Wish World, the penultimate episode of this latest season of Doctor Who, written by show runner Russell T. Davies, came out a few weeks ago, and it’s taken me a while to figure out how to write about it. It’s the first part of the season’s two-part finale, which ended up being full of some genuinely bizarre and shocking moments. But none of those were in the first part, so I guess to really look at the episode for itself, you’d have to put all that aside. I’ll try to do that a little bit, but it’s hard to completely because the way the second half ended up playing out, Wish World ends up almost being completely irrelevant.

Spoilers

It’s an unusual criticism. There are plenty of episodes that are bad. There are other episodes that are boring. But rarely is there an episode that just feels like it doesn’t matter, or it just doesn’t offer anything to be interested in.

Having said that, the thing that made me feel like Wish World is sort of a meaningless episode is something that one of my daughters really liked, so your mileage, as always, may vary.

That thing is specifically the fact that nearly the whole episode takes place in an alternate reality where the characters weren’t really getting to be themselves. Now like I said, my daughter enjoyed that–she loved the vibes of the nightmarishly dytopian utopia (an awkward way to put it, but pretty accurate, I think) that we all found ourselves watching. And certainly I agree that there was atmosphere to soak in–but for my money, that’s all there was.

If you are going to take an episode of your show and give us not just an alternate view of the world but also the characters themselves, you have to do one of a couple of things to make it work, to avoid this feeling that it all just doesn’t matter. One way is to make the new world incredibly interesting, often by raising all sorts of questions about how the world works or even how the world came into being at all.

Typically, Doctor Who does this almost every week–we don’t get alternate realities, but we are taken to far off and fantastical settings and situations and plopped into the middle of them on a regular basis. This is especially true in the modern series where the shorter runtimes of the stories means that by necessity, a lot of the exposition comes out as we are running away from the monster, not before we meet them.

But in Wish World, we understand the nature of the world pretty quickly: it’s a reactionary throwback to progressive society thanks to Conrad Clark’s outdated views on just about everything. And we know how it came about almost immediately: it’s something the Rani thanks to the power of the magical wish-baby that she found. So there’s no mystery here, and no story of the Doctor discovering things, since almost all of the revelations come through the Rani blurting out a bunch of backstory in the most exposition-heavy scene that I can remember seeing in the series since The Timeless Children.

And the episode doesn’t use the setting to make any sort of comment, either, at least not anything of substance, except, “Conrad is a jerk,” and “So are all the people he represents.” It’s not exactly a nuanced insight, is it?

(There is one idea that I think is interesting, which is the concept that because of Conrad’s tunnel-vision, he’s completely unaware of the disabled people that live in his world, and what they are doing. That is an idea worth exploring, and briefly the episode pretends that it is before it turns out that is all filler that has nothing to do with anything that matters at all. But sorry, I’m again letting my knowledge of The Reality War seep in here.)

The other way to make an alternate-reality story interesting, and by far the preferred one, is to make the alternate-version of the character meaningful. And the way to do this is to use this new persona to reveal something that we couldn’t otherwise about that character. I’d go so far to say this is the only justification for spending an episode burying the main character in flatter and duller version of themselves.

This is precisely what was saw the last time that I remember something like this happening, which was with David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor in Human Nature and The Family of Blood. That story spent nearly two episodes with the Doctor being the ordinary man-of-his-time, John Smith, and yet it never had that feeling of irrelevance that we got with Wish World because Tennant’s John Smith was a fascinating character who showed us sides of the Doctor that were brand new. Gatwa’s John Smith is charming because Gatwa himself oozes charm uncontrollably, but that’s really all the character’s got going for him. He doesn’t show reveal anything about the character or take us anywhere new, and he doesn’t do anything that’s of any consequence to the story.

Now it could be argued that it’s unfair to compare the two versions of John Smith. After all, in Wish World, John Smith is purposely “flattened out” due to Conrad Clark’s reactionary worldview. It wouldn’t have made sense for him to be fully developed multi-layered character because nobody in that reality was.

And to all that I’d agree, but then I’d say you shouldn’t have written an episode where that’s who the Doctor is for nearly the entire runtime. Regardless of what various show runners say, it’s the Doctor and not the companion that is the main character of this show. He or she is, or should be, the glue that holds it together. And we’ve only got eight episodes this season and one of them was Doctor-lite, and now we’ve got another episode in which the Doctor is mostly missing, even if Ncuti Gatwa isn’t. I spent the whole episode waiting for the Doctor to wake up, or to begin to wake up and take some sort of action, only for it to not occur until the last couple of minutes when it was basically too late.

There was one moment in the show where I was hoping we were seeing the sort of characterization from our regular cast that I’m talking about, and that was when Belinda goes into the woods and screams. I thought, wow, that’s interesting, there’s something deep inside of her that is raging at the artificiality of the world around her, a part of her that feels things so deeply there’s no place to express it in a world where everyone’s lives are prescribed and there is no room for doubt. Again, that’s an idea worth exploring.

Except, nope. It literally has no bearing on the story at all.

Ruby, of course, fairs a lot better. As the character who does seem to remember how things used to be, sort of, she gets to explore, to ask questions, and to take actions. That leads her to Shirley Bingham, formerly of UNIT, and all that stuff I mentioned before about disabled people in Conrad’s world. Shirley has got lots more personality here than she’s ever had before, in that she’s got any personality at all. It’s the first time she’s been an even remotely interesting character, and so it feels briefly promising when she and Ruby take action to break into the Rani’s “Bone Palace.” Too bad, of course, that it all goes nowhere when the episode ends with reality falling to pieces and all their actions proving irrelevant and meaningless (spoilers for The Reality War).

The end of the episode brings the Doctor face-to-face with the Rani (both of them) and is important only because a whole bunch of exposition takes place. This is given the in-story justification that it’s necessary for the Doctor to learn everything in a giant info-dump in order to fuel the doubt that the Rani is collecting, but just because there is an in-story justification doesn’t mean it’s not incredibly annoying. Maybe if this where they had revealed the Rani’s involvement, it would have at least had that to hang its hat on, but as it is it’s just a giant blob of backstory punctuated by a name-drop of Omega.

I did get excited for a moment there. After Omega is a big deal character from the original series, who appeared in both of that show’s 10th and 20th seasons. But then I remembered that in this new-Russell T. Davies era, we’ve had a lot of other returning villains, such as the Toymaker, Sutekh, the Midnight Entity and of course the Rani, and so far none of them have born more than a passing resemblance to their original version. Boy, one cannot help but to think, I sure hope that don’t do something silly with Omega and bring him back so that he also is only a pale shadow of his original version (spoilers for The Reality War).

Omega’s return, or rather name-drop, is one of three moments that were apparently meant to be reveals in this episode. The first one is the brief return of Rogue in a scene that doesn’t really make much sense but is used to provoke the Doctor into the small amount of self-awareness that he gains while in his fantasy-stupor. I assumed when watching this that this would mean that Rogue would play a bigger part in the second half of the story; otherwise it’d prove to be a pretty meaningless sort of appearance just to remind us that the character existed and to scratch the itch of people who wanted to see Jonathan Groff again (spoilers for The Reality War).

The last moment, coming after the Omega name-drop, is the Doctor yelling out in the closing moment of the show that “Poppy is real!” What does that mean, we all wondered? Could it be that Poppy is somehow really the Doctor’s daughter?

Are we going to get some understanding of where Susan came from? Is it going to tie into Susan appearing in the show properly (after her brief mental cameo in The Interstellar Song Contest and here even briefer return here? Certainly, the writers will pay this line of dialogue off, right? Or at the very least, make it make sense? Right? Right??! (spoilers for The Reality War).

One thing the episode has going for it is the cliffhanger, which is where the balcony the Doctor is standing on is jettisoned off the side of the Bone Palace and is plummeting down to the ground below. That was good stuff.

Also, as I said, Ncuti Gatwa is good, as is Varada Sethu and Millie Gibon. Archie Panjabi makes a passable villain as the “main” Rani. The big walking dinosaur skeletons are intriguing to look at, and though they don’t do anything here they do end up being important in the next episode. The show continues to look good (mostly) and there is definitely atmosphere in its dystopian setting.

But aside from that, it’s an episode where almost nothing that happens matters at all. Some of the backstory does, but the plot itself, and all the things that happen on screen, do not.

My daughter walked through a few moments ago and I told her I spending a lot of time writing about the episode and how irrelevant it was, and she smiled and encouraged me and said not to let the irony get to me.

Other Thoughts

• This episode has one of those gip-rundowns of all the past Doctors, including all the main ones in number order (including both 10th and 14th) and with the War Doctor stuck in where he belongs after the 8th, but with the Fugitive Doctor visible after the 13th–in other words, in the order she was introduced to the audience, not when she supposedly comes in the timeline. What does it mean? Probably nothing. I generally prefer to see William Hartnell depicted first, and I’m just glad there was no gratuitous inclusion of Richard E. Grant.

• In addition to all the things I’ve mentioned, Conrad Clark’s reading “Doctor Who” stories to all the people in his fantasy world also proves to be meaningless. As does, I’d argue, the conceit of having the two Rani’s running around together.