The Reality War Review
It’s always useful to take stock of where you are, so hey. It’s May 31st, 2025. I think I read that Morgan Wallen is at number one. But never mind that. On television, Doctor Who has just lurched into an uncertain non-existence, there’s a trailer for the Sea Devil spinoff, and we just Introduced Billie Piper, though pointedly not as the Doctor. The episode was wholly embargoed for a genuine world wide premiere, and so I’m reacting in real time with the rest of the world in attempting to process this hourlong piece of television that just happened to me.
Broadly, in terms of this precise moment, I think I liked it. I could not begin to predict what I will think about it at any other time in my life. But that’s future El’s problem. I’ve gotta get a review out, and I broadly liked it. If it is, in fact, the last episode of Doctor Who, it ended like I feel about that: in a sense of subtle wrongness. I even, perversely, find myself liking Wish World more, in that it extends the wrongness. There’s a fractal perfection to it—here we are, trapped in an apocalyptic hell world in which the rotting soul of the twentieth century genocides trans people, just like on TV.
And like, I can do so much with this. Cause, see, the fascist on TV peers out from the screen just like Patrick Troughton, and the Underverse is Narnia, and there’s fucking Susan. I’ve not gone frame by frame through, but I think Yasmin Finney disappears from the episode once reality starts breaking, and then we get the Doctor regenerating into Rose. Like, my conspiracy wall on this shit is huge. I’m gonna Eruditorum the shit out of this someday.
But right now, in the moment, all I know is that I’ve definitely never seen anything like that. Up to the halfway point or so, it is simply the sugar rush thrill of Journey’s End—the repeated fireworks as bits of continuity and fanwank are rolled out in perfectly escalating order. Bonnie Langford’s entrance to UNIT HQ is particularly immaculate, and delightfully paid off in her sneering hatred of the Rani, which she plays with startling intensity. ”We meet again” is clearly a line Bonnie Langford has waited her career for. The story fragments into three well-defined arcs for the three credit-level characters. Each strand gets some great moments: that sharp cut to Belinda in the zero chamber, the furious precision with which Ruby dismantles Conrad’s defenses, and the Doctor’s delighted “fuck yeah” to seeing Omega (because of course he does), all of them just starting points for some great sequences.
Then at the halfway point the Doctor smoothly plucks the Vindicator out of his bag of unresolved setups and shoots Zombie Omega, and we enter the far more puzzling back half—a series of “gosh, there’s sure a lot of episode left” cliffhangers that gradually drift askance, repeatedly not quite getting reality back together into a configuration that can possibly feel like a resolution. These too are precisely delivered—Whittaker slipping through the narrative cracks of the moment to have the Yaz subplot and her emotional unavailability highlighted is a particular treat, as is the meta-dialogue about how if they get this wrong the show will be cancelled. But they repeatedly move the story away from the path it ostentatiously flagged for itself—the one that goes and resolves the giant knot of emotional/continuity trauma around the Doctor, parenthood, and Susan. At times this is genuinely disorienting—the Doctor and Belinda forgetting about Poppy and preparing to spin off on endless travels is a remarkable piece of sustained dissonance. And then like, the narrative collapses so hard reality shatters and the Doctor orgasmically regenerates into Billie Piper and the credits roll and we wait to find out what Disney is doing and wonder if we’ll live til Christmas 2026 or whenever we actually come back.
And I ask myself, what if this is Survival redux? You can pretty much see the join, after all—somewhere in or around the last UNIT scene, when it pivots awkwardly to being a regeneration story instead the originally shot ending that presumably had Carole Ann Ford in it. So did Davies slap a weird coda onto his show as effectively as Cartmel dashed up “worlds out there where the sky’s burning?” If this is it for Doctor Who, is it a good ending? And ultimately I think yes. I don’t want Doctor Who to end, and I broadly appreciate Davies for seemingly going out of his way to end on a sour, unsatisfying cliffhanger. It’s as if the show is as annoyed as I am about this renewal bulshit, as if the story desperately wants to go on and is stuck at a red light that won’t turn. In which case, well done Davies. We’re all on the same page.
And if there is more? Well, I suppose we’ll see. I remain genuinely interested in the idea of engaging meaningfully with Susan. Billie Piper as the Doctor is superficially alarming but also something that could perfectly plausibly work—it’s not as if she’s a bad actress. I want to know what we’re doing with Anita Dobson notably surviving and Boss and all those random unfired guns on the mantelpiece. Maybe it’ll all be complete rubbish. Maybe it’ll get cancelled after twenty-three years and seventeen seasons, a run almost as impressive as the first time. Maybe it’ll resolve the Timeless Child in earnest. Maybe that was just it. We’ll see.
But this is today, and I have to decide what I thought of this weird two-parter and rank it on a list with the rest of the season. Suppose I’d better get to bullet points.
- The Rani finally manages to settle as a character for me here. It’s the sneering superiority of being a Time Lord—her cackling eugenics about the inferiority of humanity and Time Lord racial superiority—that finally cements it. Rani as Peter Thiel technofascist. That works. That’s solid.
- I’m also charmed by the Panjabi version just getting eaten as soon as she accomplishes her plan. The degree to which she’s comical and low rent is really carefully calculated, with Mrs. Flood successfully remaining as the more plausibly interesting version.
- Also the entire “I’ll do anything for you mistress” scene with Conrad was absolutely bonkers. Who expected Davies to out-horny Moffat.
- Speaking of whom, utterly charmed by Anita being the deus ex machina to resolve the cliffhanger. Less charmed by the Joy to the World callback in the regeneration (although “this has been an absolute joy” was sweet). But I do like that Moffat bails Davies out of his narrative collapse.
- OK, fanwank corner. First of all, I like the vague stabilization of the second Time Lord genocide. The hazily defined “genetic explosion” that kills all the Time Lords except for the ones it doesn’t, and sterilizes the rest is actually a thematically sane interpretation of The Timeless Children. Second of all, I’m horribly amused by Chibnall’s half-baked adoption trauma stuff becoming the excuse to go full Curse of the Pythia. But third of all, and most significantly, did they just fucking solve UNIT dating?
- Comments all season have been quite divided on Belinda. I quite like her. The dichotomy of being a perfectly capable companion who can see the appeal of the Doctor and someone who urgently doesn’t want to be there is a solid character concept, and has been since the days of Jacqueline Hill. Sethu does a bang-up job of playing her, and the result holds together. It’s simple and efficient as concepts go.
- Ruby remains more complicated, and not just in her seeming status as a semi-permanent feature of the UNIT landscape. I can’t really say that character ever fully clicks, even as Millie Gibson can deliver individual scenes when called to, but the whole never quite gelled.
- Honestly, there’s a degree to which that’s how I feel about the Gatwa era. Penn and I were listening to Serpentwithfeet’s Grip the other day. There’s a lyric in one of the songs, “A penny saved might be a penny earned / But if you save that freaky shit for later, you’ll never learn.” And I noted that was basically how I thought of the Gatwa era. Obviously Gatwa himself is good. And there are oceans of potential in the openly libidinal Doctor—potential that periodically spills out into the actual episodes. But on the whole he feels like an unrealized opportunity. He didn’t even meet the Daleks.
- Right. the ranking. So, Penn wrote back in Liber Forty about his wish magic. And obviously, I’m a supportive wife, so I joined in. After all, he’s wishing for the life we live together. Why wouldn’t I use whatever wishes I have to help sustain that? So I do. Every time I get an opportunity to wish, I wish for more time with him. Because like Jodie Whittaker of all fucking people says, you always do. And it’s hard not to think about that when looking at a Doctor Who finale that is in a large part about wishes. Especially when that finale has a backdrop of a fascist world in which trans people are literally erased. It’s just very on the nose.
- I’ve talked about my suicidal ideation before. Usually a bit jokingly—I think I noted that the Whittaker era spiked it, which is tremendously petty. But it’s not entirely untrue, because that ideation is just sort of a constant background hum. I am, at the end of the day, inordinately tempted by antinatalism. And my dopamine system is a cratering wreck of ADHD so I’ve got chronic anhedonia, and I just think being alive in this world is a raw deal. Donald Trump is President and AI slop is consuming the Internet and the planet is cooking and no matter how hard we wish some day either I or Penn are going to have to wake up without the other one and it’s awful. Why would anyone want this?
- But then, of course, I have my wishes. Because, like, I’ve had this bullshit depression for as long as I can remember. I’ve gotten used to deciding against it. And for a long time—since 2011 at least—one of my standard tools for shutting that line of thought down has been “well yeah, but don’t you want to see the next episode of Doctor Who?” And like, that’s not the only thing or even the main thing. But it’s a reliable thing—a solid way to reorient myself when I get unmoored, dust myself off, and get back to work.
- And part of that—not all of it, but part of it—is that I owe this show so much of my life. Not the survival of it—I’d have found other things. I did so through the whole Whittaker era after all. But the facts of it. That wish I make isn’t just for Penn but for our life creating art. And the reason I have that, at the end of the day, is that I wrote a stupidly successful Doctor Who blog.
- Which, I’d be remiss if I didn’t use this opportunity to thank our Patrons one more time. Currently I’m pleased to say that the Patreon is actually at the level where I’ll do public War Between the Land and Sea reviews whenever that airs. And after the weekend I’ll be getting back to Last War in Albion v4, which hits From Hell soon. They’ve also got a mid-size essay I wrote on Alan Turing and AI, and my commentary on The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, both of which I used the last eight weeks to write. And of course when I finish the Last War in Albion v2 revisions and get that book out, all Patrons will get it for free. So please consider joining up there, not least cause it’s the only place I’m gonna be posting regularly until the fall.
- But if this is where we leave Doctor Who for sixteen years (because in these terms, at least, Paul McGann will never count), well, what can I say. I still want more. I want to know where this daft cluster of ideas resolves. I want to know what the fuck Billie Piper as the Doctor is going to do. I want to see if Davies can actually land it, and I want to see what comes after him. I want more. Of Doctor Who, of Penn, of writing for our Patrons, all of it. I want more. And I don’t really know what more a girl can wish for than that.
Rankings
- Lux
- The Story and the Engine
- Wish World/The Reality War
- Joy to the World
- Lucky Day
- The Interstellar Song Contest
- The Well
- The Robot Revolution
May 31, 2025 @ 8:06 pm
I did not expect a broadly positive review out of you for this! The entire Gatwa era has been a wild ride for me reading you – I have been consistently wrong about episodes I thought you’d like and episodes I thought you’d loathe.
So is this your favorite Jodie Whittaker episode, then? Lmao
May 31, 2025 @ 8:08 pm
Listen when they were going on about Time Lords being sterile the LOOMS alarm in my brain was firing off and I was really thinking RTD2 was gonna bring Looms into the 21st Century
May 31, 2025 @ 8:32 pm
Same here… And they still might. shudder
May 31, 2025 @ 10:35 pm
As soon as we saw Poppy in Nigeria and then got the Rani, I have been desperately hoping (and knowing it was in vain) that we were going to get the Rani having engineered the space babies while trying to reinvent Looms – and so the emotional rollercoaster I went on from hearing “Time Lords are sterile” to “because of the Master’s whatever” was deeply traumatic.
June 1, 2025 @ 12:05 am
Interesting that the Doctor and the Rani casually drop in the whole “genetic bomb that wiped out all the time lords instantaneously except for the two who it left alive but sterile instead” thing, which has never come up before, and gets no further explanation.
I realize how wildly implausible it is to have imagined the Master’s act of genocide was “He literally went up to each and every one of them and shanked them” but I still find it weird how offhandedly they threw that in.
June 1, 2025 @ 3:27 am
Jon shouted LOOOOMS at that moment, to my delight.
June 1, 2025 @ 6:45 am
I silently mouthed it and then screamed NO! staring transfixed at the screen while my wife, next to me on the sofa, checked my pulse.
May 31, 2025 @ 8:13 pm
What a deeply bloody weird episode. The good; Anita and the time hotel saving the day is fantastic, The Rani actually works as a character here – her getting hoist by her own petard and Mrs Floods final sign off is hysterical. Omega reimagined as Saturn Devouring His Son feels deeply thematically appropriate. Omega and the Rani and all that being shoved out of the way for a story about family and the episode actually making me feel sorry for Conrad. Is Russell wondering about a world in which he was a father..? The sheer wrongness of Poppy vanishing with that shot of the coat getting smaller and smaller, all of Gatwa and Sethu’s charisma suddenly seeming sinister and phoney…. And yet…
The last fifteen/twenty minutes feels so jarringly “written at 3 in the morning in a mad rush” you can practically smell the sweat. The show simultaneously carries on yet shuts down any attempt for it to do so. Whittaker and Piper feel like moves of desperation, a pull lever in case of emergency. I genuinely have no idea whether the show will come back, or if I even want it to. If The Doctor Falls was where Moffats vision of the show came to an end, here, it seems, is Davies’…
May 31, 2025 @ 8:13 pm
Watching Jodie Whittaker deliver Davies-penned lines to Ncuti Gatwa makes be ache for a Thirteenth Doctor we could have had.
May 31, 2025 @ 10:53 pm
Oh, aye.
June 1, 2025 @ 3:29 am
My second-favourite Fourteenth Doctor scene (after the COVID PSA).
June 3, 2025 @ 1:23 am
Yep, that was an almost totally unrecognizable Whitaker Doctor for me. The difference is astonishing. Only “It Takes You Away” and large parts of “Village of the Angels” even come close.
May 31, 2025 @ 8:14 pm
And that’s a wrap. And I pretty much agree with all of this; the tricks that RTD is so good at pulling are all on display here, with set-up and resolution perfectly munged together so that one really doesn’t care in the short term, but there’s so much to unpick later on for good or ill.
And yes, if this is indeed the start of the second interregnum, it’s not a bad place to pause. I’m not sufficiently informed about production backstories (I gave up trying to find out when it started to spoil things too much for me) to know what the whole Susan gambit might have been intended to turn into etc, but the effort taken to make this episode into both a valid end point and a viable continuation is remarkable. It’s hard not admire RTD for his ability to do things like this and make them look easy.
Plus the single best joke I think RTD has ever done, even if it was one that anyone in the UIK who has been doing “The Two Ranis” line for the last couple of weeks knew was coming. I guess we should have been glad that we didn’t have four candles.
May 31, 2025 @ 8:16 pm
Apropos of nothing, even if you include the blip that is the McGann movie, Doctor Who has the longest stretch of time wandering the wilderness than any other sci-fi series. (Star Trek’s longest was four years between the cartoon show and the first movie.)
Anyways, this was a fantastic write up. I honestly left the episode feeling “I should hate this on principle, but I don’t.” Because, usually I don’t go for all this lore crap. Omega and Time Lord Sterility and what have you. But I was rather charmed by this finale for a season that, if I’m being honest with myself, I mainly watched for friends and the conversations we’d have about it. There were some highlights (Lux being an S tier episode), but it was mostly television that wasn’t my thing.
It’s always a pleasure to read your write ups of these episodes as well as the various things going on in the Patreon. I look forward to whatever comes next. (Seriously, that Blake piece was great, as was the Turing essay.)
May 31, 2025 @ 11:15 pm
“Apropos of nothing, even if you include the blip that is the McGann movie, Doctor Who has the longest stretch of time wandering the wilderness than any other sci-fi series. (Star Trek’s longest was four years between the cartoon show and the first movie.)”
I’m prepared to be corrected here, but didn’t Battlestar Galactica have a 23-year gap between the end of the original series in 1980 and the Ron Moore reboot in 2003? (Or does that not count because the latter series was a total continuity reset rather than a continuation?)
June 1, 2025 @ 12:48 am
That, and Battlestar Galactica didn’t really have a Wilderness to wander in the way Star Trek or Doctor Who do. Nor does Quantum Leap, which has the larger gap and is a continuation. (In retrospect, I probably should’ve specified “major” when talking about science fiction series.)
May 31, 2025 @ 8:24 pm
It’s interesting you should mention antinatalism, because I found this episode’s fixation on babies and family and reproduction so deeply offensive on an aesthetic (and therefore ethical) level that it’s the actual Worst Episode Ever for me. For Belinda to spend all season an underwritten cipher, only to get overwritten as Mother without her consent, feels genuinely gross.
May 31, 2025 @ 8:29 pm
I liked Ep. 1-6 Belinda more than you, but yeah, what they did with Belinda here was ick, straight up.
May 31, 2025 @ 8:44 pm
Not just gross but also … small, and uninteresting. It’s like when RTD hooked Martha up with Mickey in “The End of Time”. A lack of imagination so profound that it cuts off the very possibility of escape from the crushing banal nightmare of heteronormative family life.
May 31, 2025 @ 8:41 pm
I don’t especially like it, but I think the ONE trait they very clearly gave Belinda all season long was that she cares deeply about family.
May 31, 2025 @ 8:43 pm
Yes, parents. Loving a parent doesn’t mean you want a child!
May 31, 2025 @ 10:05 pm
Is it really so bad?
June 1, 2025 @ 7:06 am
Not really “bad” in the sense of morally wrong for her to want a kid, but it’s also just not what the character is/was all season, and I think people are well within their rights to react to “this woman suddenly and through the power of lore nonsense wants a kid” with “oh hell no” on a gut vibes level.
May 31, 2025 @ 10:21 pm
I can certainly understand that response, but if you watch Belinda every moment after Ruby convinces everyone she’s not crazy, you can see she absolutely consents, and she certainly consents as much as she can during the period she remembers herself and hasn’t forgotten her daughter.
And it isn’t as if the Doctor forced her to have his child, either, no more than his revival of her at the start of the season represents his forcibly making her live against her will.
June 1, 2025 @ 11:53 am
But she didn’t express any desire for a child before Conrad’s Wish World put the whammy on her mind. We’re deep into fantasy territory here with things that can never happen and situations that have no real-world equivalents, so the morality of this is a matter of taste more than anything. But there are soooo many out-of-place feeling baby moments here. Anita is suddenly pregnant. Poor Carla gets yet another baby dumped on her. You know? And Belinda having that baby in the first place was one of the things that made Conrad’s Wish World visibly evil, forcing women into the role of motherhood was supposed to be a bad thing. More than anything it feels like a failure of imagination.
June 1, 2025 @ 7:39 pm
The Doctor’s role in it left a bad taste in my mouth, too. Our first bold, unapologetically queer Doctor gets forced into a reality where he’s stuck in a heterosexual marriage within a tyrannical, explicitly homophobic society? Okay, that’s fertile grounds for some great drama and poignant themes. But then, rather than treat this as the violation that it is after he wakes up, protecting the trad family unit becomes the most important thing in the universe to him. Not even a whiff of discomfort from either him or Belinda that they’d effectively been made to reproduce without their consent.
June 3, 2025 @ 1:50 pm
Conrad’s fake trad family is the only trad family unit on display. Wish baby ends up adopted by single mother and grandma (with Ruby I guess as sister?): no man in the picture and biofamily long since gone.
Poppy’s family situation is either: no birth mother (or birth), mom has never had children. Dad is gay alien not in romantic love with mom who he never had sex with. Extended family unit is trad on Belinda’s side (sort of: mother and grandmother and no sign of men) and UNIT on dad’s side. OR, Belinda is a single mother in the more trad way of Poppy who is 100% human. In this ret conned version, Belinda insisted the Doctor had to get her home so she could look after Poppy when mom left. No dad in the picture (though I guess he’s “around”) and Belinda’s still a nurse on the night shift.
If “never-married mother working as a nurse while her mom and grandma help with the baby” is considered “trad” then I don’t know how to respond to that.
June 3, 2025 @ 8:05 pm
Exactly. And that’s the unit I’m addressing.
Poppy is the product of Conrad forcing the Doctor and Belinda into a traditional, heterosexual marriage. And rather than be horrified at having their agency stripped from them, they’re both delighted by it and treat their non-consensual reproduction as if it were a gift from God.
You can break down the various relationships and family units all you like, and sure they can sound subversive when you put them like that, but aesthetically and thematically, that isn’t what we got on the screen. At least for me.
Personally, the way the text treats our most explicitly gay Doctor yet, the pro-natalist position it puts him in and the lack of nuance, is unpleasant. That’s all I’m saying.
May 31, 2025 @ 8:24 pm
From its first moments juxtaposing early electronic music with an ordinary junkyard, Doctor Who stories have been powered by mining the tension between the strange and mundane. It presents a familiar, comprehensible set of aesthetics before ramming them against a different, competing set of aesthetics and revelling in the chaos, a chaos that generates pepperpot nazis and cartoon cosmic horror. The modern series captured that tension perfectly in The Doctor and Rose. Of course The Doctor’s presence is strange within the social realist aesthetics of Rose, but conversely Rose’s mundanity made her feel strange and unexpected in Doctor Who.
Which is something I’m sure 100% of people reading this comment don’t need spelled out for them. But I point it out because, if this is it, and we have just watched the last Doctor Who episode, then I think fusing The Doctor and Rose, synthesising the strange and the mundane and finally resolving that central tension is a pretty neat ending.
That said, I do of course mean “neat” as in cool, because this is such a gloriously messy ending that it just begs for the story to keep going. As it should.
June 1, 2025 @ 2:06 am
Your commentary on the last image of the show is great. I truly want this show to continue, but the notion of a Doctor played by the actress of a former companion is truly dreadful. But if this is it, it was indeed the best last shot the revival show could have had. Truly remarkable.
June 1, 2025 @ 3:11 pm
Can you explain why, exactly it’s so dreadful?
May 31, 2025 @ 8:26 pm
Also, just wanna point out that The Doctor defeated Omega with a gun while wearing a frock.
June 1, 2025 @ 4:34 pm
Nice point.
But a little annoying that the vindicator hasn’t shown any signs of being a gun before.
June 1, 2025 @ 6:42 pm
Fair point but tbh, “it looks a bit like a gun if you hold it like this” is the level of logic that I expect Doctor Who to work on.
June 1, 2025 @ 7:34 pm
Well, it is called the freaking Vindicator. Which comes from vortex indicator, but I always thought it was weird to keep calling it that – what is it vindicating…? feels so un-doctory… – so its ultimate fate to be the big laser gun legitimately pays off that tension.
May 31, 2025 @ 8:28 pm
What a fantastic post, El. It’s an honor to be your reader. I’m glad Doctor Who has been such magic for you, and the rest of us.
Even when it’s a bit rubbish, which for now I feel this mostly was. I’d like to come around to your view on it someday, but for now I just can’t get over how The Reality War compounds Wish World’s problem in that Varada Sethu doesn’t get the chance to play the character she’d been playing previously – until the very end, and even then with a major adjustment to her reality that she herself has no awareness of. The reduction of her arc to “The Doctor’s improved her life, now she has a kid to go home to!” is just bizarre. I’ve really enjoyed Belinda up until now and I can’t help but feel the show did its co-lead dirty here. And because the story’s actual arc falls flat, the twin-joke that is the Rani and Omega’s presences never lands the punchline like it should.
Obviously, great bits – Anita’s rescue, Rose reappearing into reality, Mel facing the Rani (lack of impersonation though – boo!), The Doctor triumphantly showing off his fit under the suit, Ncuti and Jodie, and yeah, Billie Piper’s probably gonna be great. I look forward to your Eruditorum essay on it, but for now, this was a mess that felt more frustrating than fun, and ended the sometimes great Gatwa era on a big old shrug. Which might be the point, but as with how Last of the Time Lords felt wrong at the time, I don’t have the benefit of hindsight to properly contextualize it.
June 1, 2025 @ 4:56 am
I’m genuinely baffled by people finding Anita’s rescue charming rather than a cheap cop-out at roughly the, “wait!” level of writing. I’m glad you enjoyed it but I am afraid I can’t share the sentiment. As for Mel confronting the Rani, it was just a less well done version of Tegan confronting the Master, wasn’t it? RTD is now cribbing from Chibnall…
June 1, 2025 @ 7:54 pm
Anita’s rescue immediately reminded me of an astute observation El made here on the blog a long time ago. Something along the lines of “Moffat solved the problem with two parters by discovering that the second episode should start in a completely different place.” I legitimately think about this every time I rewatch a Moffat two parter. And the episodes that don’t do it, the ones that simply continue on directly from the cliffhanger, stand out like a sore thumb. They’re cheap, unsatisfying, and narratively dull.
I wish RTD had learnt this lesson from his successor. The Doctor falling into Omega’s Underverse as reality literally crumbles around him was the PERFECT excuse to dive deep into the middle of a really different, really strange story. Instead, the magic “nevermind!” door takes us back to last week’s story. Dull.
May 31, 2025 @ 8:28 pm
Can’t disagree with anything you’ve said El, but the way Belinda was treated – forced into motherhood against her will and informed consent – left a very bitter taste on top of the general dissonance of the back half of the episode.
Oh what I would give for a Moffat showrun series with Russell contributing episodes!
May 31, 2025 @ 10:08 pm
She didn’t seem to be against it. She had more than one chance for Poppy never to have existed.
May 31, 2025 @ 11:33 pm
“Chance for Poppy never to have existed” AFTER she’s already been in existence ≠ consenting to Poppy’s creation in the first place.
True, the sci-fi of it all does muddy the analogy but it does come off, at best, as unfortunate implications.
June 1, 2025 @ 6:09 pm
Something I noticed that stuck out with me. Belinda’s main character trait all season is that however nice she thinks traveling with the Doctor might be, she’s adamant that the one thing she wants is to get home.
The one time this breaks down is during the sequence after the three of them return to the TARDIS. Suddenly, she’s got no interest in going home; she fully plans to stay with the Doctor and co-parent Poppy while traveling the universe – no one even brings up the idea that hey, maybe the Doctor ought to hang it up and stay on Earth at least until his kid is verbal. And her attitude doesn’t change even after Poppy winks out of existence: she’s still planning to continue traveling with the Doctor. It’s only when Poppy has been restored and woven into Belinda’s backstory that Belinda is fully restored to the character we started with, the one who says, yeah, this is fun and all, but I’ve got something at home that I am not willing to step away from.
The Belinda in that third quarter is wrong; she’s a glitch like Ernest Borgnine. Restoring Poppy changes the details of her backstory, but it doesn’t change who she is.
June 3, 2025 @ 3:17 am
There’s possibly evidence that everything from at least the Doctor waking up in the back garden of what I assume is meant to be Belinda’s parents house was a later reshoot. An actor was cast as Belinda’s father but his scenes were all cut. The episode was supposed to end with the Doctor and Belinda dancing at a party (of which there are pictures) with Carole Ann Ford looking on in the distance, so we might have been in for a third straight season of ‘mysterious woman lurking around’! It does seem that Ncuti did want to leave sooner than expected, though if it was always going to be only at this point the continuation of the show would be decided I can’t blame him.
And I’ve got a ticket for that Shakespeare and Marlowe play he’s doing in London in the Autumn.
May 31, 2025 @ 8:30 pm
It was a bizarre mess of an episode in so many ways, and yet it somehow worked for me in all the ways Empire of Death didn’t.
I loved how Russell kind of pulled a classic Moffat bait and switch, getting bored of the Rani’s and Omega early and getting on the with a different story.
Thirteen came back and in three minutes Jodie demonstrated that she was never the problem (and oh how it made me ache for an era we never got).
And finally for all it was preposterous, Billie’s appearance left me grinning like a mad fool, and I suddenly found myself excited to see what happens next. To my amazement, I really want to see her as The Doctor, even if only for a few specials or one season. I’ll be gutted if I never see it, or it proves to be a momentary ruse… yes, pun intended!
May 31, 2025 @ 9:22 pm
I have to be honest I think this entire episode is just Davies trying to generate the most unhinged possible Eruditorum post for when it gets there
May 31, 2025 @ 10:07 pm
I wanted to add something about Belinda character crashing into burning dumpster with really uncomfortable undertones, about Rani and Omega being sidelined, about “thanks for not going full Hitler, Conrad! have a happy ending!” but what’s the point…? As you said – it was trash, but this show means a lot to me in the end and it always will, whether or not it ever comes back. So no point to bash it.
Billie Piper return is exact sort of eyeroll enduring clickbait soulless corporate shit marketing they will backpedal from the second if and when show is renewed.
June 1, 2025 @ 7:43 am
Ruby does seem horrified to realise what she’s done (or failed to do), which felt like quite interesting commentary (the amount of media more interested in redeeming the Conrads of the world than spending any time on anyone else’s story…), but it’s for all of like one line.
June 1, 2025 @ 8:29 am
Between Conrad being ultimately redeemed (as in he got literally no punishment for the events of his own episode and Wish World) and the Doctor doing arguably the same thing he did fifteen minutes later, I sadly don’t think there was as much thought put in underlying commentary as many would like to admit.
June 1, 2025 @ 10:38 am
Conrad had his identity overwritten.
Some might consider that punishment. You may very well consider that insufficient punishment, and I would respect your opinion if you did so, but to say that is ‘literally no punishment’ seems to be going a little far.
June 1, 2025 @ 8:22 pm
Well, yes. We went from “you’re going to rot in jail alone, Conrad” to “you could do so much worse with this godly power, but you didn’t, and your family was bad, and you have a reason to be like this, and you technically did what the Doctor said but with your own bigoted spin, so you have a chance to start over in a better life and become a better person, Conrad”. Which is to me looks like a known human trafficker being sentenced to community service hours. Technically there’s a punishment, but de facto he got away and didn’t even get to feel remorse.
June 1, 2025 @ 11:43 am
Let me suggest another way of looking at it:
Conrad was DENIED a villain’s death. He didn’t get to be defeated by the Last Time Lord. He didn’t even get to be eaten by zombie Omega. Instead, he became the thing his own philosophy hates the most.
Conrad was given an ordinary life. Without wealth, power, or influence. He was given the life of what he’d call a “beta”.
And yet, just as getting everything he wanted didn’t make him happy, being “punished” with everything he hated made him content. His whole PHILOSOPHY got defeated. He got turned into the the thing he hated most AND had his own moral system inverted.
June 1, 2025 @ 8:42 pm
That’s one way to look at it, but I’d disagree. The way he was shown in the show, I don’t think Conrad would really hate such ordinary life that much. New him has a good family, job he loves, he is respected by the community. He completely avoided the fate the Doctor promised him. Because Ruby is merciful. Meanwhile Conrad grossly violated Belinda’s body autonomy which resulted in a baby and the only way to save her for the Doctor was to do the same thing Ruby did – create new Belinda with the child written in her life retroactively. And die in the process. Did Conrad and his philosophy really lose if he successfully forced the Doctor to conform to it somewhat and take Belinda frankly dubious consent to rewrite her life and lose his own, because they had no other choice in this show morality paradigm? I don’t like these implications as much as I didn’t like them las week
June 2, 2025 @ 6:32 pm
All good 🙂
Maybe one day we’ll get to hear the alternate version. Although I don’t expect it to make much more sense from a logical point of view, it might flesh out some of the themes a bit more.
May 31, 2025 @ 10:20 pm
Wait, how does this solve unit dating? My goodness
May 31, 2025 @ 11:55 pm
Kate mentions that the incident with Omega happened in the 1970s rather than “The 70s or was it the 80s”.
June 1, 2025 @ 3:54 am
It might still be 1979 rather than 1972.
June 3, 2025 @ 12:49 am
Well that’s certainly not the intention, this comes from RTD’s insistence that the “present day” in Doctor Who should always be the time the episode was transmitted. It’s on record that he hates the idea the UNIT stories took place at any point other than when they were aired and refuses to acknowledge it.
(That confusing line about it being July for Ruby in The Devil’s Chord was also meant to be a reference to UNIT dating; He was trying to establish that Sarah Jane claiming to be from the 80s was just her getting it wrong because time travel skews your perception, by showing us Ruby getting it wrong too.
This also explains why the one-year time jump in Aliens of London is ignored by subsequent RTD stories)
May 31, 2025 @ 10:38 pm
I have no idea how I am feeling right now.
May 31, 2025 @ 10:45 pm
Letting this percolate, but I think the narrative collapse here is doing something very clever and profound in a way that utterly subverts the entire story that it looks like RTD is giving to us, through the Rani.
Because she’s trying to access Omega, First Time Lord, through inducing her own narrative collapse of Doctor Who, reaching into the collective subconscious and pulling him out to reconstitute the Time Lord race, only better. And in doing that, she quite literally stands in front of the Doctor, of all people, and quite literally has another character ask why his and her DNA wouldn’t suffice to reconstitute the Time Lords, and rejects the very idea. And yet, her solution, while profoundly queer, is also profoundly conservative and reactionary: she wants to Make Gallifrey Great Again. Of course she wants to bring back the First of the Race to do that. And of course what she brings back out of the Underverse bears little resemblance either to the man Omega, or what remained of him to appear on screen in two previous stories: a fetal corpse, an artifact that would produce the Time Lords purely to consume them, the Mad God everyone built Omega into, the object of collective dreams and delusions, a Dead End. Of course the Mad God eats her face (and the rest of her), eagerly: after all, isn’t that what she wanted? Of course the Doctor drives him away but cannot (and would not) end him.
Because Omega isn’t the First of the Time Lords, not really. The Timeless Child implies that the Doctor was first, though the “lord” part didn’t really apply. And The Reality War suggests instead that we (and the Rani) are using the wrong model, the worst model: are we really claiming Omega (the end) as the Alpha of the Time Lords, and insisting on something ordinal and linear? Even the Time Lord society we saw in the show preferred cardinal to ordinal; Omega is only the Rani’s target because she is congenitally incapable of recognizing the Doctor as what she really should have been wishing for: Last of the Time Lords, maybe First, but more to the point, last multiple times, mixed up and out of order, striving (as the Rani accuses) to be “more than just another Time Lord” because in part the Doctor is drawn to humanity.
Of course the Doctor is who you rebuild Time Lord society and Time Lord existence upon, because the Doctor (and the show) preceded the Time Lords. The Doctor’s origin isn’t Gallifrey because it follows from him, not vice versa: the planet and the people who lived there matter in the show because of the Doctor.
And of course, set against the consuming and consumptive corpse of the Mad God, we have Gatwa’s Doctor, scrambled within his own timeline, sacrificing his life to nudge reality 1% over so that Poppy can live, despite the fact that by doing so, he loses a daughter he maybe never had, and possibly or possibly does not lose a granddaughter he always had but lost, and of course he maybe regenerates into Rose, or The Moment, or Bad Wolf, or whoever, because at this moment, in this episode, within the Reality War, the Doctor is the beginning and the end, the center of mavity, the Alpha as well as the Omega. “I live; I die; I live again” is cyclical, it is productive, it is generative. The Rani’s cliffhanger narrative collapse leads her up a blind alley; this episodes eventual narrative collapse is, at the moment, ongoing so long as Billie Piper’s status remains unclear, the show swallowing its own tail but not in a consumptive way but a regenerative one. I wouldn’t be surprised if Joy plus Regeneration didn’t bring back what was lost to the Flux (assuming Sutekh didn’t already do that); Susan Twist exists because of the Doctor, and so did Wilfred Mott, and Ruby Sunday, and all the other lives he saved.
The Doctor may have had looked like he had a het baby in the last episode. But the child was produced asexually, via wish, ceased to exist shortly after the wish ended, and was then reproduced with this Doctor’s life (and some advice from Thirteen) in a form that left Poppy a life but a life distinct from the Doctor and legible as that het baby again. And yet… haven’t we seen the Doctor reproducing again and again, certainly since the first RTD series, through his companions, through the people he inspires, through the people he saves. He shines… and we can all aspire to be stars as a result.
May 31, 2025 @ 10:53 pm
I had two big, big laughs out of this one, which I’m sad weren’t mentioned (but still really glad you like this episode El, as I did too): When the Rani starts off on her eugenics rant, and the entire room just groans at her bullshit. Perfectly timed, perfect joke, no notes.
Funnily enough I can’t recall the first thing that really made me laugh, but that just means I’ll get to rediscover it when I watch it again.
May 31, 2025 @ 11:16 pm
genuinely surprised to see you not mention the insane misogyny of Belinda’s ending – after 45 minutes last week of explicitly going “The 1950s view of The Family and Women As Babymakers is fascist and wrong,” Belinda’s entire prior character and sense of self gets overridden by Motherhood to the point that the Doctor literally gives up his life in order to force Belinda into an alternate universe version of herself where her defining character trait is Mother. The baby isn’t even the Doctor’s anymore, he’s just killed himself to saddle his companion with a child! I don’t think Reality War was the worst thing to ever air because there were some great moments in it, but it pointedly is the most explicitly misogynist moment in the show to be put to screen since, i don’t even know, the 70s?
May 31, 2025 @ 11:34 pm
I simply don’t think the episode does what you think it does.
Like, even less supportable than “Kill the Moon is about abortion.” This is plainly not what the episode is trying to do. There are plenty of other perfectly reasonable interpretations of the text. There’s absolutely no reason to make this complaint other than wanting to not like it, and nah, I’ll pass. After all, might not get to like any more episodes for a while. May as well try to like this one.
June 1, 2025 @ 12:44 am
fair enough! I’m looking forward to reading more charitable interpretations of that plotline, because for me it sticks out as an offensively sore thumb I can’t get past
June 1, 2025 @ 5:07 am
One exceedingly minor point – when Poppy is the Doctor and Belinda’s child and the Rani describes has contaminated, the first thing that popped into my mind was, “wait, is Poppy half-human on her mother’s side? I wasn’t expecting a McGann movie callback right at this moment…”
June 1, 2025 @ 8:09 am
I really thought they were going there. I should’ve learned from the ‘Vinder and Bel are the Doctor’s parents’ theory turning out to be nothing lol. I assume we were at least meant to believe they were going there?
June 1, 2025 @ 9:02 am
That’s my assumption, yes! It did make me smile, much more than the more obvious fan-bait stuff.
June 1, 2025 @ 11:49 am
It kinda seems to me like the obvious read of that sequence of scenes is “The Doctor doesn’t want to do this (In fact he’s kinda weirdly – for him – resistant) and literally everyone else, Belinda, Kate, Ruby, Susan Triad, all of them, are basically begging him to bring back Poppy to be Belinda’s daughter, with Belinda having been fully on-board every second she remembered Poppy and even being fully on-board when she doesn’t remember Poppy but does comprehend that she was real” so yeah, I think trying to read it as “The doctor imposes his will on the universe to saddle a companion with a child she has never given any indication of wanting” is a stretch.
June 1, 2025 @ 12:00 pm
I never cared about the imaginary baby and I don’t understand why the characters did. I felt absolutely nothing.
June 1, 2025 @ 12:49 pm
I think it’s because they’re not sociopaths. “You’re not real, you’re just a thing, I don’t have to care about you” is not the thing good people say in Doctor Who. It is literally the thing bad people say in Doctor Who.
June 1, 2025 @ 1:02 pm
But she wasn’t real?
June 1, 2025 @ 1:54 pm
I wonder if RTD has read that Superman story where Kal-El is trapped in a hallucination of family life on Krypton and has to tell his son he’s not real.
June 1, 2025 @ 9:04 pm
No one in Doctor Who is real. They are all imaginary.
This idea has come up in the series often enough for it to be rather obvious, especially so in this particular season (the fans in Lux, for example).
I think the point being made was that Poppy was just as real as The Doctor, or Belinda, for example. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that anyone who doesn’t think this way is a sociopath, but I would suggest that Poppy’s reality or lack of it probably feels less black-and-white to people who are more ambivalent about the merits of parenthood per se.
June 1, 2025 @ 9:57 pm
Let’s try a different tack: what about the Poppy subplot is meant to be interesting? What about it should I be invested in? Why is it important that Poppy get brought back, when that ends in the Doctor dying and Belinda staying at home, when it seems like the alternative is the Doctor going on and Belinda finally getting to enjoy adventuring with him, which seems like a more interesting thing to watch?
June 1, 2025 @ 10:20 pm
It is important that Poppy be brought back because otherwise Doctor Who is saying “Some people aren’t important and thus it is okay to consider them acceptable losses and just move on.” Poppy is Wilf in the radiation chamber. Poppy is the heirloom varietal humans under the hospital of New New York. Poppy is the Almost People. Poppy is Lazlo. Poppy is Ursula. Poppy is Susan Triad and Joe Sunday.
June 2, 2025 @ 2:49 am
To be fair, Belinda isn’t staying at home: she goes to work while her parents babysit, in the way a lot of people do. Much as I dislike a lot of this story, that does reflect everyday reality, if only, probably, by accident.
June 2, 2025 @ 11:38 am
What about all the people from the Interstellar Song Contest future, who lived in a timeline that no longer exists where Earth was destroyed in 2025? Presumably they all blink out of existence. Did they not deserve to be saved too? Are they not just as real as all these other imaginary characters?
June 2, 2025 @ 8:17 am
I think the sociopaths comment is a bit strong here!
Even this season we’ve seen characters who are sympathetic and have their worth acknowledged by the show and who are acknowledged as not being real and the Doctor goes on.
He honours the fans in Lux, he’s sorry they’re not real but as far as he’s concerned they go when he moves on.
Donna’s children in The Library – maybe a better analogue – aren’t real and that’s an awful awful thing. But they’re not real.
I just don’t buy the ‘Poppy is real and must be saved’ plot when ‘Poppy was a cruel illusion of Conrad’s world and losing her hurts’ to me makes such a lot more sense.
June 2, 2025 @ 11:12 am
“Poppy is an illusion” is a radical misunderstanding of what they established about Desideria though. Violetta really turned into violets. Conrad really got a new backstory. And Desideria himself really became a normal baby. The wish is NOT an illusion: it is real. What it isn’t is STABLE and self-sustaining, and this is not because it is a wish, but because it is “too big” (Probably in the sense of both “a whole planet is too big” and “Wishing human nature to be so different that nobody’s queer is too big”). The whole point of the Rani’s plan is not to make a fake world, but to make REALITY change in a big enough way that the universe is damaged by accommodating it. Poppy was real because she existed – she was breathed into existence by the power of a god.
You can well argue that Poppy is part of an alternative universe and is not per se due a place in the “final” universe, but arguing that she’s an illusion is saying that Desidera’s power does not actually shape reality but instead creates illusion, and that reading makes the rest of the plot stop working.
June 2, 2025 @ 11:39 am
So is it morally wrong to reset the Wish World, because all the nightmare hell versions of these characters — Mel the Spinster, etc. — are real? Don’t they deserve to keep existing too?
June 2, 2025 @ 12:01 pm
I don’t think there’s consistency on this. Those children were actually turned into ducks but the Doctor wasn’t actually changed into a heterosexual suburbanite – and nor was Belinda. Conrad’s world is depicted as a nightmare to wake up from. Something they running screaming from, quite literally in Belinda’s case.
Poppy is depicted as part of the Wish World. Not a real child rewritten into the Doctor and Bel’s daughter, but an invention.
People have come up with more or less elegant solutions to this in the comments here, but they’re not present in the text. The inconsistency is not resolved in the episode as transmitted
June 1, 2025 @ 12:07 am
Really liked that, both on its own merits and in the ways it made some of the previous episodes feel more meaningful in retrospect. The bit with the ever-shrinking jacket was quietly heartbreaking, too.
I was not expecting Anita to return after “Joy to the World,” but I was glad to see her show up here, especially because of the way her role here tapped into what is, for me, one of the best aspects of Davies’s runs on the show: the “everyday people doing the right thing is vitally important” of it all.
I’m curious about the plot threads that remain dangling, if this truly is it for the series for a while. The “boss” (who runs the Time Hotel and hired both Rogue and the Meep) seems like the big one; see also: the question of how the Doctor has a granddaughter.
Also…was the Matt Smith appearance archival footage or something newly filmed for this episode?
June 1, 2025 @ 1:00 am
The Matt Smith appearance was a scene from A Wedding of River Song (where he’s, funnily enough, opposite Mark Gatiss in heavy prosthetics in an uncredited role).
June 1, 2025 @ 3:25 am
I’m surprised, but happy you liked it. Personally, I’m just sad by the unreached potential of Gatwa’s Doctor. He was fantastic, but he was let down by a run marred by poor dramaturgy, over-reliance on nostalgia and being slotted in between 2 desperate casting choices.
June 1, 2025 @ 6:56 am
I agree with so much of that comment, though I don’t know what you meant by desperate casting choices. Dramaturgy is the issue for me, too, though I wish I had the formal vocabulary to express this in detail.
Gatwa showed tremendous potential. Sorry to lose him so soon.
The companions can certainly handle good writing when they get it. The switch to Belinda seemed forced. With a bit of tweaking, Ruby could have handled much of the second season, as well as Conrad. Whatever the cause, Belinda had no room to breathe. Ruby is already represented as having a strong and yet not totally normative family, her mother adopts the Desiderium (sp?) and there could have been a way to write Poppy into that. Belinda a devoted mother in Wish World and somehow retains that devotion to Poppy … until she doesn’t.
Apart from us being told that Ruby has the knack of remembering alternate realities, it’s really not clear how she can remember Poppy when the Doctor and Belinda forget. I mean, you could argue it’s something to do with the events in 73 Yards, but that was last season and not mentioned. I could sense something was wrong and that Poppy was about to be zapped out of existence, from the dialogue and the look on Ruby’s face but I totally missed shrinking clothes or whatever it is. I’ve not re-watched yet.
It’s convenient to rematerialise Rose to make a point about Conrad’s lack of imagination not encompassing trans people, but they phut she plays no further role in the episode.
The magic door is one of the worst “with one bound he was free” moments I’ve seen. (And as El says, bringing back Anita just to hold a door open is a waste of a character. I presume the actress was indeed pregnant when this was filmed, but why waste time talking about her partner whom we never see? It’s not as if the audience would say “wow she’s changed her body shape, I can’t imagine why”
The UNIT team when brought to their true selves just stand around motionless while the Rani(s) and the Doctor ruthlessly exposit a backstory…. what? If these characters were written true to form at least one of them would be looking around for some zapgun thingy. Would Kate or Colonel Ibrahim just stand their slack-jawed. (Are these characters just being refreshed for future appearances in the War Between?)
And then the Ranis fall out of the plot, wasting two good actors.
Seriously, they brought back Susan two episodes ago to say a handful of words and then get ignored again?
And Omega turns up and isn’t Omega in any real sense. He’s zapped by the Vindicator which up until now has shown all the offensive power of a feather duster, but now is a zillion zapguns.
If Chibnall had written this, he would be excoriated. RTD is more interesting in individual concepts and scenes, but this is easily as incoherent as Flux.
The sad thing is, I get the feeling at RTD is having a laugh at my expense. Not me personally, as I am not that sort of an egotist. He’s easily the kind of writer who can do better. The show doesn’t have to make complete sense in a scientific way; of course not. But it needs some internal logic and cohesion and this doesn’t reach even the level of cohesion achieved in The Stolen Earth or Last of the Time Lords. The callbacks to the past are not slavish Ian Levine-isms where feality to past lore is the only thing. This is digging up the corpses of old ideas, then randomly re-animating them.
I submit Chekov’s Omega – “If you mention an ancient time lord in a silly hat in the first act, he must return with a silly hat in act 2. Even if’s a different CGI silly hat.”
So much to enjoy last night, and yet so much weird nonsense.
June 1, 2025 @ 7:02 am
… and once again my formatting is walloped. Trust me, the original had bullet points. 🙂
June 1, 2025 @ 5:31 pm
Absolutely, Belinda had no room to breathe. That’s been bugging me too. I mean, she only got seven episodes all up, and one of those was Wish World, so she wasn’t really herself. Then, at the end, the reveal that Belinda had a child in the ‘correct’ timeline, and is therefore not really the same Belinda we’ve been travelling with for two months or so, left me feeling like I didn’t know the character at all.
June 2, 2025 @ 3:32 am
It’s all good. I appreciate the response 😀
By desperate casting choices I meant Tennant and Piper.
June 1, 2025 @ 3:31 am
Thanks El. Always enjoy your take, whether I agree or not. In fact, I’ve gotten more from some of the commentary around the series lately than anything in the episodes. I’m genuinely a bit sad about how much I dislike what RTD has done with the show the last couple of years. It all feels so empty and stupid and smug. I honestly couldn’t say that I like Doctor Who at this point.
Keep doing what you do, El.
June 1, 2025 @ 3:50 am
A compelling and thought-provoking review, as always. Thank you for your wonderful writing, El.
I think it’s absolutely mad that a uniquely Dalek-free era of Doctor Who comes at this moment in our politics and culture. You could have done so much with the Daleks in the current context, especially up against a black, queer Doctor. I understand the rationale behind giving them a pause, but it’s backfired.
June 1, 2025 @ 4:33 am
“instead the originally shot ending that presumably had Carole Ann Ford in it”
This line intrigues me. DO we have evidence that this was a revised ending to something else that was written and filmed?
June 1, 2025 @ 5:45 am
Having her appear in the previous two episodes (in scenes which could have been cut out, TBH) is now quite baffling, in retrospect. Unless they were kept in just to ‘generate content’, which they did.
June 1, 2025 @ 6:06 am
Reshoots/regeneration happened earlier this year.
The season originally ended with everyone dancing (there is a photo of this).
It’s my understanding that the regeneration was filmed as open ended, so the Piper shot must’ve been done even more recently.
June 1, 2025 @ 12:53 pm
“It’s my understanding that the regeneration was filmed as open ended, so the Piper shot must’ve been done even more recently.”
Yes, there’s a point in the regeneration CGI where Gatwa disappears and there’s a brief moment of just energy before Piper appears. This is clearly where they could have just ended it there (or possibly spliced it so the regeneration energy just disappates making it seem the regeneration failed – that might have been interesting…)
But in the end RTD went in a different direction and cast Piper – not as The Doctor, but as a Bookend (potentially). Which seems like a very RTD move.
June 1, 2025 @ 5:47 am
one of my standard tools for shutting that line of thought down has been “well yeah, but don’t you want to see the next episode of Doctor Who?”
I have a suffered from depression my entire life and am currently on treatment.
And I’ve had the exact same thought.
That and next Fall album but sadly he is no more.
It is good to know I am not alone in this.
June 1, 2025 @ 7:26 am
Yesterday, on this site. On the tail end of the comments on Wish World I wrote –
I’ve never dreaded a season finale as much as this one. It could go one of two ways –
The Moffat style misdirection heel-turn where nothing that’s been set-up is actually what we should have been concerned about. “Don’t look at the arrow. Look where the arrow is pointing”.
The RTD style everything but the kitchen sink emotional roller-coaster where everyone lives or everyone dies and The Doctor is a twinkly Jesus or cries. And then he chucks in the kitchen sink.
In the end we got both.
I hated this episode and I’m glad the show is over for a while. I’m not averse to nostalgia but being embarrassed to be a Doctor Who fan is something I never wanted to revisit.
I will enjoy imagining the Billy Piper Doctor (I don’t for a moment think well see more than a special or a Xmas episode with her) but I’ve no interest in pouring salt in the wound by watching “The War between the Ratings and the Streaming”
I will see you again…but not like this
Some day I shall return. Yes I shall return…
But not with this old face
June 1, 2025 @ 7:39 am
There’s so much I could say about this episode but what it boils down to is that I wanted Susan and instead I ended the episode screaming “WHAT? WHY? WHO IS THIS FOR??” at the screen.
Like El — and I assume many other people here — there has been times in my life where I’ve lived and breathed Doctor Who. I would think about it every single day, thoroughly consumed. Chibnall broke that connection. RTD brought me back. But I’ve felt a disconnect ever since. I just don’t think this is for me anymore. When I think about it being cancelled it feels… right? I want it to stop.
A grim, sobering realisation.
June 1, 2025 @ 7:53 am
I have so many thoughts and feelings about this episode that I could write a whole blog post (but I won’t do that here). It continues to feel nice to have things to chew on and percolate, compared to the meh of the late Chibnall era. I admit, however, that there was a moment (possibly around the emergence of Omega as a giant CGI monster) where I thought, huh, is this the point where I decide I’m done with Doctor Who?
On the other hand, I felt this way when watching The Doctor Falls, a point of view which is baffling and somewhat embarrassing to me know, since that finale is mostly a triumph. So I guess what I’m saying is, it’s too early to tell how I feel about this…
I do have some thoughts about Susan – see next comment.
June 1, 2025 @ 7:58 am
In which the Doctor gets Boss Baby vibes.
June 1, 2025 @ 8:04 am
Worth seeing in the cinema for the communal moment of confused laughter at the end.
Also interesting because seeing “Wish World” again meant I got to pay closer attention to what Conrad was saying and I had this wonderful moment where the whole era suddenly made sense. Conrad says something about how the Doctor used to have his faithful companion by his side, and I keep thinking about that striking image from last year of Ruby declining the offer of further Tardis adventures while not looking up from her phone…
And then I got it: the point being made is that the model of the young female companion who wants to see the universe and is buddies with but ultimately subservient to the Doctor is broken because in the 2020s that just isn’t so exciting anymore. But Doctor Who needs his companion, so he ends up with Belinda, who is basically kidnapped and forced to go on adventures – just like back in the old days. Hence all the comparisons between the Doctor and misogynistic figures like Al and Conrad. Just like them, Doctor Who needs to change or die.
All of which would be leading to a finale which deals with this show-shattering problem by finally returning to the original wound of Susan, after which a new model for how the series operates would be found. I felt very pleased with myself for figuring that out and realising there had been an intentionality to the whole thing and quite a smart and interesting one at that… and then the interval ended and I watched “The Reality War”.
Having slept on it maybe I’m a bit more open to a redemptive reading. Narrative collapse is fun, I enjoyed ‘The Chase’ and even ‘The Android Invasion’. As another commenter has pointed out, you could view the image of a companion outright taking the role of the Doctor as a different conclusion to this arc. Unfortunately for now it’s just an image rather than a storyline, and I’m still not sure if I care enough to watch more of this. I’d rather we wait twenty years and it was all a dream. But I’d also rather Doctor Who be good, because who knows where we’ll be in twenty years?
I don’t know. At least it’s motivation to write something better.
June 1, 2025 @ 8:11 am
It does feel like the Susan plot thread is somewhat unresolved, but i can’t help but think it was a deliberate misdirect all along.
One reading of this episode could support the idea that finding out how the Doctor came to be a parent/grandparent doesn’t matter. An obsession with genetic lineage leads to, well, eugenics (sort of). An obsession with lore and mysteries of the show’s past creates a monstrosity (Omega). All of the characters are the Doctor’s children/family. Poppy’s importance is not related to her potential link to Susan, or her potential Time Lord DNA. She is important because she is a living child, and that’s worth fighting for.
Then there are the obvious parallels with the season one/14 finale (i.e. Ruby’s birth mother is important because we made her important). This continues to feel, in part, like a reaction against The Timeless Child.
I dunno, as I said upthread, I need more time to process, but I felt at least some of this was worth stating.
I’m still not sure if the episode told it’s story (stories?) particularly well, and if that even matters 😅
June 2, 2025 @ 8:08 am
I think this is fair enough but there’s a degree of care needed with these “actually, caring so hard about this bit of the plot is a flaw of the audience” stories.
Ruby’s mother skirts the boundary of it – the script deliberately makes her mysterious, dressing her up in a big cloak, doing mysterious pointing. But the show hasn’t been concerned with “finding out how the Doctor came to be a parent/grandparent”…I was going to say since Susan left but actually ever. It’s never been treated as a mystery, it’s either a fact of life (which I like: the Doctor talking about being a father in The Empty Child is nice not because it’s a sci fi mystery but because it’s a deepening of his character) or it’s something for the show to awkwardly talk around. In this reading RTD makes it a mystery with cryptic lines he wrote himself, then dismisses it as unimportant.
What I thought the promise was was reckoning with the fact that he left her alone centuries ago in his life and never went back. That’s an interesting story. That’s an interesting pry into his character.
And bringing back Omega to demonstrate the decrepit horrors of being obsessed with lore is the same thing. Russell T Davies brought back Omega. And Sutekh. And Susan. If you think diving back into the lore means it eats you…just don’t do that. Write bold new, exciting things. Like the whole rest of the season!
June 2, 2025 @ 11:47 am
“In this reading RTD makes it a mystery with cryptic lines he wrote himself, then dismisses it as unimportant.” Well, yes, he did that with Ruby’s mother so it wouldn’t be a first.
But I take your point, the show doesn’t really show much of an interest in how the Doctor came to be a grandfather. I suppose I was thinking of the fans/online commenters who do seem interested in this. I thought Davies might be teasing/reacting to those fans, but I have no evidence about what is in his head 😊
Likewise though, I don’t really think “reckoning with the fact that he left her alone centuries ago in his life and never went back” is a particularly interesting or important thing for the show to do. YMMV of course. In my view if indeed Davies teased this ‘reckoning’ and deliberately avoided dealing with it (rather than being forced to abandon it due to production issues), I can see a logic to it and it would be consistent with the ending of S1/14, although I don’t particularly enjoy it.
“If you think diving back into the lore means it eats you…just don’t do that.” Exactly, I agree. I wasn’t saying I like this mode of story telling, more just trying to puzzle out what Davies may have intended with this particular episode. But I agree then more work is required to square this away with the fact that Davies also brings back Susan, the Rani, Sutekh, the Shalka doctor etc.
I don’t know. (throws up hands)
June 1, 2025 @ 9:32 am
I do find it funny how the doctor is willing to give up his life to save poppy but can’t be bothered to look for rogue in his spare time.
June 1, 2025 @ 10:44 am
Doesn’t scan great for the first queer Doctor, does it…?
June 1, 2025 @ 3:34 pm
The Doctor didn’t go looking for River, either. The Doctor may be something of a romantic, but doesn’t want to be tied down, that’s a very consistent character trait.
June 1, 2025 @ 4:48 pm
Completely different context with River, who dies at the end of his time knowing her. He knows for a fact that’s all coming for him in his future, he doesn’t need to go looking for her. Rogue … might just die and he’ll never see him again (which is in fact probably what’s happened now).
June 1, 2025 @ 5:03 pm
I’m still hoping we’ll see more of Rogue (depending on the show’s future of course).
June 1, 2025 @ 5:41 pm
I’m not clear how you conclude that he didn’t look for Rogue. We don’t see him doing it, but i got the strong impression that the Doctor had been fruitlessly trying to figure out a way to rescue him during the off-hours between epsiodes.
June 2, 2025 @ 7:46 am
I like the idea, but what is this impression based on?
I did think we’d have another Rogue episode at some point – the chemistry between Groff and Gatwa (rip) was too good to waste, he’s connected to a running plot thread – and at that point the show might say “the Doctor has been trying to find Rogue all along” but until it goes…he hasn’t. The show’s not given us any reason to think this.
June 2, 2025 @ 8:24 am
Yeah there is zero grounds on which to base it; it’s entirely “Charitable Headcanon”, so depends on how charitable one is feeling. Textually he seems defeated by the prospect already by the end of Rogue.
June 1, 2025 @ 10:41 am
I look forward to the “Pop Between Realities, Home in Time for Tea” about Rose.
June 1, 2025 @ 11:24 am
So this is a different sort of take – I think the Doctor is being an unreliable narrator here. I don’t think he changed reality itself. That’s not how time travel works in DW – we know that time isn’t set and linear, save a few fixed points. There’s no sign Poppy herself is a fixed point. Instead, the Doctor changed which reality he was in, not reality itself. We know that the version post-wish of Belinda isn’t the Belinda he traveled with – she doesn’t want to go home, she doesn’t seem to care about getting back to her parents. In addition, when he shows up, he doesn’t show up with Belinda in the TARDIS. That indicates she didn’t change – instead, which Belinda he was with was. Also, we’ve never seen a change in the future retroactively change the past (I don’t think). So instead of going to his original reality where Poppy doesn’t exist, he jumped to a third one where she did to alleviate his guilt about Susan. Now, that fact that he picked the version of Belinda as a mom for his happy ending is telling and a bit problematic, but it’s rather different than his I changed the very fabric of reality itself silliness. Now, will the show ever back this up or address it? Who knows. But it makes more sense to me both thematically and logically than what he claims.
June 1, 2025 @ 1:26 pm
This episode kind of itches at my brain. It has so many things we accuse of Chibbers of
Lengthy dull exposition scenes
Random yet pointless callbacks from the lore (I mean how was Rogue last night any better that Captain Jack?). I mean, was there anyone at all who found the Susan appearance even slightly satisfying? Why that random selection of clips of some doctors?
Non sequiturs.
Also, how is it that I warmed to Jodie as written by RTD more than I ever did to her actual tenure? (To be fair, I don’t really how how reliable that feeling is).
Billie isn’t really the doctor, is she? I mean, I can see an actor of her calibre giving it a good shot, but it feels just a little off, especially with the detail of the credits not saying “as the Doctor”.
It’s only in rare conditions that scripts as conceived will make it untouched through to transmission. Drama production is inherently collaborative and difficult to manage, I know that much. Who knows what has been happening behind the scenes between the beeb, RTD, and Disney? But if this is EXACTLY what RTD wanted to give us, I have deep questions about how sustainable it is. If this is EXACTLY what the master plan was all along, I can’t shake the feeling I’ve been trolled. If all these unexplained and confused unresolved plot points are deliberate, what’s going on?
I know, it’s veering into “WHAT HAPPENED TO THE MAGIC OF DOCTOR WHO” territory. I’m genuinely glad that some folks really felt positively about this. I liked many, many touches of it. But these two series have been quite disorienting for me to invest in fully.
June 1, 2025 @ 1:42 pm
The Power of the Doctor was … better.
June 1, 2025 @ 2:42 pm
Steady on now
I can no longer remember the Power of the Doctor except as a few confused images. Ask me I can remember this one in six months
June 1, 2025 @ 1:31 pm
I’m glad you enjoyed this finale (I did too!) but rating it above “Joy to the World” is pure insanity. You do you, I guess…
For me this was RTD’s love letter to the Chibnall era (or maybe just “The Power of the Doctor”), right down to 13 appearing. A mess of continuity references, a mess of dozens of characters who just stand around doing nothing, a mess of thematic strands trying to say something and ultimately saying very little. It was mostly enjoyable in the moment but it was not good TV.
And Belinda… My God. I loved her after her first two episodes but then that character just disappeared and got replaced by a Generic Companion Who Loves Travelling With The Doctor. And then in the finale she once again got replaced with a weird Wish World counterpart who then got rewritten to become a mother which is not something she ever wanted or consented to. And this is apparently a happy ending. What the hell?
I’m genuinely confused about what has happened to RTD. I get that he’s not the same man he was in 2005 but I never thought he’d fuck up character arcs. And character emotional beats. Belinda is barely a coherent person.
June 1, 2025 @ 2:05 pm
I think if it had been any less insane, I might have hated it, but as it is, it is exactly the right amount of insane so I loved it. There’s a thrill in the fact that the narrative openly agrees that the “Unholy Trinity” isn’t really a compelling villain, and thus just casually clears away the Rani, Conrad, Omega, and Desideridum by the halfway point to become a much more personal story. I love the visual of Rose popping back into existence, because Conrad ignored the disabled but he ERASED trans people. We stop one step short of UNIT HQ turning into the Megazord, and I would have hated it except that it was wedged in there with the rest of the insanity of the plot so that was great. It went mad without becoming incoherent, and I think that made it feel pretty good.
June 1, 2025 @ 9:31 pm
I do think that how much you like it partly depends on how tidily you want it to be sorted out. Like you, Ross, I kind of like the messiness, and that’s part of the appeal: the viewer basically has to do a bit of work to figure out what to make of it. But I fully understand why those who like a bit more structure/consistency, or those who were offended by specific elements based on their reading of the show, would find it awful. I mean, something similar applied to ‘Love & Monsters’.
June 1, 2025 @ 6:34 pm
The whole paradox of Poppy not existing any more reminds me of years ago before a friend from work , who had 4 children , expressing surprise when I said I didn’t want to have children. “But how can you deny someone the chance of life?” he asked. I pointed out I wasn’t denying anyone anything if they didn’t exist. He didn’t understand my point of view at all and although I am a dad now and don’t regret it all I still don’t understand his argument at all.
June 1, 2025 @ 6:39 pm
A couple of small observations.
Some people call Omega “the original sin of the Time Lords” – further evidence that RTD reads the blog surely.
And UNIT planting bio chips in all members – is this supposed to be a good thing? A bit Elon isn’t it?
And lastly , my guess is if it’s gone it’ll probably only be for a short while, it makes too much money for the BBC.
June 1, 2025 @ 7:08 pm
(long time reader, first time caller)
it’s strange. the more I see the internet hating this one, the more inclined I feel to love it. There are so many weird, uncomfortable ideas that beg for more thought I’ve been thinking about it literally since the second it was over which must mean something surely?
The final fate of Belinda remains a problem imo (as well as her being shoved in a box most of the episode), but one that was solvable if we’d spent time with her in any of the previous episodes and let her voice (for example) a desire for children, but the men she dated/her flat-share situation/the fear of being tied to a domineering person has been holding her back. Then the world we find her in after the Doctor gives his regeneration energy to bring back Poppy (which is lit so gorgeously in gold I find it hard to believe it isn’t a final collective wish for a better world powered by the Doctor) wouldn’t feel so similar to the patriarchal one we just left. That said, I think a positive signal is what we know about Poppy’s father compared to Al at the beginning of the season: they were together (note: didn’t marry), had a child, separated on positive terms, and is a good person and involved father which makes him the opposite of Al and Conrad.
Then there’s the couple of minutes where the Doctor and Belinda talk earnestly about raising a child in the TARDIS without it even being a blip in the adventures, finally cracking (but not shattering, see later) that last glass ceiling in a companion’s lifecycle. Again the choice of exploring this with the most openly queer Doctor is odd and uncomfortable, but I wonder if the obvious lack of romantic chemistry between Sethu and Gatwa helps this: they’re so clearly not in a romantic relationship, just friends and their wish child who has no one else (imagining this scene with Eleven and Amy makes me cringe to even think it). Unfortunately we run into another problem where this is undercut by Belinda’s final scene where now settled, Belinda wants to wait until Poppy is older, but the Doctor can’t promise to come back for her. Frustrating.
Conrad I feel was dealt with perfectly. Imagine being able to look JK Rowling in the eye and say “I Wish you to be happy,” and just like that she stopped doing all this awful shit.
No idea if any of this is coherent. If there’s one word that describes this episode and my thoughts about it it’s ‘messy’. I can’t even begin to put together thoughts on how I feel about UNIT or Billie Piper. The tracker microchips are so hilariously absurd I can’t help but think it’s meant to skewer the last 15 years of rosy UNIT nostalgia, but why do that just before a UNIT show with Pete McTighe of all people is coming out?
I don’t know if I love it at the end of the day, but I’m not feeling the burning hatred for it I’m seeing around.
June 2, 2025 @ 4:40 pm
“Imagine being able to look JK Rowling in the eye and say “I Wish you to be happy,” and just like that she stopped doing all this awful shit.”
Getting strong vibes of the end of The Neverending Story 2 when Bastian wishes Xayide to have a heart, and she explodes.
June 2, 2025 @ 6:39 am
I’m seeing a lot of people annoyed about Poppy, on this site and elsewhere. The main argument seems to be that Belinda was forced to be a mother without her knowledge or consent. Maybe I’ve completely misunderstood the episode but that it not how I see it at all.
I was thinking that the Doctor and Belinda (and by extension, we the viewers) have been in a false or incorrect reality all season. This is a reality where Poppy doesn’t exist and the world ends on 24 May 2025. I take it as given that any reality where the world ends (and this is not reversed) is not the ‘correct’ reality in Doctor Who. The world has somehow ended up in this other reality due to the Rani(s) and Conrad mucking about with reality itself. Although the Wish World isn’t fully formed until episode 7, it seems sensible that the events of the finale have repercussions backwards and forwards in time (e.g. see The Big Bang).
So when Poppy appears in the Wish World (and the Story and the Engine), it is Belinda’s subconscious memory of the real or ‘correct’ reality bleeding through. So Belinda was a mother all along, she just didn’t know it (and neither did we). The Doctor’s sacrifice at the end is to shift time/reality so as not to settle for a ‘close enough’ reality, but to get back to the original version where Poppy always existed. Prior to this, it is acknowledged that the ‘close enough’ reality is not quite right – e.g. Ernest Borgnine is still alive, and the border or Norway and Sweden shifted etc.
There is a deliberate sense of unease about this. When Poppy didn’t exist she never existed and when she did exist, she always had existed. It also isn’t clear why everyone can remember that Ernest Borgnine died etc but no one can remember Poppy, except Ruby. The Doctor is slightly evasive about fixing it. It should be noted (and it has been noted upthread) that Belinda is fully in support of the Doctor trying to get her daughter back, even though she can’t remember her. It feels disorienting at the end because the Belinda we end with is, by definition, not the same Belinda we saw all season. The character suffers from this (IMO). It also raises questions about how far back Reality has been affected – Season 1/14 as well? Is that why Poppy showed up in Space Babies? It all could have been set up better, granted.
I dunno, I really think it is like Season 5, where Amy had no parents all season and didn’t notice anything was wrong, but at the end, when the cracks were fixed, her parents came back and she always had parents.
Maybe this is all just my head canon? I will re-watch one day (once I’ve had some separation from this era of Who) and get more out of it, perhaps. Incidentally, this is why WW/TRW is better than Power of the Doctor – as messy as this finale is, there’s enough depth and intentionality to support detailed analysis and multiple close readings.
June 2, 2025 @ 7:39 am
It’s not a bad idea but it’s not onscreen at all. If that was the intention it simply wasn’t communicated.
In fact I got the impression Wish Poppy was far more the creation of the Doctor than Belinda. He’s the one who’s had family on his mind since The Legend of Ruby Sunday, he’s the one who met Captain Poppy. That’s part of what soured me on the whole thing. Poppy doesn’t feel Belinda’s to me.
June 2, 2025 @ 8:30 am
I suspect the original version of this season in which Ruby was the companion the whole way through would’ve made vastly more sense. Ruby has the existing connection with Captain Poppy; the Doctor even says he wishes that she & he were her mummy and daddy in Space Babies. She has the yearning for familial connection and the whole backstory of abandonment and foundling and foster family. We’ve seen her with babies and children multiple times. It seems very obvious to me that Belinda inherited some of what would’ve been Ruby’s storyline for this episode after the companion switchover happened and Davies had to quickly come up with a replacement companion because Gibson left in Empire of Death when that was not always the plan.
June 2, 2025 @ 9:53 am
But with Ruby present in this episode, surely they could have done that version anyway! That would make so much more sense! The Doctor and Ruby are pulled into suburban fantasy based on their memories from Space Babies and conversations about the Doctor’s family last year – plus Conrad knows about her connection to the Doctor. And Belinda is stuck outside the fantasy trying to wake the Doctor up to fix it – like she has been all season!
June 2, 2025 @ 11:22 am
Indeed. And Belinda would make more sense in Ruby’s storyline of the dispossessed in camps! Aaaaaagh
June 3, 2025 @ 1:06 am
I agree it wasn’t well communicated in the episode at all but the youtube making-of video indicates that James is right, it was indeed the intention
June 2, 2025 @ 8:56 am
The fact that one can technically / Well, Actually one’s way out of Belinda being an unwilling mother doesn’t change how on a gut level it feels viscerally wrong to a lot of viewers (indeed, it seems to be the most widespread online reaction as far as I can tell). It’s absolutely true that the Hand of Authorly God writes it so that she’s determined to save Poppy’s life (though as Cyrano notes, nobody seems to care about the presumably thousands of other wish babies in ConradWorld who will also wink out of existence) and, indeed, that in itself is a fine beat, typical if slightly standard DW companion material to try and save a life. But the choice (which is not necessitated by the motivation to save her life) to do a sharp heel turn and define her as A Mother First and Foremost is never not going to jar for a lot of people and create (ironically) the sort of unease you’re talking about wrt the childless timeline. It’s a hard sell to an audience that Wrong Timeline A as written by a villainous conservative is the one where she has a nice suburban life and a husband and a daughter and a tradwife existence and doesn’t go to work, as juxtaposed against Correct Timeline B, in which she’s a stressed and overworked nurse sharing a flat with others her age, except sike! Correct Timeline B is in fact Wrong Timeline B, and she really belongs in Correct Timeline C, in which she’s the overworked nurse from B but has the exact same suburban life/house from A and the same daughter from A but none of the obvious conservative fantasy trappings, and this has all come about because of the Doctor “nudging reality over” to make it happen, which comes uncomfortably close to a rewrite of the character as we knew her. As I say, one can Well, Actually the idea that the character we knew from the start was All Wrong and actually she was always a devoted mother, but if so one must be prepared for fierce pushback from people who think “fuck that” to such a starkly deterministic portrait of motherhood. Functionally, it is a rewrite, even if one can argue that it isn’t in-universe.
What feels sketchy with where Belinda’s story ends up is slightly more than just “dodgy consensual issues around her timeline rewrite”, however. This is a character who began the season by fighting against the idea of dwelling in a reality being written by a problematic man who doesn’t listen to her. That is not the same person (more’s the pity) as the woman who happily accepts the reality at the end that’s been (re)written by a problematic man (one explicitly paralleled to Alan from the start of this run, a parallel the finale never returns to) who doesn’t listen to her (he still calls her “Miss Belinda Chandra” at the end here, her hated moniker, which, gross). The Doctor scans Poppy’s DNA without asking Belinda’s permission first which, again, is a far cry from the defiant and independent woman from the beginning of the season who told him where he could stick it when he did that to her. It should be pretty apparent why a lot of young queer people have quite reasonably reacted with “fuck that” to this narrative. It’s Davies’ prerogative to explore his feelings around not having children and the sublimated desire for that as an older gay man who’s partly by choice partly by circumstance locked out of that world, but it’s equally the prerogative of younger millennial and Gen Z viewers (who are increasingly hostile to the idea of having children at all in this waking nightmare of a world) to react to this with horror as perilously walking the same line as Conrad’s conservative fantasy. And RTD goes and does the exact same thing with Pregnant Anita! The wish dream we end up with is parenthood and the queer are locked out of it. The intent isn’t awful but by god the result is.
I think it’s by a mile the most regressive and misogynistic ending any companion has had in twenty years of new Who. It ends up with us barely knowing Belinda at all as a coherent person beyond “is mother, wants to get home to daughter”. Really, really iffy stuff. Oh the irony that people say Moffat had the issues around women.
June 2, 2025 @ 10:05 am
Paralleling the Doctor to these men isn’t completely absent; I thought it was striking when Conrad said his vision of reality was inspired by the Doctor’s own words. (Not that this goes anywhere either.)
June 2, 2025 @ 10:11 am
I also appreciated that moment – nice way of recontextualising what some have described as the slightly fashy vibes of that speech to Conrad in Lucky Day (I didn’t have a big problem with it, but the complaints were there!)
June 2, 2025 @ 10:20 am
It’s also, by the way, an incredibly shitty ending for Ruby, who spends the back half of the episode being gaslit for an uncomfortably long time and when the Doctor goes off to die she just … never gets a goodbye. He doesn’t look at or acknowledge her. Her final line is “yes”. Really sour taste to the whole thing. Gibson looks kinda pissed in the BTS material on the UNIT set reshoots which were the episode’s final scene, too. So although Ruby doesn’t get a misogynistic ending, this still feels a bit like doubling down on the shittiness.
June 2, 2025 @ 11:24 am
Not just young queer people either: I’m firmly middle-aged.
June 2, 2025 @ 1:28 pm
I absolutely didn’t mean to dismiss any visceral or unpleasant reactions anyone had about this episode and I’m sorry if I did so. I absolutely hate heteronormative bullshit too and have no intention of becoming a parent for some of the reasons mentioned and more, so on some level I get it, although I am cis-het so I do not pretend to claim experience of being queer. I think the part I don’t understand is why many people keep saying that it all happened without Belinda’s consent or that it was more mysoginistic than, say, Donna’s original ending. But to push on with that argument gets into an icky debate about particulars and semantics that will go nowhere good so I’ll drop that and accept that there are different views.
I am trying to understand the episode in a way that is consistent with what I saw on screen:
I did not see any reason to think there are other Wish babies. I did see Poppy outside of the Wish World, so I do not believe she is a product of the Wish World. I don’t see anybody else’s wishes come to life in Wish World, only Conrad’s, so how/why would Poppy appear if she did not already exist? I don’t fully know how to explain why the Doctor says ‘It just makes it even more amazing, Bel, little scraps of memories, yours and mine, have come to life in a child of our own”. Maybe he is just wrong – there are perhaps multiple versions of truth in this episode. I’m suspecting there is no way to make this episode make sense in the way I would like.
To focus on what we agree on, I did see a very poor ending for Belinda’s character and I absolutely understand why people hate it. I hated that too. However we got there, the result is the same, the character that showed so much potential in the first couple of episodes is overwritten with a character we don’t know, who is more submissive and fills the more stereotypical female role of mother. It sucks and is such a waste. I also agree that Ruby gets a poor ending and I didn’t enjoy the way the Doctor and Belinda dismissed her. I thought, however, that this was meant to be uncomfortable – the Doctor was glib at first because he wanted to have adventures with B. instead of acknowledging the truth of what Ruby was saying (although this might be my personal interpretation). Either way it was a difficult and uncomfortable ending to the season and the fact this was probably deliberate doesn’t erase the unpleasant overtones for many people.
🙂
June 2, 2025 @ 1:58 pm
I’m just having so much trouble seeing how this was all supposed to land, I hope I haven’t come across as too thorny to anyone. Normally even if an episode doesn’t land for me I can at least see what they were aiming for, but I’m really at sea this time and trying to feel out the shape of it.
June 2, 2025 @ 2:09 pm
“I’m suspecting there is no way to make this episode make sense in the way I would like.”
I think we’re in the same place here. I just don’t want to or have to force it to make sense to live with it. Parts I liked so much. Parts less so. Some parts I thought were basically incoherent and led to some unfortunate implications which in the left me with a bit of a bitter taste in the mouth.
June 2, 2025 @ 3:23 pm
I’m definitely struggling not to see it as patronizing or even paternalistic to see Belinda saying OVER AND OVER that she wants to save Poppy, would do anything to save Poppy, even when she can’t remember Poppy, and respond that Belinda is not giving informed consent. It feels like “I don’t believe any reasonable person would consent to that therefore I will disregard her unambiguous verbal affirmations as the result of her being compromised.”
June 2, 2025 @ 3:55 pm
But she never, ever expressed any sentiment like that on screen until Conrad warped her into the Wish World. On screen, to me at least, it comes across like all of that sentiment has been imposed on her, externally, by Conrad, whose world is explicitly portrayed as bad and wrong.
June 2, 2025 @ 4:33 pm
She expressed the specific desire to keep Poppy:
When she was in the wish world with her identity restored.
When she was out of the wish world and remembered Poppy
When she was out of the wish world and didn’t remember Poppy but believed Ruby that she had existed.
You’re inventing this idea that Belinda was still in a diminished capacity even after having her identity restored, and setting the implausible standard of “A person has to talk about wanting children in random situations where it isn’t relevant ahead of time in order for me to believe their consent later”
June 2, 2025 @ 5:07 pm
I guess we’ll leave it there.
June 2, 2025 @ 5:09 pm
Ah, thanks for the very measured response, I appreciate it. Sorry I came on a bit strong before (as you can tell, mega frustration with the ep spilling over); by talking of technicalities and “Well, Actually”s I didn’t really mean to accuse you per se of being dismissive because you weren’t! 🙂
V good points on everything else. I think there was possibly an ending at some point where Poppy disappeared and they couldn’t ever find her or get her back (at least temporarily) and the Doctor actually knew that she’d faded but was real, and was hiding this from Belinda – this is my read of their including that wink to Ruby in the TARDIS scenes, that’s his way of telling her he knows too. Which is huuuugely prickly and questionable but in a very compelling way IMO. One imagines this would’ve carried on into the planned Series 16/3 with more Susan stuff, finding the real Poppy, etc.
June 2, 2025 @ 6:34 pm
Oops, accidentally posted this in the wrong spot somehow:
All good 🙂
Maybe one day we’ll get to hear the alternate version. Although I don’t expect it to make much more sense from a logical point of view, it might flesh out some of the themes a bit more.
June 2, 2025 @ 7:17 pm
I did wonder if the Doctor remembered and was lying for Belinda’s sake, and if that was why he was being so forceful about it with Ruby. I don’t ultimately think that’s what we’re meant to understand, because frankly, he’s gaslighting Ruby if that’s the case. But it’s uncomfortable for me that the Doctor basically had to be shamed into doing it, and weird that it seems like a lot of folks came away from that scene thinking the Doctor was imposing his own will on an unwilling Belinda.
June 3, 2025 @ 5:28 am
“I’m suspecting there is no way to make this episode make sense in the way I would like.”
Says it all.
June 3, 2025 @ 1:12 am
No, you’re right. RTD and Varada both talk about it in the making-of video like this is the exact intention. I cannot blame anyone for interpreting it the other way, though. It isn’t very well conveyed in the episode
June 3, 2025 @ 8:05 pm
this was my feeling on it too, and it seems like it was intentional but muddled by the final draft of the season. it’s funny how much we (as opposed to not-we) rely on knowing obscure production details. i overall was kinda left wanting by this finale and it was largely because of the threads that didnt come together vs. the ones that did, and i wondered right away if that was because of compromises behind the scenes. like,, no way were these 2 seasons written with Ncuti leaving in mind, let alone anything else that might have thrown a spanner in
but yeah i took Belinda’s last scene as a reveal that this was always her real life, and it was actually “rewritten” when she was cut off from her intended timeline by the events of The Robot Revolution, and the ripple outward from May 25th. it just was conveyed kinda poorly. Like, were Mundy Flynn and Captain Poppy supposed to be hints that time was scrambled even back in the last season? i look forward to learning more about like the second most opaque Doctor Who era in history after the previous one
June 3, 2025 @ 8:08 pm
sorry to double dip but i forgot to mention there were little inconsistencies in The Robot Revolution that stuck with and bugged me all season too, like the Doctor just inexplicably looking for Belinda by name and her knowing the name of the TARDIS without getting an introduction. it’s just weird that these weren’t more obviously tied up in a season that honestly didn’t leave a lot up to the imagination (in terms of plot i mean, there was some pretty imaginative shit in this season). I wonder how much of that was (is being?) left open for a renewal. but all i can do is wonder i suppose
June 2, 2025 @ 7:33 am
Watched on a little table in a balcony at Atlanta airport, waiting for a connection to visit the US for my father in law’s funeral. An odd context for this episode. In that context, very welcome as a distraction.
Too chaotic and compromised for me to honestly say it was good, too full of wonderful moments to want to call it bad I guess it’s fitting that as the show sails into its Commissioning Shrug, it sort of falls apart altogether.
The good: The Rani. Making her a scientific racist, a Gallifrey first eugenicist? A good, coherent conception of the character. No notes. “Well it’s goodnight from me” created a weird guffaw from me that unsettled the Atlanta-ans, except for the small child that wanted me to admire their toy owl.
The reappearance of Anita and the way the Time Hotel allowed normality to blow through UNIT HQ? A nice bit of through season plotting. A gun you don’t even realise has been placed on the mantle. The sort of thing that should please fans who don’t like RTD’s plotting normally. It treats Doctor Who as a coherent world with rules that continue to be in place from story to story. And the character and actress are so likeable it’s a sheer pleasure to catch up.
Seeing Jodie Whittaker get material she could make something of – without compromising or rewriting the character – is a bit of genius and makes me sad for the era that never really brought her into focus.
I thought Omega was used well – calling him the Titan fits with his role as an exiled, prehistoric giant of Time Lord society and his becoming a rotted corpse sort of mirrors and extends the decay of his character between the Three Doctors and Arc of Infinity.
The bad: I’m afraid the Baby Poppy material sat badly with me. I truly don’t think that plot coheres either mechanically or aesthetically. Poppy is…not Captain Poppy but when the Doctor and Belinda were forced into Conrad’s world, the Doctor’s memory of Poppy, a baby he met once, inspired the creation of Wish Poppy? Who is also a genuine, biological mix of The Doctor and Bel? But not the product of her wishes and memories? And being forced into this relationship saw the Doctor sitting up alone drinking and Belinda running into the woods to scream?
And the happy ending is Belinda’s life is rewritten so she’s a mother – exactly the thing she ran weeping from one episode earlier? And she’s raising baby as a single parent, working as a nurse for the NHS…that’s not the house of someone in that situation. I’m DWM RTD talked about reshooting the opening of the series to turn Belinda’s house into a house share because it didn’t ring true. While you have to ask how it got through multiple drafts and actually in front of cameras without anyone saying “this is not what reality is like”, it’s good they cared to fix it. The reversion at the end to baseless moneyed comfort just contributes to this sense that something unacceptable is being smoothed over.
I just, truly do not get this. I don’t understand it on an intellectual level, I don’t feel it in my guts. There’s no level of symbolism or theme I see it playing to. Poppy is just declared by authorial fiat to be ‘real’, unlike everything else created or changed by Conrad’s wishes. Is there not a world of other wish babies created by forcing everyone into heterosexual hell? Do they not count?
The treatment of Conrad is complex and I admire that attempted complexity. I’m not certain I buy the idea that Ruby would call Conrad’s world nice. It’s a minor detail that sours the scene for me. “You thought this was nice”, “This is what kindness is for you”…there’s other permutations of the line that capture the meaning and carry the scene forward without actually saying Conrad is kind. I think it’s a shame because it biffs the complexity the scene attempts. It’s off by one degree.
The Doctor and Bel’s treatment of Ruby towards the end seemed like an incredibly bum note to me. It’s not like I want the show to have the goodies being explicitly being lovely all the time. But what is meant to be a sinister moment of the Doctor and Belinda behaving ‘like normal’ instead seems to become them behaving uncharacteristically shittily to Ruby. It’s dissonant, but the wrong kind of dissonant.
And then, there’s the ending: on the one hand, it’s incredibly visible that the episode that existed had to be smashed up and turned into a regeneration story. It feels like a crisis. What on earth was going on with Susan and Poppy showing up in the run up? There’s such a chaotic sense that things have gone wrong. And yet it’s done with generosity. Jodie Whittaker, the incredible, rich lighting shining into the darkened TARDIS is a beautiful, artful shot that doesn’t feel like the last minute panic the production was in. “I don’t want to do this alone” and throwing open the door to be with the universe I loved. Joy to the world less so.
And Billie Piper. On one hand, on paper it sounds ludicrous and desperate. On the other it won me over instantly and I want to see more. Such charm and charisma in that moment of performance.
Who knows where we go from here. This was a season where it felt to like the show had its mojo back. It was motoring along, always trying, reaching, finding things to say and having fun. I want to see more but I ache for a bit of consistency.
June 2, 2025 @ 8:21 am
I think there are some things on screen that support my take, although the episode/season does seem muddled and not entirely internally consistent, as many have pointed out.
1. It is clear from ep 1 that the world is going to end on 24 May, so something has gone wrong with time that the Doctor will have to rewrite.
2. Belinda (not the Doctor) sees Poppy in the Story and the Engine, suggesting she is at least partly Belinda’s creation.
3. The discussion about all the little things that are wrong at the end (Borgnine, Sweden etc) tells us that the timeline/reality is still not quite back to the way it was.
4. Transcript:
Ruby: So what we’re saying is, my memory is one of the glitches
…
Doctor: Yes.
Ruby: Except the glitches were real before they changed. Because I was right in the Wish World, wasn’t I? And I’m right now. Conrad wasn’t some nice, happy chef, was he, Kate? Kate: No.
Ruby: And that’s not teal, is it?
Shirley: No, it’s too blue.
Ruby: Don’t you see? There’s another world, a slightly different reality. And it might just be a tiny little change, but she’s a child. She’s a little girl and she’s so beautiful. Her name is Poppy, and she’s lost somewhere out there.
Doctor: Ruby, I’m not wrong on this.
Ruby: Doctor, one life has disappeared, and you know this can happen. You know this better than anyone because it’s happened before. It happened to me. Remember?
Doesn’t this support the reading that something has gone wrong and that they are in the wrong timeline? And therefore by bringing Poppy back, the Doctor is restoring things to the ‘correct’ timeline.
June 2, 2025 @ 8:51 am
I think I’m with you. The disparity between Belinda’s work and the house struck me – but it’s not the same house we see in TRR: it’s her parents’ house. It has a piano and a music stand. Belinda and Poppy live with them.
In the end I found the tying-together of the themes of family and memory rather effective. Certainly I was taken up by the emotion of the final ten minutes and especially the regeneration, which I thought was magnificent (but then I liked Jodie’s as well, not only because it took place at Durdle Door). The rest of it – I may well consign that to a glitchy memory. But then I’ve felt the same in the past about some other overblown finales, and come to feel differently.
We’ve already seen a companion turning into the Doctor (which is why I was relieved to realise that when the Doctor says his is the only TARDIS in existence, he would never have known about Clara and Me, who I want to think are still flying around somewhere). The Doctor turning into a companion could well be something fruitfully new. But I’m quite glad the series is resting at least for a while. Wading my way through my own contradictory reactions is exhausting, quite apart from whether it needs to rest.
Thank you for your insights, Dr Sandifer. It’s always fascinating and fruitful to read what you have to say, and I’m very grateful I discovered the Eruditorum, even if it’s used up more of my time than perhaps it should. But you should always waste time when you don’t have any.
June 2, 2025 @ 9:40 am
I don’t, to be honest, read “the world will be destroyed unless the Doctor stops it” as anything other than the basic plot of a Doctor Who story. Sure it’s wrong that the world is destroyed on the 24th May but that doesn’t connect, for me, to Poppy.
Poppy is not present when Conrad reshapes the world, appears when he does.
I understand Ruby’s lines, but they’re not coherent to me. Everyone is aware of some of the changes to One Degree Off World – they all have a look at New Teal. But no one remembers Poppy. There’s no way for Ruby to remember Poppy from pre-Wish world: she never met Belinda before this episode, only met Captain Poppy in the future.
Your idea would make sense of the episode but it’s not in it.
June 2, 2025 @ 11:22 am
The Doctor says to Belinda, ‘It just makes it even more amazing, Bel, little scraps of memories, yours and mine, have come to life in a child of our own’ – suggesting that Poppy is as much Belinda’s wish as his, a fragment of her pre-Conrad World life too. Can he be referring to anything else? I suppose the fact that she happens to look like Captain Poppy is coincidence, or an echo across time if you like.
June 2, 2025 @ 11:34 am
I would expect Poppy’s resemblance to Captain Poppy is the same order of thing as Belinda’s resemblance to Munday.
June 2, 2025 @ 11:49 am
TV is a visual medium: he says it, but I don’t see it. Which little scraps of memories are hers? What about Poppy comes from her?
If you’re going to make such a big plot point work, you have to do the heavy lifting to put the details in place.
As someone has observed above, this would make sense with Ruby in Belinda’s place in the episode: they both have memories of Poppy, both shared intense discussions about family in the last series. Nothing comes from Belinda here which is why it’s sitting badly with a lot of people
June 2, 2025 @ 8:03 pm
I didn’t understand Ruby’s argument when I watched the episode and even now, reading the transcript, I can’t parse its meaning. What does “the glitches were real before they changed” mean? I understand “the glitches” to be the small differences post-change, like teal being a slightly different colour. But they quite obviously weren’t real before the change, because the change is what brought them into existence.
Ruby’s first example following that statement is “Conrad wasn’t some nice, happy chef” but for the life of me I can’t make the connection between those two statements. Conrad being a chef isn’t a glitch. It’s the direct result of Ruby’s wish. And who Conrad was before that change wasn’t a glitch either. It was just reality.
So what is she saying?
Ah. How annoying that immediately after writing all of the above I think it finally clicked. She means the pre-glitched facts (teal being teal, Norway’s border) were reality before they glitched. So the “glitch” of Poppy being gone (or even the supposed glitch of Ruby’s memory of Poppy existing) therefore proves that Poppy was once real.
Okay. What a convoluted way of putting that! It does support your argument, that Poppy was always Belinda’s biological baby, but it doesn’t gel well with the rest of the episode. So was the Doctor’s parentage the aspect that wasn’t real? But then why does she look like and have the same name of Captain Poppy? And why does Belinda also think she is a wish baby, rather than remember giving birth to her? Once reality is let in, and the Doctor is going on and on about how special Poppy is because he and Belinda somehow created her out of thin air, shouldn’t Belinda be saying “Uhh, no. This is my baby and always has been”? Instead, she’s gleefully planning to co-parent with him. Why? Why does she still believe Poppy’s fake origins at that point?
It’s so messy.
June 2, 2025 @ 8:58 pm
I think I can see why it’s confusing. They’re telling Ruby that her memory is a glitch: that she’s remembering something that DIDN’T happen. Ruby is explaining that this is contrary to the nature of the other glitches. All the other glitches are “A thing is different than it was before, and we remember the old version.” None of the glitches they describe follow the pattern of “A thing is the same as it was before, yet we remember it differently,” which is what they’re claiming by saying that there never was a Poppy. For it to be a glitch, by the established pattern, the thing Ruby remembers has to have been real in a now-defunct version of reality.
In each of the examples they mention, the thing they remember – Conrad being a dick, Ernest Borgnine dying in 2012, teal being greenish – is a thing that was true in the old version of reality. Ruby concludes that for her to remember Poppy, there must therefore be a previous version of reality in which she existed. Ruby is saying that Poppy’s ABSENCE is the glitch, whereas everyone else is pushing the idea that Ruby’s MEMORY of Poppy is the glitch. Ruby is rejecting that because “A memory of a thing that was true neither before nor after the wish” isn’t how glitches work, based on the other examples.
June 2, 2025 @ 9:23 pm
If I’m understanding it correctly, Belinda’s life was altered from having-a-child to not-having-a-child by the time glitch she went through in the rocket in “The Robot Revolution,” which is entirely separate from all the changes Conrad made (and retroactively changed all the scenes before it, so we only saw altered Belinda-who-has-no-child and lives in a shared flat instead of with her mother and Poppy even though the glitch hadn’t “happened” yet). So Wish World goes away, but the rocket-glitch is still in effect and that’s the one-degree-off the characters notice and that the Doctor ultimately has to fix by giving his life.
I’m dizzy from writing that up. But also it seems like “reality has been changed not once, but twice” is a pretty simple summation, and the fact that those changes were, specifically, Conrad’s Wish World and the rocket time-glitch seems like it should have actually been stated somewhere in the episode.
June 2, 2025 @ 10:07 pm
There’s a thought: Poppy disappears en route to toss the star certificate out into space for the Belindachandrakind to find. Perhaps the unresolved paradox kept time brittle enough to allow Poppy to exist, and as they got closer to resolving it, time swept up after itself.
June 2, 2025 @ 10:13 pm
But we saw her life before she went through the Time Thing in Robot Revolution: she was a nurse living in a house share. She was not Poppy’s mother.
June 3, 2025 @ 7:34 am
Also worth noting that the very existence of the house share situation (and the flatmates) was a late addition to the episode. In DWM, RTD notes that he suddenly panicked about the implication that Belinda or her parents have a LOT of money if she just owns that house in London, so “months after we’d finished” TRR they filmed a few pickups in the kitchen and added some ADR to establish the housemates.
Unfortunately it really seems like he didn’t think through the implications that would have for later — if we weren’t introduced to these flatmates she never mentions again,and instead she were living alone in her parents’ too-large house (someone’s missing!), it would be much easier to read the final timeline as the fixed/restored one. And I do think RTD wants us to believe this is a restoration.
(Of course the finale also changed quite a bit, so maybe “bring back Poppy/find Susan” was going to be the narrative engine for Series 3?)
The time glitch definitely feels like a good way to explain it — I jumped to that as well, and it justifies doing the time glitch thing in TRR at all — but in that case we really needed a line to establish that in the finale.
June 3, 2025 @ 12:15 pm
While it’s an interesting idea, I think the idea that Poppy pre-existed the Rani’s interference and the wish world undermines a big thematic element of the story. I think we are meant to ultimately reject the notion of “There is one proper Original Canonical Reality which is Really Real and anything else is an inferior ersatz fake illusory timeline” in favor of the view that there are just DIFFERENT realities, which each have their advantages and disadvantages. One’s got Ernest Borgnine, the other’s got a teal that is more confounding to us deutans. A universe with Poppy in it is better than a universe without her, so the Doctor did what he always does and put his neck on the line so everyone could live in the better one.
(Also, I really wish when the Doctor grabbed the Vindicator his line has been “If only someone had hung a gun on the wall in act one”)
June 3, 2025 @ 7:25 am
Glitched –
So was the Doctor’s parentage the aspect that wasn’t real?
I think so? Does anyone actually confirm that Poppy is half time lord in the Wish, or does he just assume?
But then why does she look like and have the same name of Captain Poppy?
I don’t really know. Could be a descendant thing like Munday Flynn. Could be that Poppy has become unstuck in time like Clara? Sorry.
And why does Belinda also think she is a wish baby, rather than remember giving birth to her?
The general sense I get is that something has gone wrong with reality in addition to the Wish, and only Ruby can see it. That seems to be what is conveyed by Ruby’s lines quoted above. So even when Anita opens the door to let the winds of the ‘pre-wish reality’ blow through, Belinda’s memory is not restored, because something else is going on. Notably, Poppy doesn’t vanish when Anita opens the door (i.e. if Poppy existed entirely in the Wish, wouldn’t you expect to see her vanish in the opposite way to Rose reappearing?) I guess that can be handwaved away – ‘oh Poppy lasted longer due to the strength of the Doctor and Belinda’s love, or something.’
Once reality is let in, and the Doctor is going on and on about how special Poppy is because he and Belinda somehow created her out of thin air, shouldn’t Belinda be saying “Uhh, no. This is my baby and always has been”? Instead, she’s gleefully planning to co-parent with him. Why? Why does she still believe Poppy’s fake origins at that point?
Seems like she does, yeah. It’s all a mess.
The Doctor does go on a lot about Poppy being created in the Wish. The real world explanation is probably that, as people are saying, Davies rewrote the ending, and it doesn’t fit well with the rest of the episode. The possible ‘in-universe’ explanation is that the Doctor is just wrong. During that whole discussion with Ruby, about the glitches, that we’ve quoted above, the Doctor says “Ruby, I’m not wrong about this”. But he is. We know, and Ruby knows, that there was a Poppy, he just can’t remember at this point. It’s doing a lot of heavy lifting, but for me, as the viewer, this conversation casts doubt on some of the events of the episode – i.e. what else is the Doctor wrong about? What else has he forgotten?
Maybe this is the Reality War: the very fabric of the show is being contested and there are multiple entangled versions of reality, that are surprisingly fragile. See also: Mavity, the fans in Lux, The Robot Revolution, 73 yards and anything to do with the pantheon really.
Sorry I don’t have a coherent explanation, but I think I’m grasping at something that I think Davies at least partially intended to convey in the last act of the episode, even if it is a mess.
June 2, 2025 @ 3:22 pm
By resetting time at the end, does the Doctor effectively sacrifice Ernest Borgnine so that Poppy can live?
June 2, 2025 @ 4:21 pm
LOL
June 2, 2025 @ 9:02 pm
And what’s the name of the fundamental force of attraction between objects caused by distortion of spacetime by mass?
June 3, 2025 @ 5:43 am
I think we’re underestimating the mavity of the situation
June 3, 2025 @ 12:20 pm
I’d like to know if it’s “gravitas” or “mavitas”. I think logically it should be the former, since Newton didn’t invent the WORD “gravity”, he’s just responsible for that word taking its modern meaning of “the universal force of attraction between objects caused by the distortion of spacetime by mass” rather than its original definition of “weightiness”. But one suspects the show would go with the latter because it’s funnier that way.
(My pet theory is that modern-day etymologists incorrectly assume Newton coined the word “mavity” as a portmanteau of “meta gravity”, since it describes the abstract universal principle of which ‘weightiness’ is just one example)
June 3, 2025 @ 2:49 pm
The use of the term for the force of attraction pre-dates Newton.
June 2, 2025 @ 4:59 pm
On a completely personal note (because I can work out no less public way of passing it on), I’m also subject to self-destructive ideations, so solidarity. It’s an almost-constant background noise that doesn’t need to be closely related to any actual events. I fear Dr Who is more likely to be more a source of melancholy than reassurance for me, especially regenerations. Instead, an ex-partner once said to me, ‘If you were dead you’d never see another sunrise and I’d never see you again’: in fact I very rarely see sunrises, but she’s a good person for saying it. I’ve just seen two bats chasing each other in the garden, and as an old goth I always think where there are bats, there’s hope.
June 2, 2025 @ 7:14 pm
I I had a very hard time when I discovered that “but then I won’t be able to see the next episode of Doctor Who” no longer had any effect on me. That was a long time ago for me, and honestly I didn’t get a lot of support in that place.
June 2, 2025 @ 5:52 pm
That was terrible. I loved it.
June 3, 2025 @ 6:33 am
I have an absolutely insane fan theory that I have to put out into the World. Carole Ann Ford is 84 years old so I feel like the Susan situation has to be dealt with pretty soon. And the Doctor, having wished to be a parent, has just regenerated into a woman. We only saw the face post regeneration – Piper was framed from the neck up. Is it possible that the Doctor is pregnant? A surprised “oh, hello” makes sense as a response if the Doctor is pregnant. Particularly if she is heavily pregnant. Also I could see RTD enjoying the semi-sacriligeousness of the Doctor giving birth during a Christmas special.
It would be a new spin on bi-generation and a secret origin for Susan.
June 3, 2025 @ 1:39 pm
I got to watch it late and I don’t have anything particularly clever to say, so I’ll just talk about some of my hopes/fears (mentioned last time) and how the episode felt for me. Let’s see if it smooshes everything into one paragraph again.
“They really need to confront how problematic the Doctor has been this season.” This was a big miss. I think the fifteenth Doctor has been great, and I’m sorry we’re not seeing more of Ncuti, but some of his actions and attitudes this season really needed to be addressed. Not getting that leaves me with an uncomfortable feeling – the character having such issues isn’t in itself problematic, but this really should be intentional and with consequences. Ironically, it did retroactively address one of the thirteenth Doctor’s issues, so maybe there’s still hope for this being “fixed” in the future. (And while I’m here, it was so good to see Jodie in a scene with such well-written Dialogue!)
“Belinda has been sidelined so much, and her unique qualities as a reluctant traveller mostly ignored. She needs to be key to the finale.” This is in the ‘partial success’ column. She was still sidelined for a large chunk of the runtime (even being shut in an actual box as a step beyond the metaphorical box where she spent the whole of last episode), but then she was a large part of the final section. However, she was only “key” in the sense of being something that got manipulated (along with the audience’s emotions, and wasn’t Murray Gold’s score as OTT as everything else?). Her ending felt…weird? Which is an odd thing to say in an episode full of reality rewrites, but I still can’t decide how I feel about it. Ask me next era. Right now, though, her treatment this season feels somewhat like Martha’s, with Ruby taking the S3 Rose role of the previous companion who the showrunner is still more interested in.
“The Rani needs to be unique – the amoral scientist, not just another megalomaniacal evil Time Lord/Lady.” This we got. In fact, something interesting was done with all the villains – the qlippothic Omega, the pathetic Conrad, and the eugenicist Rani, plus compliant Mrs Flood. Each got a unique ending that felt right to me – the Rani undone by her inability to connect her experiment with real-world consequences (too soon!), Conrad given another chance by Ruby’s compassion (too kind!), and Omega summarily dispatched by the Doctor with Chekhov’s clockhand (too CGI!), while Mrs Flood nods to the audience as she slips out the side door (Two Ronnies!).
Random other notes: I was so pleased to see Anita again! Okay, she spent almost the whole time propping open a door, but it felt like it completed something. In fact there was a lot of that – given what a massive melting pot of untidy elements were included, we had a surprising number of resolutions, the lack of Rose Noble in the outcast camp last episode getting pointedly explained for one. The episode started out far too exposition-heavy, but once it hit its stride it worked for me. There were many moments which made me very uncomfortable, but not in a way that got me angry with the program makers.
Also, it gave me an opening to explain Looms to my wife. Bad, bad RTD!