Just before we begin, I want to quickly address how I have been writing this post. Basically instead of trying to write my first reactions to each episode and publish them ASAP, I have this time written my thoughts for each episode as it airs, but saved them all for this season spanning post. Previously whenever I tried to post reactions ASAP, I’d end up starting the next post with the things I forgot to mention in the previous.
That’s why this post is coming out a week after the end of the season, because if I am to give myself a week to react to episodes 1-9, then it’s only fair to give myself the same amount of time to react to the 10th episode.
I’ve also not been watching the acompanianying show ‘Doctor Who: Unleashed‘ which documents the making of each episode, as I’m aware they generally show interviews with the writers of the episodes and often they will talk about the themes they are trying to convey in the episode. I want to ignore these because if you know an episode is supposed to be about ‘x‘ or ‘y‘, well that’s what you see in the episode. I want to watch the episodes and see what themes emerge without being told what themes should have been present.
And this should be fairly obvious, but spoilers!
Episode 1 – Space Babies
I’m guessing that this episode had two jobs:
- Quickly establish the lore of the show, or at least the salient points. This is both because it’s a new companion episode, but also for the new Disney+ watchers.
- Set the tone for this incarnation of the Doctor, and possibly for this season.
Let’s quickly talk about each of those. The lore thing was a fairly quick dump. “I’m an alien, my home planet is dead, this is a time machine, where shall we go?” It’s to the point but it was an info dump in the first few minutes, and then on with the adventure.
That adventure though? It was very family friendly, almost a little too family friendly. I don’t think we’ll know if or how much Disney influenced anything about the show, but this first episode isn’t abating those fears.
We definitely seem to be leaning more into the fantastical and fairy tale sorts of stories. So far this incarnation of the Doctor has battled the God of Game by playing catch with him, recused 2 babies from some pirate goblins, and now rescued a space station full of ‘space babies‘ (how many times could they say that BTW) from the literal bogeyman.
Actually that’s very ‘Doctor Who‘ now that I say that.
Anyway, I have a couple of minor issues with the episode.
First is the whole babies with the voices of children gimmick. Why not make the crew a bunch of 6 year olds, rather than trying to use babies? I know it’s a sci-fi show where all sorts of things happen, but I couldn’t get my head around the idea of these babies growing up mentally but not physically, especially since there wasn’t an explanation as to why that had happened.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s an interesting concept – a space station being crewed by children far too young to be able to, but I think Russel T. Davies was too invested in the idea of space babies, because ‘space children‘ doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it?
The second issue was this moment:
The Doctor intentionally scares a bunch of babies for no reason. It goes against the idea of him being a caring person. I could get it IF there was a reason to scare the babies, like he’s testing some hypothesis, but we didn’t see that.
For that moment, the Doctor was an asshole.
I think on the whole, it was a ‘safe’ episode. Like I said, it was family friendly, but not a bad episode. Just not that great either.
Episode 2 – The Devil’s Chord
Maestro was fun, weren’t they?
Right from the start they are a force of nature, eating the music from people’s hearts and killing them. Let’s not beat around the bush here. That’s not the only thing being eaten here. Jinkx Monsoon was chewing the scenery and loving it!
Story wise it was another interesting concept – What if the world didn’t have music any more? Though that’s not quite what we saw. There were songs, but they all lacked any heart or soul to them. It was all flat sound. I do think the potential end result was a little far fetched. Somehow without music we’d stop being able to express ourselves properly and that would lead to wars, wars and more wars until Fallout: London.
OK, they established dance could still exist, but what about painting? Poetry? Acting? Screenwriting? Writing books?!
Now on a different point, this episode feels like it should have come later in the season. The dialogue between the Doctor and Ruby after they had hid from Maestro gave me the impression that they have been traveling around together for a lot longer than we’ve been shown. Then moments later the Doctor decides to show Ruby what the future could be, and confirms with her what date she came from – JUNE 2024.
Previously when we’ve seen things like this happen, it’s been the present day, matching the date of broadcast. At least in the revival era, I know a lot of the 4th Doctor’s stories were set a few years ahead of their actual air date.
This bucks that trend though. This is something happening in our future. Then after Maestro is defeated and being sucked into the piano, their final words are “The one who waits is coming soon!” Wouldn’t that line make more sense if this had actually been one of the latter episodes in the season? That said, it’s not like a few weeks isn’t also ‘soon’ in the grand scheme of things.
For the record, it’s fine that we don’t see all of their travels and we’ll always assume there are smaller uneventful journeys in between the episodes we get to see. It’s just worth bearing in mind that ‘Space Babies’ picks up from the end of ‘The Church on Ruby Road‘ which is set on December 24th 2023. At the very least we can infer that the Doctor and Ruby have been travelling together for at least 5-6 months.
Episode 3 – Boom
OK, a quick add on to what I just said above about the previous episode feeling like it should have come later on. The start of this episode seems to dispute this, because they make an explicit point of telling us this is Ruby’s first sunset on an alien planet. Either the Doctor and Ruby have only been travelling around Earth’s at various points in time, or they’ve travelled to other space ships / stations (hey maybe they did visit the Star Trek franchise at some point)
All of this I think lends credence to the idea that ‘The Devil’s Chord’ was supposed to air later in the running order. But let’s move onto this weeks episode.
You had me for most of the episode, Steven. The first three quarters of the episode were fantastic, but I’ll come back to what I think of the ending later on.
What’s the Doctor famous for doing? Running around like a headless chicken, and using his sonic screwdriver. OK, it’s more than those two things, but those things were evidently banned from this episode. It was a stripped back episode of the Doctor being pretty much powerless to get out of the situation without outside help. This Doctor is having to put his trust in other people including a new companion.
Throw in a bit of social commentary on war, the church and capitalism that’s enough to make you think about them for bit, without having to hammer home “these things are bad, do you understand?”
I’d say that it was the last quarter of the episode that just went a bit too far for me. I think it was just after the we learnt that the mine isn’t actually explosive itself, it turns it’s victim into the explosive, and because the Doctor is special, he’s going to be a fucking nuke.
Oh and he was bulletproof? I mean Ruby got shot and died, but the Doctor takes three shots to the arm to practically no effect. And bear in mind, this was before we saw Mundy Flynn suggest to Ruby that she be shot, and she openly says she’ll put it on the lowest setting. Meaning when Mundy shot at the Doctor’s arm, that was at a higher setting, presumably at a kill setting.
Anyway, so Ruby gets killed but because this was filmed so far in advance that we know she’s appearing in the next season, we know she’s not going to really die. If anything this was a wasted moment. The Doctor has not long faced the Toymaker who taunted him about past companions who have died, and now he’s just lost another one. Hell, this is a new companion he’s just lost as well. We should have heard the Doctor or The Toymaker just screaming “She’s dead already!?”
I think the most egregious thing was to do with the dead Father Vater. I liked the concept that a person would get compressed down into a rod of dried flesh, and that some aspects of their personality could be saved as a primitive AI.
But that AI being able to transmit itself and turn into a virus that can then take down a whole system? Nope. Step too far.
Episode 4 – 73 Yards
I don’t know what to make of this episode. Doctor-light episodes in and of themselves aren’t bad. If anything it’s a opportunity to show what us ordinary people would do when faced against something the Doctor would know how to. And that can work both with monsters we’ve seen before and those we haven’t.
But all Doctor-light episodes still have the Doctor in there somewhere to make sence of it all. This, does not.
Don’t get me wrong, the Doctor does appear for all of a few minutes, but he doesn’t get to explain anything.
I think the best summation is that something causes the Doctor to disappear, at the same time a watcher appears (who we don’t know yet is an older version of Ruby) who remains permanently fixed at 73 yards away from Ruby, waving her arms at young Ruby and driving anyone who talks to the watcher so crazy they run in fear from Ruby. Eventually, somehow, the watcher manages to prevent the Doctor from stepping into the faerie circle, which prevents his own disappearance.
Speaking of which, did Ruby never think to check if the watcher was using sign language?
You can see big arm motions, like she is signing something. It would then make sense for Ruby to learn sign language so that when she ends up being the watcher, she has a reason to be making those gestures because she’s trying to sign to her past self the message she wants to send.
I know I said I hadn’t been watching the behind the scenes show, but apparently I wasn’t the only person to think this because someone shared a screencap on Tumblr that shows that the signs they had the watcher use were picked because they could be read from a long distance, and when actually translated they didn’t make any sense. So the showrunners decided not to go down that route because then people who actually know sign language would be quick to point out that there would be a vast difference between what was signed in reality, and what the episode claimed the signed message was.
I think this episode was meant to be some form of allegory for mental illness. Like, people learn something about Ruby that makes the want to exclude her from their lives. Ruby however, learns to live with it and still manages to live a successful life, albeit somewhat lonely.
Frankly the whole thing with the Welsh Prime Minister, Roger ap Gwilliam, was nearly useless. He had nothing to do with the mystery of the watcher. He was just something for Ruby to do. Oh remembers the Doctor once told her he would be one of the worst prime ministers, and manages to weaponise the watcher into making him resigning.
There’s too many little mysteries in this episode. Not everything needs an answer, but we needed more than the one we got.
Episode 5 – Dot and Bubble
I have a confession about this episode. It didn’t hit me they way it should have done until after I looked at social media and saw what other people were saying about it. Which made it more impactful for me.
The racism was so invisible to me, I felt ashamed for having missed it. Which definitely was the point. The racism was so casual and easily explained by other behaviours or motivations that you might not notice it all, until the moment you realise just how much racism there is and then you can’t un-see it at all.
For example, take the first appearance of the Doctor. He pops up in Lindy’s bubble as an “unsolicited request“, so she blocks him. Nothing racist about blocking a request from someone you don’t know, right? But of course in retrospect, we know she blocked him because he was black.
The ‘disguise’ of the episode was the social media aspect of it, and they leaned into that really well. It was almost exaggerated how much social media these people used, but I think that was the point. It was misdirection; “Look at how obsessed these people are with their social media and devices“, when actually it was “look how racism flourishes when people stick to their own small social bubbles.”
Also, can we give props to actress Callie Cooke here? Because she had to portray someone we liked enough enough for us to want her to survive, but hate enough to want her not to. She was the focus point of this episode and she carried it well. She’s a spoiled, bratty young adult but weren’t we all at some point? Then you get the reveal of the racism and that just confirms the suspicions. That said, there was of course the moment she showed she was hateable before the racism moment, when she turned on Ricky.
Ricky was good fun, wasn’t he? In retrospect I can see that his role in the story is to show that Lindy will only accept help from other white people, and that when you understand the context of the world they live in, he too is a racist. If anything his racism is more subtle than Lindy’s because he has less interactions with the Doctor and is outwardly more friendly, but he’s still very subtibly dismissive and unsure of how to act around the Doctor.
The difference is, Ricky is at least trying to be polite about it, even if he is still trying to do an impolite thing. Lindy is very much “ew, go away” while Ricky is “You don’t need to be here, you can go now.” They are both still asking the same thing.
I still have a few flaws with this episode:
The first is the idea that people are so accustomed to walking with their bubbles up that they cannot walk without them. Not being able to navigate, sure. But not being able to use their own eyes and just walk in a straight line? No, that breaks the suspension of disbelief for me.
Secondly, the dots being evil just came out of nowhere. There wasn’t any decent setup to indicate the dots were secretly evil. The fact that people were being killed alphabetically wasn’t enough of a clue.
Also while we’re talking about the dots, why did they bother letting the killer slugs into the city when they were capable of bludgeoning people to death themselves? Just wait for people to go to bed, and hit all those sleeping, stationary targets. I think that could have been a better clue to the dots being evil. Not people being eaten alphabetically, but people’s bodies being discovered with signs of being beaten to death by small metal balls.
Frankly the slugs were there to be scary. Part of the misdirect to be sure, but ultimately not the villains of the episode. That was the racists.
Episode 6 – Rogue
“We’re going to cosplay this planet to death!”
Doctor Who S14E06
Well that was a line said in ‘Doctor Who.’
Did Russel T. Davies just do a disservice to cosplayers? People who dress up as their favourite characters and pretend to be them for a while? A group of people who no doubt cosplay as various incarnations of the Doctor and other ‘Doctor Who‘ characters?!
Honestly, that line I quoted above highlights just about the only issue I have with this episode. Essentially the plot is about a group of aliens who cosplay as humans, except doing so kills the people they cosplay as. Fair enough, that’s a good concept for an episode of Doctor Who. Where this goes wrong for me is the sudden leap in scale. These 4 Childurs are going to work their way up the seats of power and deliberately start wars with other countries.
Um, everything we had seen up to that point was just them playing a bit of Bridgerton. Yeah sure, it’s a fatal to those around them, but why isn’t that enough of a threat in it’s own right?
But let’s not kid ourselves. The childurs were second fiddle to the main story in this episode, that of the titular Rogue.
Oh it’s allegedly the episode that made the Doctor gay! Yeah, apparently a lot of people missed the gay subtext between the 13th Doctor and Yaz.
Look, I don’t actually have much to say about this aspect of the episode. The romance between the Doctor and Rogue was believable enough, though falling for the same issue a lot of shows do. The time limits of the episode runtime heavily impacts how quickly and organically the relationship can develop, meaning it ends up feeling rushed.
Nonetheless, I think they spent just enough time for us to believe that the two of them cared for each other.
Still, we can’t ignore that this was the best episode of the season so far. A solid plot, good foreshadowing and just the right amount of ambiguity about the Doctor himself.
Episode 7 – The Legend of Ruby Sunday
I think my opinion of this episode has been tampered by another thing I watched recently. I’ve mentioned before that I watch Steve Shives on YouTube, and recently he has been doing retro-reviews of various Star Trek episodes. Right now he is working on the ‘bad’ Borg episodes, and this week reviewed the Star Trek: The Next Generation two-parter “Decent”, which ended season 6 and opened season 7.
In his video, he spoke about how he felt the action of episodes were unbalanced, with not much actually happening in the first episode, with the few events that do happen acting as setup for a cliffhanger. Out of the two, it’s the second episode where the majority of the plot actually takes place. I’ll link to his episode here so you can hear for yourself.
I mention this, because that’s what I then noticed with this episode. So up front, the Doctor is out to get answers to some questions with help from UNIT:
- Who is the woman he keeps seeing on his travels?
- Why does he keep seeing her?
- Who is Ruby’s mother?
Well, we do get the answer to that first question, but nothing the Doctor or UNIT does actually earns them that answer. The big reveal happens without any intervention on their part. Susan Triad makes her announcement and Sutekh makes his grand reveal. The Doctor was there to talk to Susan, which he did and nothing happened as a result.
The events of the episode would have ultimately been the same if the Doctor had stayed at UNIT HQ.
There were plenty of good beats in the story though. The moment when Kate asked the Doctor why he hadn’t gone to find his granddaughter, he replies that he is worried that he would bring death and devastation to where ever she is that would kill her. Kate then replies more optimistically at how the Doctor also brings hope. It’s a quiet little conversation in the lull of the show that answers a long standing question.
Then later on in the episode, he is visibly nervous at meeting Susan Triad because of that lingering question.
I have to say that because we know it’s a two-parter, we knew this episode was going to have a cliffhanger and frankly, this cliffhanger wasn’t that great. Oh the big bad is the God of Death?! OK…. nice callback to a older ‘villain’ from the Doctor’s past.
Episode 8 – Empire of Death
Did the Doctor defeat the god of death with walkies?!
OK between last weeks episode and this, I went back and watched ‘The Pyramids of Mars’, the 4th Doctor story where he first encountered Sutekh. In retrospect, I needn’t have bothered. The writing did it’s job of telling us what we needed to know about Sutekh and how the Doctor defeated him previously, in some cases by literally showing clips from the older episodes.
That in it’s own right is a whole can of 4th wall breaking ‘who’s filming all this and for whom‘ when looked at from an in-universe perspective. Well hey, we’ve already established that apparently the Star Trek universe is both a TV show and a place the Doctor can visit, so ‘Doctor Who‘ referencing itself as a TV isn’t that big of a surprise. Just so long as the Doctor doesn’t visit any past or present showrunners, that’ll be fine.
I’m not sure if I like how we learned the answer to the first two questions posed in the last episode because Sutekh just tells the Doctor in the first few minutes. You can’t even say he got ‘caught monologuing’ as the meme goes because he had pretty much won at that point.
We learn Sutekh latched on the the Tardis, secretly bringing death everywhere the Tardis went. We learnt that all of the Susan’s are acolytes that Sutekh created for himself every time the Tardis materialised somewhere, and that he deliberately chose to call her ‘Susan’ so that the Doctor might think she was his granddaughter and seek her out.
So was Sutekh waiting for the Doctor to notice the Susains before he made his appearance? What was he waiting for?!
I think the biggest issue I have with this episode is to do with why Sutekh didn’t kill the Doctor or Ruby. The mystery of who Ruby’s mother is, was so compelling to him that he spared them to allow them to find the answer.
- We get told the Sutekh thought this question was so important because the Doctor thought it was so important.
- Yeah, it was so important that he waited till the end of the series to actually try answer the question. I’ll grant the conceit that was raised last week, the Doctor can’t go back to where he has already been, and because he had already been to Ruby road on 24th December, he couldn’t go there again. Alright then, go back a week further and install a HD camera that’s immune to the Tardis’s perception filter, pointing at where he knows Ruby’s mother will be.
- Surely there was thousands of other mysteries in the universe more intriguing than who this random earth girls mum is. Did the people chasing the answers to those mysteries get spared too?!
- Sutekh does nothing to motivate the Doctor to answer the question either. He had already killed off huge swathes of the life in the universe, giving the Doctor little to save. If he had told the Doctor something on the lines of “Yes, you figured out why I spared you for now. Bring me the answer to the question before I wipe out more life in the universe. The longer you take, the more dead there will be.“
- The Doctor and Ruby do indeed go off the find the answer anyway. Were they expecting Sutekh to allow them to live after they told him the answer?
The act of letting them live gave the Doctor the time to think of a plan to save the day.Look I know this is basically a trope. The good guy has got to win somehow, and the remembered Tardis was an inventive way to reuse an existing set to give the Doctor a way of travelling to where he needs to go in order to solve the question.
It’s the fact that there are so many bad reasons for Sutekh to let the Doctor and company live that makes it feel like a bad episode. Why couldn’t it have been that the Doctor survived because he managed to escape into the remembered Tardis and dematerialised just in time.
Then we get that scene in the tent with the mystery woman. I spent the whole time wondering where this scene was going. and it took me until the rewatch to realise the purpose of the scene. It was to let the after effects of Sutekh’s death wave sit with us. To lets us feel the consequences of the previous scene of the Doctor crying in anger because he realised that he had been literally bringing death with him.
And as I posed earlier, did the Doctor defeat the god of death with walkies? They lash him to the Tardis (which the Doctor can control by whistle now) and drag him back into the time vortex, only this time making sure he dies in there rather than reattaching himself to the Tardis.
As for the actual reveal of Ruby’s mother, that was much better. UNIT were able to find out who she was and shared that information with Ruby. Her mum turns out to be a normal person who abandoned her baby due to unfortunate yet believable circumstances.
And then Ruby gets to meet her. It felt believable. It did seem a little rushed that somehow Ruby and Louise became best friends but then it’s not clear how much time had passed.
The very ending of the show also confused me a little. She seems to have been kicked out of the Tardis? The Doctor quite rightly see’s that Ruby will want to spend more time with her new found mum and dad. It would make sense for Ruby to ask or say that she wants to stop travelling with the Doctor for a while.
But the way the scene plays out, it’s like the Doctor is telling Ruby what she wants and kicking her out. Ruby asked if she will see him again! Thankfully we know she is in the next season, so that line is really just for Ruby herself and the few fans who didn’t already know.
Overall, it was a mixed bag of an episode.
Overall Season Arc
Does Ncuti Gatwa have hayfever or can that man shed a dramatic tear on command?
I think the only episode he didn’t do that in was 73 yards because he effectively wasn’t in that episode.
As for the season spanning arc, well as mentioned earlier there were two:
- What was going on with all of Susan Twist’s cameos.
- Who was Ruby’s mother.
I think many people saw the duel mysteries and realised that they would be connected somehow but not in the way we might have guessed. Oh there is a mystery woman, and a character looking for their mum? Well duh, the mystery woman is her mum! No no, that’s too obvious!
[insert fan theories adfinitum]
The fact that the two mysteries were in fact unrelated to each other was actually refreshing. One was not held off in favour of the other either. It could have been that one mystery was answered this season while the other was left lingering for the next.
No, that job was left to Mrs Flood.
I had to back to my previous post reviewing the Christmas special to recall my theories about her. To quickly recap, back then I thought she was either:
- An ex-UNIT employee
- A member of the conspiracy theory group seen way back in the first episode of the revived era
- Iris Wildthyme, a more hedonistic parallel to the Doctor who has appeared in various other ‘Doctor Who‘ stories outside of the TV show. Those other sources are less clear as to whether or not she is a fellow time lord, a god or just another human.
Looking back at those, I think the first two can now officially be ruled out. She clearly has an awareness beyond that of anyone human, and the first two would most likely be human people. That doesn’t mean I’m fully leaning into the third remaining theory, just that we know it’s not the first two.
All in all, it was a decent season.
I want to finish this post by quickly proposing an alternative viewing order. When writing about the second episode “The Devil’s Chord”, I commended on how it felt like that specific episode was meant to be broadcast later in the running order. With this in mind, this is the order I think the episodes were written to be broadcast in, but for whatever reason they were broadcast out of order.
- Space Babies
- Boom
- 27 Yards
- Dot and Bubble
- The Devil’s Chord
- Rogue
- The Legend of Ruby Sunday
- Empire of Death
It’s worth noting here that right up until Rogue, I thought “The Devil’s Chord” would be episode 6 of 8. It was only after the ending to “Rogue” where the Doctor is shown putting on the ring given to him. Once we saw the Doctor still wearing the ring in “The Legend of Ruby Sunday“, I went back to check if the Doctor was wearing that ring in “The Devil’s chord” which he is not.
Thus, this order to me makes the most chronological sense. A bit of a daft exercise in a show about time travel.
Oh and the sonic screwdriver changes colours depending on if the story is set in our past or our future:
Talking to a Void called 'the Internet' 