’s implied the Corporation is in trouble. An audience applauding one song isn’t enough. I got a strong subtextual sense that nobody in the Corporation likely watches the contest and that it would easily survive any bad publicity: how was Kid going to take credit in a way that makes the Corporation and not Hellions responsible? “You know how they are… that poor contest and the poor Corporation unfairly targeted.” People who love this contest and this singer (best/most popular8 are receptive to this one performance offers a bit of hope, but I didn’t see any suggestion that this was anything beyond a first step.
May 18, 2025 @ 4:44 am
From remarks RTD made about Baby Reindeer, he’s very well aware that BBC lawyers are across every little detail, which is enough to self-censor what you do. Maybe (and the same could be true of Kerblam, who knows) this episode is going as far as it thinks it can possibly go in terms of pointing anything out about the EBU and its sponsors. This year, it’s Morrocanoil, which despite its name is Israeli-owned.
We can question whether Dr Who should even go near these issues, if it has to hedge things for legal compliance. Personally, I think this episode did as much as it could to say that all problems stem from corporate greed. But it still can’t solce the central problem of Kerblam, namely that actually, most people love their poppy honey flavoured products.
May 18, 2025 @ 5:19 am
The BBC has really been quite poor at criticising Israel at all, in fact just yesterday half a million people marched in London for Palestine and the BBC didn’t mention it. I suspect you’re right that in that landscape it would be impossible for Doctor Who to take up arms against an organisation implied to be a stand in for Israel.
May 18, 2025 @ 5:01 am
I think the implication is that 2025 Rylan already lives in a cryogenic chamber, preserving his look between appearances as we speak. His tank is just part of the Earth flotsam recovered by future archaeologists.
May 18, 2025 @ 11:15 am
That used to be the joke about Dick Clark’s ability to continue to host ABC’s New Year’s Eve programming while displaying little visible sign of aging until his late seventies
May 18, 2025 @ 5:12 am
Based on the clip shown in Unleashed it does look like the next episode is going to heavily engage with the theme of misinformation. But obviously best to see if it substantially does, or if it’s just flavour for the first half hour, like The Giggle.
(Although it’s weird not to have a trailer – you’ve got the FA CUP audience and the Eurovision audience)
May 18, 2025 @ 5:29 am
Why are we so certain this wasn’t intended as an allegory with Israel in mind? Obviously it was written too long ago to be about the specific atrocities that are currently unfolding, but it’s not like the connection didn’t already exist. Iceland’s contestants showed Palestinian flags during 2019’s grand final, an act of protest that made headlines and was condemned by the EBU.
May 18, 2025 @ 10:32 am
The similarity of PoppyHoney and MoroccanOil as genocide-complicit companies based on foodstuffs that also sponsor Eurovision/the Song Contest makes it practically a certainty Dawson was thinking of the Israel-Palestine situation, yes.
May 18, 2025 @ 5:51 am
The evil corporation in this episode is called “The Corporation”, the most generic name imaginable. This allows it to be read as capitalism itself – and capitalism can’t really be destroyed or even harmed by exposing its ugly side. History has proven this time and time again. “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world” etc. That’s why the story treats Kid’s plan as fundamentally misguided. But capitalism (with its mass media) can be used and that’s Cora’s solution: sell the story of your people’s suffering as a song and earn people’s interest and compassion which in turn can improve the quality of life of the survivors.
The audience is stupid/apathetic enough that they don’t even notice that they’re watching a dress rehearsal instead of the actual show but Eurovision is all about shallow, powerful emotions and those can be influenced and used to your advantage, which is what Cora ultimately does. The episode seems to assume that capitalism can’t be defeated, it can only be used to your advantage and so presents Cora and her song as the realistic best case scenario under that assumption.
And honestly, can you blame it? I’d love for the Doctor to start a revolution but honestly, in this case it would just be pure wish fulfillment. And so I just try to enjoy the episode for what it is, and it was very enjoyable indeed.
May 18, 2025 @ 6:25 am
I had this amazing dream after watching this in which, at the end, Mark E. Smith and The Fall gatecrash the Interstellar Song Contest and perform Totally Wired. The audience goes mentoe, and afterwards Mark E. Smith meets the Doctor and they go for a pint.
How I miss him!
May 18, 2025 @ 6:49 am
As a quick precursor, I want to say what a genius choice bigenerating the Rani was. She only ever worked as a comedy straightman in a double act, this way she gets to be in a double act with herself, and we get to keep Anita Dobson around.
Regarding the actual episode… um. People have articulated the wishywashy politics better than I could, but a few extra points; I haven’t read the Good Doctor, but judging from the Eruditorum post on it the Marvel-esque “you have a point but you are going about it the wrong way :(” idea isn’t particularly new ground for Juno Dawson. I briefly thought it might actually be intended as a trans metaphor (Cora getting her horns removed to “pass,” the idea of her mate working with her for years and turning instantly on her when he clocked her), but it can’t really be read as anything other than a colonialism thing. Which… look, I know this was mostly written before the latest batch of public war crimes and genocide, but it’s a Eurovision episode about colonialism, how could it not have been about anything but Israel?
And I know the traditional liberal viewpoint on it was “very fine people on both sides,” but seeing the resolution being Cora getting the chance to demonstrate to the universe that Helions are people too and everyone accepting her, after nearly two years of horrific images and human stories coming out of Palestine and accomplishing jack shit, is quite possibly one of the most astoundingly tone deaf things I can remember coming out of Doctor Who.
Beyond that, the episode was just… weirdly shoddy, I found. The pacing was weird, the characterisation awkward and full of “let me articulate my deal bluntly” lines, and I agree setting Belinda up as the untrusting companion and then having her call the Doctor wonderful after watching him torture a genocide survivor is… interesting. If this is all adding up to something, sure, I’ll eat my words, but I waited patiently for all the Chibnall dodgyness to add up to something, and as much as RTD has more credit in the bank there’s only so much of it.
May 18, 2025 @ 7:41 am
The idea that this episode’s airing is an accident of unfortunate timing and that the episode would have been written before the current wave of violence doesn’t hold water to the simple fact that Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people has been ongoing for decades, and Eurovision’s complicity in that violence by platforming Israel has been an ongoing point of revulsion for years. This is only a a matter of unfortunate timing if you have been, frankly, ignorant of one of the longest-running and greatest atrocities ever committed.
The occasion of Eurovision has increasingly become a point of real conflict and division with many friends and with the wider queer community at large. There is something deeply gauche and pathetic to me about the way many in the queer community will pretend that booing Israel’s act while happily engaging in the thing that continues to platform them is tantamount to meaningful engagement or even resistance, and I think extremely little of this episode’s overtures towards largely the same thing.
I wasn’t expecting Doctor Who to come out and declare that the entire project of Israel from minute one has been a genocidal expression of western imperialism and that the only ethical response is resistance against the western hegemon propping it up. It’s a product of the BBC. But, fuck me. I don’t see how anyone could watch something like this and not feel sick about it, though I feel the same way about Eurovision, and that clearly hasn’t stopped people.
May 18, 2025 @ 11:47 am
“Kid Hellion” is totally what you’d call your first Tiefling character.
May 18, 2025 @ 1:32 pm
Before I make my point I must clarify that I fully support the right of Palestinian people to a peaceful homeland and am no kind of supporter of Zionism. Let’s not do a “fine people on both sides” but let’s also not confuse pro Palestinian anti-Zionism with anti semitism.
If Kid and the other Hellions were meant to stand in for Palestinians it was an odd choice to give them horns.
Horns, traditionally have been an anti-semitic trope dating back to medieval times and exploited later by the nazis. The imagery has had an unfortunate renaissance recently. When Netanyahu spoke to Congress this past July, protesters marched through the streets carrying a giant effigy of the Israeli prime minister with horns on his head. Many Jews have anecdotes of being asked to remove their hats or yarmulkas so that people could check for their horns. I guess the imagery in this episode could be read as simply ‘demonic’ or even Pan-like but still, it was a clumsy visual metaphor.
Anyway it was lovely to see Carole Anne Ford’s Susan because “it’s never Susan”.
I couldn’t care less about the Rani but I’m pleased for those who wanted her return.
May 18, 2025 @ 6:51 pm
On the contrary, it’s a very smart choice. Because as well as the other codings going on, there is a distinct gradient of coding the Hellians along the lines of traditional European antisemitic stereotypes – horns, yes, and the direct association with goats (and cloven feet) in Kid’s name, with all the satanic implications as you gesture towards, but rather more: there’s explicit reference to witchcraft, and cannibalism (blood libel goes ding?) and the fact that they’re the most consistently hated and scorned set of people around, as in much of European history. They’re obviously not meant to be read as an analogy for Jews. But by invoking certain (hateful, bigoted) stereotypes alongside aligning them closely with other peoples (Palestinians most obviously, but also the population of Afghanistan whose nation is invaded by an imperialist power for a specific resource rather than settlers “taking back” land), the episode avoids making the Hellians a direct 1:1 allegory for any real world group, even if the most explicit connection there is with Palestinians. By muddying the clarity of singular analogy there’s an increase in wider applicability.
May 18, 2025 @ 2:00 pm
On a completely trivial front, the delta wave is not what I expected when RTD hyped the return of a weapon from season one. The absolute perversity of trying to hype us up for the return of a friggin’ weapon, of all things, made me convinced it was gonna be the squareness gun. Squareness guns are fun! I’d be up for some squareness gun silliness. But the return of the delta wave? Who the heck cares one way or the other? They could have called the weapon anything and it wouldn’t have changed the story one bit.
May 18, 2025 @ 6:45 pm
Using the delta wave does specifically invite comparison between the Doctor and Kid as two survivors of genocides grappling with the ethics of using the exact same weapon of mass destruction against their opponents in said conflict. You could even argue that when the Doctor is torturing Kid what he’s really doing (psychologically) is torturing his past self for some of the decisions he’s made with these sorts of weapons before.
May 18, 2025 @ 5:34 pm
By 2 January 2024, Davies’ Doctor Who Magazine column stated that Episode 5 was on Draft 5, while Episode 6 was about to enter Draft 9. He wrote:
“Getting this script ready has been epic… but all worth it. What a story!”
(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_series_15#Writing)
So, Episode 6 hadn’t been finalized by January. It was also the last episode filmed before the finale, with filming taking place sometime between February and May 2024. Which, unfortunately, makes the authorial intention justification sort of null, and worries me that it was written intentionally to be likened to the Gaza genocide.