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 25, 2025 @ 4:27 am
Yes. Someone else noticed the similarity with PKD, though I was thinking mostly of Eye in the Sky.
May 25, 2025 @ 11:06 am
I love PKD and his works, and I think he’s just become synonymous (for fairly good reasons mind) with any “what is reality?” story at this point – his name is the trope now.
May 25, 2025 @ 6:22 pm
Eye in the Sky is a good comparison too, especially given that one’s politics.
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 25, 2025 @ 10:25 am
“Next week could be a masterpiece, or it could be awful and sour everyone on the series as a whole. What a weird situation.”
Having flashbacks to the previous season finale.
May 25, 2025 @ 11:03 am
The Legend of Ruby Sunday at least had a feeling of ominous dread, that this was all leading somewhere. Here there’s none of that, it’s all just marking time until it ends. I really hope that all the character drama is being saved until next week, otherwise this is all going to feel like such a waste.
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 25, 2025 @ 3:36 am
Yeah, I do agree that this episode should still have had the usual moment when the Doctor and current companion are backed into a corner looking terribly concerned, and the companion says “The Rani, who or what is a Rani?!” and then the Doctor gives a single sentence summation. I don’t find it to be a horribly unforgivable sin though, just a flaw.
May 25, 2025 @ 2:20 am
RTD severely misunderstands even the most enthusiastic Who viewer aged around 13 years old if he expecs them to get through even a minute of Mark and the Rani
May 25, 2025 @ 4:17 am
And yet Mark of the Rani remains, as of time of writing, the high watermark for Rani TV stories. Ponder that for a second…
May 25, 2025 @ 4:51 am
I’d not seen MotR other than a few clips before, so I spun it up on iPlayer last night. It’s true that it suffers from so many of the faults of the era, the main one being the Doctor-Peri interactions. One wonders why that poor woman didn’t take a run into the woods to have a good scream like Belinda did yesterday, before returning with a Large Axe. But I found it lot more watchable than, say, Vengeance on Varos. I shall perhaps steel myself for TatR another time.
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 25, 2025 @ 1:57 am
I’m sorry, but I think the suggestion that casual modern viewers might struggle to recall characters like Shirley, a character who appeared literally three episodes ago, is patently absurd. And even if that were the case, are those the people whom any show should cater to in its writing?
There’s a difference between being (potentially, ymmv) fanwanky and overly referential and trusting the audience to be able to keep track of a tertiary ensemble cast, something even the most lowest-common-denominator sitcom used to take as given.
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 25, 2025 @ 1:36 pm
Off topic, but are you Roadworx from Doomworld by any chance? You have the same profile pic 🙂
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 25, 2025 @ 3:58 am
Yeah, as Arakus says, these seasons were made back to back so there was no chance of reflecting or changing anything substantial between seasons.
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 25, 2025 @ 5:02 pm
Omega was a returning villain for the 20th Anniversary season. And this is also the 20th Anniversary season. I do not believe this is a coincidence.
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 25, 2025 @ 4:57 am
I can imagine that if Ruby (or almost any other modern companion) was the wife in this episode, then that table mugs scene would be the cue for her trust of the Doctor to break through the false reality. Whereas Belinda’s reaction to John Smith’s doubts was not just to disbelieve him, but to report him.
Maybe if the series had continued Belinda’s introductory characterisation as a companion who’s unusually skeptical of the Doctor, then her reaction would have felt like a natural continuation/escalation of that?
Unfortunately that wouldn’t solve the uncomfortable optics you mention.
May 25, 2025 @ 5:13 am
Problem is, that distrust pretty much went out of the window in second episode. And even if it didn’t, reporting neighbors and relatives to a vaguely fascist government is not something I expect from Doctor Who companions, even reluctant. Especially after she had her own moment of doubts over nature of the world.
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 25, 2025 @ 10:31 am
“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.”
I think he is. They used a line from a BF audio. If there’s a voice actor for him next week, surely you’d just record a new line for use here? I think we might glimpse him but that’ll be it.
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 @ 11:56 am
Is that the one with K9 and Drax (of all people)? I had that one!
May 25, 2025 @ 2:19 pm
I know there were three of them and I am uncertain which elements were in which books, but I do know Drax and K9 were in one of them. Also there was a bit where Turlough thinks that a message revealing the impending threat came from someone named “Annie Hiliate”.
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.
May 25, 2025 @ 4:11 am
Judging by the new Mission: Impossible film, which features a large quantity of flashback clips from previous films in the series (including at least one that’s shown twice!), it’s also how movies are now.
May 25, 2025 @ 5:49 am
Fine, I guess, as a cute way to reward those who keep forking out good money to keep following a franchise. But Wish World literally flashes back to remind us that Ruby had knocked at the Doctor & Belinda’s door earlier in the episode. It’s like the show is petrified that people aren’t paying attention for more than five minutes, but at the same time invites us to find significant a giggling laugh from 2023, oh, and also, a villain last mentioned when his ‘hand’ became a thing in a story from 1988.
Maybe I’m just getting old.
May 25, 2025 @ 9:02 am
I watched the episode with someone who was on their phone half the time and kept asking what was happening. I finally understood why they do these inane flashbacks – to fill you in if you weren’t paying attention to the earlier scene. Now I’m not sure how to feel. Certainly some viewers are benefitting from them, but since when did it matter that a casual viewer could figure out what exactly the hell is happening on Doctor Who anyway? (Some have argued that carrying around machines with easy access to all the answers means we’ve come to expect, well, easy access to all the answers…)
Another problem (or intriguing phenomenon) may be how to distinguish between unknown information that was established in earlier episodes and unknown information that hasn’t been explained yet. “Are the Doctor and Belinda dating?” and “Why is the Rani?” are equally total mysteries to a new viewer, yet only one is answerable. I remember as a kid asking my parents if there was more information about the Time Agency than was explained in the episode etc.
May 25, 2025 @ 10:57 am
The important factor is not whether the questions are answerable but whether the information (I can’t stand the pompous use of the word ‘Lore’) is necessary to follow the plot. A back story of the Time Agency was not. Similarly a back story of the Rani is also inessential to this story (even though that backstory exists). “Are the Doctor and Belinda dating?” on the other hand is a pretty important question to understand the weird dynamics of the fake world they are in. Particularly its valorisation of heteronormativity.
May 25, 2025 @ 6:00 pm
At least DW seems to have (so far) avoided the other vaguely opposite trend of spending the first minute or so giving a preview of the episode you’re about to watch, presumably so you can decide you no longer need to watch it…
May 25, 2025 @ 12:43 pm
Well, recycling old footage (often as explicit flashbacks) to save on the budget has a long and proud history in cheap sci-fi…
May 25, 2025 @ 1:52 am
I just feel really sorry for Varada Sethu. What a waste this series has turned out to be for her. Her first two episodes formed a solid introduction, and then…
Once again, the POC companion draws the short straw: consider Martha next to Rose & Donna, Bill next to Amy & Clara, Yaz & Ryan next to Graham, and now Belinda next to Ruby. Belinda had such promise early on, but the show is consistently more interested in the white companions.
May 25, 2025 @ 2:09 am
Arguably she had it the worst so far.
Bill, Yaz and Ryan at least did stuff on regular basis while not even being sole companions.
Martha didn’t stick the landing and her crush was cringe, but she had agency.
Belinda was just sidelined and then became stepford collaborator.
May 25, 2025 @ 4:56 am
Martha’s best moment (well, one of them) was her, “oh, she was a BLONDE” in “Utopia” when even she gets heartily sick of the whole Rose thing. Freema’s just so good in that moment and it’s hard to imagine it’s not real frustration bleeding through.
May 25, 2025 @ 2:17 am
The Rani, Omega, and Susan all return at once. Seriously. I don’t think the show will be cancelled, but it’s hard to argue it doesn’t deserve to be. And that’s before we even get to it being done via a clunky, ludicrously long monologue which repeats itself endlessly and still fails to describe who any of them are properly.
I think the Big Finish comparison is frankly too kind. It’s the sort of thing you imagine might be the grand plan of one of those fans with no professional writing experience but an entire era of their own planned out.
I adored the first ~20 minutes, so it’s far from the worst episode ever, but The Timeless Children may well be the only one more fundamentally misconceived.
May 25, 2025 @ 5:03 am
I think there’s now a question as to whether the Rani or the Master holds the award for the longest “standing around just expositing plot at the Doctor” (and no, the “this isn’t just exposition!” line doesn’t cover it. It’s just smugly dreadful). I’m not going to mount a defence of The Timeless Children but at least New Who viewers had plenty of time (and seasons) to be familiar with Gallifrey, Cybermen and the Master. Why are New New Who fans meant to care about a new character who isn’t explained, some random old lady on a telly and someone called Omega? They could have announced it was Swatch the Rani wanted to find in the Underverse and it would have had the same impact. I think I actually prefer The Timeless Children to this and that’s saying something. What a monumentally shit episode.
May 25, 2025 @ 5:39 am
RTD’s sadly lost his touch. Hard to believe the writer behind Utopia’s pitch-perfect reveal (a building up of tension that engages every level of fan – from diehard anorak to casual viewer) is the same person responsible for this week’s episode. “Omega” is thrown into the mix so lackadaisically, without any real sense of the stakes ramping up or an imminent twist, that I actually managed to speak over the entire reveal with a casual comment about something else. I had to rewind just to catch it.
May 25, 2025 @ 1:28 pm
I am still holding out hope for a shocking twist where it turns out that the point of this entire exercise has just been to set a massive pile of Disney Money on fire as a performance art project.
May 25, 2025 @ 7:36 am
I think TTC is still far worse tbh, at least so far, and even if Reality War fully wrecks one or more of the Rani, Omega, and Susan, they can just be ignored forever with no issues. TTC did permanent damage to the ability to tell whole categories of story involving the Doctor’s past. Plus Wish World has actual good bits lol.
I do agree with what you’re saying in terms of fanwank incomprehensibility though, Moffat’s “no one knows who the Rani is” comment applies even more strongly to Omega, and their names have now been cliffhangers in successive weeks
May 25, 2025 @ 1:23 pm
While I don’t believe The Timeless Children will be topped as the worst lore altering finale in NuWho, it’s difficult to argue if Wish World is actually better than Ascension of the Cybermen.
May 25, 2025 @ 3:43 am
I sincerely wished (lmao) that the whole “far right wandavision” part of this was its own episode untied from any other plotline instead of the finale
Felt like having it be part of the finale was an even worse version of Turn Left abandonning the interesting parts of its premise 2/3rd of the way in to have rose return and set up the stolen earth or whichever finale it was
Imagine if sutehk was here for half of dot & bubble for some reason
May 25, 2025 @ 3:44 am
I’ve been complaining for a couple of weeks bout Google repeatedly insisting that the most recent episode of Doctor Who was Castrovalva (season 117), but it turns out it was sort of prophetic. A fake world constructed by an old time lord enemy as a Doctor trap. I did like the idea that the Rani(s) where trying to intensify the level of doubt rather than suppress it (or supressing it to make it more intense), sort of accelerationist scepticism.
I can’t call it a bad episode given the giant floaty skeleton animals and Captain Poppy but I also can’t call it a successful one.
May 25, 2025 @ 3:55 am
There’s a clip in the preview for next week where the Rani explains she wants to use Omega to “build a new Gallifrey”, which retroactively clarified her plan but uhh I think this episode should’ve done that.
Also “do you know what that means?” is a pretty lame thing to shout as you’re plummeting to your death lol
May 25, 2025 @ 4:23 am
Am I the only person to notice the similarity between this and some of Phillip K Dick’s work, in particular The Eye in the Sky. In that novel the protagonists are projected by mishap into a series of alternative realities which turn out to be the various perceptual world of those involved, so we get fundamentalist world, elderly pride world, communist world etc. If there was any influence a beat has been missed by having only one world.
May 25, 2025 @ 5:25 am
After this episode finished I went “Oh so it is getting cancelled, then.” Not because it was especially bad – it started strong, I liked the slip, LOVED the huge bone beasts – but because the show is falling into the all-too-familiar trap of catering to a fan minority, instead of just being good television. I say this as an Arc of Infinity apologist: “The Rani brings back Omega!” is disastrous. I felt absolutely nothing at either of those character reveals.
Now, Susan, on the other hand…
May 25, 2025 @ 7:00 am
Honestly I don’t think this is catering to a fan minority. Fan wisdom says the Rani is a fringe villain from 3 stories renowned for being rubbish and Omega was last scene in a boring Gallifrey story.
This story gives them context as a surviving Time Lord possibly an ex of the Doctor and as happy to use him as to impress him, and The First Time Lord, a terrifying presence trapped in the Underverse.
Now, I’m not thrilled by the treatment of the Rani’s character. But “she’s not like she was on the 80s” and “she’s too much like the Master in 2007” are complaints for old obsessives not casual viewers, here for the spectacle.
May 25, 2025 @ 9:05 am
For clarity, by “fan minority” I don’t mean a specific portion of the fandom. What I mean is the slice of the overall audience that is comprised of fans, rather than viewers — the sort of people who don’t need to google “Rani” or “Omega”. The “old obsessives”, as you say. Us, in other words.
Bringing these relatively obscure characters back is 100% designed to appeal to fans, because who else cares? (Whether it’s successful or not is another matter.) And I disagree about the story giving them context. It’s very stingy with context. Like El points out, it doesn’t even bother to explain that Rani is an amoral scientist! Absolutely zero groundwork put into setting up Omega at all. This is not a casual viewer-friendly introduction. It’s fan shorthand — banking on recognition to give the reveals meaning, rather than good writing.
As a rule of thumb, when Doctor Who becomes ABOUT Doctor Who, it’s time to worry. We’ve had years now of flashbacks and references and lore dumps, and it isn’t slowing down. The show is eating its own tail.
May 25, 2025 @ 9:56 am
“Like El points out, it doesn’t even bother to explain that Rani is an amoral scientist!”
Quite. In fact, the episode goes out of its way to introduce the Rani (to new/casual viewers) as some kind of witch, complete with broomstick.
May 25, 2025 @ 2:13 pm
I’m sort of thinking now. If you aren’t familiar with the Rani and Omega, do they work here as well as, say, The Corsair and Tecteun? If you didn’t know the Rani was a returning villain and she was just a previously-unmentioned evil time lord, does the story work better or worse? If it works better, that’s not exactly “writing for the fans”. What I might challenge though is whether the episode does enough to give us the sense of who the Rani is and why it matters that she is a new character rather than The Master Again.
May 25, 2025 @ 5:28 am
The line in the preview about the Rani using Omega’s body to build a new Gallifrey is leading me to believe that Omega is dead, which a) gives me some hope that next week might not be an overstuffed washout, and b) sounds like a potentially cool plot (‘the Rani rebuilds Gallifrey using Omega’s corpse’). If not then it’ll definitely be the Spiderman 3 of series finales, with too many villains at once (and hopefully Ncuti Gatwa doing the emo Peter Parker dance).
May 25, 2025 @ 12:05 pm
Isn’t one of Omega’s defining traits that he hasn’t got a body?
May 25, 2025 @ 5:28 am
I very much enjoyed the episode. I am genuinely looking forward to next week to see how it turns out. HOWEVER…
I’d prefer to see Lore more restricted, get back to a show made of anthology stories with a broad through line. Seasons without extended finales. Let the Doctor have new adventures in different situations most of the time. Yes, there will be occasional returns from Daleks to keep the Nation estate happy. I realise that is is contrary to popular taste and the AmazDisniFlix model, and I get that it may not happen. What was the line about comics trying to imitate Jack Kirby and the sincerest imitation would be to do something more original (I’ll be flamed for a misquote no doubt)?
RTD’s crowning glory will always 2005. Knowing that it had to have wide appeal, he stayed clear of excess continuity, dropped a few little Easter eggs, but generally addressed an audience that had forgotten or never knew the core ideals of the show. Not quite a reboot, but in the style of one.
Lore just isn’t as necessary as some people think. The concept of “maintaining a wish and keeping it coherent is mentally draining” is true on multiple levels. It’s true for Conrad (well, he tells us, it’s not shown). We don’t need to invoke the Lore of Omega from 1973 to see and know it. We don’t need to reference the Land of Fiction to see it and know it. We don’t need to resurrect WhizzKid to tell is.
Absolute fealty to The Lore is no better than Newton’s Sleep.
May 25, 2025 @ 5:35 am
I quite liked the stuff in the imaginary world – Conrad’s ideal society being a warped , more oppressive version of the 1950s made sense. But yes , I lost interest once it got to the Rani and her grand schemes and CGI end of the world (is that every RTD finale? Not far off ). I am slightly amused that RTD seems to have been trolling fans all along – the pay off to a two season mystery being the Rani , always a rubbish character, and then suddenly we find out he’s tricked us and the Big Bad was Omega all along. But – where is the CGI Omega looming into view at the end of the episode? Surely that should be how the episode ends?
May 25, 2025 @ 5:56 am
I’m sincerely hoping that Omega doesn’t actually make an appearance in the next episode. Unless he’s a brain in a jar, like Morbius, bitching at the Rani. That would be fun. Or played by Peter Davison covered in Rice Krispies.
May 25, 2025 @ 6:09 am
The trailer suggests the Rani is going to be using “his body” for her purposes of constructing a new Gallifrey, which might imply he’s dead or comatose rather than an active agent in the storyline.
May 25, 2025 @ 1:30 pm
Curious whether it will matter that Omega doesn’t HAVE a body.
May 25, 2025 @ 6:10 am
I’m a bit surprised this one didn’t land a bit better here.
I really enjoyed the 1950s heteronormative hell world – I thought it was very artfully drawn.
The fact that it’s impossible for anyone to meet this fictional standard of perfection – everyone’s got bright orange Slip bins outside for their broken crockery.
The way it drives even characters we know to be good to such a state of fear that they report their loved ones for doubts they themselves have.
Mel’s scene – saying she’s alone so she’ll be glad to sit inside by herself and feel grateful. But she’s bringing out a broken cup to the slip bin so what was sitting at home thinking?
The limits it places on everyone’s ability to express themselves: the Doctor’s ostracised at work for telling another man he’s attractive – even though it’s in service of the 1950s hell world heteronormativity.
Belinda running into the woods to scream in lonely despair when she can’t perform motherhood to her own mother’s satisfaction? She’s shopped to the authorities for not being able to do the cisgender motherhood performance well enough.
The image of the Doctor sitting up alone late at night drinking. Deeply unhappy and repressed and not able to recognise it until catching a hot guy on an illicit late night TV show breaks open his world?
I thought there was so much more in this than just wheel spinning until the cliffhanger and Part 2. It’s a comprehensive tour of why gender fascism is miserable, incoherent and simply doesn’t work
May 25, 2025 @ 6:16 am
Agreed on all counts. It’s a much richer and more thought provoking episode than Legend of Ruby Sunday, which felt more like a trailer for next week to me, and certainly one with a) a duller aesthetic and b) very little to say in comparison.
It also clears the extremely low bar of being the best Rani story of all time (yes I’m including the EU). Okay, make that “the first good Rani story of all time”.
May 25, 2025 @ 6:30 am
The Rani material is the definitely the weakest part of it. It’s hard to see it as anything other than a lukewarm retread of Davies’ treatment of the Master. Which is a shame, not because that wasn’t good but because it’s been done and better.
But it’s also a pretty minor part compared with JK Rowling takes over the world and not only is that awful and stupid but JK Rowling is only a tool of greater evils who want to destroy society altogether.
May 25, 2025 @ 7:49 am
Wouldn’t quite agree, I think there’s enough here that makes her distinctive. She’s not viciously vindictive towards the Doctor, for one thing: as soon as she’s finished using him for a specific purpose, she dumps him into the nearest chasm without sentiment. The Master would lord it over the Doctor for an extended period of time first, at the very least. The big scheme is an experiment/project of a world in a petri dish rather than rule or dominion for the sake of it; she’s not particularly sadistically thrilled that it’s going to people, she just doesn’t care (note also she doesn’t go out of her way to kill the couple at the end of last week); and she doesn’t seem to be primarily motivated by messing with the Doctor (as the Master invariably is). We don’t yet know why she wants Omega apart from something to do with “a new Gallifrey”, but I wouldn’t be surprised if as an infamous scientist she’s seeking out the ultimate famous Time Lord scientist/engineer to repurpose reality in an image that goes away with gods and magic, even if she’s clearly not above using such powers and taking on a Wicked Witch mantle to get what she wants. The weaponising of doubt and scepticism in the nature of the world also feels very much like her rationalist MO that would encourage always questioning one’s reality, as does the syringe-looking sonic. Even the choice to make their dance sequence be a waltz feels like Russell saying “no look, she’s classy and refined and superior” as opposed to a cheesy 1990s/2000s Britpop banger as is otherwise his wont with the Master.
May 25, 2025 @ 7:50 am
Going to kill people
/
Does away with
May 25, 2025 @ 9:25 am
Mm. Fair enough as it goes. There are definitely points of distinction but I’m not sure “doing stuff like the Master but subtly different” quite does it for me. She’s dances with the Doctor…but in a classy way. She throws him into a deathtrap…but in a detached way. Anyway, the narration building her up is at pains to mention their relationship, that she thinks they’d be friends if she could only make him see. It is pretty Mastery/Missyesque to my eyes. It’s distinct…but not very distinct.
The weaponisation of doubt is nice, I’ll give you that. But I still think it’s the weakest aspect of a string episode.
May 25, 2025 @ 11:52 am
Problem with that: not only are the characters effectively overwritten with different people here, Belinda was already such a blank slate that it’s difficult to say either way what we “know” she would or wouldn’t have done in that situation.
When the Doctor unconsciously admires another man’s beauty, we can at least tell that’s a trait of the real 15 slipping through. What actual equivalent is there for Belinda?
May 25, 2025 @ 1:26 pm
The weakness of Belinda’s character the ambiguity about whether she’s a reluctant traveller wanting to get home as soon as possible, or someone who loves travelling with him. So far, she’s come across as having a primary motivation to get home on the day she left, to reconnect with family, and so one. But more often than not the Doctor persuades/seduces her into Just One Adventure.
It’s possible to have shades of meaning and transitions over time. Barbara and Ian come to value their time travelling in the Tardis, but when given the option to return they take it. That takes time, and Disney schedules make that kind of character growth difficult. I think Varada and Ncuti do pretty well what the script requires them to do, but the ambiguity is there. And a whiff of suspicion that the Doctor is going all manipulative and chessmastery … that no one commits to fully.
I can’t help feeling that a single season of about 14 episodes transmitted consecutively would make this easier to manager compared to two lots of 8 eps + Christmas specials. But yeah, economics, Disney, whatever.
May 25, 2025 @ 7:11 am
This had plenty of moments that I kind of liked but the whole thing just fails to hang together and none of it remotely matters and will doubtless get rest buttoned next week. Anita Dobson and Archie Panjabi at least feel like their having fun, even if neither version of their character feels recognisable as the Rani.
Glad I wasn’t the only one thinking of the Ancestor Cell or Faction Paradox with the giant bone things! And bits of the Fash world felt very much like RTD trying to do a version of one of Robert Shearman’s stage plays (the accusation that Belinda isn’t a good mother if she doesn’t know how long she was in labour for could have come straight out of Caustic Comedies) … at least until my partner pointed out it was straight up rip off of WandaVision. Combine that with the very TVA looking redress of the UNIT headquarters set gives the unshakeable impression that RTD has no higher aspiration than making Doctor Who into Marvel-lite.
In hindsight, it an odd contrast to The Legend of Ruby Sunday, which was blatantly just an extended trailer for Empire of Death, but still actually felt like it was building up to something the whole episode and wasn’t just marking time until the cliffhanger.
May 25, 2025 @ 11:16 am
I’m not going to comment until the second part of this finale drops which will undoubtedly resolve all the unanswered questions from the last 62 years which have been puzzling Disney+ viewers; including – Why have the Reapers never turned up again to seal a time wound? Is the Doctor really half human on his mothers side? Whatever happened to Dodo? Is Kamelion still in a cupboard in the TARDIS somewhere? And was the Doctor really going to murder that caveman with a rock?
May 25, 2025 @ 11:34 am
Remember Elizabeth talking about the Web Planet?
“The story, in other words, is unmistakably a case of familiar, well-loved characters thrown into an impossibly strange situation full of bizarre spectacle. The audience does not need to ‘believe’ the spectacle to get into this, because the main dramatic tension is in fact how weird and strange everything is. Immersion and belief are anathema to what’s going on here – bizarre and unsettling theatrical staging does a much better job of making the audience feel uncomfortable and lost (much like the characters) than any sort of realism possibly could.”
I read that write-up maybe ten years ago, and was reminded of it when I stumbled across the snippet of Ruby and the Doctor singing that ‘goblin song’ back in the first Disney season; I think it still applies to the show. I know, I know, ‘TV and the show has matured some, and so have we, and it’s effing glorious when the show can do and be more than that,’ but if this is the show’s mere ‘low bar’ it can still manage to land, then fantastic! It course be worse, it might only be as interesting as a Marvel D+ series… maybe it can aim to be as exciting and vista expanding as the Obi-won series.
May 25, 2025 @ 12:42 pm
Yet Another episode where Belinda does virtually nothing and it solidifies ann idea for me which I’ve been having for quite awhile that dr who in it’s current format has outgrown the need for the long-term companion role and that it would be interesting to see a series without one.
Instead we could have a series of temporary or one off companions as audience identification figures but I think it would vastly open up the storytelling possibilities, you could introduce unreliable or hugely biased narrators and you wouldn’t be restricted to portraying a 21st-century human perspective on events.
I’d like a story where the dr visits a planet and something obvious to him and the planets inhabitants is happening but the audience has to figure out what it is without it being explained.
May 25, 2025 @ 12:50 pm
It strikes me that the reappearance of various characters from the show’s past isn’t just revival for its own sake, but done in order to ‘correct’ the original portrayal of that character. So we now all accept that the 1965 version of the Toymaker is racist, and his updated presentation gives him a ludicrous German accent and prejudiced opinions to critique the original. Sutekh is shorn of all the Egyptian imagery whose use is explicitly critiqued as well. The Rani appears played by a South Asian actress to amend the original portrayal by a white woman of a character with an Indian title. (I struggle to imagine how this might apply to Omega). None of the roles in these stories needs to be occupied by those revived characters; each could have been someone new. Marcus Greel’s up next, presumably. It’s not just reordering the distant past, either: RTD seems to want to rectify his own egregious moments, such as the brainwashing of Donna.
Yesterday I heard the name Omega and my heart sank, but when I was 13 I was very excited by working out that he was the hidden enemy in Arc of Infinity, in the same way that I congratulated myself for realising that the Melkur was the Master’s TARDIS in Keeper of Traken. Maybe 13-year-old fans are the same now and RTD understands that better than we do here. Maybe, dreadfully, he realises the thing doesn’t need to be all that good to achieve what it has to, which would be hugely depressing (I’m not sure whether anyone has mentioned how flaccid and unremarkable the dialogue has been these last couple of seasons. I got annoyed by Steven Moffat’s smart-alecking at the time, but I don’t half miss it now).
Or maybe you can understand this current epoch of Who as a strange inversion of the 1980s, in which long-term fans who remember (or if a bit younger at least know about) what happened then, are impatient with the disinterment of the show’s past and would prefer something more original, whereas the rest of the world doesn’t care. The Nathan-Turner excessive pandering to fans in the mid-80s is now itself part of fanlore: we’re all brought up on that story, and we therefore cry fanwank when an old character reappears, but perhaps that’s just our problem. Especially when you can discover the show’s past in a matter of seconds rather than through buying books or videos – if you don’t know who these people are, there’s a Wikipedia page waiting.
May 25, 2025 @ 1:23 pm
I’d like to posit the argument, not in relation to El but in relation to the whole conversation down here, that an obsessive worry over “what will the casual fans think” isn’t necessarily more rational than an obsessive worry over one’s own experience as a hardcore fan. At least the latter is being reactionary about their own experience, rather than a hypothetical imaginary person’s experience.
I don’t think new viewers are missing any important information about the Rani and Omega – if anything the choice to show flashback images of her is misleading and unhelpful, because her role in the story doesn’t depend on her previous plans whatsoever. And Omega is just a McGuffin, and his importance to this story has been explained in this episode. As for Susan, she was discussed extensively last season – we’re following up on that. Absolutely none of this relies on outside information, and I would’ve gotten excited about it as a child who didn’t know Classic at all.
Conversely, as a young teenager, I fell off of Moffat’s run hard, and when I look back on it now I realize how many casual continuity references there were that just felt like “random stuff” to me – the Great Intelligence, the Sisterhood of Karn, the city on Skaro from The Daleks, the Matrix. It all felt really off to me, and verveless. As an adult I can understand that Moffat was (I believe) deliberately avoiding the Davies-style epic register, but as a kid I found myself confused. But those Capaldi years are, I believe, fairly well-liked here.
I think there’s some major criticisms to be made of the RTD2 era, but “I assume that casual fans couldn’t understand it” does not feel like one of them to me whatsoever, especially when so many of the non-finale episodes HAVE been 100% new concepts. (I could use less outright flashbacks though, I agree about that – it creates the unhelpful illusion that this is all less standalone than it really is.)
May 25, 2025 @ 1:39 pm
Wait, I’ve remembered. This WAS a Big Finish plot. The Doctor and his companions clearly having been brainwashed into good and compliant citizens in a fascist world, and slowly realizing something is wrong but fighting to maintain the illusion. The Doctor’s adventures recontextualized and sanitized to fit the worldview of the power structure? This is The Natural History of Fear. Except that it can’t have one of the few times Big Finish actually did something amazing with the medium of audio.
(Oh god I am comparing a Big Finish story favorably to an RTD story)
May 25, 2025 @ 4:29 pm
I think a version of this that works on a similar logic but is more eventful is you have the Doctor, under the spell of this new world, enforcing this status quo. Like the police box appears and the Doctor is the police. And over the course of the episode he breaks his brainwashing. At the very least it could be a bit more Lynchian with it.
But yeah, the fake world is a mid season idea, because you know it can’t last. It didn’t really work in Wedding of River Song, but worked much better in Extremis (and then worse again in Lie of the Land). This was basically Don’t Worry Darling, but with Doctor Who bolted on rather than with a Doctor Who twist.
Interesting to see how the finale handles The Doctor, Belinda, Ruby, the Rani, the Rani, Conrad, Mel, Kate, Colonel Ibrahim, Shirley, Omega, Susan, Captain Poppy, and any other characters that might pop up next week.