2,084 words, 11 minutes read time.
Overview
The job of a penultimate episode in a season is to recap where we are so far, and to put the finishing touches to the finale set-up. It’s difficult to judge the quality of such episodes in isolation apart from what follows. Season 1, episode 7 last year, The Legend of Ruby Sunday did its job well, and, for me, was probably the best of the whole season. But it now has zero watchability, because the finale itself, The Empire of Death was unmitigated disaster that resolved nothing.
As this season has progressed, it’s become clear that it should really be viewed as being of a piece with the season that proceeded it. That being the case, next week’s episode has even more riding on it. As the culmination of not one but two whole seasons, sixteen episodes in total, and twenty-one if you include the three sixtieth anniversary and two Christmas specials, as logically we must.
That put a huge amount of importance on Wish World. That being the case, the one thing RTD shouldn’t have done was to throw yet more elements into the mix, elements that have not been adequately foreshadowed in the year-and-on-half that has gone before.
Sadly, that’s exactly what he chose to do, leaving the narrative even more convoluted than it was already. The Legend of Ruby Sunday, despite a very disappointing season to that point, left me hopeful that the various strands we’d been introduced to would be satisfactorily resolved. All Wish World left me was feelings of confusion, exasperation, annoyance and the expectation that those feelings would still be present and correct in a week’s time.
Positives
Yes, there were some. I’m enjoying Archie Punjabi’s acting, although I’m not sure how much her character has to do with the Rani as we knew her from the Classic era. It would have made more sense had she been playing Missy/The Master and having her point out the distinction between her being a Time Lady rather than a Time Lord makes no sense since the concept of gender shifting Time People was introduced. She does look great, and I enjoyed the sight of her riding her space-motor scooter thing immensely, even though I’d much sooner have seen her in her cool 1980s Tardis with the miniature dinosaurs and other creatures in jars. But she is good. Whereas Ncuti Gatwa looks woefully out of place when faced with flashbacks of previous Doctors, Archie stood up remarkably well during a welcome reprise of the original Rani, the late, great Kate O’Mara. Without doing an imitation, she is recognisably the same character.
The whole episode looked the part, with Conrad’s 1950’s conservative-utopia well realised in terms of clothing and setting, with the Bone Palace in particular, looking spectacular, like a Salvador Dali painting brought to life.
The giant dinosaur skeleton things seen overhead were an impressive use of CGI, though I’ve no idea what the point of them was.
Negatives
Where do you start?
There’s nothing wrong with the idea of entering an alternative reality (Conrad’s Wish World, though it was presumably created under the direction of the Rani?) where the Doctor isn’t the Doctor, but ‘John Smith’ (a name the Doctor has made use of many times when working undercover, whether knowingly or not), who is happily married to Belinda, with a baby, namely Poppy from Space Babies. Done well, this could have given Gatwa an opportunity to add a new acting chop to his arsenal, to go with his flamboyant gay and his angry, vindictive ‘Dark Doctor.’ Unfortunately, he came across as a gay man pretending to be straight. There is no comparison between Ncuti’s John Smith and that of Tennant in the all-time-classic Human Nature. In that case, I really believed that Tennant was playing a different character. Ncuti Gatwa is always Ncuti Gatwa, whatever name he is given.
This Wish World appears to being read into existence by Conrad, the English podcaster who we first met in Lucky Day, from a book called Doctor Who and the Deadly Wish. The design style and colouring of this hardback book looked suspiciously like Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. This can’t be for any other reason than for RTD to have a dig at J.K. Rowling for having differing opinions to him when it comes to trans-related issues. The title is, now I think of it, also likely meant to invoke Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. This is the level of pettiness we’ve now reached. Trolling fans like me who don’t like the current direction of the show is no longer enough. Davies is now also using his scrips as a means of doing battle with ideological opponents, though arguably, the last two seasons have all been about that.
Conrad also refers constantly to ‘Doctor Who’, which is surely another fan-dig, this time aimed at people like me who enjoy pointing out to normies that the show is called ‘Doctor Who,’ but the character is always simply ‘The Doctor.’
The book is allegedly written by one I.M. Foreman. This was the name above the junkyard where it all began in An Unearthly Child back in 1963, from where Susan took her second name. It takes more than Ester Eggs like this to keep us happy, Mr. Davies.
Much of what follows will likely be disjointed and chronologically incorrect, because, despite two watch throughs’, that’s how I remember it, to the extent that I remember the episode at all.
Another god is entered into the fray in the form of a baby (not Poppy, a white baby), the god of storytelling, the seventh son of a seventh son, taken from a strangely unconcerned couple in a nice-looking nineteenth century Bavaria by an even nicer looking Archie on horseback right at the start. Whether or not seventh sons of seventh sons are reputed to become gods of storytelling, or of anything else, in Bavarian folklore from this period, I’ve no idea; and how this god fits in with RTD’s Pantheon, or the now actually existing Greek god Dionysus or Nigerian spider-god Anansi who we met in the barbershop episode, I also have no clue. I suspect neither does Davies. As I’ve probably said before, Tolkien he is not.
Conrad’s evil Tradtopia is a world where men are still dominant over women, and men have the ‘doubt police’ called on them for complimenting another man on his looks. But wouldn’t the idea work better if it was set in the present day, rather than in the 1950s, where we (perhaps unfairly) expect that sort of thing anyway? And the world seems nowhere nearly as bad as it would need to be for RTD to effectively make his ultra-progressive point.
Even in the ‘refugee camp’, where we get much talk between Ruby (who sort of swanned around in the episode, remembering more about the ‘real’ world than most, for reasons that are unclear), Jenny scientific advisor from UNIT, which has now been re-imagined as an insurance corporation, and some other disabled people about the likes of them being ‘invisible’ to the average person, they had nice clean tents and nice clean clothes. This was explained as parts of the ‘real’, i.e. ‘good’ world, ‘bleeding through’ to their reality, but this just seemed like a loss of nerve by Davies, as though he was afraid to show any real hardship. We even had an iPad (complete with tripod) bizarrely and pointlessly ‘bleeding through.’
We also had a random Drag Queen in the camp. Because they’re repressed and ‘invisible’ too, just like the disabled, though at ‘she’ was also clean and well-fed, a little too well-fed.
Surprisingly, there was no racism in Conrad’s utopia. I suppose that would have been too difficult to pull off, even for RTD, given such a white-lite cast.
There was lots of stuff about ‘doubt’ and every-time anybody did doubt or question the reality they were in, yellow cups fell through solid tables and broke on the floor. Nothing else, just that, and the phone calls to the ‘Doubt’ police.
At one point, when she realised that she couldn’t remember giving birth to Poppy, Belinda ran out into a large field, which was conveniently placed in the middle of a residential area, to scream loudly. Her mum also lacked any memory of the birth of her grandchild. This was the first time we’d seen this character. She was indistinguishable in character from Ruby’s mum, or one of them.
This continued until Rogue, the Doctors lover from the titular episode Rogue appeared by video-link from what was described as the Hell-realm, where he’d presumably been cast down for being gay, and chose to make use of his fortunate access to digital forms of long-distant communications to tell the Doctor that ‘Tables don’t do that.’
We had a flashback to past Doctor’s for the second episode in a row. This served a dual function this time, not only reminding the viewers that Ncuti Gatwa is also supposed to be the Doctor but also causing ‘John Smith’ to remember this himself.
The Doctor’s recognition that he was now face to face with the Rani, an old and feared adversary, should have been a big moment, but wasn’t and lead nowhere, other than a vague suggestion that they might once have been lovers, and a dance under a disco-mirror-ball she manifested from the ceiling. They did look a handsome stylish couple in their fine clothes, though the fragrant Rani had clearly picked the wrong incarnation of the Doctor if she has any residual romantic aspirations towards him. Jodie’s Thirteenth would likely have been a better bet.
What else? Mrs Flood/Rani 2 pottered around a bit, save for one nice moment when she and Rani 1 spoke creepily in unison. Mel also turned up for a few seconds, and, after her underwhelming return last week, Susan got another second or two inside the Doctor’s head. Let’s hope for more next week.
It was then that RTD decided he hadn’t woven enough threads into the last two seasons, nor had yet enough Big Returns. So, we get the Rani pointing out the ‘Seal of Rassilon’ before announcing next week’s classic era comeback, that of Omega, the Time Lord who introduced his people to Time Travel. It’s not clear how this fits in with the Timeless Children saga.
There’s a lot of homework ahead if next week’s finale is to be enjoyed to the fullest possible extent. The Three Doctors and The Ark in Space from 1973 and 1975 respectively are the key texts for getting up to speed with Omega. But best also to delve into The Five Doctors from 1983 to be on the safe side, lest Rassilon be lurking at the ready behind his seal. This could also prove handy if there is to be more Susan-lore, in which case we might also need to seek out the 1993 Dimensions in Time Children in Need crossover with Eastenders, which in any case has now been made canon through reference to events that took place involving the Rani and Pat Butcher in that short. Then, there’s the whole Gallifrey Big Finish audio boxset…
It’s going to be a busy week.
Conclusion
Somebody needs to tell RTD that having a character say, ‘This isn’t just exposition’, as the Rani did when outlining her unfathomable ‘plan’, doesn’t stop it being exposition. It merely draws attention to the fact that it is exposition.
And, if you end an episode on a cliffhanger, like the Tardis exploding at the end of The Interstellar Song Contest, it’s polite to return to and resolve this at the start of the next episode (call me an old traditionalist), but here, nothing, not a reference. The cliffhanger at the end here was the Doctor’s realisation, as he was poised to crash to his death from a collapsing beam, that Poppy really is his and Belinda’s child. Does this mean she’s Susan’s mum, or somebody else, or will this simply never be mentioned again?
Wish World was tosh. Pretty tosh, but tosh, over-complicated tosh, nevertheless. I’ll be at the cinema next week where I’ll have to sit through it again, followed by the sixty-five-minute Big Finale, The Reality War, where without a doubt, all questions will be answered.
More realistically, there’s a possibility we might see the end of Ncuti Gatwa, and perhaps even that Holy Grail for Whovians, a regeneration into a Doctor as yet unknown.
Anthony C Green, May 2025
