Posts Tagged Ncuti Gatwa

Review: Doctor Who Unleashed: 20 Years In Wales

June 10, 2025 at 12:26 pm · Filed under Doctor Who, TV Shows ·Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

1,383 words, 7 minutes read time.

Last year, Russell T Davis said that nothing was planned to mark the twentieth anniversary of the return of Doctor Who to our screens in March 2005. In the end, perhaps inspired by the possibility that that era is about to come to an end, maybe also to drum up a bit more interest in his desperate gamble of bringing back Billie Piper to the show, perhaps as the Doctor, perhaps not, he decided to throw together this hastily arranged extended version of the regular behind-the-scenes show Unleashed, three months after the anniversary has passed.

Exactly how hasty, can be gauged by the dating of the interview with Davies early in this special, 25th April, while the just-completed disaster of the confusingly named ‘Season 2’ was still airing. We also got an obviously tacked-on interview with Billie at the end, separate from the main interview she gave alongside David Tennant. In this second interview, without saying anything specific, it was clear that Billie knew she was about to return, though she was, and probably still is, about as much in the know about how, why and in what capacity as we, and Davies, are.

Logo of 'Doctor Who Unleashed' featuring the show's title in a colorful and futuristic style.

Eternally annoying Unleashed presenter Steffan Powell did refer to last week’s ‘shock’ regeneration, when Bilie’s head appeared superimposed on Ncuti Gatwa’s body, but, again, there was nothing specific said.

How could there be? The big Disney investment is almost certainly over, so it’s down to the BBC if they want to run with Davies’ latest half-baked idea, either with or without another streamer. There is almost certainly no script either. One rumour is that Steven Moffatt is hard at work on one, perhaps to air as early as Christmas this year. But, given the funding question, that seems unlikely.

For what it was, the documentary itself was OK. We got some nice location filming shots, particularly of Eccleston and Piper at work on the first season back in 2004. It was heavy on the whole Wales angle, as the title suggests, about how Doctor Who has put it on the map as far as TV and film production goes.

I particularly enjoyed the interviews with the owner of the real-world record shop where Blink, Moffatt’s masterpiece, was filmed, and the couple who are the custodians of the Lighthouse where one of the Jodie Whittaker episodes was filmed, Fugitive of the Judoon, I think. That was less of a masterpiece, but still a nice setting, and Wales has proven to be a great, scenic home for the show over the past two decades.

As far as major participants were concerned, we got the three showrunners, RTD, Moffatt and Chibnall who’ve now dominated the show throughout the modern show’s twenty-year existence. Of the era’s Doctors we have Gatwa, Whittaker and Tennant; and on the companions front we had Varada Sethru, (Belinda in the latest series), Karen Gillan (Amy) and her on screen husband and fellow Eleventh Doctor sidekick Arthur Darvill (Rory), both appearing via an iPad, Pearl Mackie who played Bill Potts in Capaldi’s last season, Mandip Gill who played Yaz as part of Jodie’s ‘Fam,’ and as I’ve indicated, more Billie Piper than originally planned, the first and possibly the last face to appear in Modern Who.

But more significant is who wasn’t there. Given his righteous ‘Sack Russell T Davis…’ diatribe of three years ago, Chris Eccleston’s non-appearance was a given. We know that Peter Capaldi had wanted, and deserved, a fourth season, but didn’t get it because Moffatt was leaving and his replacement, Chris Chibnall, had made the casting of a woman Doctor a precondition for taking the job. But he’s always remained positive about the show publicly, so I’m surprised he didn’t contribute a short, pre-recorded section. That he didn’t is perhaps an indication that his departure was more bitter than we know. Maybe he wasn’t even asked.

In fact, Capaldi’s three seasons got a mere two of the fifty-nine minutes here. Even more surprisingly, there wasn’t even a single mention of Jenna Coleman’s Clara, let alone an appearance from Jenna herself. This is bizarre, given that she was a two-Doctor companion, firstly in the later period of Matt Smith’s run as the Doctor, including in the iconic fiftieth anniversary Day of the Doctor special, the high-point of the modern show as far as public interest goes, as well as in Capaldi’s first two seasons.

The Eleventh Doctor himself, Matt Smith, who was the most popular Doctor globally, not Tennant, contrary to the official narrative, was also absent. Yes, he’s a big star nowadays. For him, Doctor Who was the launchpad to the sort of career Ncuti Gatwa almost certainly hoped for when his time in the Tardis was over, though that’s now unlikely. Matt cited the pressures of work for his non-appearance. But, if he’d wanted to, I’m sure he could have found five minutes to knock out something positive on his iPad or phone, as did his Co-star Gillan (for whom the show was also a stepping stone to greater things). It’d be interesting to know his reasons for not finding that time.

Another person who failed to appear was Millie Gibson, Ncuti’s companion in his first and for parts of his second season. I touch on the Millie saga more in my review of that second season finale, The Reality War.’ We don’t know, and perhaps never will know, the full story of her departure. But we do know that she was intended to be Gatwa’s companion for both seasons, and that she left early during filming, necessitating her replacement with Varada’s Belinda for most of what turned out to be Gatwa’s premature swansong season, and substantial rewrites, returning only for likely contractually obliged last-minute reshoots earlier this year.

The documentary was less than an hour long, and we could cite others who were absent, such as Freema Agyeman’s ‘Martha’, John Sims, the best of the modern Master’s, Michelle Gomez (‘Missy’), and Alex Kingston (‘River Song’).

John Barrowman, whose ‘Captain Jack’ was an important aspect of the show’s success early on, as well as that of the more adult spin-off Torchwood, has now become something of a persona non grata on British television because of some well-documented, though arguably, by the standards of the BBC rather harmless backstage sexual high-jinks, so it was never likely that he would appear.

So, given the limited time available, it’s perhaps a mistake to read too much into who wasn’t there.

But, the sheer number of significant figures who didn’t feature, including three of the six modern Doctors, four out of seven if we count Jo Martin’s Fugitive Doctor, make it hardly wild speculation to suggest that the production has not always been as full of fun and happy Welsh frolics as this ‘celebration’ suggested. 

Still, it’s enjoyable enough for what it is. And there is something rather poignant about seeing Eccleston at work early in the production of the first season of the modern era, with the knowledge that his decision to quit was made during that very first block of filming.

Anthony C Green, June 2025

PS In the day or so since this aired, the press is full of speculation that Tennant will return yet again, alongside Piper, for another ‘special’. Reading between the lines of this Unleashed, I suspect this is true, and perhaps it will be sooner than expected. It could make some sense if the BBC can find the money. As much as I dislike the idea of another Tennant return (and Tennant in general, to be honest), it could tie up a few loose ends, like undoing the ‘bigeneration’ mess, to explain Billie’s appearance at the end of The Reality War, and to bring to a final close the whole misguided Tenth Doctor/Rose romantic thread. But it should only happen as a means of drawing a final line under this era, leaving the road clear for a new Doctor under a new production team at some point in the future. If it’s merely an exercise designed for the BBC to keep the show on the road at any cost, with RTD still in post, and with plans for a series featuring Piper as the Doctor to follow, it will be a counter-productive waste of time.

Available on the BBC iPlayer

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Exploring Themes in Doctor Who: The Story and The Engine

May 19, 2025 at 3:01 pm · Filed under Doctor Who, TV Shows ·Tagged , , , , ,

Doctor Who: The Story and the Engine

Season 2, episode 5 reviewed

Overview

The episode was written by Inua Ellams, a Nigerian poet and playwright, after he was recommended to showrunner Russell T Davies by Ncuti Gatwa. Davies rejected Ellams’ first idea and suggested he instead base the episode around his Barbershop Chronicles play. This had been developed by the writer as a celebration of Nigerian barbershop culture, and had been based on real conversations Ellams had taped in barbershops. Davies had seen this play and liked it.

Promotional poster for Doctor Who featuring a male and female character standing on a colorful alien landscape with the Doctor Who logo.

Aside from one white woman who appeared very briefly, the story featured an all ‘people of colour’ cast, and has been described by RTD as a companion episode to episode 6 of the last season, Dot and Bubble, which, aside from Ncuti, featured an all-white cast.

‘Nigerian barbershop culture’ doesn’t immediately sound like a great premise for a Doctor Who story, but if you locate the barbershop simultaneously in Lagos, capital of Nigeria, and mounted on top of a giant spider travelling through the ‘Nexus’, have it powered by the stories of customers, and you throw in a few gods, both Nigerian and non-Nigerian, then I suppose it can be. At least, it can fit into Doctor Who in its present Science Fiction-lite, Fantasy-heavy incarnation.

It didn’t offend me politically on the scale of Lucky Day, though I do have political issues with it, as we shall see. If I were to sum up the episode in a few words, then ‘tedious,’ ‘pointless,’ ‘convoluted,’ ‘tell not ‘show,’ and ‘irrelevant’ to the main season arcs would be high on the list of words featured.

Positives

I don’t hate the idea of a story derived from oral storytelling traditions, of Africa or anywhere else, and this did have a recognisably different voice as far as script and performance go. This was a mildly refreshing, if somewhat stagy, change after the last two episodes. The Well had been co-written by Sharma Angel-Walfall. Lucky Day was ostensibly by Peter McTighe. But, in both cases, Davies was unmistakably present in both, almost as much as if he’d written them both alone. Here, the dialogue had a very different feel in places, and that made for a refreshing, if somewhat stagy, change.

It was again a reasonable performance by Gatwa, and the main supporting cast did well, with credit particularly due to Sule Rimi as Omo and Ariyon Bakare as The Barber.

Visually, it had some nice features. The Nigerian market looked authentic, before we settled down into another single location ‘bottle’ story within the barbershop. The giant spider looked good on the two occasions we saw it, especially the aerial shot of the barbershop mounted on top of it. I also liked the painterly-style animations that accompanied some of the stories, and the beating heart inside the brain, as well as the screaming head that appeared briefly, and rather mysteriously, beside it towards the end.

Negatives

Politically, there’s nothing wrong in itself with the idea of an almost totally non-white cast, but for a show that is so keen to combat homophobia to have an episode set in Nigeria with no indication at all of the difficulties gay people can find in that country seems hypocritical. In a scene with Belinda in the Tardis, we hear the Doctor declare that now he has found himself in a black body for the ‘first time’ (see below), there are places on Earth where he no longer feels welcome. Ncuti is a very camp, gay man who, wrongly, in my opinion, plays the Doctor in a way that closely reflects this. I wonder how welcome he would really feel in Nigeria, a country where overt displays of homosexuality can bring a sentence of fourteen years in prison, as well, almost certainly, oppression from within their own community. As a gay man himself, RTD will be well aware of this, as will the writer. It is perhaps not simply down to cost as to why the episode was filmed entirely in London, not Lagos.

On the issue of race, I very much regret how much attention is being given to the current skin colour of the Doctor. The character, remember, is a Time Lord, perhaps thousands of years old, who has travelled through the furthest reaches of the universe, at all points throughout its history. He’s fought aliens such as the Daleks, the Cyberman, and many others who are bent on the elimination of all difference between species. He’s a lone wolf well accustomed to being an outsider. To have him so focussed on his current form and to be so pre-occupied with how that form is received in certain parts of twenty first century Earth, diminishes the character, and is part of the wider problem mentioned in previous reviews, that of the Doctor now being written and played as if he was a mere human, specifically a black, gay, male human.

I’ll add that Ncuti Gatwa’s parents are from Rwanda and left that country because one tribe of black Rwandans was determined to genocide their tribe of black Rwandans. He grew up in Britain, has succeeded in becoming rich and famous, and is now in the fortunate position of being the lead actor in an iconic British show. I have no doubt he’s faced racism and homophobia in his life, but is he really a victim or a success story? Would he have done better to have remained in Africa, where he feels so ‘at home’ or in the ‘racist’ West?

Moving on to the episode itself, the only note I made during my second watch was ‘Full of stories we haven’t seen, featuring characters we don’t know.’ These stories were made all the weaker by the fact that they were largely told to us in pure exposition, without even the animations as illustration for the most part.

The worst of these stories featured a character called Abby who, if I’ve got this right, had been a friend, or a companion of the Fugitive Doctor (see below), who’d somehow lost her hand in marriage through in an il-judged bet by the Doctor, Ncuti’s Doctor or the Fugitive Doctor. As we’d never seen or heard of the girl before, it’s difficult to know why we should care.

As viewers, we were expected to take a lot on trust. For a start, we were expected to believe that the Doctor, at least since he manifested as a black man, and maybe previously as a black woman, or in general, had spent a lot of time hanging out in this Lagos barber shop, was known and loved by all, and was expecially close friends with Omo, thus setting up a later ‘I’ve been betrayed’ bout of Gatwa overacting. As I struggled to recall any mentions of Nigeria, Lagos, barber shops or Omo through the sixty-two-year history of the show, this was too much of an ask for me.

One of the main problems with the episode was that it took us even further down the road of Fantasy, this time inserting a mixture of African and Western pagan gods into the plot. I learnt that the Nigerian god of stories was called Anansi, and took the form of a woman’s face on a spider’s body, so that explained, sort of, the giant spider that was transporting the barbershop through the Nexus. But where did Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and dancing and theatre and stuff come into it? Did the Doctor’s comment that he’d got drunk with this god mean that the deities of the Greek Mythos now have temporal existence ‘in-universe’? What about the Roman Pantheon, or the Egyptian, or the Norse? And how do these fit with RTD’s own beloved Pantheon, with Lux and Maestro, with the Toymaker and his ‘legions’?

I’ve no idea, and I very much doubt I ever shall.

Aside from the choice of setting and the casting being one big virtue signal, there was inevitably yet more. 

For instance:

The Barber revealed that his original name for the Nexus had been The World Wide Web. It soon became clear that the only reason this was inserted was so that the Doctor could call him a ‘Troll on the World-Wide-Web,’ revisiting one of the central themes of Lucky Day.

This has been a problem throughout the series. The writing serves the message rather than the story. Another example was the story that the Doctor told once he took his turn in the hair-cut chair. He had thousands of years’ worth of stories to choose from. Would he decide to power the engine with a tale of one of the numerous occasions he has saved the Earth from alien invasion, or of his many battles with the Master? Perhaps he might plumb for one of his historical journeys and his meetings with iconic figures from the history of our planet, with Marco Polo maybe, or Shakespeare or Hitler?

No, instead told a simple story of one of Belinda’s heroic endeavours saving our NHS from collapse, this one about how she saved the life of the token white character by correctly diagnosing her, overruling the Southeast Asian doctor in the process. Usually, bumbling fools in need of rescue by a Strong Woman of Colour are reserved for straight white males, but we all know now that the people we used to call ‘Orientals’ are ‘White Adjacent’ and thus part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

For some reason, this story was revealed through a proper short film, rather than mere words or painterly animation. Whatever, it had no reason to be here other than to stress how hard our nurses, especially our Indian nurses, work.

The resolution of the thin plot was unsatisfactory and derivative. How many times has the bad guy been vanquished through the sheer awesomeness of the Doctor and his history? Quite a few, though it was the climax of the Eleventh Doctor story The Rings of Akhaten that sprang immediately to my mind.

The point was that the Doctor had so many stories that the Engine overheated and was destroyed. This was illustrated by the overused projection of the images of some of the iconic Doctor’s past.

Perhaps this was used simply to remind us Ncuti was the Doctor. As is the norm for this season, the Doctor’s clothes gave no clue, blending seamlessly as they did into the pseudo-Nigerian environment. If one had joined the episode once the opening scene in the Tardis was complete, with no prior knowledge of the era, there would have been little to identify this show with the show we had once known or, until they appeared to remind us, the fantastic actors who’d once inhabited the character.

As far as I noticed, we didn’t get Colin Baker’s Sixth or Sylvester McCoy’s Seventh but we did get a few seconds of Jo Martin’s Fugitive Doctor who we’d first met during the rightfully derided Chibnall/Whittaker Timeless Children story arc.

Unless Martin is to re-appear as the next Doctor proper in the season finale, this appearance was pointless in the context of the story. Indeed, in the latest after-show Unleashed look behind the scenes, RTD said that this appearance was simply an acknowledgement, appropriate to the setting of the story, that we had had a black Doctor previously in the canon of the show. He seemed unaware that this contradicted the canon of the individual episode, where we’d already heard the Doctor play the victim as regards finding himself in a black body ‘for the first time.’ Maybe Ellams slipped that bit in without Davies noticing?

Conclusion

As I said at the beginning, The Story and The Engine didn’t offend me as much as Lucky Day, but I’d rate it fourth out of five so far this season, not far ahead of the last episode. It was instantly forgettable, and it’s unlikely I’ll ever watch it again.

Next week, it’s the Interstellar Song Contest, a tie-in with the oh-too-real-life Eurovision Song Contest. It’s been written by Juno Dawson, best known for his cryptically named opus How to be Gay. As great as that sounds already, it should be made all the better by the promise of the ‘Who Is Mrs. Flood’ reveal.

I should also mention that we also saw a little black girl at one point. I took this to be the little girl who was the first incarnation of the Doctor as seen in The Timeless Children. But the credits at the end revealed that it to have been ‘Poppy’ from the space station in episode one of ‘season one’. It seems she’ll be re-appearing in the finale, so maybe, as well as an answer to the riddle of Mys. Flood, we’ll also be getting a clue as to why RTD should have decided to open a brand-new era with Space Babies.

Anthony C Green, May 2025

Cover of 'The Angela Suite' by Anthony C. Green featuring feet and a camera, with a backdrop of industrial structures and the title prominently displayed.

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Doctor Who: The Well and Lucky Day reviewed

May 13, 2025 at 10:59 am · Filed under Doctor Who, TV Shows ·Tagged , , , , , , , ,

2,940 words, 16 minutes read time.

My plan to review every episode of the current series was almost derailed by season 4, episode 4, Lucky Day. Never before has an episode of Doctor Who, and possibly an episode of any long-running television series, offended me on such a scale politically that I’ve finished it wanting to stop watching any future episodes, entirely and forever. I got over it sufficiently to watch episode five, The Story and the Engine, but that doesn’t mean I like Lucky Day any better. I’ll come to that shortly.

The Well, season 2, episode 3

Firstly, I need to catch up with the episode that immediately preceded it.

The consensus seems to be that this was one of the strongest, if not the strongest episode of the series, and possibly of the RTD 2 era so far. I’d go along with that. For once, Davies, with co-writer Sharma Angel-Walfall, put together a cohesive story that held my attention, and a consistent tone and atmosphere, more or less throughout.

The decision to make this a sequel to 2008’s Midnight, which I gather was not Walfall’s original intention, gave the story a wider context, making it bigger than it would otherwise have been. But it also invited comparison, and one that will only serve to confirm to viewers that, despite a marked improvement this season, the show has still fallen far below the standard of its glory days in terms of quality. 

Positives

Gatwa continued his improvement and embodied the character of the Doctor for more of this episode than for any other. For the story to work, we had to believe that this was recognisably the same character as Tennant’s Tenth, on a deeper level than could be achieved through a flashback to Midnight, though inevitably, we got that too. Gatwa just about pulled it off.

Varada Sethru’s Belinda is becoming more of a believable companion with believable reactions, though the fear she displays here doesn’t fit with the blasé way she accepted being kidnapped and taken to an alien world by giant robots in episode one. That’s not Varada’s fault. It’s just an inconsistency of characterisation, and that’s down to the writers, particularly to Davies. She and Ncuti do at least show a bit more chemistry together than Ncuti and Millie Gibson’s Ruby managed in the last season.

The episode was also elevated by the performances of two of the supporting actors, Rose Ayling-Ellis as Aliss and Caoilfhionn Dunne as Shaya.

Ellis in particular was excellent as Aliss, and her real-life deafness was made good use of in the plot, rather than being simply another ‘representation’ tool.

Unlike most anything else in RTD 2, The Well presented a cohesive story and making Aliss the focal point, sitting alone, away from the space station soldiers and the Doctor and Belinda worked in building up the tension, with her disability adding vulnerability and believability to the character and the situation. The use of sign language and the character’s desperate appeal for the other characters not to turn their backs when speaking was a point worth making, from which some viewers might learn something and maybe adapt their behaviour in a real-world interaction, rather than being yet another pointless virtue signal.

Dunne’s Shaya was given some characterisation, and we were introduced to skills she possessed, shooting and running, that were important to the plot resolution, and she did a good job with the material she was given. However, suddenly giving her a back-story in flashback about one minute before her climatic act of self-sacrifice was another example of the lazy, rushed, disjointed writing we’ve come to expect.

Mrs Flood made her now customary appearance at the end of the episode. For once, she wasn’t nodding and winking at us through the fourth wall, but dressed as a proper Science Fiction character, possibly from Star Trek Next Generation, with an appropriate Science Fiction backdrop. She was asking the surviving soldiers on the base about the Doctor and his ‘Vindicator’ gadget.

It was at this point, watching last Saturday afternoon, that I had a moment of realisation and solved the riddle of who is Mrs Flood, the question that’s been exercising the collective mind of the nation since her first appearance in The Church on Ruby Road seventeen months ago.

She’s Susan the Doctor’s granddaughter!

I won’t go into how I arrived at this conclusion, because I’m much less sure now than I was on first watch, and so many other rumours, concerning both her and Belinda are now running riot throughout the ranks of fandom. It’s still a possibility, though one I hope won’t be realised. I’ve been campaigning for the return of Susan since the triumphant rebirth of the show in 2005, but it would be wrong on every level to do this without giving Carole Ann-Ford, the real Susan, 1963-4, and The Five Doctors anniversary special, 1983, a valedictory bow; and I hate to think what the modern incarnation of RTD would do to the character.

All that needs to be said in this context, is that at least the ‘Who is Mrs Flood?’ story arc is giving me a reason to continue watching.

Negatives

This was the first of four episodes this season to feature a name other than Davies on the writing credits, and, as I’ve already said, RTD has acknowledged that the sequel idea did not come from co-writer Angel-Walfall. With a bit of between-the-lines intuition, I’d guess that Davies took this writer’s original story idea, decided it had a Midnight vibe, and decided to revisit one of his best loved stories, ultimately making the episode much more his work than hers.

That might be jump, but the whole sequel idea did seem tacked on, rather than either planned or arising organically from the story.

Without the Midnight link, with a few changes, we would have had a serviceable, old-fashioned ‘Base under siege’ type episode that stood or fell on its own merits, and would have avoided the risk of comparison.

This was better paced than either Robot Revolution or Lux, doing a decent job of building tension, especially around the Aliss character. But, as usual, the ending was rushed, and the resolution unsatisfactory.

Or, perhaps ill-judged might be more exact than unsatisfactory. The strong possibility that the entity survived Shaya’s attempt to kill it by leaping to her own death down the well once the unseen antagonist had attached itself to her, suggested that Shaya’s heroism had been in vain, a suggestion that I thought we could have done without.

The selfless heroism that’s been a feature of the show since the beginning has been in short supply in recent years, and whether Shaya’s self-sacrifice was of value or not, it should be pointed out that, once again it was not the Doctor who saved the day, a lack which has been a big problem with Gatwa’s Doctor from the beginning. The central character has never been a ‘superhero’ in the conventional sense. But he (or she) does need to be a hero.

There were many plot-holes, but I’ll mention in this context only those concerning the way the entity was defeated, if indeed it was. Firstly, it was established that these events took place 400,000 years after the events of its parent episode. What reason do we have to believe that something as simple as a long plunge would destroy it? For that matter, what reason was there to believe that we were dealing with a single ‘entity’ and not a whole colony of them, especially as we were dealing with something that was invisible to the human (or quasi-human) eye?

Having praised (a bit) the two lead characters and the two main supporting actors, this was quite a big cast, most of whom had no function other than being killed by being hurled against the wall by the power of the entity, and it didn’t seem believable that this was sufficient to kill all of them, given their heavily padded suits and helmets. It was very predictable that the only white male with a reasonably significant role would turn out to some be a ‘wrong un’ to some degree. Sure enough, it was he who attempted to lead a mutiny against Shaya, an act for which he received his just deserts, though it seemed that his actions weren’t entirely unjustifiable if thought of in purely military terms.

I’ll mention just two more things. The episode began right after the events of Lux, with the Doctor and Belinda still dressed in their 1952 outfits. I like that, as it’s a callback to the very earliest days of the show when Hartnell and co. would often go straight from one adventure to another. But, it now seems to have become a ‘thing’ that the two disappear into the Tardis wardrobe, accompanied by either time-appropriate or cheesy music (Brittney Spears’ Toxic this week, a song that also used in season one 2.0, episode two, The End of The World with Ninth Doctor Christopher Eccleston way back in 2006, which may or may not be significant) after first getting all excited about the prospect of playing dress-up. I hate this, and here it was completely out of step with the tone of the rest of the episode. It was made all the worse by the Tardis supplying them with the exact same black shiny space suits as the soldiers they were about to meet on the space station.

Here, with every character bar Aliss (who looked a bit too West Earth 2025 than was necessary) dressed uniformly, the Doctor’s continuing lack of a distinctive costume was even more glaring than normal.

Having said the use of a deaf actor/character worked in serving the plot, and while there was less virtue-signalling here than we’ve grown accustomed to, there were two glaringly stark examples of it related to Ellis/Aliss’ deafness.

The first of these was when Aliss was told that Belinda was a nurse, but was unable to sign. Aliss came back with, ‘A nurse who can’t sign, I thought that was against the law?’ It doesn’t seem a very hopeful vision of the future, 500,000 years in the future, that a species who transverse space, and mine a planet for its diamonds can’t also develop cure for deafness. It also doesn’t seem a very practical use of resources to force nurses to learn what is essentially a foreign, non-verbal language which they will rarely use, thus likely requiring regular refresher courses.

The other ‘moment’ was when the Doctor was signing with Aliss and the dodgy, would-be-mutinous white male soldier barked ‘No private conversations!’ This seemed fair enough, for a soldier, in a dangerous situation, who’d found himself in the company of three individuals, the Doctor, Belinda and Aliss, who he’d never met. But the Doctor thought differently, explaining, to the other characters and to us at home, that ‘Even in the future, people get paranoid when people sign.’

Do they, really?

I thought that RTD, and/or his ‘co-writer’ missed a trick here. ‘People still get paranoid when people talk to each other in a foreign language’

would have worked much better, if they must virtue-signal, because it contains at least a grain of truth, and would have emphasised the point that sign languages arecomplex languages in their own right, and not just people waving their arms around and hoping for the best.

These things might seem like nitpicking or ‘hating’ on the show. But if you’re going to make political points, then they should at least be thought through. More importantly, it’s bad writing, not serving the plot, and immediately taking you out of the story. I know I’m not alone in rolling my eyes and thinking ‘Here we go again’ at such moments.

Conclusion

The Well is not some great return to form, but it is a reasonable episode with the positives outweighing the negatives. It was the best of the last two series’ so far, but not top-drawer. It’s probably too late to turn around the fortunes of this season, and I don’t have confidence that Davies can even maintain or build on the mild impetus provided this episode. But I’m still enjoying the ride, wherever it might lead.

Lucky Day

Season 2, episode 4

Or, at least I was enjoying the ride.

Rarely has anything on television made me as angry as the diatribe by the ‘Doctor’ in support of authority and ‘expert’ monopoly of the control and dissemination of information. The co-opting of this iconic character as a propaganda mouthpiece for the elitist politics of showrunner Russell T Davies and episode writer Roger McTighe (the man behind the almost equally vile Kerblam! In the Chibnall/Whittaker era)  is a disgrace, and one from which the show does not deserve to survive under its current management and ‘creative’ team. I’ve committed myself to watching and reviewing the remainder of this current season, but I will now do so reluctantly and I won’t watch further than that unless, and at a minimum, Davies steps down or is removed from his current position.

It would be pointless to go through the numerous plot holes and the amazing coincidences which kept the ‘story’ moving. It would also be pointless to mention the weak, lazy characterisations and their confused motivations. Pointless, because the story only had one reason exist, and that was to tell the viewers what to think.

The politics of the episode can be summarised as, ‘Trust Authority!’, ‘Only listen to approved sources of information!’, ‘Anyone who says differently is your enemy!’

Positives

The first twenty minutes or so are soapy and confused, but at least there was the return of Mille Gibson’s Ruby to enjoy and, as usual, Mille did as much as an actor can do given such a sub-standard script.

Visually, the episode is good, in places, and the alien, the Shreek, looked like a good, old-fashioned Doctor Who. It was criminally wasted here.

The idea of the general public questioning the existence and funding of Unitis not a bad one. But you have to do more with it than use it as a flimsy pretext for an attack on ‘conspiracy theorists’ and ‘Far Right grifters.’

I’ll leave for another time the many reasons that Unit and its leader Kate Lethbridge-Stewart have increasingly become a joke in the modern show. I’ll also put aside the confused world-building which has made the relationship between the human race and life beyond the Earth unclear: How many times is it now that our collective memory of the many alien invasions we’ve faced been wiped? We’re certainly a long way from the diverse and colourful universe Davies introduced us to during his first time as showrunner between 2005-9.

 Negatives

It’s a small issue, given this much wider context, to ask why we needed another ‘Doctor-lite’ episode in a run of a mere eight episodes, as indeed it is to question why we should invest any interest in the ‘Get Belinda home’ story-arc when we are fed an episode in which Varada Sethru’s character barely appears.

These are valid issues, but such things disappear beyond the horizon once the politics of the episode become obvious, and especially when Gatwa finally re-appears close to the end, to hammer home this narrative for all he’s worth.

This character has battled the Daleks and their evil space-Hitler creator Davros, the Cybermen, the Master, the Sontarans, the Silence, the Great Intelligence, Sutekh and many other would-be destroyers of the human race/conquerors of the universe. But never, in the sixty-two-year history of the show have we seen him as moved to anger as he is by Conrad Clark, a human podcaster in England, Earth, 2025.

This character, well-acted by Jonah Hauer-King, who could have been a decent Doctor in another, almost certainly better universe,, if we can look at such things in a purely technical manner, separate from the heavy-handed, exclisionay politics on display.

But the character is nothing more than a cipher a representation of all that RTD, McTighe and everybody else involved with the show hate, which amounts to any of us that thinks or speaks outside their ‘in-group’ mindset.

On a meta level, following one of the themes of Lux, this ‘out-group’ enemy most definitely includes fans critical of the current direction of the show.  

The climatic scene when the pseudo-Doctor transports Conrad to the Tardis, or materialises it around him, or whatever, is akin to the Time Lord appearing in the universe of the great John Carpenter film They Live and angrily snatching away and grounding underfoot the glasses that enabled people to see through the surface messaging that surrounded them, to the real nature of those with the wealth and the power.

In other words, the Doctor became an enemy of the people.

What made it worse was how petty, meanspirited and spiteful it was, with the Doctor railing against the ‘noise’ of people asking questions and putting forth alternative viewpoints online: ‘You exhaust me!’ he spat out, before outlining the future that awaited Conrad, one of dying alone and broken at the age of forty-nine.

So, this is the Doctor, is it, travelling forward through time to watch a puny human being die, and then back again to gloat about it to his face?

This was truly hateful writing, indicative of the real nature of Davies’ oh so kind and liberal politics.

It was a novel and strange experience to find myself rooting for the supposed villain of the piece as he pushed back against the Doctor at the end.

The worst episode ever, wrong on every level.

Anthony C Green May, 2025

Picture credit: By https://www.instagram.com/bbcdoctorwho/p/DHyBku8OAtV/, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=79334790

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Doctor Who Season 2 Episode 2 Review: Lux Analysis

April 28, 2025 at 6:48 am · Filed under Doctor Who, TV Shows ·Tagged , , , , ,

2,251 words, 12 minutes read time.

A critic asked to summarise Lux in two sentences, at some unspecified point in the future might write, ‘It was ambitious and innovative, had loads of potential, retains many good points, but, like almost every episode from the ‘RTD 2 era’, it is an incoherent, unsatisfying mess. Lux is remembered primarily for one ‘Meta’ scene that both referenced and hastened the show’s long hiatus.’

Plot

After last week’s more traditional Science Fiction season opener, The Robot Revolution, we’re back to the Pantheon of Gods, which Russell T Davies (RTD) first introduced us to in The Giggle, the last of the three Sixtieth anniversary specials in late 2023.

This time in the spotlight, almost literally, we have Lux, the God of Light, who manifests in the form of a traditional, old-school Disney-type animated character, Mr. Ring-a-Ding, in a cinema in Miami, Florida, 1952. Breaking free of the cinema screen, he imprisons fifteen local cinema goers within the frames of celluloid film.

The Doctor and Belinda, as part of the ongoing season arc of attempting to return the new companion home to England on the date she left, May 24th this year, find themselves in Miami and begin to investigate the disappearance of the ‘Miami 15’. In their interactions with the lead villain, they too find themselves trapped within celluloid, briefly turned into animated form themselves, before finally escaping by smashing through a modern flat TV screen into a British living room where they interact with ‘Doctor Who fans’. These three fans advise on how to defeat Lux. Returning to Miami, our heroes follow this advice, and with the help of Mr. Pye, the cinema projectionist, who sacrifices himself with the help of his dead wife by setting alight to the many rolls of film, burning down the cinema. This exposes Lux to outside sunlight, an influx of light so great that he begins to grow, to lose his animated form, ultimately merging to become ‘all light’. The missing fifteen walk free from the cinema, seemingly unharmed.

That’s a simplified version, and much else happens along the way, but that’s essentially it.

Positives

It looks great. Miami, 1952, at least an idealised, Disney-fied version of it, is very well realised, the cars, the clothes, the gaudy neon signs, the diner, the ‘picturehouse’…

An early shot of one of the ’15’ screaming out from the frames of film looks genuinely terrifying. The animations of Mr.-Ring-a-Ding and of the Doctor and Belinda were impressive and, based on my admittedly limited knowledge in this area, looked appropriate to the period. Close to the end of the episode, the distorted image of Lux as he began his transformation away from his animated Mr Ring-a-Ding manifestation towards infinity was also impressively horrifying.

Even the ‘fourth wall’/Meta-break is visually striking.

Ncuti Gatwa continued the improvement seen in his portrayal of the Doctor in last week’s season opener. Arguably, he even finally had his proper ‘Doctor moment.’ This was in the diner when he had been explaining to a shocked Belinda that they were at a point in history when segregation was still in place in America. He responded to her incredulity that he wasn’t as outraged as she was about this fact by saying, ‘I’ve toppled worlds. Sometimes I wait for them to topple themselves.’ I shine.’ Good lines, well-delivered, which could have come from the mouth of any of the modern Doctors not played by Jodie Whittaker.

Grudging credit must be given to Davies for his tackling of the segregation theme in general. We might have expected him to go to town on this, but, for once, he showed restraint. Or, maybe, as I mentioned in my review of The Robot Revolution, much work was put into post-production and re-editing in response to criticisms of last year’s series. Of course, there was no necessity to set the episode in segregation era America in the first place, either, and it could be argued that the contrast between the restraint displayed here and the histrionics on race-related issues at the end of Dot and Bubble shows an inconsistency of characterisation. True, characters should grow and develop over time, but that was a mere five episodes ago, and the Doctor was, supposedly, no less a Time Lord then than he is in Lux.

Sadly, though not unexpectedly, Ncuti’s good work was undercut by his usual array of campy posturing, with no consideration given by Davies to how adding such flamboyant characteristics, clothes and modes of speech (‘honey,’ ‘babes’) to his skin colour would likely have been received at this time, in this place.

Gatwa’s threads look very nice, but once again, he’s deprived of a recognisable ‘Doctor costume’ which immediately signals to the viewer that this is the character he is portraying.

Verada’s Sethu’s Belinda was a much more engaging character here than in the season opener, with less moaning and ‘pushing back’ against the Doctor and more entering into the spirit of being a companion at the beginning of what ought to be a series of epic adventures through space and time.

There was some good dialogue and banter between Doctor and companion, and other characters, and some good one-liners from Mr Ring-a-Ding (‘I never should have learnt perspective!’), and it’s probably a bit late in the day to be mentioning how superbly voiced the ‘villain’ was by Alan Cummings. I believe he does this sort of thing for a day job, and you can see, or at least hear, why. 

Negatives

As much more of a Science Fiction than a Fantasyfan, I’m not greatly impressed by the move in this direction since Davies once more took over as showrunner. I can certainly appreciate the genre in the hands of masters such as Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Ursula Le Guin, and even J.K. Rowling. But these writers spent decades, a lifetime in the case of the former, building complex, internally consistent worlds full of characters who are believable in the context of those worlds. RTD is no Tolkien. As far as I know, he has no track record of writing Fantasy, and I have no sense of him believing in his ‘Pantheon of Gods’ to the extent of being able to stand even a few minutes of questioning concerning the nature of these ‘Gods’ and how they relate to one another. For Davies, it seems the ‘Fantasy’ tag is merely a convenience that frees him from the need to write plots that make sense to anyone other than himself.

In addition, as Brendan, host of my favourite Doctor Who podcast (‘Sense Sphere’) puts it, ‘These Gods are crap!’ turning up in random places which may or may not be related to the Doctor turning up at the same place and time, and then being quickly and easily defeated after causing harm to a limited number of people for a while or, this case, maybe not defeated, because becoming at one with all light is presumably where Lux as the God (or ‘a’ God?) of Light, started from before randomly manifesting as a cartoon character in a cinema because of a chance occurrence (moonlight reflected from a spoon).

I also don’t feel invested in the Belinda ‘Journey home narrative’. It worked fine with Ian and Barbara in the early days of the show, because it was clear at that point that the Doctor had no control of where and when the Tardis materialised.

But here?

As I understand it, the Tardis can’t land on the target date of May 25th, so the Doctor has built a gadget, the Vortex Indicator (Vindicator), which, in theory, could, by getting somewhere (and somewhen) in the right vicinity, drag the Tardis to the desired destination. In which case, why are they in Miami in 1952? It would make sense for the Doctor to at least attempt to materialise on May 24th and, if successful, take Belinda to one of his favourite clubs for a few hours until the clock strikes midnight and, voila, it’s the 25th. She can say a quick ‘Hi,’ to celloist mum and karaoke dad (new information gained in Lux. What a surprise that it’s only the mum who is given a proper career), have a few hours’ sleep and be at the hospital in time for her 2-10 shift preventing the NHS from collapse.

Job done.

Such things are logistic plot-point problems writers can easily deal with, explaining away as necessary, if they are aware of them. But that will often require an editor with the confidence and authority to read through their work and drop them a friendly email saying ‘Very good, but…’

Pacing

Like so much of this incarnation of the show, the actual plot is slight and could be raced through in much less than its forty-five-minute time allocation. But telling it in such a way that it doesn’t strain the viewer’s credulity, at the same time as peopling it with believable characters we feel we’ve come to know and have grown to care about, can’t be. So, that early image of the character we saw screaming from within a celluloid frame was never capitalised upon, because we never saw this character again until he miraculously walked free from the cinema at the end. He didn’t even have a name (only Tommy Lee, son of one of the characters at the diner, had that), so why should we feel relieved that he’s been rescued from his horrifying ordeal?

A lack of consequences is another big problem with the show in its current run. Almost every major character was dissolved into dust early in the season one finale The Empire of Death. By the end, they’d all been resurrected. Similarly, Mr. Pye was the only character who died in Lux.

Linus Roche, a fine character actor in his own right as well as the son of William Roche (Ken Barlow in Coronation Street), deserves a lot of credit for his portrayal of the projectionist. But he got no more than a few minutes of screen time, so, again, why should we care?

***

Over the last week, I’ve watched the latest run of six Black Mirror episodes on Netflix, and this set me thinking that, in at least one future world, Doctor Who could be improved if it could be detached from the BBC completely (as far as new content is concerned). The move from Channel Four to a fully streamed service allowed Black Mirror to achieve what Davies had said was his ambition for Who, to take it from being a niche British show to a truly global phenomenon which enjoys both public and critical acclaim. Netflix provided Black Mirror with a much bigger budget than could have been imagined during its first two series, which were funded by and shown only on Channel Four. But, more importantly, the move freed it from forty-five to fifty-minute episode time constraints. Stories now take as long as the show creator and writer, Charlie Brooker (sometimes with co-writers), feels are needed to tell them. I’d recommend watching, back-to-back, the season four episode, USS Callister and its new season seven sequel USS Callister: Into Infinity, both feature-length, both incredibly tightly written, working on several levels, including meta-Star Trek parody, but managing to incorporate genuinely thrilling SF adventures with real consequences for believable characters who viewers have formed a relationship with.

It helps that Brooker is a brilliant writer, and even his early, time-constrained episodes stand up well. But he would never have been able to produce something this ambitious within the parameters of British network television.

And Doctor Who could never attempt to emulate it, no matter how many billions Disney, or anyone else, throws at it while it remains tied to BBC television scheduling.

The ‘Meta’ Scene

I intended to say more about the ‘scene with the fans’ than I will, because it remains to be seen if this will have a significance in the series beyond Lux, in the season climax as, I think, is strongly suggested by Mrs Flood’s nod and wink references at the end of the episode. I’ll provisionally stick to three short points: 1) It put a break on the story, adding to the pacing problems 2) If the show does end up on ‘indefinite hiatus’ then, as I indicated at the beginning of the review, this is the scene that everybody will remember it for, irrespective of its many good qualities. 3) It’s the sort of indulgence that a show can perhaps get away with when it’s at the top of its game and is still clearly beloved. I doubt many Buffy fans rewatch the musical episode often, but they can forgive and even admire its existence. In a show that is haemorrhaging viewers (I’ll talk more about ratings in a future review, but a 23% drop in the overnight figures from The Robot Revolution to Lux can’t be spun in a positive direction, and now even the pretence of pretending all is well is falling away) it risks further alienating loyal viewers, whether it was affectionately stereotyping Doctor Who fans or not, as well as being incomprehensible to new viewers.  

If the show is cancelled, what photo-still from its illustrious sixty-two-year history will accompany the headlines? I’ll take a wild stab that it’ll be of Ncuti Gatwa and Veranda Sethru standing, with three cosplaying ‘fans’, next to a television screen upon which are displayed the ‘Doctor Who’ and ‘BBC’ logos as well as the legend #RIPDoctorWho.

Anthony C Green, April 2025

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Doctor Who: Season Two, Episode One, Robot Revolution, Reviewed

April 19, 2025 at 5:49 pm · Filed under Doctor Who, TV Shows ·Tagged , , , , , ,

845 words, 4 minutes read time.

Initial Impressions

Well, knit me a skirt and call me Susan Foreman. The first episode of the new series of Doctor Who was… good.
At least on first viewing.

On second watch, my opinion dipped slightly—and I expect a third will lower it further. But it remains the most enjoyable episode since Ncuti Gatwa officially took over in the 2023 Christmas Special.

I’ve deliberately avoided other reviews, much like Bob and Terry dodging football results in Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?—so what follows is purely my take.

The State of the Show

The RTD2 Era So Far

Fandom has rarely been so united in criticism as it has with Russell T Davies’s (RTD’s) second stint as showrunner, starting in 2022. Once the hero who brought Who back in 2005, RTD returned to a franchise weakened by the Chibnall/Whittaker years, with high hopes buoyed by Disney’s reported $100M partnership.

Those hopes were misplaced.

His Children in Need short undermined Davros with ill-advised political revisionism. The 60th anniversary specials, despite the return of David Tennant and Catherine Tate, fizzled rather than soared. Ncuti Gatwa’s debut, in The Giggle, saw the first use of ‘bi-generation’—leaving Tennant’s Doctor bizarrely alive and semi-retired with a working TARDIS.

Season One: A Litany of Missteps

  • Opening Disaster: Space Babies—arguably the worst Who episode ever.
  • Immediate Follow-Up: The Devil’s Chord, offensive to Beatles and Doctor Who fans alike.
  • Lazy Writing: With six episodes penned by RTD himself, most felt like first drafts.
  • Rare Bright Spots: Only Boom (written by Steven Moffat) stood out as complete and coherent.
  • Musical Numbers: Overused gimmicks (The Goblin’s Song, There’s Always A Twist…) quickly wore thin.
  • Unconvincing Relationships: Ruby Sunday and the Doctor’s bond felt forced and underdeveloped.
  • Weak Finale: Empire of Death left major questions unanswered or resolved them with laughable twists.

Sutekh—once a terrifying god-like villain—was reduced to a cartoonish giant dog, ultimately defeated with a magic rope. It would be funny if it weren’t so depressing.

The Doctor and the Gatwa Problem

Gatwa’s Doctor still lacks a defining moment. He changes outfits constantly (so no iconic look), cries often (up to five times per episode), and seems more human than alien. His sexuality was foregrounded—fine in principle, but clumsily executed in Rogue, where he ditched Ruby for a romantic rendezvous with a near-stranger.

Worst of all, the Doctor rarely saves the day anymore. The “male saviour” trope appears to have been shelved—at the expense of the show’s storytelling.

Culture War Fallout

The show’s shift from story to message has not gone unnoticed. Political soapboxing—on gender, race, reparations—has replaced the sense of wonder. RTD and Gatwa’s response to criticism? Blame the fans—accusing them of bigotry rather than acknowledging creative decline.

Robot Revolution: A Ray of Hope?

What Worked

Surprisingly, a lot:

  • The Concept: A star named after a girlfriend leads to her being abducted by giant robots years later and crowned their queen. Classic Sci-Fi hook.
  • Aesthetic Style: Ray-gun robots, 1950s rocket ships, and space cityscapes—this looked like real Doctor Who.
  • Pacing and Visuals: It didn’t drag. The time fracture effects were trippy. Disney’s budget might finally have shown up.
  • Restraint from Gatwa: Fewer manic outbursts, just one single tear (still too many), and toned-down antics helped. Post-production may have removed the worst.
  • A Solid Companion Setup: Belinda Chandra has potential—feisty, capable, but not yet loveable.

But There Were Issues…

  • The Message: Toxic masculinity was this week’s villain. The metaphor was belaboured—Alan’s marriage proposal came with weird conditions (no tight clothes, no texting after 8 PM), and Belinda’s “Planet of the Incels!” line felt jarringly on-the-nose.
  • Shaky Character Beats: Belinda was indifferent to the death of a cat and quite rude to Alan. Not ideal for a new character intro.
  • Gloating Doctor: The Doctor’s smugness at Alan’s fate was disquieting. Classic Doctors showed compassion even toward enemies.
  • Convenient Tech: The robots’ inability to process every ninth word let the Doctor and Belinda speak in code—a clever but fragile plot device.

The Bigger Picture

Despite RTD’s promise of a darker Doctor, what we got was a confused one—part clown, part political commentator. Robot Revolution hints at a course correction, but it’s not yet the show many of us fell in love with.

Moffat’s fingerprints—nonlinear storytelling, callbacks to Boom, the wordplay—were everywhere. Even Belinda’s jab at “timey-wimey” felt like a meta-apology for narrative fatigue.

The big question remains: Is there a future for this version of Doctor Who?

Rumours swirl of Disney pulling out after The War Between The Land and the Sea. Gatwa’s departure seems imminent—potentially without a replacement announced, a first since Patrick Troughton’s exit.

Final Verdict

“Better than Space Babies” is a low bar, but Robot Revolution clears it with ease. In fact, it’s probably better than anything from last season. It feels like Doctor Who again—if only faintly.

Guarded optimism replaces despair. I’m even looking forward to Lux.

Low expectations, it turns out, can be a gift.

Anthony C Green, April 18, 2025.

A promotional image for 'The Angela Suite' book by Anthony C. Green, featuring a close-up of bare feet resting on a surface, alongside a radio or speaker and a backdrop of an urban skyline.

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