The Missing Episodes

Most readers are likely aware of the backstory of the long-running saga of the ninety-seven missingDoctor Who episodes. But, for those who aren’t, here’s a quick recap.

In the 1950s and 1960s, television was seen as an ephemeral medium, with most shows made to be broadcast once, maybe repeated a couple of times if they were popular, and copies sold internationally if there was demand. Then, they were often literally erased with the tape reused for another show. For popular shows likeDoctor Who andThe Avengers, the majority might be preserved for the archives, but certainly not all.

In the fifties, many programmes were performed and broadcast live. With these broadcasts, we’re lucky if they were recorded at all, and luckier still if that tape still exists today. The second performance of the 1954 version of Orwell’s1984starring Peter Cushion survived, and you can read my recent review hereReview of the 1954 BBC Adaptation of Orwell’s 1984 But the firstQuatermassserial from the previous year is gone forever.

It’s easy to be critical in retrospect, but who could have known that, six decades later, there would be a clamour to see the 1965Doctor Who serialMarco Polo, of which all seven episodes are missing, or the early television apparencies of here-today-gone-tomorrow ‘pop groups’ with names like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, TheKinksor The Who?

It tends to be the BBC that gets it in the neck for most for these acts of cultural vandalism, obviously so when it comes toDoctor Who, but this was a widespread practice. Nothing remains of the first series of The Avengers, an ITV show, and such destructive practices occurred in other countries, too.

The same is true in the medium of film, which I’ll touch on later. Only around 10% of all the silent movies made before the dawn of the roaring twenties are known to exist. That’s a sadly substantial gap in the history of the development of cinema.

As well as the belief that these artefacts of visual media would, aside from exceptional cases like 1953’s Coronation of Queen Elizabeth 11, be of no interest beyond the current audience, the expensive nature of tape was also a big factor at work, as much in the 1960s as in the 1920s.

 The Bicycle System

At one time, 136 episodes of Doctor Who were missing from the archives, all from the 1960s black and white era, with a large chunk of the second Doctor Patrick Troughton’s time in the lead role from 1966-69 seemingly lost to time. It’s thanks to the tireless work of individuals like Philip Morris that thirty-nine of these episodes have been recovered.

Most of these finds came through following the trail of the BBC’s foreign sales.

These  sales were made using what has come to be known as ‘The Bicycle System.’ Instead of sending out multiple copies, one each to all of the foreign television services willing to buy them, which would have increased costs, they would send one single copy on a mini world tour. The tape might be sent to Australia, then once it had been broadcast there, be sent on to New Zealand, to Canada, and to various African nations. Some of these countries made their own copies of the tape for repeat purposes, and some didn’t. Some returned their copy to the BBC, some didn’t.

It was through making contact with, then visiting and searching through the archives in countries where lost episodes were known to have been shown, that Morris and Co. were able to significantly reduce the list of ‘lost’ episodes.

The Dump

Having given the BBC a bit of a free pass so far, what they did in the mid-seventies is unforgivable. From 1972 onwards, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation returned every episode ofDoctor Who they had bought and broadcast to the BBC. Thus, at this point, every episode of the show ever made existed in the BBC archives.

But, for reasons of storage space, they ordered large numbers of them (and other shows, but we’ll stick with Doctor Who, for now) to be sent to landfill.

By this time, it was obvious that some television material had lasting interest, at least to some people, so they really should have known better.

Of course, there was nothing to stop BBC employees or contractors tasked with disposing of these tapes from rifling through them and deciding to keep a few rolls for themselves, either for later material gain or simply because they liked some of these shows and thought it a shame for them to be destroyed.

The Detectives

The first recoveries made by following the ‘bicycle trail’ came in 1983, but it was during what fans have come to know asThe Wilderness Yearsthat interest in recovering the missing episodes intensified. This was the period between 1989 and 2005 when, apart from the one-off 1996 TV Movie starring Paul McGann, and the occasional repeats of old stories,Doctor Who was absent from our screens.

It was during this period that many of us first became aware that ‘missing episodes’ existed (or rather, didn’t exist), and it was exciting whenever news broke that long lost treasures like the Troughton eraTomb of the Cybermen had been unearthed.

With the advent of VHS and then DVDs, television channels like the BBC had learned the error of their past ways, if only because they now realised there was solid profit to be made through physical media sales.

The last great find was made by Morris in Nigeria in 2013. It was here that, in a rolled-up carpet in an otherwise empty room in a disused television station, he found all six episodes of two long-lost Troughton stories,The Enemy of the World andThe Web of Fear.

A great discovery, only slightly spoiled by episode three of the latter somehow disappearing in transit.

You can hear Morris tell this story in a great podcast interview hereDOCTOR WHO – PHILIP MORRIS LIVE – MISSING EPISODES? RTD? CURRENT STATE OF DR WHO? SEASON 2?

In the ensuing twelve years, there has been nothing, and it seems likely that the ‘bicycle system’ avenue of enquiry has run its course, that everything that had long languished in the former HQs of obscure African television stations awaiting discovery has been discovered.

This being the case, the only hope for the ‘lost 97’ lay with private collectors.

EnterFilm is Fabulous.

Film is Fabulous

Film Is Fabulous emerged when members of the film collecting community, especially during the covid period, began to receive an increasing number of calls from the loved ones of fellow collectors along the lines of ‘My dad has passed away. He left no will, so we don’t know what to do with his films.’

Given that in many cases they were talking abut thousands upon thousands of rolls of film, that the receivers of these calls had no storage facilities beyond that reserved for their own collections, and had no legal rights to do anything at all with other people’s collections without explicit instruction, this was a big question indeed, and sadly, some of these collections were summarily disposed of.

A small group of younger members of this mostly ageing group of niche and dedicated hobbyists decided to discuss the means by which these problems might be addressed.

It’s best to listen to the whole story as told by two of the members of this group in their own words via a recent appearance on the always excellentDoctor Who Missing Episodes PodcastDoctor Who: The Missing Episodes Podcast – Special Edition – Film is Fabulous!, but the bottom line is that after a determined campaign,Film is Fabulous was born, and has now attained charitable status.

The advantage of this status is that they can now receive public donations, and I will include a link to how readers can donate at the end of this article. Adequate funding means that they can at least start to at least receive expenses for the work they’re already doing, perhaps be able to employ paid staff at some point, and attain suitable premises for storage.

(Since I wrote the above, I’ve learned thatFIF have now been granted access to suitable storage facilities by Montfort University in Leicester)

It also gives them the gravitas to start approaching collectors or their executors, to gain permission to begin cataloguing these collections, to see exactly what is there (no easy task, given that, on work completed so far,FIFestimate that 18% of reels do not match the label on the cannister), assessing its condition, and looking into the legal aspects of who owns the rights to whatever is there. Once that is done, they can return their discoveries to their legal owners who, hopefully, will begin the task of restoration, archiving and, if there is sufficient demand, making items available to the public.

It’s the legal aspects of this work that are perhaps the hardest. I’ll return here to our possibly mythical BBC contractor. If he (most likely a ‘he’) did indeed ignore orders to dispose of certain items, then in the eyes of fans of certain shows, with particular reference toDoctor Who fandom, he will have done the world a huge favour. But, despite ordering its destruction, these reels will still rightfully belong to the BBC.

In other cases, legal ownership might not be so easy to discern.

Confusion and the fear of possible reprisals may have prevented some collectors from coming forward for decades. It’s good news that the BBC have made it clear that no collectors who ended up in possession of BBC-owned material, by whatever means, will face prosecution.

The Good News

The important headline from a recent statement made byFIF, and which their representees amplify on theMissing Episodes podcast, is that ‘Several episodes ofDoctor Whocurrently missing from the BBC archives exist in several collections.’

Naturally, fans have taken to discerning the meaning of ‘several’. It has no universally agreed-upon meaning, but it’s definitely more than a couple. So a minimum of three. Thus, several times several make at least nine, which would be great, and the grapevine suggests it could be more.

In hisSense of Sphere interview, Philip Morris, who is not a part ofFIFbut is in contact with them and clearly knows more than the rest of us, stated that ‘Fans won’t be disappointed when an announcement is made.’

That sounds promising indeed.

Unfortunately, a small number of members of the lunatic fringe of Who-fandom have been hasslingFIF, issuing threats, demanding to know what they’ve found, and when we will get a chance to see it.

This is the epitome of zealous stupidity. First, we don’t know the quality of the discoveries: Is the film salvageable? If it is, then it will be down to the BBC to begin the work of restoration, and to make decisions as to how and when we will be able to see it: On the iPlayer, all in one place at the same time, on a special Blu Ray or with newly found episodes slotted into the relevant seasons as part of the ongoing, and excellent, Collection series?

And What Else?

FIFhave made it clear that their work is much broader than seeking out missingDoctor Who episodes.

They themselves, and most members of the Collector’s community, are interested primarily in feature films. Some have specialised in subsets of this, like early/silent films. Others have been more interested in factual documentaries and information, for instance, in thePathe newsreels.

A focus on vintage television is rare, so random episodes of old television shows are generally something that fell into their hands almost incidentally in the process of amassing their collection.

Personally, I’m interested in all of these areas, fascinated by lost media of all types. I’m therefore excited by the whole project.

Already, it’s believed that Oliver Hardy’s first-ever film appearance, believed to be long lost, has been recovered. There’s also a photograph of a missing episode ofSoftly Softly, aZ Cars spin-off I remember from my childhood, being returned to the BBC. It’s also been made known that some lost episodes ofThe Avengers have been found.

Apart from that, we know very little. But I suspect we are in for some nice surprises over the next year or two.

Wish List

Aside fromDoctor Who, and briefly donning my Beatlesbuff hat, I’d love to see the long-lost episode ofJuke Box Jury, when the Fabs comprised the panel; and it’s ironic that all we have of them performing (or miming to)Ticket To Ride onTop Of The Pops is a few seconds on the Tardis monitor in the First Doctor storyThe Rescue.

It’d be nice to see this properly, and to recover other lost Beatles, other great sixties bands, and even early British rockers from the fifties performing on sparsely preserved shows likeThe Six-Five-Special,Ready Steady Go orOh Boy!

To return to our main topic, after a blank twelve years, the recovery and restoration of any more lostDoctor Who is to be welcomed.

Wish List

Given the choice, I’d go for anything from the aforementionedMarco Polo, hopefully enough to make it worthwhile for the BBC to animate the rest, to make a Series OneCollectionbox viable.

For the sake of completion, Harnell’s last appearance, in episode four ofThe Tenth Planet, would be nice, as would episode one of Troughton’s first story,The Power of the Daleks. We do have the show’s very first regeneration, from Hartnell to Troughton, thanks to a preserved clip fromBlue Peter. But it would be great to have the last and first episodes of these two giants in complete form.

Something fromThe Highlanders, the last of the 1960’s ‘Pure Historicals’, which featured the first appearance of Troughton’s companion for the rest of his run, Jamie played by Fraser Hines (best known as Joe inEmmerdale Farm), would also be high on my list.

I was going to conclude by saying that, as we face a likely long hiatus for the modern show, aWilderness Years 2.0, the rediscovery of lost sixtiesDoctor Who is especially welcome. But in the last few days, it’s been announced that the show will return for a 2026 Christmas Special, written by Russell T Davis, in what is almost certain to be his swansong, possibly with a new series under a different team to follow.

But I’m guessing that I’m far from alone in being much more excited by the prospect of being able to see some hitherto lost Hartnell and Troughton episodes than by whatever is to come in 2026/7.

Donations can be made to the good people at Film Is Fabulous hereFilm is Fabulous | Film Collectors | Cinema | Vintage Television

Anthony C Green, November 2025

6,513 words, 34 minutes read time.

Introduction

 It’s taken a while, but there’s a lot to say, so much that I’ve had to cut about half of what I said in my original draft. New information, rumours, gossip, speculation and leaked information from previously reliable sources, related to both the final episode of the season and the future/non-future of Doctor Whoin general, has been coming out almost by the hour. This hasn’t exactly made my task any easier. But you have to stop somewhere, and maybe I should stay away from Who-related YouTube podcasts for a while.

Anyway, here we go,

As I’m sure everybody who cares in the slightest knows by now, Billie Piper, formerly ‘Rose’, companion to Ecclestone’s Ninth and Tennant’s Tenth, is the next Doctor.

Or maybe she isn’t.

I’ll return to that.

Either way, having her appear at the end of Ncuti’s regeneration scene looks like the last gamble of a desperate man. We know Russell T Davis (henceforth RTD or, simply Davies), likes to generate online ‘content’. If that was his aim, then he has been successful in that, if little else. But the general fan reaction has been overwhelmingly negative, and can he seriously have expected anything different?

Conversely, if he intended to endDoctor Who there, then it might have made some sense to have Billie, a rightly much-loved figure among fandom, be both the first and last face seen in the modern, post-2005, incarnation of the show.

But even RTD can’t be so arrogant as to believe he alone can choose when the show should end? His big talk of having written season 3 and much of season 4 already suggests he believes he can and should continue in his present position, but that’s starting to look less and less likely.

Imagine the horror of scripts written for Ncuti repurposed for Billie?

To the episode itself, the climax to not just one but two seasons’ worth of work, a full twenty-one episodes over approximately eighteen months, including the specials, the whole of RTD 2 so far, or, hopefully, the end of RTD 2 Full Stop.

Overview

 The Reality War was a convoluted mess. If it is to be the end of RTD’s second coming, then it’s a fitting epitaph to the lowest point in the history of the show.

 It’s telling that even those (theShrills, as they are sometimes derisively known, and which would be a great name for Doctor Who monster) who’ve defended this period throughout have had to throw up their hands in a grudging signal of surrender as far as the finale is concerned. It’s been ages since anyone has claimed that I must be racist and/homophobic, or have it patiently explained to me online why being ‘woke’ is a good thing, because I’ve dared to criticise Gatwa’s incarnation of the Doctor and Davies’ determination to insert his political ideology into almost every episode.

Positives

The whole was such a disjointed, confused and credibility-stretching disaster that it seems wrong to single out individual elements that weren’t bad. Wong, and difficult.

Still, in the interest of balance…

• My first watch was in a surprisingly packed Liverpool cinema surrounded by an equally surprisingly young demographic. They seemed to enjoy it. This was my first time watching Doctor Who on a big screen, and as an experience, it was interesting and fun. Not that my critical faculties were neutralised sufficiently by the reactions of others for me to think at any point that the episode itself was good. 
• I liked some of the set design, most of which I mentioned in my review of the last episode,Wish World. In particular, I liked the Bone Palace, especially the Steampunk ‘Doubt Counter’ beings (I’ve forgotten what they were called). The big battle between UNIT and the Bone Beasts was visually striking, for the few minutes it lasted. The way the UNIT building turned into a sort of high-tech pirate ship reminded me of the Terry Gilliam -Monty Python shortThe Crimson Assurance, which was shown in cinemas prior toThe Meaning of Life. It was especially reminiscent when Kate Lethbridge-Stewart (Jemma Redgrave) was at the helm, twirling an old-fashioned battleship wheel. Unlike the Python film, I don’t think this was supposed to be funny. But it was.
• Millie Jackson as Ruby has been by far the most consistent actor of the two seasons, when she’s been around, and here she was no exception. More on Ruby/Millie later.
• This was Ncuti’s last appearance as the Doctor, and as somebody who has thought he was miscast from the off, and that he has never succeeded in portraying a believable Doctor for more than a few fleeting moments, it would make sense for me to see his departure as a positive in and of itself.
• I do, but I will qualify that sentiment.  As bad as this episode was, he himself was OK, mostly, and there’s been enough of those ‘fleeting moments’ over the last year-and-a-half, to make me suspect that there is an alternative universe, where the show was run by somebody who told him to play down rather than to enhance the camp flamboyance he was known for in Netflix’ Sex Education, and who provided him with cohesive scripts and a consistent character arc, in which he might have made a good Doctor.
• But we don’t live in that universe and that’s sad, for him and for fans of the show. Maybe one day he’ll have the opportunity to show he really can act, to build on the ‘Dark Doctor’ aspects of his characterisation by playing a villain in something decent and credible. Or perhaps he’ll turn up, older, wiser and better in a seventy-fifth anniversary multi-Doctor special.
• His Involvement in this will have done his career no favours, unfortunately.  I feel sorry for him, though, if he decides or is advised to go with the ‘racist/homophobic fans’ narrative as an explanation for his failure, then my sympathy will rapidly evaporate. if he does feel the need to apportion blame, then I suggest he looks closely at how he was written, by whom, and for what reason.
• There was one very clever and cool idea towards the end of the episode, when Poppy’s baby cover from her newly installed Tardis crib grew smaller and smaller as the Doctor and Belinda passed it back-and-forth between themselves, whilst simultaneously and slowly forgetting the little girl’s existence. It was a nice way of visually representing Poppy’s (temporary) erasure from reality. The best idea in the whole episode, maybe in the whole season.
• I’ve liked Jonah Hauer-King’s portrayal                                                                                                                                               of Conrad Clark since his first appearance in the otherwise abysmal fourth episode,Lucky Day. He again did what he could with what he was given here. I’ll come to the bizarre character arc he was given shortly.
• The same goes for Varada Sethru as Belinda. Enforced rewrites caused by behind-the-scenes problems we’re not fully privy to, made a big contribution to making this finale such a disaster. This adversely affected the characterisation of several characters, but none more so than Belinda. I’ll also get to that later. But purely from an acting perspective, Varanda has nothing to be ashamed of.
• I’ve liked Archie Punjabi since I first became aware of her inLife On Marstwo decades ago. She’s a fine actress with the ability to lift even the weakest material. But she wasn’t written as the Rani in any sense that those who were aware of that character’s existence from the classic era would recognise.  And almost as soon as she had presented her half-baked plan to resurrect the Time Lords in her own image, in a scene of laughably static exposition, she was eaten by Omega and gone, presumably forever. What a waste.
• Ditto Anita Dobson’s Rani 2, whose only good moment was her ‘Two Rani’s’ joke before she disappeared, again, probably never to return. Two seasons’ worth of the ‘Who is Mrs. Flood’ saga, during which she did nothing even vaguely Rani-like, for that.
• Steph de Whalley returned as Anita, the sole high point from December’sJoy to the WorldChristmas special. She was there primarily to resolve the last episode’s cliff-hanger by means of the Time Hotel, which we first encountered in that Moffatt-penned Christmas episode, and of which she is now the manager, a responsibility that provided her with a magic key that enables her to open a magic door anywhere in time and space. The Doctor thus saved, she spent most of the rest of the episode holding open doors, UNIT’s high-tech gadgetry not quite stretching to doorstops. She did at least show some nice comic timing in the few lines she was given.
• Jodie Whittaker’s three-minute appearance alongside Ncuti in the Tardis made this a multi-Doctor story, though the worst multi-Doctor story ever. This was apparently a late addition, and it made no narrative sense. Yet, strangely, alongside Ncuti, she actually seemed like the Doctor, or at least ‘a’ Doctor. I almost felt nostalgic for an era I’ve hardly watched, though that didn’t run to whooping and cheering her appearance, unlike many in the cinema. Sometimes, I despair of the youth of today. They cheered when Billie appeared as well.
• Early on in his tenure, Gatwa foolishly told fans who weren’t enjoying his version of the Doctor to stop watching, and to ‘go and touch grass’ instead. Shortly before his regeneration scene, we saw Ncuti crawling in a park, literally touching grass. It was another RTD fan-bait, but quite amusing and affectionate. It made me chuckle, anyway.
• Murray Gold’s soundtrack was decent enough. He’s been disappointing since he returned alongside Davies, recycling much of his old material, and with the sound sometimes mixed so loud that it obscured the dialogue. But he did his best to lift this.

Negatives

Where does one begin?

After the cinema, I headed straight for the Grapes, my favourite Liverpool one-time Beatles haunt, secured myself a rare but necessary alcoholic drink (£6.50 for a pint of Guiness!), found a seat, got out my notebook like a proper critic, and made a list of story threads from the two seasons that were left unresolved. After that, I moved on to plot holes and miscellaneous offences against scriptwriting from this particular episode. It was a very long list, which I’ve since added to through my enjoyable trawl through online reviews, and through the second watch I delayed until strictly necessary. It’s a very long list, so what follows are merely potted highlights. One day, I will write them all out on separate cards, throw them in the air, and write my own script based on the random order in which I pick them up, in the style of a William Burrough’s cut-up experiment. It would probably be an improvement on RTD’s effort.

• One criticism, among many, of last season’s finale,Empire of Death, was that not only was the reveal of Ruby’s mum as ‘just an ordinary woman’ a letdown, it was also never explained why she was wearing weird medieval style robes when she abandoned Ruby on the steps of the church, given that that she was supposed to be a teenage girl in living in London, 2005. I assumed that was something we’d come back to, but we never did.
• The whole ‘Pantheon of Gods’ thing went nowhere, and we never discovered who The Boss was, even though this ‘boss’ was refenced in the episode.
• And what became of the Toymaker’s ‘Legions’, who the dreadfully over-acted character Maestro (Jinx Monsoon) promised us, inThe Devil’s Chord, would soon be ‘coming?’ Nothing, and I still don’t even know if they and the Pantheon are one and the same or completely separate entities.
• Having said that these two seasons were to be an ideal ‘jumping on’ point for new fans, with no knowledge of anything that had gone before being necessary, as was the first season of RTD 1 back in 2005, Davies chose to climax last season with Sutekh, a character who appeared once in the classic series, inPyramids of Mars in 1975. For the climax to this season, he went with Omega, who appeared twice, inThe Three Doctors in 1973 andThe Arc of Infinity (notThe Ark in Space as I erroneously said in myWish World review) in 1983, and the Rani, who appeared twice in the 1980’s. Viewers basically needed an MA in show-lore to follow any of this.
• Omega was ‘re-imagined’ as a giant, generic, skeletal CGI monster, because he’d ‘become the thing everybody imagined him to have become’ according to the Doctor, and bore no relation to the classic Omega (who, if we insist on strict adherence to past continuity, had become a disembodied anti-matter being, anyway). At least last years’ Scooby Doo version of Sutekh was voiced by the same actor as the original, the legendary Gabriel Woolf.
• Having appeared from behind the Seal of Rassilon, ‘Omega’ ate Archie Punjab’s Rani, and was then killed by the Doctor using his Vindicator thing. The whole ‘climatic’ battle lasted less five minutes.
• The Vindicator, which had previously been used as a sort of tracking device to help get Belinda home, which, remember, was supposedly the focus of the season, now had the destructive power of a trillion supernovas, or something. I’m no expert, but wouldn’t something of that destructive power likely destroy whole galaxies, rather than one particular target in a closed environment?
• Before their Pythonesque battle with the Bone Beasts, UNIT did a sort of Avengers’ Assemble pastiche, though I don’t think it was intended as pastiche, complete with Shirley (Ruth Madely) burning up the pavementRoadrunnerstyle in her wheelchair and token legacy character Mel (Bonnie Langford) riding her motorbike into the control room at the top of UNIT tower, somehow, complaining that she’d been a ‘housewife’ in Conrad’s Wish World, as though such a thing is an almost unimaginable horror. This assembly of UNIT’s fearsome, battle-hardened force, was completed by the Doctor walking purposefully down the stairs, accompanied by Murray Gold giving it is all, and dramatically removing his jacket, looking like he really meant business. He ruined this effect somewhat by changing into a skirt. We’ve been assured by the powers-that-be that it was a kilt, but I’d like to see them try that one in the back streets of Glasgow.
• Actually, I’ve nothing in principle against a man wearing a skirt. David Beckham managed to pull off the sarong look back in the day, and aesthetically, Ncuti looks good in most anything, I should imagine, if you like that sot of thing. If he’d gone with this skirt ensemble from the beginning of his tenure, and stuck with it, it might even have become iconic, though, personally I preferred the fifties Traditional Britain pinstripe suit and bowler hat he wore when still trapped in the world Conrad. That and the long brown leather jacket he wore in his first full episode,The Church on Ruby Road. As I’ve said before, the decision to deprive him of a single identifiable Doctor costume, which I gather wasn’t his decision, was a big mistake. 
• ‘Dark Doctor’ went nowhere. What we are left with as the legacy of the Fifteenth is a Doctor who was mostly very upbeat, positive, camp and emotional (as in crying a lot), but also for no justifiable reason, occasionally took to torturing people (The Interstellar Song Contest), expressing delight at returning Al to the state of a ‘sperm and an egg’ (The Robot Revolution), travelling forward through time to watch Conrad die an early lonely death, and then back again to gloat about his impending fate to his face (Lucky Day). Coincidentally, these were all single, white, straight men, though he wasn’t very nice to Joy inJoy to the World or Anita in this episode either. His characterisation was a mess. Being easily ‘triggered’ through being the last of his people, doesn’t really cut it.  Apart from a brief period under the Moffatt regime, he’s been The Last of the Time Lords throughout most of the modern show. The Tenth Doctor’s Time Lord Victorious period was marked more by arrogance than cruelty and had an identifiable beginning and end. With this Doctor, the ‘dark turns’ were too random to make sense.  Put simply, there were too many times when he did things thatDoctor Who fans never want to see the Doctor do.

– Belinda’s ‘development’ was also odd, especially in this, her likely final appearance. From strong, career driven independent nurse, who wanted nothing more than to get home and continue to help people, to final contentment as the mother of Poppy, which, apparently, she’d been all the time. We even got clips from previous episodes were references to ‘getting home for Poppy’ were inserted, and, more weirdly, even from episodes we hadn’t seen where the same point was reinforced.

 The conclusion that Belinda’s life was made complete by the addition of a baby, actually made a mockery of the ‘progressive’ politics and ‘Queer friendly’ direction of the entire two seasons. I’d be all for this, if it was artfully done, deliberately, and gradually. But you can’t obliterate a tone that has been established over almost twenty-one episodes by embarking on an abrupt recon’ of the entire backstory of a major character in the last twenty minutes and expect the reaction to be anything but confused derision.

• Somebody could write a whole book on the bizarre characterisation and mixed, often contradictory motivations of Conrad. But, even now, it’s all way too much to get my head round. All I’ll say is that the ‘Wish World’ he created on behalf of the Rani, looked OK to me, with a few reservations, a sort of idealised version of a lost England, populated by happy, stable families (‘Traditional to the point of being wrong’, according to Davies in the relevantUnleashedepisode). Even Ruby said so herself, and used the ‘Wish Baby’ to wish him to be happy, which is apparently how he ended up, happily working in a restaurant, with no memory of the previous self who’d had a podcast with a hundred thousand followers, and then gone on to be a rather benevolent dictator of a whole world. That doesn’t sound like a happy ending to me. He was emasculated, not redeemed.
• Oh, and we discovered that UNIT implants microchips into the bodies of all of their employees, thus proving Conrad had a point inlucky Day concerning them being a malevolent force in the first place.
• My own description of UNIT in modern Who would not be ‘malevolent.’  It would be ‘shit.’ From their ludicrous tower in the centre of London – an easy target for hostile forces from within and withoutEarth[GC1] , to their ‘leader’ Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, to their ridiculous DEI and nepotistic employment policies (To her credit, Anita became perhaps the only character ever to refuse a job offer from UNIT) and pointless characters like young Rose Noble (Yasmin Finney), who was introduced in the very first sixtieth anniversary special, simply because RTD decided a trans character was needed, and then given no character and no role.

I hate everything about the modern version of UNIT. How much better was the old UNIT family of the Brigadier, Yates and Benton? And let us not forget Torchwood either in RTD 1. Torchwood made sense and spawned four seasons of a spin-off that, at its best, especially the five-part, single narrativeChildren of Earth contained some of the darkest and best Who related stories ever, despite Chris Chibnall being the showrunner.

• Ruby’s arc seemed to have concluded with her finding her ‘ordinary mum’ at the end of theEmpire of Death. But she re-appeared inLucky Day, and in this two-part finale she was suddenly the main companion again, before disappearing without even the opportunity of a final farewell to ‘her’ Doctor before his regeneration.  

As I’ve said, I like Millie Gibson as an actress, and Ruby was a character with promise, but why did she magically, by use of the Wish Baby, wish Conrad happiness, and then a few minutes later whine about the injustice of Conrad crossing over from ‘Wish World’ to the ‘real world’ but not Poppy? Strange.

• What even was the ‘Wish Baby’? I liked the scene when the baby was taken by the Rani from his parents in nineteenth-century Bavaria in the previous episode, but can anyone take seriously a story which relies on a magic baby’ to further the plot? And why didn’t the Rani, as she’d now ceased to be the amoral scientific genius she’d once been (Pip and Jane Baker, the creators of the character, will be spinning in their graves. I hope their estate was paid handsomely for the rights to the use of their finest character) use this baby magic to further her plan to resurrect the Time Lords, instead of relying on an, as it proved, highly unreliable Omega?
• And surely the Doctor could have found a better use of the magic baby than merely to stop it being used to make any more wishes come true?
• Time Lords are now, apparently, sterile, which I suppose makes some sense of bi-generation as an evolutionary adaptation, which was referenced in the episode, but not really when the ‘Last of the Time Lords’ trope is factored in.  ‘They’re all dead, except for the Doctor and the Rani, and briefly, Omega and they can no longer procreate.’
• The big one, for me, was Susan. I’ll say more about this below, but to have her appear briefly inThe Interstellar Contest, for the first time in over forty years, even having her mouth the words ‘Grandfather…find me’, and then nothing since, was unforgivable.   
• I’ve mentioned pacing problems in every review this season, but here they were writ large. In the cinema, I surreptitiously checked my phone when Omega was all too easily defeated. ‘Thirty-six minutes’, I thought. ‘What the Dickens are they going to do with the last half-hour, apart, probably, for Ncuti’s regeneration?’
• The answer was the Poppy story. This was the Poppy we’d seen inSpace Babies, then briefly at the end ofThe Interstellar Song Contest. Now she, apparently, became the key to the entire two seasons, this baby built on wishes and dreams, ‘like all babies’, according to the Doctor.
• Probably, there’ll be numerous novels and whole Big Finish audio boxsets produced to explain and develop Poppy-Lore. All I can really glean from the episode was that the Doctor and Belinda thought she was their daughter, somehow, for a bit, then forgot all about her. Only Ruby remembered, for some reason, and she managed to convince the Doctor and everybody at UNIT that she had indeed existed. The Doctor then realised he could use his ‘regeneration energy’ to put everything back as it should be, i.e. back to a world where Belinda was and always had been Poppy’s mother. This was a world which had at no point been foreshadowed all season. And wasn’t the real Poppy still on the space station with little baby friends?
• The breaking of the ‘fourth wall’ that began with Mrs Flood at the end ofThe Church On Ruby Road, and continued up until the point she revealed herself as the Rani, or rather two Rani’s after Archie Punjabi’s version emerged from within her inThe Interstellar Song Contest, was never explained. It also seemed to have no plausible connection to the character of the Rani as we, the small minority who’d ever heard of her, had known her. This makes me suspect that the Rani connection to Mrs. Flood was something RTD decided on at late notice.

When the Doctor and Belinda took this fourth wall breaking to the extreme of emerging from 1950s Miami, inLux, into a modern living room via a modern flat television screen to interact with a stereotypical but weirdly diverse trio ofDoctor Who ‘fans’, I thought we were about to go somewhere interesting, if probably misguided with the whole Meta angle. But no, yet another road to nowhere.

• In episode 6 of season 1,Rogue, the ‘Bridgerton’ episode, the Doctor met, lusted after, engaged in the most inappropriately sexual kiss in the show’s history with, and announced his undying love for the titular character. It seemed certain we’d be seeing Rogue (Jonathan Groff) again, though this wasn’t something I was exactly looking forward to. We did, briefly, via a video message, from within the ‘Hell Realm’ that existed in Conrad’s Wish World. One would have thought the Doctor might have tried to rescue this love of his life, especially when he got his hands on the magic Wish Baby. But no, his only comment concerned all cultures having a dark ‘Underverse’, such as theUpside Down (fromStranger Things, a decent enough modern Science Fiction show, not a culture),Narniaand Hell itself.  I’m not sure C.S. Lewis, who was not only a great writer of both Science Fiction and Fantasy, but also one of history’s most important Christian Apologists, would have been greatly pleased by this categorisation ofNarnia, his greatest creation, with Hell. I’m not sure, either, how or why Zoom or Skype calls from Hell would be an option in Conrad’s world, though I did say that his dictatorship seemed quite benevolent by some of the standards of our own world.
• Ncuti’s regeneration itself was OK, though him shouting ‘Joy to the World’ from the Tardis as it hovered in space, apparently visiting Joy who, it will be remembered, turned into a star at the end of the Christmas special of that name, was silly, and nor was I keen on the Christ on the Cross type pose he struck as the process properly kicked in. But, even leaving aside the silliness of ending with his transformation into Billie Piper, the way it was done was bad, with her face obviously superimposed onto Gatwa’s body.  
• Far better would have been to end with an ‘open regeneration,’ where we saw the process begin, fade to black, and let the future, if there is to be one, take it from there.
• Lastly, when Davies introduced the Bi-generation concept inThe Giggle, leaving not one but two Doctors existing simultaneously in the same timeline, he unnecessarily created a situation where fans would inevitably question what Tennant’s Fourteenth was doing while Sutekh, the various members of the Pantheon, the Rani, Omega et al where posing an existential threat to the universe: still sitting sipping cocktails with Donna and her family in their back garden, with his fully functional Tardis standing dormant by the back gate, perhaps being repurposed as the ultimate ‘dimensionally non-linear’ general storage unit?   

Conclusion

 The first thirty-six minutes were passably bad. Had it continued like that for the remainder of the episode, perhaps stretching it out to make the ‘battle’ between the Doctor, the Rani and this faux-Omega the climatic scene, then, with or without a regeneration, it would likely be regarded on about the same level asEmpire of Death, maybe even a little better. But, tacking on the Poppy story and retrospectively making that the focal point of two whole seasons was crazy.

Last-minute rewrites, forced upon writers for whatever reason, are always going to present problems, no matter how good the writer is. Milie quitting, or being fired, Ncuti quitting, or being fired, both clearly threw RTDs plans into disarray.

We also now know that some of the arcs he set up weren’t even intended to be resolved until season 3, or even 4. To write and record two seasons more or less in tandem, and still leave threads hanging, on the assumption that those first two seasons would be successful enough to ensure he would have the opportunity to resolve them at a later stage shows a lot of arrogance.

As I said in my last review, Belinda’s zig-zag characterisation only makes sense once you realise that much of her material was originally intended for Ruby.

We even now know, and have a still photograph as evidence, that an alternative ending toThe Reality War was shot. It should have ended happily in a nightclub, with the Doctor and Belinda dancing (Varada looking super-hot, by the way), and Susan, dressed in an outfit reminiscent of the one she wore inThe Five Doctors, taking Poppy by the hand, and saying ‘Let’s go mum…’

We even saw Carole Ann Ford wearing this outfit in herUnleashed interview. This suggests the alternative ending decision was made very late in the day.

 I know I’m not alone in feeling a sense of relief that we were spared the horror of Poppy as the Doctor’s daughter and Susan’s mum. Hopefully, that’s an idea that’s dead and buried now. But Carole Ann is now eighty-five-years-old, and it’s a shame she’ll now likely never get a proper, meaningful, valedictory appearance.

Forced late-stage changes notwithstanding, Davies could still have made other choices as regards the finale.

That he went with what he went with is perhaps an indication that there is nobody in a position of sufficient authority to say ‘no’ to him.

What is clear, is that RTD is now a pale shadow of the writer he used to be. This is the man who knocked outMidnight, one of the best episodes of the modern era, in a weekend because a planned script became unusable at the last minute.

He used to be good, and I have taken issue with certain podcasters who now, retrospectively, claim that there were always problems with Davies’ writing forDoctor Who.

Yes, some of the overt virtue-signalling that has been a big contributory factor to making this era as bad as it has been, was there from the beginning of the modern show. But, on the whole, the stories he wrote in his first era, were so good that this went unnoticed, or was quickly forgotten. Russell T Davies was a greatDoctor Who writer/showrunner, and his bookThe Writer’s Tale, which I’ve recently dipped back into for the first time in years, he gives some great insights into his writing processes back then, of how much time, effort, and love he put into his scripts. It’s also an inspiration work for anyone who writes, or has aspirations to write, similar material themselves.

As critical as I’ve been in this series of reviews, I won’t forget that Russell T Davies was above all else, a fan who was inspired to write by his love of the show, turned out to be very, very good at it, seized the opportunity to bring the show he loved  back from the dead, and put his heart and soul into making its return the success it was.

It’s a shame his legacy has been tarnished, but judging him purely on the evidence of the last year and a half, is akin to judging the career of Muhammad Ali on the basis of his last two fights.

And, who knows, his forthcoming Channel Four seriesTip Toe may prove to be good. Writing about his experiences within the LGBTQIA (apologies if I’ve missed anyone out) community is clearly where his real interest lies. That’s where he began, of course, withQueer as Folk, at a time when there were fewer letters of the Pride alphabet to remember.

But these are areas that should have, and should always be kept out ofDoctor Who, and Davies time as the showrunner and main writer needs to end here.     

The Future?

I should end where the episode ended, with Billie Piper. Clearly, her appearance at the end of Ncuti’s regeneration scene was a last-minute add-on, a stunt, a gimmick. It’s probably significant that the end credits said simply ‘Introducing Billie Piper’ without the customary suffix ‘as the Doctor.’ Frankly, I’d be amazed to see a season ofDoctor Who, with or without RTD, with Billy Piper as his Doctor. She might get a single special, written mainly as a means of explaining away this nonsense. Perhaps she’ll turn out to still be Rose, or the Moment, the personification of the super-weapon with which the Tenth, Eleventh and War Doctor brought an end to the Last Great Time War inThe Day of the Doctor fiftieth anniversary special. Or, as I’ve already suggested, the whole thing could be quietly forgotten.

We all like Billi, but the future must lie elsewhere.

Here’s a few ideas, off the top of my head:

Davies must go. He can no longer produce single cohesive episodes, let alone develop and resolve complex multi-season story arcs. As well as his clear creative regression, it’s often seemed that he’s come to regard the show as, at least in part, primarily a vehicle for the promotion of his rather intolerant brand of ultra-left-liberal politics, lashing out at those who disagree with him, whether it’s about particular political issues, or the general direction of the show. He forgot that the fans are the lifeblood ofDoctor Who, and he assumed that those who turned their back on its new itineration would be replaced by new, younger fans more in tune with his political and creative vision. That assumption was wrong, my experience at the cinema notwithstanding. BBC ratings have been poor, Disney have almost certainly seen enough and, finally, even his cheerleaders among establishment critics have deserted him.

The show was in a bad place when he returned to replace Chibnall in 2022, but it’s in an even worth place now. He’s left a mess, and he’s not the man to clean it. Nor do now long-ago past glories earn him the right to try.  

All that remains of his promised mighty, globe-spanningWhoniverse, is the bad smell of two series plus not very special ‘specials’ under his watch, and the still unseenThe War Between the Land and the Sea, a UNIT spin-off that’s been in the can for at least a year that very few expect good things of.     

There must be no return to Moffatt, or Chibnall either, nor anyone closely associated with them or Davies, though, anybody should have the right to submit individual ideas or scripts for consideration.

I’d dispense with the idea of all-powerful ‘showrunners’ completely. What’s needed is a skilled script editor with a large and varied pool of writers, established and new, to draw from. As a starting point, there are a great many Doctor Who novels and Big Finish audio dramas that could make the transition into becoming excellent television episodes.

I’m open to a full reboot, even with the possibility of remaking classic stories, if this is done tastefully and respectfully. Alternatively, you can write away the last few years in a single special or simply a few lines early in a re-imagined show. Blame the Master or consign the last eight years to a parallel universe, anything that allows us to move forward, unbound by ever more layers of impenetrable lore.

Thought must be given to episode length and format. The idea of forty-five-minute standalone stories which link to longer arcs looks tired and outdated. A few longer specials every couple of years, on something like the Black Mirror model, or a return to shorter episodes that combine into standalone serials in the fashion of the Classic era ere both options worthy of careful consideration.

Writers need to write within some form of guide, a ‘show bible’, an official canon. Franchises likeStar Wars andStar Trek have such a thing, and although it hasn’t saved them from Woke Hell in recent years, at least it prevents anyone from rewriting the whole backstory of the universe, and its key character on a whim, ala Chibnall and hisTimeless Children.

The First Doctor was played by William Hartnell. He stole a Tardis in his home planet of Gallifrey for reasons which are, and never need to be, made clear, and went on his travels. His Tardis can theoretically take on any form, but its Chameleon Circuit is broken and it got stuck in the form of an old English police box in London in the early nineteen-sixties. That’s how our story begins, and always will begin, now and forever.

That should be the staring point for a show ‘bible’, a guide that allows for change and evolution, but maintains core essence and continuity.

No more DEI casting. I’d start a new era with an older, male actor with the gravitas of a Hartnell, Ecclestone or Capaldi. Off the top of my head, I’d go for Simon Pegg. He’s proved through theMission Impossible series of films that he can do serious as well as comedy.  He’s also a fan and, at the time of writing, is the exact same age as Hartnell and Capaldi where when they were first cast.

 Paul McGann is now in the elder statesman category of Doctors, with a quarter of a century of experience of playing the role in Big Finish audio. It would be nice to see him finally get the series he got. Perhaps a six episode, thirty minutes per episode, single-story series to tide us over, and trial a new format?

I also recognise that the younger male Doctors, Tennant and Smith, brought to the role a certain ‘girl appeal’ that it had previously lacked and has lacked since, but that’s one of the beauties of the character, that, through the genius idea of regeneration, it can morph and change as the need arises.

But the casting needs to be on merit, not a tick-box exercise driven by ‘representation’ and ideology.

There is still an audience forDoctor Who, if it’s good. ‘Build it, and they will come,’ as someone once said.

 It doesn’t need a massive Disney-style budget to be good. For the $100M they apparently put into it, I don’t think the show looked any better than it had previously in the modern era. In some respects, it looked worse, with too much fake-looking CGI, and with sometimes the impression given of big money being spent simply for the sake of it. For all of its many faults, the Chibnall/Whittaker period was probably peak-Who, on a purely visual level, and that was funded by the BBC alone.

The key to rebirth is great Science Fiction (NOT Fantasy) storytelling, not hard cash, though it does make sense to reach out to an alternative high-level streaming service as a partner to the BBC, especially as the Zeitgeist now seems at last to be turning away from using entertainment as a form of ultra-liberal propagandising.

Doctor Who is a fabulous old show, a national institution that can still have a bright future.

All that’s needed is a decent rest and people of talent who care for it enough to make it, once again, relevant to new generations.

Anthony C Green, June 2025

After writing this, I discovered that in his monthly Doctor Who magazine column, Davies announced that his column was now being ‘put on hold’ until ‘we know what’s happening.’ Some are interpreting this as coded ‘Farewell.’ We’ll see

By Anthony C Green

Picture Credit: By Miguel Discart – 2019-03-03_12-08-44_ILCE-6500_DSC00368, CC BY-SA 2.0,https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=123599604

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 ofDoctor 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 showUnleashed, 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, 25^th 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.

Eternally annoyingUnleashed 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 howDoctor 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 whereBlink, 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 anniversaryDay 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-offTorchwood, 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 thisUnleashed, 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 ofThe 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

 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,TheLegend of Ruby Sundaydid 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 Deathwas 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 onWishWorld. 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. AllWish Worldleft 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 fromSpaceBabies. 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-classicHuman 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 inLucky Day, from a book calledDoctor Who and the Deadly Wish. The design style and colouring of this hardback book looked suspiciously likeHarry 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 invokeHarry 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 inAn 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 episodeRogue 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 theTimeless 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 DoctorsandThe Ark in Spacefrom 1973 and 1975 respectively are the key texts for getting up to speed with Omega. But best also to delve intoThe 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 withEastenders, 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 wholeGallifreyBig 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 itis exposition.

And, if you end an episode on a cliffhanger, like the Tardis exploding at the end ofThe 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 Worldwas 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

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 ofThere’s Always a Twist at the End fromThe Devils Chord. As it happens, the use of music was nicely restrained, with three of the songs highly truncated in nature, including the amusingDugga-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 thePoppy 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 satireKerblam!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 20^th 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 inDoctor 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 andThe 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 inThe 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 (LuxandThe 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) inThe Robot Revolutionwas returned to the state of a sperm and an egg by the little laundromat gadget, which the Doctor, and Belinda, found hilariously funny. InLuck 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 recognisablyDoctor 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 24^th. That’s the date of the next episode,Wish World… 

Anthony C Green, May 2025

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 hisBarbershop 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.

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 aDoctor 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 intoDoctor Who in its present Science Fiction-lite, Fantasy-heavy incarnation.

It didn’t offend me politically on the scale ofLucky 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 Daywas 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 ofLucky 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 storyThe 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-showUnleashed 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 asLucky 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 theInterstellar Song Contest, a tie-in with the oh-too-real-lifeEurovision Song Contest. It’s been written by Juno Dawson, best known for his cryptically named opusHow 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 inThe 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 withSpace Babies.

Anthony C Green,May2025

557 words, 3 minutes read time.

I read Higgs’The KLF Chaos Magic and the BandWho Burned a Million Pounds some years ago. It was a fascinating read that led me to a brief, and unsuccessful, flirtation with Chaos Magic. The book featured a very interesting chapter onDoctor Who, my all-time favourite television show, so I was delighted to discover that the writer had now written a whole book on the subject.

It didn’t disappoint, expanding on the main themes of the chapter in his earlier work, arguing, to simplify, that the show has enjoyed such longevity that it has taken on the form of a living entity, changing and adapting to new conditions, and evolving in such a way that it creates the conditions for its own survival.

That might sound weird and artsy-fartsy, and I suppose it is. It does, however, make sense, though it would be impossible to do the author’s thesis justice in a short review. All I can do is urge people to read it, be they fans of the show or those with a more general interest in British popular culture.

You’ll gather from this that this is no ordinaryDoctor Who book, and I suppose I should qualify my recommendation by saying that if you’re looking for a mainstream history of the show, with detailed production notes on the now close to nine hundred episodes in nearly sixty-two years, then look elsewhere. This is essentially a work of cultural criticism, written from an unusual and esoteric point of view.

It does present its analysis in a conventional structure. That is, it begins with the pre-history of the show and takes us chapter by chapter, Doctor by Doctor, from Hartnell the First in 1963,  through McCoy the Seventh, the last Doctor of the classic era that ended in 1989, and onwards through the ‘Wilderness Years of the nineties, McGann’s movie Doctor and the modern incarnation from Eccleston the Ninth in 2005 right up to the present day with Gatwa the Fifteenth/the Disney Doctor. Higgs’ Left-field analysis flows beautifully from this familiar structure.

There are many sub-themes to enjoy here. But I’ll mention just one. That is, the idea that the relationship of the BBC to the franchise is analogous to that of the Time Lords to the Doctor within the show’s lore and canon. Again, this might sound a bit ‘out there’ for some, but it really does work.

I don’t agree with the author on everything. He’s more of a liberal than I am, and his progressive views sometimes collapse into a form of cultural relativism where, in this context, one Doctor is every bit as important as every other. That’s not really a criticism. Higgs has chosen his path, and it’s a valid one that I thank him for sharing with us in such a thought-provoking and entertaining manner. However, there should also be a place for value judgment when discussing art/pop culture. Readers may be interested in checking out my reviews of the current ‘season 2’ of Disney Who. There are plenty of value judgments to be found there.

That aside, I have no hesitation in recommendingExterminate! Regenerate! It’s a book that’s well worth reading, from an author who is rapidly establishing a place among my favourite non-fiction authors.

Anthony c Green, May 2025

Exterminate/Regenerate

By John Higgs

#1 Bestseller in Television History & Criticism

Explore the extraordinary history of *Doctor Who*—a cultural phenomenon. Buy Now on Amazon

Purchases made via our affiliate links help support our work at no extra cost to you.

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 ofDoctor 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 likeLucky 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’sMidnight, 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 toMidnight, 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 inThe 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 aMidnight 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 theMidnightlink, 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 eitherRobot Revolutionor 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 ofLux, 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’Toxicthis 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 Wellis 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-fashionedDoctor Who. It was criminally wasted here.

The idea of the general public questioning the existence and funding ofUnitis 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 thatUnitand 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 ofLux, 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 filmThey 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: Byhttps://www.instagram.com/bbcdoctorwho/p/DHyBku8OAtV/, Fair use,https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=79334790

2,251 words, 12 minutes read time.

A critic asked to summariseLux 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 inThe 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 24^th 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 ofThe 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 ofDot 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 inLux.

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 (‘SenseSphere’) 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 25^th, 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 24^th 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 25^th. She can say a quick ‘Hi,’ to celloist mum and karaoke dad (new information gained inLux. 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 finaleThe Empire of Death. By the end, they’d all been resurrected. Similarly, Mr. Pye was the only character who died inLux.

Linus Roche, a fine character actor in his own right as well as the son of William Roche (Ken Barlow inCoronation 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 sixBlack Mirror episodes onNetflix, 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 allowedBlack 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 providedBlack 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 sequelUSS 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.

AndDoctor 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 beyondLux, 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 manyBuffy 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 fromThe Robot RevolutiontoLuxcan’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

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 ofDoctor 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 inWhatever 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 broughtWho 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.

HisChildren 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, inThe 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 worstWho episode ever.
• Immediate Follow-Up:The Devil’s Chord, offensive to Beatles andDoctor Who fans alike.
• Lazy Writing: With six episodes penned by RTD himself, most felt like first drafts.
• Rare Bright Spots: OnlyBoom (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 inRogue, 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 realDoctor 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 toBoom, 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 ofDoctor Who?

Rumours swirl of Disney pulling out afterThe 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 thanSpace Babies” is a low bar, butRobot Revolution clears it with ease. In fact, it’s probably better than anything from last season. It feels likeDoctor Who again—if only faintly.

Guarded optimism replaces despair. I’m even looking forward toLux.

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

Anthony C Green, April 18, 2025.