In only a few hours, Wish World will drop on Disney+ here in Australia, bringing the half of the current Doctor Who season finale to our screens and revealing, one presume, just what has gone so wrong on May 24, 2025 that leads to the earth being destroyed. But for now we’re talking about the episode before that, The Interstellar Song Contest, which turns out, against all odds, to be really good.

Spoilers ahead!

I say “against all odds” because setting the story in something like a space-Eurovision song contest seems like a guarantee that it will include all sorts of over-the-top silliness, which then starts to compete with story or character as the focus of the episode. I’d say this is part of the problem with Rogue, for instance, the parallel episode from last season.

And indeed The Interstellar Song Contest does have a lot of these elements, but where it goes right is that it keeps them in check, and never forgets that it’s telling a drama about characters. So we laugh at the garish view of future celebrity, but our real attention is on the horror of what Kid is trying to do, and where his efforts to defeat him takes the Doctor.

This gives so many memorable moments, starting with the nightmarishly beautiful image of a hundred thousand people being blown into space. It’s impressive how meaningful this feels, even though most of it is seen in extremely wide shots with characters that don’t mean anything to us (unless you’re a fan of Rylan Clark). The build-up of the scenes leading up to this, the directing of the moment (and obviously the design and effects) and especially I think the acting of Verada Sethu as Belinda reacts to everything really sells the idea that a genuine atrocity is happening. We’ve seen death on this scale in Doctor Who before, but rarely has such a wide-scale event felt so meaningful.

And as a consequence, the turnaround that takes place later, when the Doctor reveals that he realized what was happening and quickly triplicated the gravity…sigh, mavity…field in order to save everyone, packs a tremendous punch. This might be my favorite moment of the season so far, or even of the last five seasons–the Doctor, by being resourceful and quick-thinking, saves a whole bunch of lives. It’s the sort of thing that has been incredibly rare in the show for a while. I don’t mind seeing the hero fail sometimes, or having someone else save the day, but this is what I’m watching the show for. I want to see the Doctor be clever and resourceful and brave and to do good.

And that helps to make it work when the Doctor goes to the other extreme, with his enraged torturing of Kid. That’s some full-on Time Lord Victorious stuff there–of course I didn’t really think that the Doctor would carry out his threat to torture Kid a trillion times, but I did believe that in that moment the he meant it. Ncuti Gatwa has been good all along but he’s excellent in this episode, taking us down a whole range of emotions. I loved seeing how confused and desperate he is at different bits of the episode, as well as his anger and later remorse.

The Interstellar Song Contest does a great job making sense out of its premise as well. The exposition comes naturally and at an even pace, and we’re never at a loss as to why exactly people are doing things (not at all a guarantee with this show). The reveal that Cora is really a Hellion is pretty obvious for a while, but thankfully the episode does not try to preserve it as a surprise for too long. None of the guest characters are wasted (or are made into senseless victims, another common pitfall of Doctor Who, especially under Russell T. Davies). They all have something to contribute to the story and its especially fun to see the Doctor gathering a little cadre of allies to help him deal with things (even if Mike & Gary’s skill sets are just a tad convenient for this).

And of course, the episode features two returns to the show of characters that are designed to excite old fans, and to confuse new ones.

First, there is the completely-by-surprise return of Carole Ann Ford herself as Susan Foreman, the Doctor’s granddaughter who was part of the show all the way back when it began, and is indeed the last surviving cast member from that first TARDIS crew.

After teasing her a whole bunch last season, she makes an appearance as…well, we’re not sure. An image in the Doctor’s mind, it seems, but could it be more? She galvanises the Doctor to survive when he is frozen in space, and tries to stop him when he is bringing the beatdown on Kid. It’s really lovely use of the character and the actress, but I assume will not be the entirety of her appearance this season. Where it’s all going we will have to see (maybe later today?) I have my hopes and preferences of course (see below) but mostly I’m just happy to see where the show goes.

The other appearance happens in the mid-credit scene where Mrs. Flood turns out to be the last victim of Kid to be rescued and revived, announces that the process has frozen herd double brain stems and thus is fatal to a Time Lady (but not a Time Lord?), prompting to bi-generate. Actress Archie Panjabi splits off of Mrs. Flood and announces that she is the Rani, references in dialogue the first Tom Baker story (“I’m the Rani, the definite article, so to speak”) and then struts off with Mrs. Flood now as her lackey, promising to bring terror to the Doctor.

I was not a fan of this scene. It is indeed the only part of the episode that I had genuine negative feelings about, although on a rewatch it didn’t bother me so much.

My problems come at a variety of angles. First, I’ve never been a big fan of the Rani–she’s a renegade Time Lady who appeared in three stories (sort of) in the classic era–one of which was pretty good, especially for its era (The Mark of the Rani), one of was terrible (Time and the Rani), and one of which was catastrophically terrible but it didn’t matter because it was just a charity short that aired a few years after the show was off the air (Dimensions in Time). She’s got a particular motivation that separates her from the Master–an amoral drive for scientific knowledge and power without regard for who suffers as a result–but in practice she comes across a lot like a female version of the Master, which obviously now is redundant. And she is probably where my long-held desire to see the series develop a new recurring individual antagonist who isn’t a Time Lord comes from. Making her yet another renegade Time Lord who the Doctor knows from his youth just seemed like the laziest way of doing things.

Second, I hate the idea of bi-generation, and was hoping that that would be a one-time thing that we would leave behind forever. I wrote about it here but I think it’s unnecessarily silly and that it diminishes the whole concept.

In essence, if we take what see literally, then we’re now saying that Time Lords don’t regenerate to save their lives from fatal injuries, instead they just heal and reproduce. It didn’t serve any story purpose in The Giggle except to give fans a happy ending for David Tennant. Seriously, if the Fourteenth Doctor hadn’t been played by a beloved returning actor, would there have been any point at all?

Third, I didn’t like the scene because it seemed so arbitrary. Nothing we’d seen for the last two years makes it feel like “Mrs. Flood is the Rani” is something that’s been set up(unless you count “She’s a woman” and “She’s a time traveler,” which in this series is pretty thin evidence). So the reveal just comes out of nowhere. If Archie Panjabi had announced their name was the Master or Drax or the War Chief or Borusa, it would have made exactly the same amount of sense.

Most importantly, it’s hard for me to imagine that the show is going to do the work to justify that we’ve been watching the Rani all along. Will we learn why she was living on earth? Why did she not recognise the Doctor’s TARDIS until it dematerialised in front of her? Why she’s been following the Doctor through space and time? Will her fourth-wall breaks be given a story rationale, or will it just remain a distracting gimmick?

Also, she seems really fixated on the Doctor. Is that going tie into some sort of deranged scientific experiment? If not, then it really goes against the small amount of individuality the Rani has as a character. A Rani who is focused on the Doctor for revenge or whatever is just another Master.

Now with all this, I’m complaining about something that might be irrelevant. It could be that the two-part finale will justify everything Mrs. Flood has been doing, and will do so in a way that is based in who the Rani was back in her first appearance. I really hope it does. I’m just skeptical, based on my disappointment in similar situations, like back when “O” was revealed to be the Master, or more recently that whole kerfuffle with Sutekh and Ruby’s mother.

Whatever happens, I still like The Interstellar Song Contest. It’s arguably the most cohesive, most satisfying episode of the season so far. This is the second episode in a row to be written by a new writer (although Juno Dawson has written other Doctor Who-material before, just not on TV), and the second episode in a row that I’ve really liked. Russell T. Davies is doing his job as a head producer!

Other Thoughts

• Here’s what I don’t want to happen with Susan: I don’t want her to die, I don’t want her to regenerate, I don’t want it to be revealed whether she can regenerate or not, I don’t want her to turn evil, and I don’t want it to be revealed that she’s not actually the Doctor’s biological granddaughter. I don’t want the series to do any work to explain how Susan supposedly came up with the name “TARDIS” from the initials of Time and Relative Dimension in Space when obviously Time Lords were calling their ships that before the Doctor fled Gallifrey. It doesn’t matter.

• This episode did a lot to make me think of the Valeyard, the amalgamation of the Doctor’s darkest aspects that appeared way back in Trial of a Time Lord. He seems to be going very dark and cruel when he tortures Kid, and he talks about ice in his heart (hearts?) that will be there forever. That sounds like great set-up for the Valeyard. I’d be kind of excited if that turned out to be a concept behind one of the rumoured additional villains that are going to turn up in the finale. I’d be especially excited compared to the more obvious possibility…

• That obvious possibility is the Master, of course. Last we heard about the Master was that he was stuck in the Toymaker’s gold tooth, which was last seen being picked up by a mysterious woman’s hand. An obvious possibility is that was the new Rani, who wants the Master for who-knows-what. If that’s the show’s next big twist, I will find that utterly pedestrian and uninspired, even if one of the rumours I’ve hard is true and it’s Michelle Gomez in the part.

• I appreciated that the episode never did anything to “soften” Kid’s culpability in his crimes, in spite of the moral justification for his anger. It never did anything, for instance, to imply that the guy who was intolerant of Hellions, Len, was on some level worse than Kid. That’s the kind of thing you do see sometimes in movies and TV, and it’s annoying.

• So the earth gets destroyed on May 24, 2025 (today!), but Rylan Clark gets frozen and taken into space so he can be thawed out and used as a celebrity host every once in a while. That must mean he left earth before it was destroyed. Maybe he’s out there in space somewhere right now.

• My daughters were disappointed that there weren’t more silly songs in this episode. I think there were just the right amount, especially after the last big number sung, I presume, by Miriam-Teak Lee.

• The Doctor talks about, as he has before, the death of his people, presumably not from the Time War since that was undone, but by the Master around the events of Spyfall. We never learned how the Master did this, but the Doctor seems to know that it happened in an instant, and he seems to believe that it would have effected Susan as well. What did the Master do that supposedly killed all Gallifreyans everywhere, not just on Gallifrey?