It’s taking a lot for me to get my head together about The Reality War, the conclusion to the latest (and according to some rumors, maybe the last) season of Doctor Who. It’s confusing to write about because the episode is just all over the place in so many ways, with some elements that are really good, some that are pretty bad, and a general feeling that many of these don’t really have much to do with each other.

Consequently I’m writing all sorts of words about it, and having a challenging time organizing them into a coherent critique. Which I guess is fitting since the episode and season really struggled to form a coherent narrative.

Now, most of us know by now that the episode that aired is not the episode that was originally conceived of or even produced, with major reshoots late in the game accommodating series star Ncuti Gatwa’s unexpected exit. But while this adds some texture to considering why the episode came out the way it did, I’m going to try to ignore it as much as possible and just comment on the episode that we actually got.

But given the general “all over the show” quality the story has, I’ve decided that the easiest approach I can make in discussing it it go through things roughly chronologically, the one structural approach for things that seems relatively straightforward.

This however leads me to a whole lot of words and some temptation toward rambling and ranting. If you don’t want to subject yourself to that I’ll just jump in here and start off with a quick summary–I have very mixed feelings towards The Reality War. There are a parts that I really liked and were quite moving and even beautiful. And there are other parts that are really dumb and half-baked and amount to incredibly wasted opportunities. Mostly the parts I liked came toward the back half of the episode and the parts I didn’t like came earlier, but not exclusively.

Anyway, Spoilers ahead, if that still matters.

Now let the ranting and rambling begin!

Anita

The episode starts with something that I really enjoyed, and that is the reappearance of Anita (Steph de Whalley) from the last Christmas special (and according to some rumors, the last Christmas special) Joy to the World. It’s a truth nearly universally acknowledged that Anita was the best part of Joy to the World, so her reappearance is a bit of a delight. The character is as engaging as she was before, and it makes sense that she’d show up here given her role at the Time Hotel. Using her as the resolution to the last episode’s cliffhanger (the Doctor on a balcony that has been severed from its building and is plummeting toward certain doom) works really well, so this whole sequence was a nice treat.

Unfortunately, Anita gets sidelined once the plot really kicks in, and spends a good chunk of the episode just holding a door open. Even so, it’s still nice to see her.

The Pointlessness of Wish World

At the same time, however, we also find out that the whole threat of the earth unraveling, as we saw last episode, is sort of nothing, since everything was just going to be reset anyway–and indeed this has already happened a bunch of times. Now, Wish World already suffered from an air of irrelevance on its own merits, but developments like this in The Reality War just makes it worse: the story beat which confirms that much of Wish World’s specific story beats don’t mean anything doesn’t even happen in Wish World itself, but in the follow-up.

This is the sort of thing that will come up in The Reality War repeatedly, through either acts of commission or acts of omission. I’ll probably just summarize them at the end, but you see it at the start when the Doctor returns to UNIT and everyone starts “waking up”. Shirley Bingham is activated thanks to a little implant that all UNIT officers have stuck in them (sounds dodgy, but it’s probably fair enough given the sort of threats these guys deal with), and so uses her rocket-powered wheelchair to say “see ya later” to he disabled friend so she can go and help save the world.

So aside from the basic of point of how dumb of an idea rocket-powered wheelchairs are (I first saw this notion in the movie Steel, which, trust me, is not the sort of movie that you want to be bringing up comparisons to), this just emphasises that all the scenes with Shirley and her band of cultural outsiders from Wish World serve no role in the larger narrative. If you had skipped the scenes all together, the story would remain exactly the same; it’d just be shorter. I’d argue that your story would be better served if you focus on scenes that actually do matter, even a little bit, to what is going on.

Mel Bush & Everyone at UNIT

The revival of UNIT also brings Bonnie Langford’s Mel Bush back into the story, absurdly riding her scooter up the stairs or something into the main command centre of the place. Mel’s appearance here sort of negates her appearance in Wish World, since she seems to be a different character. Wish World Mel was single, while The Reality War Mel was a housewife. (Presumably this is supposed to be an example of the glitches that Conrad’s world is said to experience on its repeats, but this isn’t made explicit.)

The bigger issue with Mel is that her role in The Reality War is sort of pointless. She’s literally just there because either the audiences or the producers just expect Mel to be around now. Now, against all odds, Mel has turned out to be a decent character in modern Doctor Who (after being a strong contender for the very worst classic-era companion), but if a story can do without a character, in general it would be better for the story to actually not have that character. Things are crowded enough as they are, we don’t need more people around just so we can smile and point and say, “Hey, I recognise her!”

Now you might argue that Mel matters because she knows the Rani from the classic-era, but this connection doesn’t actually add anything to the story, and provides only the opportunity to force in some stilted dialogue and exposition. The most amusing example is Mel saying she “fought the Rani” before–of course, for those of us who have seen Time and the Rani, we know that what she meant to say is “I screamed, got in trouble, and was nearly killed when I was trapped in a big CGI ball of energy.” If Mel had actually said something like that, I might have found her presence purposeful.

Mel’s lack of a meaningful role in the plot is also something you could accuse a bunch of other characters of–Kate is important as the leader, Colonel Ibrahim to give that leadership weight and mass, and Susan Triad to build the Zero Room, but that’s about it. But they are all positively integral to the plot when compared to Rose Noble. Rose materialises out of nowhere to provide an opportunity for the show to make a bit of social commentary but to do nothing with in the way of characterisation or plot. (This is, of course, a perfect summary of the character after her debut). The fact that UNIT has Rose working for them at all is one of the show’s most ridiculous contrivances, and the only saving grace is that she is only in the episode so briefly. (That brevity doesn’t stop her from saying one of the most ridiculous things anyone says in the episode–see below).

The Rani’s Evil Plot

Anyway, around here we finally get to the episode’s main plot (or at least the first two thirds of the episode’s main plot) which is the Rani and her (their?) wacky scheme to use the God of Wishes and Conrad Clark to generate a superficially idyllic world…so that she can harvest doubt from the Doctor and everyone else in the world…so that she can use that doubt to break through the barriers of the “Underverse” and set free Omega, the original Time Lord…so that she can use his body as a gene bank to bring the Time Lords back to life…so she can have a Gallifrey that she can rule, or at least that isn’t so mean to her, or something.

Was there not a way to streamline this a bit? Could she have used the God of Wishes to generate the doubt instead of generating the world that needed doubting? Or to use the God of Wishes to break open the Underverse?

The big mid-story pre-climax face-off

Anyway, the Rani shows up in UNIT headquarters for what is an incredibly awkwardly paced pre-climax “face off” between hero and villain. The idea of scenes like this is usually to clarify the stakes and bring focus to the conflict. But this scene just smears it all over the place. I saw this episode twice but it wasn’t until I read through the transcript that I fully realized how bizarrely constructed it is. So much happens so quickly that it’s easy to get confused. Honestly, if you actually break the scene down it’d be impossible to not be confused.

But before we even go there, let’s take a minute to mention how even none of those people standing around UNIT make any effort to actually capture the Rani while she is there in their headquarters? They all just kind of stand around and wait for the grown ups to have their talk. Obviously, we weren’t going to have the Rani defeated at this point, but it was a chance to show us something about the character, perhaps by having her easily avoid capture without resorting to Master-like murder. And it certainly would have helped to make the scene feel more natural.

It would not necessarily have helped it be less ridiculous when you break it down, however. To wit:

• The Ran shows up and we get the aforementioned artificial exchange between the Rani and Mel. (“We meet again,” indeed)

• This is followed by quick exposition dump about how the Rani escaped whatever the Master did off-screen to kill all the Time Lords: “I saw it coming–the genetic explosion. I had a split second. Flipped my DNA, made a biological sidestep. Survived the carnage.” This is smoke and mirrors, of course–it doesn’t actually tell us anything. But it’s no worse than a lot of other examples of this sort of storytelling, so I can accept it. (But what doe it mean, I can’t help but to wonder. Did she become human or something? t Is this why Mrs. Flood is so dotty?

• Then there’s more exposition about how Mrs. Flood is also the Rani and has been spying on both Ruby and Belinda. Does it explain how Mrs. Flood knew to spy on Ruby, or why she seemed surprised when the TARDIS dematerialised, or why she always talks to the camera in fourth-wall breaks? No–it ignores all that and asks us to remember things differently than when they first happened, which is funny as that ends up being kind of a minor theme for this episode.

• Then there’s a quick reintroduction to Omega and the Rani’s plan to bring him back from the “Underverse”. The Doctor explains the Underverse by comparing it to Narnia, the Upside Down and Hell, which only goes to show that he’s a little confused about the source material for some of those things.

• Kate Stewart name-drops her father fighting Omega back in The Three Doctors, an event that took place “in the 70s.” My biggest takeaway from this is that in this exact moment in Doctor Who history, the UNIT stories took place definitely in the 70s, and not the 80s (usually dialogue about these things keeps it ambiguous).

• Then Mel asks the Rani why she needs Omega if all you need is a Time Lord, and the Doctor and the Rani are right there? The Rani says, “I think she’s asking us to mate”. Err, I’m not sure where that idea came from. Nobody has mentioned Time Lords having children at this point–nobody would think that the Rani intends to have children with Omega from anything she said. She talked about using his body as a “gene bank”, whatever that means. But if the Rani is right and that is what Mel was saying, why would she say such a thing? Does she think that if the Doctor and the Rani hook up, that will help solve the crisis?

• Really, this is just an excuse to mention that Time Lords are infertile now, which is the sort of thing that should feel like a big deal, but doesn’t since there are only two Time Lords left (or four, since they’ve both bi-generated) and they don’t seem like the sorts to want to have children together.

• But the infertility talk does give room for the Doctor to comment that maybe bi-generation is their species’ desperate effort to continue to reproduce. This actually reflects one of my thoughts about bi-generation and one of the reasons I hate the idea–because it seems like it’s a Time Lord reproducing, not regenerating, but it makes it more sad and poetic.

• Anyway, all this brings up Poppy and what a miracle she is, because normally Time Lords can’t have children. Now there is a lot to say about Poppy so I’m going to give her her own section below. For now let’s just point out that Rose Noble, of all people, suggests that the existence of Poppy solves all their problems, since she is Time Lord DNA.

Whaaaat??????!!

What is she suggesting? It really sounds like she’s saying something like, “Hey we’ve got a Time Lord baby here–why don’t you harvest her genes to make your new race of subserviant Time Lords?” You can just imagine Kate Stewart freaking out, regretting deeply that she ever hired this child to work in her command centre, and then breathing a sigh of relief when the Rani rejects the idea.

I mean, obviously this is not how we’re meant to interpret Rose’s suggestion, but what is the alternative.

• It doesn’t matter, because then the Rani reveals that she’s a space-racist (dismissing humans as inferior), and everyone reacts how they typically do in this show–they groan, role their eyes, and act smugly dismissive. “Sure the Rani is threatening all reality with her mad schemes, and is literally about to destroy the earth…but if she’s a racist then by golly let’s cancel her!”

• Then the conversation awkwardly segues to the idea that when the Rani manages to build her new Gallifrey, that will be the end of the Wish World. This of course will mean that Poppy will cease to exist. Belinda randomly points out, “But if we don’t end the wish, this stays as Conrad’s world.” To me this really sounds like she’s saying this might be too high a price to pay to preserve Poppy, but a moment later she clarifies that this isn’t what she meant, it was apparently just something she was mentioning randomly. And then Varada Sethu gets the acting challenge of her life by having to be convincing while uttering the story’s dopiest line of dialogue: “Not one of you is taking her out of existence. Have you got that? Not one of you!” Yes, really.

• Finally, there is a tiny bit of plot when the Rani and the Doctor zap each other with their sonic devices, with the Rani seemingly winning with ease. She then leaves and the sequence is mercifully finally over, and we’re onto other things.

Poppy

Before we get there, let’s talk about Poppy. All the way through this episode people keep insisting how special Poppy is, how real she is. You get this especially from the Doctor and from Belinda, of course, but also from others. It’s even what the Doctor yells out in the cliffhanger to the previous episode. But as much as they talk about it, it’s never justified.

Is the idea supposed to be that Poppy is special because she is based on an a pre-exiting person? Because wishing a child of a Time Lord is extra hard? Or is it just because the Doctor and Belinda are our main characters that their child somehow extra-matters?

Surely, given Conrad’s views on the role of women, the Wish World provided lots of children for people in their imaginary families. Even Mel, when she was a housewife, presumably had children that didn’t exist before. Maybe, just maybe some of those people would have wanted to hang onto their children too–well, too bad for them. They weren’t main characters, or in families with the Doctor, so they literally don’t matter to the story, the heroes, or the audience.

So there is some effort to say some interesting things about the Doctor through Poppy and what it would mean for him to have a child. And obviously becomes extremely important to how things play out in the end (which we will eventually get to), but it’s sadly all built on a pretty flimsy piece of story foundation.

The Big Battle

The story continues with our big epic action set-piece. The Rani turns the giant dinosaur skeletons that have been wandering around since last episode against UNIT HQ, but UNIT HQ reveals that it is actually a giant battle turret with a steering wheel inside of it! This is stunningly goofy, but perfectly awesome. As the battle gets underway, Belinda and Poppy must get inside a “Zero Room” that Susan Triad has been building so that Poppy will have chance to survive the end of the Wish World, Ruby Sunday has to get ready to teleport inside the Rani’s headquarters to confront Conrad Clark, and the Doctor reveals he was clever at the end of the last scene and only pretended to lose to the Rani so he could hack her sonic device and take control of her broomstick…er, Green Goblin glider…er, flying segway and penetrate her force field.

All this works pretty well–the action is well-paced and things feel appropriately tense and thrilling. The effects aren’t seamless but they are pretty darn good, and I imagine that it must have been a pretty rousing for those who saw the episode as part of its cinema release.

Omega’s Attack

And wow after all this build-up Omega is here–!

Omega’s Defeat

Oh never mind, he’s gone. Sorry. Did you blink?

This whole big confrontation with Omega and the Rani is maybe one of the worst elements of the entire episode. It’s meant to feel big and consequential–the climax of the episode and really the climax of the whole season. But it’s all over and done with in such a short sequence that you are left wondering if anyone on the production team really thought this was going to work. It’s like they just realized suddenly they were running out of time and just needed to close things down as quickly as possible.

What is the point of including a character so significant to the mythology of the Time Lords and the classic series if you are going to rush through his story so abruptly? And having the Rani get eaten (or one of her, anyway) along the way just makes it all feel even more perfunctory and pointless–why did we even bother bi-generating her into existence at all?

And though I think that sometimes the Doctor’s “pacifism” is overstated by people inside and outside the show, having the Doctor win by basically finding a big gun that’s been left lying around and shooting Omega back into his hole is a bit lame. There’s a certain cleverness to it, but it still feels a bit off.

Classic villains who aren’t as familiar as they should be

And while we’re at it, what’s the point of bringing back Omega if they were just going to so thoroughly redesign him in terms of look, personality, abilities and motivations? Other than his name and backstory, there is just nothing recognisable about the character at all.

This is not an issue exclusive to Omega, incidentally–he’s just the most egregious example. You could also say this is true for all of the show’s recent returning villains–the Toymaker, Sutekh, the Rani and even the Midnight-Entity. (And actually, blogger and commentator Fraser Sherman has mentioned on my post for Wish World that even Conrad Clark seems like a toned-down guy compared to his original appearance earlier this season!)

With the Rani, the only indication that we get that she is an amoral scientist (and not a toned-down Master) is some stuff Mel says about her: “She’s indifferent to any pain or morality or humanity. The whole universe is just an experiment to her.” But we don’t actually see these qualities in her in this story or era of the show–she seems kind of purposely mean when she steals the God of Wishes from the Bavarian family, and her motivations otherwise aren’t some unquenchable thirst for knowledge, but having Time Lords back that she can control.

The only saving grace about this point is that none of these returning villains have been Daleks or Cybermen or the Master. It’s been nice to at least focusing the effort elsewhere, but even so it does bring up another, related problem, which I’ll get into the at the end of this admittedly overlong write-up.

The Legendary Ruby Sunday

Anyway, while the Doctor faces Omega and the Rani, Ruby Sunday confronts Conrad, and from here on in my comments about The Reality War are going to skew a lot more positive (even there still are points of frustration). The scene between Ruby and Conrad was handled quite well, and I appreciated the way that Ruby could see things from his point of view, without of course agreeing with him. I loved the “kindness” that Ruby shows him at the end–I think that’s much more in the spirit of Doctor Who than the condescension and smugness that came through from the show at the climax of Lucky Day.

Ruby actually comes across really well for the entire story. This is a big step up for her compared to last year. The sequence in the TARDIS where she realises that Poppy is vanishing out of the Doctor and Belinda’s memories is very well directed and beautifully sad. And her efforts to prove to the Doctor and the rest of UNIT that Poppy existed at all is the most engrossing conflict of the whole episode. I loved the fact that she’s able to out-logic the Doctor about it: her memory of Poppy is a glitch, glitches are things that were real in the other reality, therefore Poppy was real. And tying in the significance of this with what happened when Ruby herself stopped existing briefly in The Church on Ruby Road was a nice callback.

It does, however, feel like Belinda gets pushed off-stage a bit (she’s literally put into a hermetically-sealed box) now that Ruby is back (as if this was the story they wanted to tell all along, but Millie Gibson wasn’t available for all of it), so that is a shame. More on Belinda later.

Regeneration vibes!

From here, the story suddenly starts giving massive “regeneration story” vibes. This would have come as a big surprise to me, in spite of all the rumors, if not for the huge massive spoiler that I got before watching it. I watched The Reality War about a day after it aired, and made the mistake of habitually clicking on my Facebook app to be confronted by an image that looked a lot like this:

Oh no! I thought. So…somebody is regenerating into Billie Piper. But, but maybe it’s not the Doctor. Maybe it’s the Rani, or the Master, or Omega…maybe…maybe…

So anyway, we now get into all the regeneration story stuff, and I have to say that in spite of how abrupt it all is, in spite of how obviously it wasn’t the original plan and in spite of how much I didn’t want it happen, I thought they did a good job. Ncuti Gatwa has really begun to flesh out his unique take on the Doctor over this last season, and so it was a bit heart-breaking to realize he was leaving. Having him go out to save the life of this one little child, to preserve her very existence, is very fitting, and a nice change of pace from having the character get zapped by enemies (as happened the last three times).

And then out of nowhere, Jodie Whittaker shows up!

I have never been the biggest fan of the 13th Doctor or her era, but I was excited as any fan to see her walk onto the screen. Especially after the big spoiler I’d already run into, it was a nice that the show still had a surprise in store for me.

And I really liked her scene with our outgoing Doctor. The 13th Doctor got to be funny, she got to be clever, she got to be charming, and she got to be socially awkward, and she got to do it all pretty much better than she ever got to back in her own era. Russell T. Davies pulls off another unexpected feat by making the 13th Doctor one that I’d really enjoy seeing again.

Of course, her appearance is also fan-servicey nonsense. I mean, what was even going on from her point of view? Did the TARDIS “tell her” that her future self was doing some pretty massive manipulations to the timeline and needed to be stopped? Or if not the TARDIS, then who? (It doesn’t matter, obviously, but I’d be interested in reading the fan-fiction someday that explains it, just like I’ve always wanted to see the one which talks about how the 12th Doctor was there in Day of the Doctor.)

Miss Belinda Chandra

After making his big sacrifice, the Doctor is taken back to earth to find Belinda with Poppy–her daughter, the girl who has always been her daughter, all along. And oh, Poppy is human and also not the Doctor’s daughter, not anymore.

This scene has taken a fair amount of heat for fully rewriting Belinda’s backstory and expecting us to care about it, and while I can understand that frustration I did enjoy it for one particular reason–I feel like it was the first time in a while that we had Belinda’s character back, and I was reminded why I liked her so much. It’s ironic, since her motivations had been completely altered, but even so her original personality had been retained, or more accurately, restored.

Belinda was one of the best parts of The Robot Revolution, and she continued that way through Lux and The Well. Then she was barely in Lucky Day, and only in The Story and the Engine in a generic and token sort of way (except for the flashback to her nursing). Things improved a lot in The Interstellar Song Contest–though it would have been better if she’d doubled-down on the need to get home at the end, having seen how her indulgence in a little fun almost got her stranded alone at the end of the universe forever.

But then for most of the two-part finale, we get a whole succession of alternate takes on Belinda that aren’t quite right. She’s either lost in Conrad’s world, or back to normal but obsessed with Poppy, or a weird variation of Belinda who is super-excited to take her baby to other planets, or a weird variation of Belinda who doesn’t have a baby but is still really excited about traveling to other planets…

It’s only here at the end that Belinda is back to the woman we met, just in altered circumstances. All the “flashbacks” to her revised interactions with the Doctor give us glimpses of that original authentic and nicely-developed character that had me thinking that she was going to turn out to be one of my favorite modern companions ever. So I quite liked seeing her here–even though it just highlights the sad fact that this character only featured in about half of the episodes of a season that was already too short.

It’s been said that things would have been better if Belinda’s rewritten history had just been her history all along–make Poppy her daughter that she needs to get home to from the beginning. It’s blatantly obvious that this is the case, that this would have made her story stronger and would have positioned the production team to create a more meaningful finale. If the Doctor had to sacrifice himself to save her daughter, not his, how powerful would that have been?

All this supports the idea that this was a late addition to the story, and gives everything else a “first draft” sort of feel, which is obviously unfortunate.

The Actual Regeneration

And then finally, finally we come to the regeneration itself, which for the most part is fine. Having Ncuti Gatwa hanging out of the TARDIS is a neat way to do it. Having him reference Joy the star from Joy to the World brings a fun sort of symmetry to the episode (even though that symmetry amounts to the episode referencing the best part of Joy to the World at the start, and the worst part at the end).

And then of course, it all ends with Billie Piper smiling at us as…well, presumably the Doctor, but maybe, not since it’s been left ambiguous. Maybe somehow it’s Rose Tyler? Maybe it’s Rose in her Bad Wolf persona (the Doctor did look into the heart of the TARDIS, after all, same as Rose before she turned into “Bad Wolf”)? Or maybe it’s the Moment, Piper’s role from The Day of the Doctor? Or maybe…something else? I vote for the Valeyard, given the direction the Doctor was going in The Interstellar Song Contest.

Of course my preference would have been not have her at all (was she anyone‘s preference?) and for the show to continue without having to resort to gimmicks. Actually of course my real preference would have been for Ncuti Gatwa to not have left in the first place, since we were just beginning to feel like we were getting a handle his Doctor and there was still room for real development. I’d guess that most fans would agree that 19 episodes is just not enough to go as far with a Doctor as we’d like–especially when one of those was an extended cameo, and three of them were Doctor-lite episodes.

But if we have to say goodbye, then the best choice for a replacement would be a talented newcomer, ideally someone who can commit to being around for more than a couple of years. That might still be what we get after they do whatever they are going to do with Billie Piper, whether it be a special or a couple of episodes or a season (these days “a couple of episodes” and “a season” are barely distinguishable).

Of course, the big question is when will that next episode of the show actually arrive, and even will it at all? Without the partnership with Disney+ (which sounds dead) then how does that impact the future of the series? The answers to those questions are out in the future. In the meantime, we just have got the episodes that we’ve got. And I guess, The War Between the Land and Sea, coming out sometime sometime.

Things That Got Left Behind

As I mentioned, there were other things that the previous episode or season seemed to promise that never came to pass, or that were addressed but perfunctorily. These include:

• Conrad reading “Doctor Who” stories to his audience. This is nothing but a way to fill time in Wish World

• Rogue’s appearance–turns out to have just been a little teaser filmed around the time of Rogue, presumably to whet the appetite for a big return of the character, which I’m sure the production team hoped to do while Gatwa was still the Doctor.

• As already mentioned, Mrs. Flood’s fourth-wall breaks are not addressed. Neither is her tension with her successor, at least in any meaningful way.

• We got an explanation for how the robots found the star-diploma for Missbelindachandra, but it amounts to nothing. They simply found it, floating in space, either accompanied or not accompanied by the rubble of the earth.

• Similarly, we get a quick call-back to the fact that the explosion or whatever from The Robot Revolution sent the Doctor through Belinda’s time stream, with a quick reference to him saving her life when she was seven. Narratively or emotionally though, it doesn’t amount to much.

• There is no appearance by or reference to Susan in this episode, leaving whatever story they were hinting at completely unaddressed.

What was going to be

I already said I don’t want to go into this very much but there is a big rumour-story that has gotten a lot of traction (and some minor confirmation) of the episode’s original ending, which involved the Doctor and Belinda celebrating at a night club with all of their UNIT friends. The story is that both Susan and Poppy (who never returned from disappearing in this version) would be watching from the corner secretly. Susan would call Poppy “mother” before the two of them zap off to whatever the presumed plans were for a third Ncuti Gatwa season.

I don’t mind that we didn’t get this at all, if it’s true. I was excited at the idea of a return of Susan and definitely perked up when Carole Ann Ford showed up on screen out of nowhere a couple of episodes ago, but when it comes to the return of Susan what I’m interested in is not some big mythology-redefining mystery, but just a scene between the Doctor and Susan where they reconnect and share a hug. I think really that’s all we’ve wanted from that relationship for a long time. The alternative is a story about which there is a good chance I’d have found unsatisfying and kind of annoying, and I guess all things considered I can do without that.

Doctor Who is Eating Itself

This is a comment that my daughter expressed after watching this episode, and it’s been reflected by others that I’ve heard. It’s not the first time people have expressed that the show has become over-reliant on its history and lore–back in the 80s it was a criticism that I heard related to stories like Attack of the Cybermen and The Two Doctors. But that was just nothing compared to the current era.

Since Russell T. Davies took over the showrunnership again (and arguably before that, but certainly since) there has been a steady string of returning monsters and characters, many of whom debut without any sort of groundwork being laid to make their appearance meaningful to anybody but the most long-term and die-hard of fans. I’ve referenced this phenomena a few times already in different ways, as we just saw it with the Rani and with Omega, but it’s by no means new to this season.

Back in The Legend of Ruby Sunday (last episode’s penultimate episode), for instance, there is endless work done to set-up the idea that the mysterious Susan Triad is actually Susan Foreman, the Doctor’s granddaughter. This turns out to be a complete red herring–it’s all there so that the show can distract anyone from guessing that the real surprise was that the show was bringing back Sutekh. As a result, when Sutekh does appear, there hasn’t been a peep said about him. Only those long-term and die-hard fans will have even heard of the character, let alone possibly guess he is going to be part of things. All the work explaining who the guy is comes after he appears–a whole episode after. Anyone who wasn’t already familiar with a particular story from forty years earlier had to either wait that long to find out why they should care that Sutekh was back, or go and do their own research on the internet.

And that’s just one example. The show has repeatedly done things like this, with characters and concepts from the classic series, from the modern series, and as it’s gone on even from its own era. Rather than doing the work of developing new concepts or of using the ones that they have in interesting ways, familiar faces and ideas are dropped casually into the story just because they are familiar. You only have to look at the last moment this episode for perhaps the ultimate example of this trend.

You could extend this thinking to the show’s bizarrely prolific use of flashbacks and clip cameos. Now, over the years I’ve really enjoyed this sort of thing, from episodes like The Next Doctor, The Eleventh Hour, The Name of the Doctor, and more. But the last few episodes have had a lot of clips and flashbacks from old episodes. A bit of this might be a good thing, but it’s the sort of good thing you can definitely have too much of.

The reason we have a show now to enjoy is because people back in the 60s, the 70s, and all the way through to the 2000s and 2010s, did the work to make up new ideas and to build on old ones in order to grow the series and take audiences to places it hadn’t been to before. Presumably that’s what they still want to do today, but I think they are going about it in an unhelpful way.

And that’s all she wrote

Or at least, that’s all I’m going to write, at least for now, about the most recent episode, the most recent season, the most recent era…of Doctor Who. Will it end up being the the episode of the show for the foreseeable future? Hopefully not, but if it does, well, it’s worth remembering that this version of the show has been on for just over twenty years, and along the way has delivered some pretty great stuff.

That’s twenty years more televised Doctor Who then, once upon a time, I ever thought we’d get. So a lot to be grateful for, whatever ends up happening next.