Season 2, episode 6 reviewed
Overview
2,492 words, 13 minutes read time.
Not being a fan of Eurovision, and most definitely not a fan of episode writer Juno Dawson, this was the episode I was looking forward to the least this season. But I was pleasantly surprised. Yes, like everything so far in Russell T Davies’ second period as showrunner, fourteen episodes and five specials to date, the plot falls apart the more you think about it. But at least there was a plot, and we were back in Science Fiction country, with proper aliens, space, space stations and explosions. This made a refreshing change after too many diversions into RTD’s Pantheon of Gods-Fantasy world.
It wasn’t without the inevitable left-liberal posturing, but on the whole, I thought that Dawson approached this as a Doctor Who fan and writer, rather than as a political activist. It also had one fan-pleasing moment that lifted the episode above the ordinary.
The episode left me looking forward to the two-episode finale.
Positives
This was described beforehand as the ‘most expensive episode ever’ and for once, we could see where the Disney money had been spent. The episode was visually stunning in places. The ariel shots of the Harmony Arena looked great, as did the sight of the hundred thousand strong audience at the song contest being sucked into space. Especially impressive, was the Doctor floating through the black void outside the stadium, his face slowly freezing. It was also good to see some proper aliens, aliens who looked like Science Fiction aliens, in the crowd and on the stage, although, this has to be qualified by some disappointment that there wasn’t more of this and that the main characters, and the main villain, drawn from the Hellion race, were of the usual humanoid form, albeit humanoids with horns.
When it was announced beforehand that the episode would feature four especially written songs, written by regular show composer Murray Gold, there was the worry that this would be a full-on musical episode, packed with tunes of the dubious quality of There’s Always a Twist at the End from The Devils Chord. As it happens, the use of music was nicely restrained, with three of the songs highly truncated in nature, including the amusing Dugga-Doo, and the final original song, sung by the Black Hellion character in her own language was good, even if it didn’t quite raise the musical stakes to the heights that were clearly intended. Even the use of Bucks Fizz’ Making Your Mind Up fitted, even if it did account for a sizeable proportion of the large budget.
As for the plot. It was thin, and simple, but at least it made sense in terms of character motivation. Essentially, it was two Hellion terrorists attempting to destroy the people in the stadium, and three trillion viewers watching the song contest at home, in protest at the Poppy Honey Company, the not very originally named ‘Corporation’ sponsorship of the event. This company had ravaged the Hellion planet to the point of desolation, by harvesting its honey poppies to extinction, for the sake of producing ‘honey flavouring’ for vast profit.
For once, the story allowed for a degree of ambiguity. On the one hand, we are invited to feel sympathy for the plight of the Hellion people, whilst weighing this against the response of the terrorists. I doubt that many would see the destruction of three trillion people (or, more accurately, sentient beings) as a proportionate response to aggressive economic colonisation, but at least we were given reasons as to why the antagonists acted as they did, which is better than the usual ‘Because straight white men are bad’ which has been the standard of late. Yes, once again, the main villain was indeed a straight white man, as I will come back to, but at least he was given some believable motivation.
The use of poppies as the source of the Corporation’s profit, suggested to me a link to Afghanistan, though some have made the connection with the ongoing situation in Gaza. If so, the subject was dealt with in a rather shallow fashion, with the suggestion that an emotional song could make everything OK, even though the power of the Corporation was never really addressed or challenged. This aspect of the story put me in mind of the weak Amazon satire Kerblam! From the Chibnall/Whittaker era.
The episode will be best remembered for those two big fan-pleasing moments. I discus the Mrs. Flood reveal and the return of the Rani below. But, the big one for me was the return of Susan Foreman.
Susan, played by Carole Ann-Ford, is the Doctor’s granddaughter and a genuine Doctor Who legend. She was one of the original Tardis team alongside William Hartnell’s First Doctor. More importantly, she is the only member of the Doctor’s family ever identified. Susan left the show in 1964, accompanied by Hartnell’s iconic ‘You go forward in all your beliefs, and prove to me that I have not been mistaken in mine’ speech as he left her with new love David Campbell in the ravages of a twenty second Century Earth ravaged by Dalek invasion. She returned only once, in the Five Doctor’s 20th anniversary special in 1983.
I’ve been hoping for a Susan story since the show returned in 2005, and been invested enough to check out the way the character has been fleshed out and developed in some of the novels, and in the Big Finish audios, where Carole Ann has now been reprising the Susan away from the cameras for more than twenty years.
We’d had lots of false trails through the years, mentions from both the Tenth and the Eleventh, and Peter Capaldi’s Twelfth even had a photograph of her in the Tardis. Then, last season seemed to be building towards her return, only for the whole ‘Susan’ theme to be wasted on the useless ‘Susan Twist’ character/actress. My worry was that RTD would go with a regenerated Susan without the involvement of the original actress. That would have been wrong, as I mentioned in a previous review.
But here, we got the real deal, the real Susan. It was only a few seconds, and she may or may not have existed only in the Doctor’s mind, but it was still genuinely emotional to see Carole Ann back on the screen in Doctor Who, and her mouthing of the words ‘Find me’ suggested more to come in the finale. I hope so.
For once, even the Doctor’s excessive campness didn’t seem out of place, given the uber-gay faux-Eurovision setting, and Gatwa gave a solid performance, though I will discuss the ‘Dark Doctor’ torture scene below. Freddie Fox was excellent as Kid, and the side characters were more engaging than normal, with good performances from Charlie Condou and Kadiff Kirwan as the gay couple Gary and Mike, Iona Anderson as Kid’s reluctant sidekick Wynn, and Miriam Teak-Lee as Cora. It was nice to see more characters with a crucial role in the story, and even the Special Guest Star appearances of Rylan and Graham Norton worked in the context of the episode. Varada Sethru had some nice Belinda moments, even if I found it hard to believe that the thirty-year-old British-Indian nurse would be as bigger Eurovision fan as she appeared to be.
The episode ended with the doors blowing off the Tardis, which left us on a good old-fashioned cliffhanger in the style of the classic era.
One more important positive: Ncuti didn’t cry!
Negatives
I’ve spent so much time on Susan in the previous section, that it feels right to return to it here. Her return was a big moment, but I can’t help feeling that, after so long away, the reappearance of the Doctor’s granddaughter should have been even bigger. Making Susan share her re-appearance with another returning , the Rani, diluted the impact somewhat, and I think this was a little unfair on Carole Ann Ford.
As for the Rani herself, the return of this character had been so heavily trailed that the element of surprise was lost. Personally, I’m somewhat indifferent to the character anyway, and have never quite understood the fascination with her in some sections of fandom. After all, she has only previously appeared in two 1980s stories, The Mark of the Rani and The Time of The Rani, though I did quite enjoy rewatching these two stories again to get me up to speed. That’s not to say she couldn’t be good if used correctly. Her main attribute in the days when she was played by the excellent Kate O’Mara, was as an amoral but brilliant scientist, and I’m hoping to see her scientific knowledge and expertise put to good use eliminating the Pantheon of Gods, the ‘Mavity’ conceit, and all other fantastical elements from the universe, returning it to something that can be rationally understood by the application of the Doctor’s pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo.
I could have done without RTD (and Dawson) doubling-down on the bi-generation idea introduced in The Giggle. Especially as the concept was put to even more nefarious use here, with the added new lore that the old incarnation, Anita Dobson’s Mrs Flood as was, is subservient to the new, played by Archie Panjabi (which is excellent casting), ‘A’ Rani as opposed to ‘The’ Rani.
I can’t help but wonder who the show is for now. I loved seeing Susan back, and some will have equally strong emotions about the Rani’s. But assuming there are still casual viewers out there, how many of them would know who either of these characters are?
The tropes of the modern show are becoming as tiresome as those of bad 1970s comedy and drama. As soon as I heard that the episode would feature a couple going through marital difficulties, I knew that this wouldn’t be the standard heterosexual couple, because such things now barely exist on our screens, and sure enough, here was Mike and Gary, one was black, one white, thus ticking another diversity box. In addition, we had another disabled character, which is obviously not wrong in itself, but I can’t shake the feeling that the production team approaches casting with a chart on the wall chart, ensuring that ‘Everybody gets to see themself represented on screen.’
Clearly the show has a big problem with white heterosexual males. The give away that Kid was to be the villain of the piece wasn’t that he had Satanic horns on his head, but that he kissed a hot girl (Wynn). The horror.
This is three episodes out of six where the baddie fitted this profile, and as the villains in the others were gods from RTDs Pantheon (Lux and The Story and the Engine), and an unseen alien entity (The Well), that’s a high percentage.
What makes this more troubling is the way the Doctor has treated these characters. Al the Incel (which he wasn’t, anyway) in The Robot Revolution was returned to the state of a sperm and an egg by the little laundromat gadget, which the Doctor, and Belinda, found hilariously funny. In Luck Day, the Doctor travelled forwards in time to watch English podcaster Conrad die sad and alone aged forty-nine, and then nipped back to the present day to gloat about it to his face. Here, the Doctor full on tortured Kid for a good minute with an electronic taser type instrument.
It’s nice to see myself represented on screen, or it would be if the Doctor didn’t seem to hate me so much.
It’s this torture scene that has caused most controversy. For myself, leaving aside the writer’s intent as to the targets of the Doctor’s venom, we’ve seen enough of this ‘dark turn’ to know that it must be deliberate, must play a part in the finale, and should ultimately have resolution.
At the moment, the only explanation for this behaviour is through the reiteration of ‘The Last of the Time Lords’ theme, which we’ve already seen with Eccleston’s Ninth and, notably, with Tennant’s Tenth’ ‘Timelord Victorious’ story arc back in RTD 1. If that’s all there is to it, then it’s simply RTD revisiting past glories. Plus, there have been so many resets over the years, as with the human races’ knowledge or lack of regarding the existence of aliens, that it’s no longer clear where we stand with the Doctor, Gallifrey and his own people. The return of the Rani and Susan should make it clear to the Doctor that he is not the Last Timelord, but it remains to see how this thread will play out in the next two episodes.
The resolution of the plot depended on too many contrivances, in particular on Mike and Gary being in place at exactly the right time, and with just the skills needed to assist the Doctor in foiling Kid’s act of violent retribution.
Another problem is that, once again, nobody died. Too many miraculous resurrections destroy any sense of jeopardy, and that’s a petty in this case, where the initial sucking of the song contest audience into space was genuinely thrilling.
It was also rather silly that we were expected to believe that Gary processed one hundred thousand people, one by one, through his cryogenic chamber. That would take a long time, and it was also too much of a coincidence that Mrs Flood happened to be the very last one.
The Doctor has been described as a Superhero without superpowers.’ That is as he should be, but in the absense of such powers, there’s no real explanation as to how the Doctor was able to save himself from a certain frozen death in space, other than by a sheer act of will, which is far from satisfying.
There were also the usual pacing issues. The whole plot was essentially wrapped up within thirty-five minutes. This wasn’t such a glaring issue here, where the story was more cohesive and less convoluted than most. But it’s become a tired formula now that, after the twenty-fifth minute or so, Murray’s music will swell into bombastic mode, the Doctor will dash around shouting, laughing, and manically pressing buttons, and that, a few minutes later will be that.
Conclusion
For once, the positives outweighed the negatives. I thought it was a solid episode that was recognisably Doctor Who. I enjoyed it and, especially the brief appearances of Carole Ann Ford. As I said in my introduction, it left me feeling hopeful for the finale.
It remains to be seen if RTD can land it. There’s certainly a lot to fit in: The Two Rani’s, Susan, Conrad the podcaster, the exploding Tardis, two season’s worth of fourth wall breaks, Mel, a tie in to the coming UNIT spin-off, Captain Poppy and the Space Babies, Dark Doctor, the Earth being destroyed on May 24th. That’s the date of the next episode, Wish World…
Anthony C Green, May 2025
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