Wish World Review
Well that was fucking rubbish.
It’s entirely possible that next week, and by extension the story at large, won’t be. There are component pieces here that are lovely, after all. The basic premise “the Rani destroys the world trying to bring Omega back” is… OK, I mean, yes, that sounds like a bad Big Finish plot, but it could in theory work. Maybe next week it will, and I’ll get to write a giddily excited review about the brilliant use of Susan or something.
Unfortunately, it’s this week.
Much of the problem is the rigid structure of the modern two part finale, in which one entire episode has to be spent being a breathless trailer for the real episode, culminating in a cliffhanger reveal of what the actual premise is. Even when there’s no shock reveal, as in The Stolen Earth, the cliffhanger is still generally just getting the Doctor to where the plot can begin. This does nobody any favors. The actual finale is left to still be an overly packed single episode, while the first half is left with strangely little to do. This problem can be successfully worked around, and sometimes even triumphantly so. The core trick is just to have the first episode be a mad sugar rush. The best ones—and they are to be fair some of the best episodes of the series—develop a clear identity of their own by just running around and audaciously breaking things. Think The Pandorica Opens, Bad Wolf, or World Enough and Time, or even The Sound of Drums. But it’s always navigating around that central problem of having a first episode that’s structured around waiting for the climactic reveal.
Here, however, this problem intersects another one: the numerous pitfalls of the “illusion world” trope. These can—indeed often are—lightweight affairs, because nothing actually counts. Often—as here—things are outright not quite real; in any case, it’s all going to get undone. But the even more fundamental problem is that your story is structured around ostentatiously withholding the core pleasures of your larger show. Whatever characters you tuned in to watch this week, they’re not here, replaced by wrong versions who are almost necessarily defined by being less fun. This is, once again, a navigable problem, Human Nature/Family of Blood being perhaps the most triumphant example.
But it is two significant problems for this episode to overcome, and each amplifies the other. The result is an episode that simply fails to have anything happen. FIfteen minutes in all we’ve managed to do is introduce the false reality. At thirty we get John Smith arrested so that he can actually interact with the plot. Up to this point no character has actually demonstrated meaningful agency. The Doctor gets to notice the tables thing, but that’s only a trigger for the move into act three, not a development in our or his understanding of the world. Act three, meanwhile, consists of nothing save for Archie Panjabi vamping and half-explaining the plot. Ruby literally just sits around on the sidelines failing to accomplish anything. The episode climaxes in a literal countdown to its own ending. Nothing happens. None of the explanations amount to anything other than “the Rani has an evil plan,” which we knew last week because the Rani appeared and having evil plans is what she does. It’s just fucking boring.
There are no shortage of things here that, if Davies bothers to actually write a story about them, could be great. There’s no shortage of deft and artful moments along the way of this slow ride to nowhere. But watching this on its own was a chore, and even if the overall finale turns out to be a strong one, this is going to be its weaker half.
- One of the biggest weaknesses is the general mess of the Rani as a character. Rather astonishingly, she’s not actually introduced here. At no point do we get a coherent recap of who she is—not so much as an “evil scientist.” Panjabi is always fabulous, but she plays two entirely separate characters, the ice queen who finds Mrs. Flood’s suggestion of being her mother “disgusting” and the manic lunatic who cackles and dances around her bone palace. Anita Dobson is separately delightful, as she has been for a year and a half, but she’s in the unfortunate position of only having gotten her character at the precise moment that character was superceded, leaving her still feeling like an odd decoration on an incoherent concept. None of it quite works.
- No, really, Russell T Davies seems to legitimately expect the audience to have gone and watched The Mark of the Rani. Which is a dubious thing to ask of anyone. They didn’t even give it a Tales of the TARDIS.
- OK. Let’s talk about the good bits. I remain excited to actually do a damn Susan story. Her split second intrusion into this story is once again a beat that makes the heart skip, and my fan brain positively salivates at the implications of paralleling her with Omega.
- I’m also charmed by the surprise use of Rogue, in a scene I broadly assume was filmed in Jonathan Groff’s closet. It’s an unexpected payoff of that cliffhanger, and “tables don’t do that” is a great line. But you’re left to wonder why Susan isn’t the one giving that information, so as to actually set her up coherently. Once again the sense is that Davies assumes he doesn’t need to do that—that everyone will just go do their homework.
- Loved the Unified National Insurance Team set, and its successful evocation of the UNIT set even before the bay doors. Also loved the horribly uncomfortable intrusion of homophobia, which cuts in like a shard of ice.
- Dementedly charmed by the return of Captain Poppy. There will be no apologies for Space Babies. Which, I actually think there probably should be a few apologies for Space Babies, but I admire the pluck.
- Conrad wishing for Fascism World, and the incoherence of Fascism World being the entire point of having Conrad do it is very good. The disability stuff is all far too proud of itself, but it’s got a nice “heart’s in the right place” energy, and it’s just always nice to see Ruth Madeley, who’s got “UNIT scientific advisor” down even more firmly than Jemma Redgrave has the still always odd Kate Lethbridge-Stewart. But this is one of the points I’m most optimistic about paying off.
- Also fucking lol at the Harry Potter cover for Conrad’s fash version of Doctor Who.
- And the giant bone creatures. Love the giant bone creatures. Very Ancestor Cell.
- Omega being first of the Time Lords has interesting implications for the Timeless Child, as does Susan apparently both lying in the Doctor’s future and being tacitly linked to Omega. See also Susan inventing the name TARDIS.
- But see, this episode is bad enough that I’m ending the review talking about the Timeless Child. Ugh.
Ranking
- Lux
- The Story and the Engine
- Joy to the World
- Lucky Day
- The Interstellar Song Contest
- The Well
- The Robot Revolution
- Wish World
May 24, 2025 @ 8:36 pm
As much as I enjoyed the experience of watching the episode and letting my mind spin trying to figure out where it would resolve next week, yeah, there really isn’t much to say about it yet. I do hope some of the quiet political bits of the episode are picked up on next week, and I’ll admit my hopes are up about it, just to see what that looks like in Doctor Who packed with Susan, two Ranis, the Doctor, and Belinda.
May 24, 2025 @ 8:49 pm
I think I’ve developed an allergy to lore.
May 24, 2025 @ 11:05 pm
“Lore” is such a lovely, poetic word… but back in the day, we called it “fanwank,” and that was far more honest.
May 24, 2025 @ 11:35 pm
My son thinks “lore” is the best thing ever, and every franchise he takes an interest in is because it’s stuffed with “lore”. He used to be a potterhead, but ultimately found the “lore” aspect too lacking (and this was before he was old enough to appreciate that supporting the potterverse funded absolute human garbage).
“There’s LORE” is what got him to take an interest in Doctor Who. Which turned out to be lucky because he secreted off a copy of my collection of DVD rips to watch while not paying attention in school, allowing me to recover it when my home NAS crashed last week.
May 25, 2025 @ 1:34 am
There’s been many a time over the last 20 years when I’ve wanted to show my 1980s teenage self 21st century Doctor Who and watch it blow his mind on all sorts of levels. That me definitely loved lore/fanwank for its own sake and was far less analytical and would have enjoyed “Wish World” far more than I did once I started thinking about what I just watched, and would have been jumping up and down at the return of Omega, when I’m just hoping it’ll all mean something next week.
Then again, I shrieked out loud at not just the first but also the second Susan cameo last week, so that kid is not entirely dead. 🙂
(But also, RTD has set me up to expect Susan’s return to mean actually dealing with the emotional fallout over their parting rather than just “Susan is back,” which we already got in “The Five Doctors,” so…)
May 24, 2025 @ 9:04 pm
That’s an awfully long list of things to like in an episode that’s fucking rubbish…
I am in the odd position of being pessimistic that they’ll stick the landing next week (Omega and the Rani, yawn) and yet enjoying this week quite a bit. A totalitarian dystopia slowly falling apart, almost Ubik-style, while we hear a storybook backstory to the Rani that pointedly calls the Doctor “Doctor Who”…this was enjoyable, and it could resolve itself into something memorably good. I’ll cling to that “could” for a while.
May 24, 2025 @ 9:12 pm
You’re spot on here – first episode of the series I was checking the clock for because nothing was happening. The big problem, really, is that because none of our heroes are themselves at all, there can therefore be no drama whatsoever because nothing means anything to them, so we don’t care. Essentially just 45 minutes of thumb twiddling until we get to the end and the world collapses. Oh it’s Omega, oh so what, who cares, doesn’t mean anything to them so why should it mean anything to us?
I did enjoy the world as a heteronormative hell, and the reveal that the Rani was using Conrad to create a deliberately crap and facile world so people wouldn’t believe in it as part of a larger plan to collapse reality, feels very classic – we establish that mugs can fall through tables, let’s have the climax be that on a colossal scale. But yeah… Next week could be a masterpiece, or it could be awful and sour everyone on the series as a whole. What a weird situation.
May 24, 2025 @ 9:12 pm
Yeah, that was a pretty classic “part one of an RTD two-part series finale” really, wasn’t it? It span its wheels even more than last year, but that was helped by the sheer chemistry of Gatwa and Sethu, especially what I thought was the genuine feeling of pain they both exhibit when the ‘truth’ about Poppy intrudes into their apparent reality. And I did like the whole Wandavision vibe of that first half.
But there’s definitely a sense of RTD sticking two fingers up at Disney by making twenty episodes of Doctor Who that have required the audience to know sixty years of deep dive tv lore – and other (books/comics etc) stuff as well. Calling this “season one/two” is perhaps the best joke he’s ever done.
I will admit that the God of Wishes is a pretty neat Pantheon idea though (especially the 7x7x7 bit.) It enables a slightly different spin on God of Stories whilst also offering a reasonable Deus ex Machina for the next episode that’s not quite “it was all a dream”. That’s really not enough to save this one though.
May 24, 2025 @ 9:21 pm
(I just woke up so this may be disjointed, apologies if so)
I enjoyed it well enough; were this my review above I’s have started out with those “OK. Let’s talk about the good bits” bullet points, and then move on to the lesser traits. I appreciated the meta-commentary on the desire to seed doubt to break reality, a tactic the world’s suffering under right now. For all the criticisms about the show shoving everything into our faces, here it was pretty well worked into the story without the usual neon embroidery people decry. I get the structural boredom of “the first part of the two-parter,” but it will be what it will be, anything can work if done well enough so it’s worth a shot (“maybe next week will be better!” our perpetual cry ha ha). The first part can be used for some fun faffing about, and I’m OK when a show takes time to faff about or delivery character moments (again when done decently), and we did get a few – just don’t be a boring spinning of the wheel. This is something of an eye of the beholder issue as you enjoy it or seethe for the show not getting to the fireworks factory soon enough. There are problems sure, hardly any works are perfect.
One last funny note:
“No, really, Russell T Davies seems to legitimately expect the audience to have gone and watched The Mark of the Rani. ”
I literally saw someone online this morning say they were off to go do this today after watching this episode.
May 24, 2025 @ 9:35 pm
Something else I feel like throwing out here, feel free to ignore: it doesn’t matter if the lore shown on the screen today is new or years old. Star Trek, Star Wars, the MCU, comics, etc. do this all the time. New fans just roll with it and hey, are suddenly interested in this third rate team “Guardians of the Galaxy” or whatever. A friend who grew up a DC fan in the 70s and 80s told me that conversely, this sort of thing was catnip for him as it made him interested to go back and investigate that wide imaginary world. When I was first getting into Doctor Who during the same time period, I had a list of all the episodes up to that point that I had made a photocopy of. I spent real time rereading it, imagining how exciting it would be to see those two Peladon stories or even the very first episode! just based on the titles alone…
I really don’t feel this is quite the failing some say it is.
May 24, 2025 @ 10:16 pm
I agree with your point 100%. Maybe the reason it is regarded as such a failing is that it was done so badly in the Ian Levine period, and the idea has stuck that it will always be like that?
There was a period between 1967 and 1972 when I was first watching the show in which there were no Daleks. The fact that I hadn’t seen them did not in any way weaken Day of the Daleks for me: quite the contrary. Viewers of the show are aware that there is a backstory, and there is stuff they haven’t seen which is nevertheless a part of the show. They don’t necessarily feel alienated when this is invoked. However, we do also suffer from the second-screen problem where people want stuff explained so they can get it even if they aren’t paying attention.
Having said all this, I suspect we are all agreed that it can be done quite badly! Omega’s last appearance wasn’t exactly something to celebrate.
May 25, 2025 @ 1:07 am
I think fans who like to look up lore would still be tantalized if the show established “She was a ruthless mad scientist who’d let nothing get in the way of her experiments,” Although that could highlight how she’s not particularly mad-sciencey in this episode…
May 24, 2025 @ 9:29 pm
Wow. Overstuffed and overcomplicated. What must the casual viewer think?
Nobody was asking for the Rani to return. Or Omega for that matter (last seen 42 years ago!). These names mean nothing to anyone save the true middle-aged anoraks.
Even the callbacks to relatively recent episodes went largely unexplained. My family were confused by Rogue’s appearance (“Who is this guy?”) until his “I love you” reminded me that he was that guy last year that the Doctor had a crush on for 30 minutes. The plot hinges on people remembering that two years ago David Tennant threw salt over his shoulder and fretted about introducing superstition into the universe. Even the recurring modern characters like Shirley might be a bit of a stretch for the casual viewer to recall.
And perhaps ironically, I think the episode suffered from being a rehash of things we’ve seen before. We’ve seen John Smith living a pleasant domestic life. We’ve seen Ruby’s mother reject her. We’ve seen the small plucky band of underground freedom fighters keeping the flame of the Doctor’s memory alive.
Spot on about the modern two part finale structure requiring the first episode to tread water for 45 minutes and then the second not have enough time to tell its story satisfactorily. Makes me miss two parters that were just solid and simple stories. Never thought I would be remembering Rise of the Cybermen with nostalgia!
It’s frustrating because, indeed, there was a lot to like in the episode. The acting was very solid, some of the visuals were very impressive, and one can’t deny the fannish pleasure at seeing the various recurring characters doing their little 60 second inserts. But for me this was the definition of the whole being less than the sum of the parts.
May 24, 2025 @ 9:30 pm
From the first minute of this episode, I immediately thought “of course, the one modern comics crossover Doctor Who hasn’t riffed on for a season finale, Milk Wars!”.
May 24, 2025 @ 9:45 pm
i think regardless of how successful or not the episode was, susan giving the doctor the message instead of rogue would have undermined the whole point of that sequence thematically—the doctor’s doubts about conrad’s patriarchal-fascist world have to come from some kind of rejection of its values, in this case by the doctor being super gay. but susan giving the message would mean that the doctors doubts ultimately came from his granddaughter, part of a normative nuclear family arrangement. which would make the whole thematic situation much weaker
May 24, 2025 @ 10:00 pm
I agree with this. Especially coming pretty soon after the chilling “you can’t call another man beautiful”, having Rogue appear is very thematically appropriate as a reminder to John Smith that he has queer feelings within himself that are being suppressed, as the thing that helps crack him out of not questioning this reality.
May 24, 2025 @ 10:29 pm
Honestly, this is one of the few times where I think it would have improved if the subtext was a bit more on the nose instead of less. As the episode stands, I didn’t really get any sense that it was “about” questioning one’s societal expectations, etc. It just felt very rote sci-fi, telling us stuff we already know. The fake world is fake. Figure it out, Doctor! But alas, he never really did until the Rani explained it all.
May 24, 2025 @ 9:58 pm
what did RTD mean when he used a photo of the Abbot of Amboise for Hartnell in the flashback of all doctors
I just wish this episode didn’t spend so much time on establishing that the obvious fake reality was fake, even if the ‘doubt was the point’ payoff is admittedly kinda fun. Now that Omega’s in the mix we’re gonna be even more deprived of Ncuti and Archie (and Anita Dobson) playing off each other. How far this series could’ve gone if we got more than 8 episodes… at least the CGI and sets were cool enough to make me not think too deeply on first watch.
May 24, 2025 @ 10:00 pm
Rogue’s quick video insert was apparently filmed at the same time as his season one episode, which is revealing insofar as it means Davies has had a lot of this in mind for a while, and perhaps didn’t do enough reflection and listening to the critical reception between seasons as might have been appropriate.
May 24, 2025 @ 11:31 pm
The seasons were written pretty much back to back from what I understand, I think the only episodes that would’ve been out at the time this was written are the 60th specials and Church on Ruby Road (based on DWM bits from rtd)
May 24, 2025 @ 10:20 pm
Speaking of being dementedly charmed, I am perversely enjoying Pip & Jane Baker getting an on-screen credit on Doctor Who in the year 2025. (Also, the Rani once again turning someone into a plant. Also also, the still of Kate O’Mara from “Dimensions in Time” – it’s canon now, no take-backsies!)
My main problem with this episode, which I very much enjoyed moment-to-moment, is that the stuff that had any substance to it – Conrad’s fascistic, paternalistic, conformist world and the fact that those who didn’t conform were swept out of sight and were in a better position to see the truth of that world from the outside and rebel against it – was backgrounded by all the fanboy lore nonsense taking center stage. The Omega reveal got an “oh, for god’s sake” from me. Though now that I think about it, Omega’s original modus operandi as someone who made a world to suit his will and became a hollowed-out person in the process could end up being a parallel to Conrad and even a cautionary warning for him (which he will hopefully ignore and get his proper comeuppance and not a redemption arc).
May 24, 2025 @ 11:41 pm
Omega… Well, he had to come back some day (In my “Counter-factual Doctor Who revival powered by bad ideas” art project, Omega was the returning villain for the 50th anniversary special, and then reappeared in the equivalent to the Master’s role in the equivalent to “The End of Time”) , but having him come back at the same time as The Rani seems like eating your seed corn? When we someday get a “Season 3”, they’re going to have to bring back The Quarks.
May 24, 2025 @ 10:37 pm
What they done to Belinda made me really uncomfortable.
We have two brainwashed companions in this episode. One of them has agency, her own B-plot and joins silly resistance that tries to hack TV signal with an Ipad, but they are trying.
Other is reduced to tradwife, who is a bit too trigger happy to call black van on people. Which has some unfortunate implications by itself, but also highlights her role in the series overall. Last time she did something meaningful (i.e not being background character, damsel in distress or reason for male lead righteous fury) to the plot was “Lux”. It’s not the first time POC companion gets short end of the stick compared to her blonde predecessor.
May 24, 2025 @ 10:51 pm
I’m kind of hoping Omega is a fakeout – unless the Doctor beats him by slow-motion judo-ing the dark side of his mind.
The bit that struck me as actually interesting was the plummeting Doctor insisting that Poppy was really his daughter – particularly when we know that his granddaughter is due for an appearance.
May 24, 2025 @ 11:03 pm
I tend to enjoy “something is Wrong with the world” stories, so much of this worked pretty well for me; I got something of a “The Lathe of Heaven” vibe from the altered world (if the protagonist of that book had been terrible, anyway), and the small hints that mugs fall through tables all the time in this world were unsettling.
That said, this season has done very little to shake my feeling that it would benefit from a few more episodes. I have no idea how much credence to give the “Gatwa is leaving the show” rumors, but it feels like a huge missed opportunity if that is the case; especially with the shorter seasons, it feels like there are a lot more facets of this Doctor left to explore.
May 24, 2025 @ 11:32 pm
All I can think about just at the moment is that there was a Doctor Who choose-your-own-adventure book I read in the 80s in which the “good” ending revealed that Omega was the Doctor’s grandfather.
May 25, 2025 @ 12:38 am
I’m eager to find out how bringing Omega back helps The Rani’s mad science.
May 25, 2025 @ 12:46 am
I can’t help but wonder what the reaction would be if you could time travel back to RTD’s first era, where he held back even the word “Gallifrey” for two seasons, and reveal that in 2025 he’d be writing a finale featuring Omega, Susan, two Ranis, Kate Stewart and Mel Bush. It’s almost fun in its exuberance, except for the part where none of it amounts to anything or is even having that much fun.
I agree with the consensus that this story is doing interesting things apart from that, especially in showing how family, neighbours and coworkers enforce norms regardless of how absurd and harmful they are. I found the wheelie bins full of “slips” an intriguingly evocative image, tying in a very real weekly ritual we perform interfacing with an aspect of modern society we live in some degree of denial about.
Very rich fruit for a writer with Davies’ interests…which is all jettisoned into the Underverse for an insipid cliffhanger. And in the wake of that, I cannot see how The Reality War could possibly end up as the stronger of the two halves. But we shall see.
May 25, 2025 @ 1:10 am
I actually really liked it! Yes, that is primarily on the strength of just seeing a bunch of weird loaded ideas (such as the ones in your bullet points), but that kept me entertained.
Maybe the weirdest thing in it for me, though: the skeleton beasts are animals that never existed, yes? As in, the sorts of animals whose bones are fashioned into the masks and armor of Faction Paradox???
May 25, 2025 @ 1:49 am
Seriously, what’s with all the damn flashbacks, all the time? Whether it’s to Mark of the Rani, the episode Conrad was in, or to remind us of what happened in the actual episode just 10 minutes ago? Is thia actually how TV is now?
And while I’m at it, is it now obligatory to flash up all the incarnations of the doctor on-screen at key dramatic moments? Feels like I’m watching a clip show.