OK, first off a bit of housekeeping about Season/Series numbering. The first full Ncuti Gatwa-fronted season of Doctor Who is being marketed as “Season One” (the word I hear is that Disney insisted on this), which breaks what had previously been a nice naming convention adopted by the BBC where “Seasons” referred to classic Who, “Series” referred to new-Who. Russell T. Davies went all-in talking up the idea of this season as a brand-new, fresh jumping on point, but for reasons I am going to go into later the idea that this is a clean slate without a deep bench of six decades of canon to draw on is laughably inaccurate.
I wrangled on what to call this season, as a result. For a bit I considered going with “Season 40”, but I think the Season/Series distinction between old-Who and new-Who is a useful shorthand. Then I considered “Neo-Season 1”, but on the whole I don’t think this is distinct enough from the rest of new-Who in terms of its fundamental approach to really merit going along with the “Season 1” branding even to that extent. This isn’t a root and branch rethink of how the show presents itself comparable to the way Series 1 represented, not by a long shot. Therefore, I’m going to call it Series 14, Disney be damned.
With that out of the way… welcome back! When last we checked in on televised Doctor Who, the Fourteenth Doctor had bigenerated, spawning the Fifteenth Doctor whilst leaving the Fourteenth behind to enjoy a lifetime of retirement and therapy to decompress from the centuries of bullshit that ensued ever since the First Doctor decided to kidnap some teachers from Totter’s Lane. Just as all the Fourteenth Doctor episodes were written by RTD, so too is most of this season – so if I don’t mention an author, assume that an episode was penned by the Welsh Giant.
Ncuti Gatwa’s first episode as sole Doctor was the 2023 Christmas special, The Church On Ruby Road, which we may as well take as being an integral part of this season – it introduces us to the season’s companion, sets up a mystery which is resolved in the season finale, and will be included on the upcoming Blu-Ray set. Christmas specials tend to be fairly approachable as far as Doctor Who goes, since they have to cater both to fans and to families tuning in after Christmas dinner for some post-prandial nonsense. This time around, the episode is three quarters about introducing us to Millie Gibson as Ruby Sunday and her family situation, and only one quarter about providing an adventure.
Back in 2004, the newborn Ruby was abandoned outside the titular Church on Ruby Road, and was eventually named in honour of the street; she was later adopted by Carla Sunday (Michelle Greenridge), a professional temporary foster mother for abandoned children; whilst a string of adoptees have come and gone from the home Carla shares with her mother, the delightfully-named Cherry Sunday (Angela Wynter), Ruby’s the kid that Carla gave a forever home to, and the family are very happy together. Still, Ruby’s naturally curious as to where she came from, to the point of appearing a television show presented by Davina McCall (playing herself) dedicated to helping people like Ruby trace her birth parents. Not only does the show draw a blank, but on top of all that ever since she appeared on it Ruby and those she encounters have been subjected to odd spates of bad luck. When the Doctor notices the web of baleful coincidences swirling around Ruby, he begins to suspect there’s gremlins in the works… or, for that matter, goblins.
People are in two minds about the goblins in this, and I can kind of guess why. Given that they are literal goblins, go around in a flying sailing ship, and feast on synchronicity, they seem a bit more fantastical than the stuff of hard SF. Then again, it’s been strongly implied that thanks to the events of Wild Blue Yonder, entities of nonexistence have been pressing at the borders of reality, and the goblins could well be something like that that’s slipped through. The Doctor mentions in throwaway dialogue that he’s having to get used to a new logic as he unpicks the principles they put together their ship on, for that matter.
Also, we’re explicitly told that the goblins feast on coincidence, and they certainly seem to be engineering bad luck wherever they go – it’s a rather Douglas Adams twist, and if we’re going to say that Infinite Improbability Goblins are too silly for Doctor Who, that leaves City of Death and The Pirate Planet in an awkward place. More to the point, Doctor Who has not only brought in straight-up vampires previously in State of Decay, but the death of the Great Vampire in State of Decay is basically a mirror image of the death of the Goblin King here.
The goblin stuff, however, is secondary both to introducing Ruby and giving Gatwa a big dose of spotlight as the new Doctor. Something which comes in early on is that the Doctor wears several outfits over the course of the episode – as well as the pinstripe suit and orange shirt combo he wears when the action picks up, he shows up in an awesome vest/kilt combo to do some nightclubbing and sleuthing as he sniffs around the periphery of Ruby’s life. This would be carried on over the course of the season; rather than having one basic costume he sticks to most of the time, the Fifteenth Doctor is a bit more like the Third or Twelfth, who both go in for a bit more variance in how they dress. John Nathan-Turner wouldn’t approve – he wanted to have his Doctors and companions wear the same costumes as much as possible, presumably to make them a bit more toyetic in the hope of sweet sweet merchandising money, but RTD has trusted Gatwa to feel like the Fifteenth Doctor whatever he happens to wear and by and large he pulls that off this season.
Gatwa’s talked up his admiration of Pertwee a lot, and I can see that in his performance. With lines like “A pram? At midnight?” and other moments, the Fifteenth Doctor has an undercurrent of slight tetchiness which reminds me a lot of the Third Doctor’s more irritable moment. Both Pertwee and Gatwa work in doses of campness and that tetchiness into their performance – it’s just that with Gatwa, the camp dial’s turned up to where Pertwee had his Stern Authority Figure dial and vice versa, but neither of them had either of those dials below a five and whenever either of them get annoyed with someone, there’s an underlying kindness once the irritation is gone.
As far as other Doctors go, some of the Fifteenth’s moments of nervous/unnerving laughter or funny one-liners are worthy of the Second or Fourth Doctors, and his willingness to clown about a bit is worth of both of those (and the Seventh Doctor, at that). He’s a bit too unpretentious to be much like the First Doctor, and would need heavy doses of tranquilisers to approach the Fifth Doctor’s style, and is nowhere near pompous enough to be like the TV version of the Sixth Doctor. As far as the modern Doctors go, I see the Tenth or Fourteenth in him most, though because of the bigeneration aspect of his introduction it’s near impossible to dissociate the two entirely.
All of this, of course, are just accents Gatwa adds to his performance, but it’s evident he’s drawing on a deep well of notes and pointers he’s picked up from prior Doctors, in stark contrast to Whittaker, who was apparently instructed by Chibnall not to do any research on the role so that she’d have to make up her take on the Thirteenth Doctor without the benefit of learning from past actors. Who knows, maybe Jodie found working that way to be genuinely better, but if the rumour is true I still think it’s a wrong-headed decision on Chibnall’s part; Doctor Who is one of those things where people are going to have impressions about the character through cultural osmosis anyway, and that being the case Whittaker may well have been disadvantaged by that process. There was no prospect of that happening with Gatwa – this is a dude who grew up on Tennant (his first Doctor Who memory relates to robot Father Christmases running wild, which’d either me The Christmas Invasion or The Runaway Bride) and who’s studied the classics.
As for Ruby herself, Millie Gibson basically excretes likeability the way other people sweat, but the thing which really sold me on the character was the sense of her having a family and friends and a community around her, from the Sunday household to the band she plays pub gigs with her friends in. She feels more like a real person with a real life on Earth than any of the Chibnall-era companions; in fact, the only contest in new-Who is probably Rose and Donna, though Bill and the Ponds had their moments.
While we’re at it, let’s hear it for Carla Sunday: a serial foster mother in what is implied to be council accommodation (with the social worker contemplating getting them a ground floor flat to make access easier for Cherry), with the work she does being depicted as a valid and legitimate and important way to earn an income. This is at odds with more or less everything Tory Britain values, but Tory Britain’s rarely been more at odds with the mood of the country as it is now, so this is a move which is both cannily crowd-pleasing and a worthwhile statement for the show to make in its own right. Having that network of relationships around Ruby – especially when it comes to Carla and Cherry – is key to selling the mid-episode twist, where the episode turns into a Doctor Who take on It’s A Wonderful Life – except whereas that showed George Bailey what a drab world it would be without him, this twists the knife further by denying Ruby to us. That’s the acid test of Ruby as a character – if she’s taken away, will we want her back? – and to that extent the episode succeeds at selling us on her.
Ruby’s family context also includes a neighbour – the mysterious Mrs Flood (Anita Dobson), who at first seems to have no idea what the TARDIS is at the start, but absolutely does by the end – and has very obviously taken up a post outside her home to wait to see the Doctor and direct Ruby to the TARDIS – suggesting that either something’s happened to her personal timeline or she was putting on a facade in the earlier scene. The season finale will reaffirm that there’s something odd about her, but not resolve what, so I guess this is a Series 15 enigma.
We don’t get a TARDIS interior until the very end, when Ruby goes inside, which is a nice way to ease into the concept for incoming viewers without being too disrupting for longstanding viewers. It also reflects a lot of this season – after Bad Wolf went to all that effort to build a massive TARDIS interior set, they really don’t use it that much this go around, possibly because the brief number of episodes don’t leave much room for “sitting around in the TARDIS talking stuff over” scenes. The most significant one of those we get between the Doctor and Ruby doesn’t even take place in this TARDIS – but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Space Babies, the first episode of the main run of the season, opens with a little bit of recap; the scene of Ruby entering the TARDIS from the end of Church On Ruby World is replayed and then extended so that the Doctor can give us a bit of a lore infodump, with Ruby asking all the “new viewer” questions in a hurry to get the details out. Between RTD’s script and Gatwa’s performance, this scene even manages to make the lore as of the end of the Chibnall era sound like it makes sense, with the Doctor talking up the irony of the only adopted non-Gallifreyan Time Lord also being the only survivor and mentioning the awkward mess of whatever the Master was doing in Series 12 as “a genocide” and leaving it at that. We then get a bit of a demo of the TARDIS’ capabilities, as well as an instance of stuff going timey-wimey in a way only the Doctor perceives which he then fixes, with some time-hopping before we get into the meat of the episode.
That unfolds in an offworld “baby farm” – a space station dedicated to rearing fresh populations in a hurry to aid in colonising new worlds, or stabilising societies after a disaster, or because their culture “banned kissing or something”. It’s crewed, of course, by… space babies. Super-intelligent ones, who misidentify the Doctor and Rose as their daddy and mummy, who they’ve been awaiting for an awfully long time – particularly since the Bogeyman’s been lurking in the depths of the station.
There’s a certain faction of Doctor Who fans who’d generally prefer the show to be a tad more serious than RTD tends to play it. From time to time they’ve had showrunners or producers or script editors in line with their sentiments – Grand Moff Steven, Philip Hinchcliffe, and Andrew Cartmel spring to mind, and of course Eric Saward took the approach to an extreme. It’s not like RTD won’t go dark from time to time himself… but there’s a level of silliness and levity he allows himself which turns some people off. Moffat will allow himself his fish fingers and custard and Capaldi playing a guitar solo on a tank, but it takes an RTD to make the revived show’s first two-parter (Aliens of London/World War Three) revolve around burp burp fart fart aliens. Hahaha! The Slitheen are fat and babylike and they fart a lot! Classic!
Hell I am one of those fans who doesn’t like it when RTD gets too light and silly – Aliens of London was the episode which made me give up on the revived show back in 2005, dipping in again once David Tennant took over, giving it a serious try for Matt Smith’s first season and a bit, but only really giving it a full watch for this very article series. So it’s a bit surprising to me that I like Space Babies as much as I do. I don’t love it by any stretch of the imagination – it’s trying a bit too much to be fun for the whole family, even the younger kids watching, and whilst I accept that a family-oriented show is always going to do that to an extent I still kind of prefer it when the show pitches itself “the intelligent 14-year-old”, as Philip Hinchcliffe used to say.
Yes, the actual resolution of what the “Bogeyman” is turns out to be some Slitheen-tier grossout humour and the episode ends with a fart joke, but in both cases these are given diegetic explanations which make an odd sort of sense and I’m happy to go along with it. It’s not hard science, but Doctor Who has never been that, and there’s at least some weightier ideas here. In fact, the episode turns out to be an austerity satire – the station had its staff pulled for lack of funding, but it was illegal to simply turn the baby machine off, so it was left running, giving rise to the crisis that the Doctor and Ruby must now defuse. There’s a touch of pro-refugee dialogue too! It’s so nice to see the Andrew Cartmel legacy is alive and well.
Beyond that, the episode serves a very similar purpose to The End of the World back in Series 1, right down to a repeat of the plot beats about the TARDIS language filter and the Doctor giving the companion’s phone cross-temporal capabilities. It lands differently, though, not least because the episode themes tie in strongly both with Rose’s own history and the Doctor’s newfound status as an orphan – a shared link which helps explain why they have bonded so smoothly. The Doctor’s own family status is something he uses as an illustrative example an conversation with baby Poppy (baby body by Sienna-Robyn Mavanga-Phipps, voice by Shola Olaitan-Ajiboye) in order to tell her that “nobody grows up wrong” – a lovely exchange in which RTD gets more value out of the whole Timeless Child thing in a few quick lines than Chibnall managed in his entire run.
There’s some arc stuff here too; in addition to brief nods to the web of coincidence surrounding Ruby remind us that we’re in part of some sort of Infinite Improbability web, the climactic moment has the Doctor stopping to feel sympathy for the alien horror that’s about to be flushed out of an airlock into space like at the end of Alien, and then showing mercy, which in the context of the episode is in keeping with the “nobody grows up wrong” theme but when you consider how the season concludes… well, we’ll get there when we get there. Oh, and the Doctor warns Ruby at the end that he can’t take her back to the church at Ruby Road on the night she was handed off, which I guess is our Father’s Day paradox for the season, and to be fair he doesn’t – or at least he doesn’t quite do it in the way you might expect him to.
Still, whilst I don’t hate the episode, it still feels a bit lightweight, and that might have contributed to the BBC’s decision to run it as a double bill with the next episode – that, and it was Eurovision weekend, so the Beeb might have wanted to have the musically-themed episode dropping at this stage. The Devil’s Chord introduces us to Maestro (Jinkx Monsoon), a malevolent nonbinary deity of music from the same extradimensional pantheon as the Toymaker who has the fourth wall-breaking capacity which the Doctor’s historically shown over the series’ span and Mrs. Flood exhibited most recently.
The Doctor and Ruby encounter Maestro when they head to 1963, since Ruby wants to witness the Beatles recording their first album and the Doctor (who’s been a fan since at least as far back as The Chase) thinks that’s a brilliant idea. When they get there, however, they realise that the Beatles’ material absolutely sucks, and not because the Doctor and Ruby’s musical taste has improved since they last heard the band’s early Merseybeat material. (Seriously, even if you’re into the Beatles – and I’m not – who thinks Please Please Me is remotely in the same league as anything from Rubber Soul onwards?) It turns out that Maestro has tampered with the world’s supply of musical creativity to keep it to themself, the better to nudge Earth into a future where art is dead, then pretty soon everyone else is dead, and the cosmos finally has the silence necessary to truly appreciate Maestro’s own compositions.
All of this sets up an episode which is all about the Beatles but doesn’t include any of their music, like Big Finish’s Fanfare For the Common Men (which, thankfully, this doesn’t undermine in the slightest). After all, even Disney money doesn’t stretch that far – plus taking this route means the episode can lean into the idea of someone taking control of music and taking it away from people, as well as the importance of letting out the creativity that is inside you rather than being a passive consumer. In the end, it’s the song that Ruby has to play for herself which the Doctor (and the world) is moved by more than anything the Beatles have to offer here, bar for a cameo from what might be the concluding piano note from A Day In the Life towards the end.
The Doctor seems excited to be back in London in 1963 – you’d think he’d be treading a little carefully, though I suppose the First Doctor is hardly likely to be popping around the EMI studios at this time. (He eventually becomes a Beatles fan, of course, but you just know he got that from listening to Susan’s record collection rather than being in-tune with the zeitgeist himself.) He does, in fact, explain about how he lived here at one point goes into a fairly in-depth explanation about Susan – setting stuff up from the finale – and this is not the only use of past continuity in the episode. Maestro’s connection to the Toymaker is denoted by their laugh being the same as the one from The Giggle, for instance, whilst there’s an entire aside dedicated to reproducing the bit in Pyramids of Mars where Sarah Jane points out that the current crisis has to pan out fine because her current time exists, so the Doctor takes her back to her home time to show her an apocalyptic wasteland. With all of these references to continuity – both fresh and decades-old – the whole “Season 1” idea becomes a total nonsense; you can’t call a series “Season 1” of anything if it’s dipping into the continuity well this deeply.
The Beatles imitators here are not convincing at all, but this is in a timeline which has explicitly gone all wrong, so I can forgive that. What I find a greater weakness of the episode, other than the focus on a band I’m not especially invested in (call me when they do an episode where the Doctor meets Pink Floyd and has to rescue Syd Barrett from aliens trying to take advantage of his poor mental health), is the ending, which is rather muddled.
RTD’s said that part of his motivation for having more supernatural foes and deity-scale baddies this time around is to up the stakes and make you think “Gosh, how is the Doctor going to get out of this one?”, but this sort of thing can be extremely hit and miss; you risk getting into a spot where, because the enemy’s powers and character traits are basically arbitrary, the solution to beating them ends up similarly arbitrary, which isn’t especially satisfying. In the season finale here, the core elements of the big bad’s defeat are at least established ahead of time, and the whole thing makes a sort of poetic sense. In The Giggle I could see the logic of the Doctors challenging the Toymaker to a game of catch, because it was set up earlier in the episode with the “draw the high card” challenge the Fourteenth Doctor sets; the simpler the game, the less the Toymaker can exploit the rules.
Here, though, Maestro is defeated by… music? That feels wrong – turning music against the God of Music feels like it should end like deploying all of those cross-temporal weapons of war against Evil in Time Bandits ended – with abject failure, because you’re trying to beat the deity with the very thing they have power over. I get that the point of the episode is that Maestro wants utter control of music, but equally I’m not sure how making all the music vanish utterly necessarily helps them for that matter – surely what should have instead happened was a world where anyone who wanted to play music needed to go to Maestro for permission and make sacrifices to them for their favour, and Heaven help you if you didn’t? It both muddles the story and blunts the satire; I suspect the “world without music” angle was being used to set up the Pyramids of Mars riff, but equally I think if you pulled that out of the episode and spent more time establishing what Maestro actually wanted and the general parameters of how they worked, the episode would have flowed better.
(Oh, and on the subject of stuff that eats time… I don’t mind ending the episode on a musical number, it’s appropriate to the gimmick, but equally I think it’s a bit self-indulgent for the musical number to go on quite as long as it did.)
Supernatural entities don’t need to have rules in the sense of laws of physics, but they kind of do need rules in the sense that poetry has rules: what happens around them needs to feel apt and correct even if you can’t do a line-by-line explanation of why it’s apt and correct, provided that the right vibes are evoked to cover the gaps. I think that’s accomplished in The Giggle and Empire of Death, but I don’t think The Devil’s Chord manages it.
Things tighten up with the following episode, Boom, which is Grand Moff Steven’s surprise return to writing for the show. In fact, Moffat didn’t just write it – it’s emerged that he basically did the showrunning job for the purpose of producing the episode, taking on the tasks that RTD would have otherwise handled and thereby freeing the Welsh Giant up to give a bit more love to other episodes. I’m entertaining a little conspiracy theory these days that the Grand Moff has, in fact, been given an undeclared co-showrunner position on the show – not as an equal to RTD but as a helpful assistant who can provide extra capacity and spread the load a little better than back when Davies or Moffat or Chibnall were trying to showrun the thing solo, and also acting as a sounding board for ideas. A lot of the way the season plot this time is deployed is much more like the puzzlebox season arcs of Moffat’s run – especially his first three seasons – than the season arcs of RTD’s first run, where his idea of a season arc was “throw in a catchphrase a few times, then have the Daleks or the Master show up”; some of the dialogue which goes for mythic resonance in the finale, like the Doctor’s final words to the big bad, sound very much like the sort of thing Moffat writes; he’s doing the next Christmas special, for crying out loud, and for a special to air which isn’t written or co-written by the current showrunner is unprecedented in the revived show.
Boom is also delving into rehashing Fourth Doctor setpieces; here, the Doctor treads on a landmine early on and is stuck there for most of the episode. That might seem unimpressive, given that he was able to solve this problem with Harry Sullivan’s help in the space of a scene back in Genesis of the Daleks, but to be fair, that wasn’t a migratory smart landmine. The landmine prop is neat, but there’s really no getting around the fact that it looks just like a knockoff Roomba – but at least the Doctor’s got a great line to explain why the Roomba-mine has flashy lights on it: “Capitalism – flashy lights play well in the showroom”.
That sums up the story’s ethical and thematic thrust in a nutshell – it’s all about the commodification of warfare and how the new fad for generative large language models could drive that in dark and bizarre directions. The tale is told via a teetering pile of Moffatisms, but for this one episode I’m willing to indulge that – he’s making a comeback, I can’t wholly blame him for playing the hits. You’ve got his militarised space Church (introduced in The Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone) fighting a war in which both sides seem to be utilising runaway Large Language Model-driven weapons which put me in mind of Philip K. Dick’s Second Variety, you’ve got nebbishy verger Canto Olliphant (Bhav Joshi) with romantic tension with magical pixie dream vicar Mundy Flynn (Varada Sethu) in a very Rory/Amy kind of dynamic, you have the Doctor reciting a poem to himself to keep calm which seems to be a reference to Missy and some old Time Lord tea she spilled back in the Twelth Doctor era, you have the Doctor affirming that he still likes fish fingers and custard.
That would be very self-indulgent if it weren’t in the service of such a good story. It’s a proper Andrew Cartmel-esque dig at the arms industry, stuffed with weird and interesting outcomes of the underlying axioms like the autonomous AI “ambulances” roving the battlefield providing end-of-life bureaucracy to troops before destroying them on the basis that saving them is economically suboptimal. It is eventually teased out that the corporation uses algorithmic systems in its weapons to keep wars ticking along to keep business going, and the whole thing is an exercise in how artificial “intelligence” can be really, really stupid.
Everyone talks about how the ambulances have a face provided by Susan Twist – the actress who’s appeared in small roles in episodes as far back as Wild Blue Yonder whose relevance is unravelled in the finale – but the thing which really strikes me about them is that they have sort of boxy, cumbersome design that WOTAN’s mobile units had in The War Machines, arguably the first time Doctor Who has gone very topical in its cautionary tales about putting too much trust in computer science and the founder of the tradition this episode continues. Their unwieldy look is combined with a tendency towards clumsy platitudes – there’s a scene which really rams home “thoughts and prayers” as the cursed phrase of horror and emptiness and vapidity that it is – which makes a ton of thematic sense. They’re qualia-less non-people, after all, and there’s no genuine thought or feeling behind their use of the phrase, just as there isn’t in the real world whenever people jabber it after a school shooting.
The episodes’ early scenes really give Ncuti and Millie a chance to explore a more serious side of the Doctor and Ruby’s chemistry, and it helps a ton that whereas the previous few episodes were full of urgency, this one is more about tension. The scenes are slow, because the Doctor can’t afford to move fast under these circumstances, but thanks to the high stakes every moment is nail-biting. It kind of fundamentally sums up the differences in approach between RTD and the Grand Moff – Davies loves his frantic, kinetic, fast-paced stories, Moffat likes to get his setup just right and then let the shit hit the fan, and this time when the shit hits the fan it seriously hits the fan.
The ending is both very clever and very emotionally resonant, the way Moffat could do when he was 100% at the top of his game before, and by and large the episode is vastly more grown up than the three preceding episodes without being kid-inaccessible, which is exactly what I needed to see to reassure myself that the tone of the show wasn’t going to tack very hard towards the light and frivolous – The Church On Ruby Road and Space Babies and The Devil’s Chord all in a row is a bit of an odd decision, and I kind of wonder whether The Devil’s Chord was originally meant to go a tad later in the running order.
In some respects, Boom surprised me because I figured prior to transmission that it would be a Doctor-light story, focusing on Ruby heading off to get help whilst the Doctor is stuck on the mine. That’s not the case – once the Doctor treads on the landmine we stick consistently by his side, because like Ruby we’re his best friends and we’re not going to do him dirty when he’s in a tight spot, are we? But that isn’t to say we don’t get a Doctor-light story this season; Ncuti Gatwa had filming commitments on Sex Education to handle, so the first episode shot was 73 Yards, a Doctor-light tale in which the Doctor mysteriously vanishes after treading on a fairy ring in Wales, Ruby is haunted by a mystery woman (Hilary Hobson) who stays at a constant distance from her and poses a memetic hazard to anyone who attempts to talk to her, and Ruby must live out an entire lifetime without the Doctor.
It’s very much a riff on Turn Left – the previous Doctor-light story RTD wrote. Like that story, there’s a strong political angle here. A decade or two into Ruby’s ordeal, Ruby notices Roger ap Gwilliam (Aneurin Barnard), who at the start of the episode the Doctor namedrops as a disastrous future Prime Minister with a penchant for unprovoked nuclear war. Specifically, he’s a hard-right figure who is campaigning for office in the midst of a cost of living crisis and but is more focused on talking up defence spending despite that; this aired two days into the real world General Election campaign, when that was the tack Rishi Sunak was taking before he was forced into a string of humiliating resets and about-faces due to his mismanagement of the campaign, his dogshit poor choices in who to put in positions of authority, and the general corruption and incompetence of the Conservative Party.
RTD couldn’t have asked for better timing for this episode to drop, and this aired two days into the real world General Election campaign, and as I watched I thought to myself “Holy shit, ho-ly shit, are they going to do a plot where Ruby assassinates the hard-right Prime Minister candidate during an election campaign?” And fundamentally, that’s kind of what she does – her weapon is the spooky lady, not a gun, so she’s not killing him so much as she’s blasting his mind with eldritch power, but it’s symbolically and thematically an assassination, just a psychological and cosmological one, and it’s certainly shot as though it’s an assassination attempt, complete with a panicking security detail. Yet again, I’m reminded of Andrew Cartmel and his avowed intention to use the story to bring down the Tories, and I love that.
I also appreciated that this had a proper horror vibe to it – it’s RTD going for dread and tension instead of his usual frantic action, and I wish he’d do that more because he’s quite good at it, especially when he twists genres on you so the episode starts out with a folk horror vibe (the bit where the regulars in the pub prank Ruby – and, at one remove, the viewer – into thinking the village is haunted is wonderful) and ends up riffing on The Dead Zone by way of It Follows. Nobody can accuse this of being Disneyfied. The dialogue even uses terms like “liminal space”, that’s not kiddy stuff.
In the grander scheme of things, the episode doesn’t explain very much about its premise and whilst some further scraps are dropped in Empire of Death to fill some bits in, it feels like there’s more to unravel here and some doubt as to whether RTD will ever get around to unravelling it. Again, it’s one of those Davies things where you just have to go on vibes and if it emotionally makes sense to you that’s great and the episode will probably click with you, because RTD prioritises things emotionally hanging together over logical cause and effect a lot.
And there’s a lot here which has wider resonance. Ruby waiting decades to see the Doctor again is, come to think if it, the biggest Susan parallel so far; it’s not that she is Susan (that’s settled by the end of the season), but she is like Susan in some respects, living out a life according to her best ideals and principles just as the Doctor wished for Susan at the end of The Dalek Invasion of Earth. This is also the second episode in a row where trouble kicks off because the Doctor trod on something he shouldn’t have, just as in Space Babies Ruby doesn’t look where she treads, whilst the plan of the big bad this episode hinges on the Doctor not realising what he’s leaving behind where he treads. The imagery of the TARDIS sat on a clifftop by the sea, its original purpose forgotten, was mentioned by the Doctor in Wild Blue Yonder, and early on here the Doctor namedrops “the war between the land and the sea” early on, which is the name of the rumoured spinoff series that’s apparently in the pipeline.
Oh, and there’s an appearance from Kate Lethbridge-Stewart and UNIT, and it was nice to see that UNIT seems to have pivoted a little away from being flat-out militaristic and more towards resembling a police counter-terrorism group in terms of boots on the ground, and uniform styles, which is a nice shift away from outright militarism whilst keeping it in a sphere where there’s ample room for criticism. That was good.
On the whole, I don’t wholly understand 73 Yards, but I don’t feel particularly invested in understanding it – Millie Gibson’s performance over the course of the episode had me engaged with this story of a life Ruby might have lived, had not causality reasserted itself, and given that the point of the episode is to give her a big spotlight to enjoy I’m fine with that. It certainly seems to be one of the Marmite-y episodes when it comes to fan reception, but that’s fine, I’d rather have episodes which spark furious discussion than the swathes of “…meh” we had under Chibnall.
Next up is an important rite of passage for any post-Troughton Doctor Who actor: yes, it’s Gatwa’s first Base Under Siege story! Dot and Bubble started out life as a script RTD wrote to offer Grand Moff Steven during the Eleventh Doctor era, but the central conceit – a very dystopian version of social media displayed as a head-enclosing bubble – proved to be unfeasible to pull off with the budget and technology of the time. RTD retools it here to account for, among other things, a different actor playing the Doctor, resulting in an episode which lands vastly differently to the way it would have with Matt Smith in the lead.
That, however, is to the episode’s benefit. Frankly, I expected this episode to suck. The premise seemed to lean into full-on Black Mirror levels of What If Phone But Too Much, promising stale satire of socky meeds-driven insularity based on creaky old jokes about smartphones that are already well over a decade out of date by this point; Welsh Giant Shakes Fist At Cloud, the episode, in other words. Initially, it suckered me in with how well it executed that otherwise somewhat overused concept; goofy though it is, the head-enclosing bubble is a striking visual metaphor, and it’s nice that Disney budgets allowed RTD to pull it off.
About five to ten minutes in, I realised what the whole setup reminded me of, with its bright colours and relentless cheeriness and the monsters preying on people – to knowledgeable fans, the episode presents itself as a 2020s update of The Macra Terror, with slugs and socky meeds and influencers instead of crabs and pollution and Butlins. This is emphasised when it becomes apparent that the enclave of Finetime is some sort of weird commune – an off-world colony of hand-picked settlers from an elite social class, all within a tightly defined age range, who work in some manner of data processing capacity which their culture clearly could just automate with the computing technology available to it.
Key to the success of the episode is Callie Cooke’s performance as the infuriating Lindy Pepper-Bean, who we spend most of the episode with – because the Doctor and Ruby haven’t been able to get into Finetime proper and Lindy’s the person they’ve persuaded to actually listen to them when they slide into her DMs, rather than just blocking them at first sight. Cooke’s delivery of lines line “What am I supposed to do, look?” and depiction of Lindy’s anxiety about walking around without the Bubble’s directions is all very on the nose but what it lacks in subtlety the episode is packed with satirical fury, which again puts me in mind of the Andrew Cartmel approach.
Also notable is Tom Rhys Harries as Ricky September, the top-tier influencer who’s followed by literally everyone in Finetime. There’s a lovely scene here where Lindy’s in a panic and her dot (the floating device which projects her bubble) is out of power and slugs are closing in on her, and Ricky September shows up and ends up talking her through it. It’s a really tense moment where I was genuinely not sure whether he was helping Lindy or planning to get her eaten, so when he turns out to be genuinely nice (and even one of the few people in Finetime who likes to turn off his dot and read books and touch grass once in a while), it’s a huge relief. The Doctor and Ruby both thinking Ricky is hot is both a neat character moment and also helps sell us on him as a cool dude who’s much more appealing than Lindy is.
His presence even seems to bring out a better side to Lindy! They have this moment of connection and they have some dialogue about that, and whilst if you were being very hostile to the episode you could read it as “kids are oversensitive about consent these days, they’ll end up worrying about consent for hugs and hand holding next”, but I think it is defused by the fact that it happens in a genuinely uplifting moment of hope so the consent dialogue is framed in a really positive way. It’s very endearing and charming!
That makes it all the more of a gutshot when Lindy exposes the truth of Ricky September’s surname to the AI behind the dots – which is responsible for the mass culling of Finetime in strict alphabetical order – so that he gets killed first. It’s some real “Do it to Julia” shit, and it finally helps us resolve our feelings about Lindy, because all through the episode there’s been this tightrope act where on the one hand, she’s this irritating rich kid who seems to be a massive snob and is occasionally massively rude (especially to the Doctor), but on the other hand she’s caught up in this horrid situation her upbringing and her lifestyle has completely failed to prepare her to face and it’d be a bit extreme to want to see her and her peers fucking die. Once it’s clear that she is just kind of a shithead who’ll murder someone else to save her skin, investment in her survival begins to wane; if you don’t hate Lindy by the time the last scene of the episode starts, you’re definitely going to be highly ambivalent about her.
Then it turns out she and everyone else in Finetime is a Nazi.
Yes, as The Devil’s Chord told us “there’s always a twist at the end”, and in this case it turns out the colonists are white supremacists – and they refuse further help from the Doctor because he’s black, and chatting to him on a screen might be acceptable but fraternising with him further than that would be ick. There’s interesting nuances here about how when the screens are taken away and the social media facade is ripped off and things really come down to the crunch, the pretences around why Lindy dislikes the Doctor go away. Ncuti and Millie’s reactions to the colonists being Nazi fuckwards who refuse further help – even though they are most likely going to die like dogs out there in the wilderness they are fleeing into – is excellent.
All of this has been set up nicely during the course of the episode, with Lindy consistently being more patient with Ruby than the Doctor – despite the fact that they are both strangers to her – and getting weirded out when they turn out to be in the same room with each other. Many of these things might, in isolation, give a different vibe – for instance, the Doctor is a bit too direct with the uncomfortable truths when he’s talking to Lindy whilst Ruby is more willing to tell her things she expects to hear and coax her along gradually, and the Doctor also struggles a lot not to talk down to her, an impulse I really get given the helplessness that has been cultivated in her. However, assemble them all together and the trend becomes easy to see in retrospect, and if you already spotted that Lindy’s friends list is curiously homogeneous and clocked to the weirdly eugenic vibe of sending a bunch of rich people in their late teens and early 20s off to make a colony with each other, then you don’t need the more circumstantial evidence to guess where this is going. RTD constructed this one with social media in mind, after all – and the thought experiment of “how long did it take you to guess?” has had some interesting results.
(For my part, I became pretty certain there was gruesome eugenic ideology going on when the colony’s age makeup was discussed. I had my suspicions about the uniformity of the friends list, but there’s a lot of faces onscreen at any one time so it’s tricky to be certain that it’s an all-white lineup – and because everyone had this pastel cutesy influencer aesthetic going on I wasn’t sure my impression of homogeneity was springing for that, but once you start sending youths of a notably horny and fertile age off on a colonisation project in such a weirdly deliberate manner then there’s clearly some sort of greasy ideology underpinning all this and only so many candidates of what that ideology could be. Incidentally, the implication that Finetime is some sort of sinister social experiment perpetuated on young people by their elders is a big help in making sure the episode isn’t exclusively about dumping on Kids These Days.)
The Finetimers end the episode by heading on a boat into the Wild Woods that surround Finetime – hostile territory where the Doctor is pretty damn certain they’ll just get killed (especially since the process which is killing them off in Finetime will probably figure out that they’ve escaped, and there’s only so many places they could have fled). And because they outright refuse to accept the Doctor’s help, there’s nothing he can do short of outright forcing them to accept his assistance… so he doesn’t. He does his level best to convince them to accept his aid, but they firmly and unambiguously refuse it, even when he’s levelled with him about what he fears will happen to them, so he and Ruby get in the TARDIS and leave. Nothing short of mass abduction can save the Finetimers – and if the Doctor did that and whisked them away to a safe world, all he’ll have done is establish a Nazi colony in space. The crucial moral distinction here is that he’s not passing judgement on them and condemning them to death – they condemn themselves, several times over to his face, and it sinks into him that that’s what they are doing.
This outcome does mean we don’t get full answers to exactly why all this has happened. However, finding the true explanation of why the AI is exterminating the Finetimers, and why it’s chosen this particular method of doing it, is the sort of thing that the Doctor would do in the back half of a traditional Base Under Siege story – the stuff that happens in, say, episode 3 and 4 of a classic Who four-parter, after the first two episodes have established the threat and seen the Doctor winning the locals’ trust. Usual practice in new-Who when doing this sort of story is to condense the stuff that the first episode or two of a classic serial would deliver into the first few minutes, to give room in the remainder to do the “unravel the final mysteries then solve the problem” stuff we love watching the Doctor do. In contrast, this episode basically covers the first episode or two of a classic-style serial, but then the locals refuse to trust the Doctor, breaking the usual Base Under Siege formula.
Now, this does mean that RTD lets himself off the hook when it comes to explaining the slugs, but there’s enough meat on the bones to brainstorm possibilities. Possibly the slugs were the point – that the fascist clique behind Finetime were going to use them to cull the population all along, and from their might-makes-right perspective anyone who had the grit to survive was the sort of person they wanted to be forming the new society in the wake of the destruction of the old. (The dialogue does refer to some “disinfection” which occurred in the city prior to the current generation being settled – though equally, it’s also possible Finetime was formerly a different culture’s home that got genocided by the Homeworlders during the “disinfection”.) Or maybe it’s like the Doctor said earlier – that the Dot algorithm had come to the conclusion that the Finetimers (and their parent culture) were monsters and their society needed to be overthrown. The twist here is that in this case, the Dot system kind of has a point there – it’s just taking a violently excessive and cruel route to solve the problem. (Take that, Kerblam!, that’s how you do that twist interestingly.) Sure, its approach is weird and bizarre and a bit of a non-sequitur, but that’s kind of what happens when algorithms and LLMs go awry so that kind of makes sense.
Either way, this conclusion means that the episode becomes a meditation not on social media as a cloying thing which brainwashes us – the Shakes Fist At Clouds approach to socky meeds – but as a vehicle by which people edit their own experience of the world to suit their own personal values, making it a perfect tool for creating a sanitised pastel-plastic form of fascism. Take that, add in answering the question of “how much would it take for the Doctor to wash his hands of people who are otherwise in trouble?” and you get a fantastically good episode of Doctor Who.
After a triptych of heavy episodes, it’s high time for something a little lighter, and Rogue is that. We’re at a fancy Regency-era party – Ruby is very excited by how Bridgerton it all is – and as the stately dances continue in the ballroom, there’s some creepy shapeshifter stuff going on in the gardens and side rooms. The show’s willingness to let the Doctor and Ruby dress appropriately for the epoch they’re visiting pays big dividends here, with Gatwa and Gibson both looking astonishing; it’s an episode calling for a classic costume drama aesthetic, after all, and if there’s anything which the BBC has even more experience with than trundling out some Daleks in a quarry, it’s costume drama.
Costume drama, naturally, calls for a big dose of romance, and that’s what the Doctor gets here in the form of the titular Rogue (Jonathan Groff), a spacetime-faring bounty hunter with a Mr Darcy-esque demeanour. I’ve seen some criticism that the Doctor falls for Rogue a bit quickly, but at the same time there’s only so much time that can be used establishing a romance when you have seasons of eight 50 minute episodes and you only have Groff signed for one, and what with the Fifteenth Doctor specifically being more open with his emotions and less unhealthily bottled up than prior Doctors due to Fourteen spending most of his regeneration getting therapy it kind of makes sense that he’d be open to being spontaneous and flirty.
And that’s the level it’s at for much of the episode – spontaneous flirting, with the Doctor only really feeling a major emotional wrench once Rogue sacrifices himself to save Ruby from exile to a pocket dimension. We get some smouldering glances, some bantering dialogue – “Just ‘the Doctor’?” “Just ‘Rogue’?” – we get a brief moment of connection when the Doctor and Rogue talk to each other about their losses and why they keep living, and finally we get a kiss just as Rogue’s getting in position to enact his last gambit. That’s not a high-speed romance, that’s flirting at a party going very very well right before disaster strikes.
Sure, in between the initial flirting and the kiss there’s a bit where Rogue proposes to the Doctor, but that’s in the context of a scene where they’re doing a scandalous gay ballroom dance escalating to a scandalous lovers’ tiff escalating to that scandalous proposal because they’re trying to provoke a reaction in the onlookers and flush out the shapeshifters. (Note how back in Series 1 we had The Doctor Dances and its running “dancing = sex” metaphor.) The proposal isn’t meant to be for reals – not until it suddenly feels very real indeed.
That’s apt for the episode, because it’s all about faking it until you make it. From Rogue taking his badass bounty hunter codename from Dungeons & Dragons (which the Doctor susses out when he spots some polyhedral dice in Rogue’s ship) to the Doctor and Ruby coming here for a bit of a Bridgerton experience to the alien Chuldurs basically doing the shapeshift-and-murder deal because they’re space cosplayers – and identify themselves as such – this is a very self-aware episode which is about fandom and storytelling and roleplaying.
That’s some very geeky subject matter, but the script by Kate Harron and Briony Redman manages to pull all that off nicely. Harron directed and produced the first season of Loki – which was basically “the MCU does Doctor Who” – and she also directed about half of the first season of Sex Education, so she both has a knack for Who-esque material and had an extensive working relationship with Ncuti Gatwa before he was even on the Doctor Who radar. Briony Redman is, among other writing and acting roles, a contributor to a D&D actual play show on Twitch (a la Critical Role), so the roleplaying and cosplay themes are something she has actual knowledge of. The two of them have been regular collaborators on various projects, and between them they not only turn in a grand episode, but also save this season from a strange fate; were it not for them, every single episode of this season would have been written by a current or past Doctor Who showrunner. In fact, Rogue is the first Doctor Who episode where a current or past showrunner doesn’t have a writing or co-writing credit since The Haunting of Villa Diodati from back in 2020 – RTD promises a wider base of writers for Series 15, so we’ll see how that pans out.
Harron and Redman come from a very modern fandom perspective, but then again RTD, Grand Moff Steven, and Chibnall all came out of 1980s or Wilderness Years fandom, so there’s something of a passing of the torch moment here. It also makes them a good choice to write an episode where the aliens have a certain degree of genre savvy – right down to calling the culmination of their plan their “season finale”. Moreover, it’s an interesting interrogation of the historical side of Doctor Who in general. What are historicals other than indulgences in cosplay? A more benign version than the Chuldur’s perhaps, but they’re still an act of tourism where the time travellers have the option of just leaving but the people living in that context have to, well, live with it. There’s a but where Ruby spies on a lover’s tiff in the library like she’s watching a costume drama, and that’s fun, but it’s also a bit creepy – sure, the characters she’s spying on aren’t who they appear to be, but if they had been, wouldn’t it be massively intrusive and horrid to treat their personal lives as the stuff of entertainment?
The “playing a role” theme also helps framing Rogue a bit differently from Captain Jack Harkness, a character he has obvious similarities to, right down to having a cloaked ship whilst visiting a historical period. Since we’re in fannish territory with this episode, I’ll describe the difference by reference to Red Dwarf: Jack Harkness strikes me as being the sort of smug character that Ace Rimmer was originally conceived in Dimension Jump as being a spoof of, a square-jawed badass hero who gets all the tail of whichever gender. Rogue, however, is Ace Rimmer as he actually was – not someone who was like that purely by default, but ended up that way because he’s trying to fit into a particular role, and he’s done it long enough that he’s become quite good at it.
And then, of course, there’s the scene where the Doctor’s own mask is set aside, where Rogue’s ship scan reveals him to be not just the man he is today, but the sum of a swathe of past regenerations, their holographic heads floating around him. It’s great! In no particular order we get the fifteen numbered Doctors, plus the War Doctor, plus the Fugitive Doctor, plus the Shalka Doctor, and…
Wait, hold up. The Shalka Doctor? The one-off Doctor that Richard E. Grant played for Scream of the Shalka, a webcast which was used as a testbed for ideas for reviving the show, during which he was briefly announced as being the actual Ninth Doctor before they rowed back on that for the revived show? That Shalka Doctor?
Yes. I don’t know whether this was Harron and Redman’s decision or RTD’s, but by god they did it. You maniacs! You blew it up! The barriers of canon haven’t been shaken like this since the Eighth Doctor namedropped his Big Finish companions in The Night of the Doctor – if anything, this is a far more fundamental breach. The Toymaker said in The Giggle he’d made a jigsaw of the Doctor’s past, and by gosh he’s right. If Scream of the Shalka is now canon, all bets are off – and there were probably some serious mending of bridges behind the scenes, because RTD was astonishingly rude about Richard E. Grant’s performance in Scream of the Shalka back in the day. The entire expanded universe is basically in play at this point. Madness. Chaos. I love it. And this most fannish of episodes is the perfect moment to do it.
Yes, this is an episode with tons to offer long-term fans whose knowledge of the show extends beyond just the televised revival. (The Doctor gets tetchy about being called “Doc”, just like when he was the First Doctor! Yay!) But at the same time, it does have a nice emotional arc to it which new viewers will also enjoy; the coda between the Doctor and Ruby at the end, where she strongarms him into feeling some feels about what just happened rather than coping by immediately pressing on, is rather sweet and a nice acknowledgement that therapy is an ongoing process and a way of living your life, not a one-and-done fix. And the Doctor keeps Rogue’s ring! Surely there’ll be more to come from that quarter eventually.
Our season finale is The Legend of Ruby Sunday/Empire of Death. I’ve generally found that RTD’s hit/miss ratio on season finales is pretty poor – Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways is grand, but I basically didn’t like any of the Tenth Doctor season finales. You might, in a pinch, stretch the definition to include The Giggle, which I did enjoy, but then again The Giggle wasn’t a two parter and this is.
The episode opens with the TARDIS landing at UNIT HQ so that the Doctor and Ruby, who have by now noticed that they keep seeing the same woman (played by Susan Twist) showing up wherever they go, can get UNIT’s assistance in trying to figure the problem out. Why UNIT specifically and not, say, the mathematicians of Logopolis or any other hyper-futuristic think tank? Well, maybe part of it is that the Doctor has a hunch that this ties in with the mystery of Ruby’s birth mother, and so UNIT’s close enough to that time period to be more likely to have salient information to hand, but probably another reason is to reintroduce us to the UNIT gang and show us who’s working with Kate Lethbridge-Stewart these days. The robotic Vlinx is still there and still unexplained, Mel’s still about and is still great, Rose Noble works at a head office-tier job (presumably her residual DoctorDonna energy helps out there), and there’s also a new scientific advisor (apparently because Ruth Madeley wasn’t available to reprise her role as Shirley Bingham). This is Morris Gibbons, a 13 year old uplifted to genius intelligence thanks to a passing meteor and played by Lenny Rush.
Born in 2009, Lenny is playing a character close to his own age, and he has spondyloepiphyseal dysplasia congenita and therefore suffers from dwarfism; as with Madeley, his mobility aids are integrated into the script, to the point where in some parts where RTD seems to have just done a find-and-replace to swap their names out, but he brings his own spin to the role. He dresses older than his real-life and in-character age, and whilst his condition can make him appear a bit younger than his actual age, I think the makeup job they’ve done on him is intended to make him look a bit younger than his age – and specifically, a bit like a somewhat old-fashioned depiction of youth, like a 1950s illustration of a boy genius.
This lends an uncanny valley effect to his performance which helps sell the idea that he’s had uplifted intelligence, which Rush reinforces with very expressive body language and facial expressions, which he’s fantastic at. There’s a running joke where he cites an increasing percentage chance that the situation is a trap which I think falls flat, but ultimately I think that would have annoyed regardless of the actor you gave it to – it just isn’t that funny of a joke. Rush apparently originally auditioned for a part on Space Babies, and I think he might have been able to pull it off, but at the same time it’s probably better that he gets to play a character who has his real-life condition plus some cool additional extras and whilst it will be a shame if we don’t get Ruth Madeley back, I wouldn’t hate seeing more of him.
Anyway, onto the meat of the matter: the first chunk or so of the two-parter is largely dedicated to an infodump recapping all the stuff which diligent viewers had already discussed widely on social media leading into the finale, and I have to say part of my enjoyment of the story stemmed from how it engaged with that. It’s probably fair to say I’m more in tune with online Doctor Who chatter than I was for previous season finales, and that may have enhanced my appreciation of the thing. There’s a certain pleasure from yelling “RTD, you weird bastard!” at the screen when he does something particularly trollish, as happened here when the “next episode” preview at the end of Rogue showed two particularly eldritch-looking guises of Susan Twist only for this episode to reveal that they were supporting characters in adventures we haven’t seen and so aren’t really any more important than the other Susan Twists. Similarly, it got a chuckle out of me when the Doctor pointed out that “S. Triad” – the name of Susan Triad (Twist), the tech billionaire that UNIT is currently tracking having noticed peculiarities themselves – is an anagram of TARDIS, and everyone at UNIT rolled their eyes and pointed out how obvious that is. (I can see this is a generation of UNIT that the Master will have to work harder than usual to infiltrate.)
All that is neat, but it does give rise to a pretty fundamental question – is this story any good once the transient fun of having your guesses confirmed or struck down is over and you look back at in retrospect? On reflection, I think manages to be fun, engaging, and emotionally resonant without necessarily making a whole lot of sense, and that typically wouldn’t be a problem for Doctor Who – the major criticism I’d have is that it sets you up to expect a Douglas Adams puzzlebox where all the moving parts click into place and suddenly everything makes sense, when in fact that isn’t what RTD tried to offer and isn’t what he generally tries to offer. Despite the fact that Grand Moff Steven kept cramming poetry into the dialogue in his run, I’d say that RTD is the better writer of mythic or poetic television than Moffat, because RTD’s writing opts for emotional aptness over logical rigour whenever he’s forced to choose between one or the other whilst Moffat tries to do the opposite. (It’d be nice to have both, of course.)
Put it this way: great chunks of this serial entail the Doctor getting all wrapped up in the question of Susan – not Susan Triad, but Susan his granddaughter, abandoned after The Dalek Invasion of Earth. (We are apparently glossing over the brief reunion in The Five Doctors.) Early on the Doctor has to give Ruby “the talk” about regeneration to explain why he doesn’t simply recognise Susan Triad as Susan his granddaughter, there’s a bit where the Doctor needs a stern pep talk from Mel before confronting Triad, who he thinks might be his Susan (which Mel is quite good at – she’s dealt with the Sixth Doctor, she can handle Fifteen just fine), Susan is all over this two-parter.
From a strictly logical perspective, this is pointless. The basis for thinking that Susan Triad might be Susan Foreman is slim to nonexistent, and if Susan Triad had been called Angela Triad more or less the whole two-parter could have panned out more or less the same, bar for the Doctor’s brief moment of disappointment when she doesn’t recognise him and then later, once she’s possessed by the big bad, the bit where she taunts him about it. From a similar perspective, there really isn’t much of a compelling link between the Susan Triad enigma and the question of Ruby’s mother; in retrospect it turns out that the big bad is just as curious about Ruby’s mother as Ruby or the Doctor are, but the Doctor and the gang only discover that fairly late; early on they just kind of arbitrarily decide that the mysteries are linked.
However, as with a certain other classic science fiction property now affiliated with Disney – “it’s like poetry, it rhymes”. The mystery of Susan Triad is the mystery of where she and all the other Susan Twists come from, and they turn out to be templates spat out across the cosmos by the big bad like star orphans in the wake of its passing. The mystery of Ruby’s mother is the mystery of Ruby’s origins, and the question of why she would have abandoned her child. Susan Foreman was literally an abandoned child, and the Doctor is the abandoner who’s never gathered the emotional inertia needed to go back and visit. The space babies in Space Babies were abandoned children. The inhabitants of Finetime were cast into the stars by their parents and then orphaned by slugs. A child is literally orphaned in the process of Boom, a story which resolves because the child’s dad was a good enough dude that an LLM approximation of him must inherently also be a good dude. Ruby was left abandoned by the Doctor and by her family and by everyone else that spoke to the mystery woman in 73 Yards.
Themes of abandonment – on both sides of that equation, have run through the entire season. So having the Doctor suddenly latch onto Susan makes emotional sense, putting the two major season mysteries together and having them have these parallels makes emotional sense (as well as helping to justify a two-parter), and so on. It isn’t logically rigorous but it feels right, so I can go along with it better than I could go along with absurdities like the Master becoming a cannibal Super Saiyan in The End of Time or the Doctor turning into Dobby the House Elf in Last of the Time Lords. From that perspective, it makes a ton of sense that the big bad would turn out to be the god of death of the pantheon. Death is the ultimate abandonment; the dead don’t write, don’t visit us, and rely on us to make contact, having departed often without warning and leaving the rest of us to tidy up after them. The absolute fucking ingrates.
It’s a bit weirder that the god of death turns out to be Sutekh from Pyramids of Mars – especially if you are still clinging to the notion that it makes sense to call this “Season 1” of anything. Even wackier are the implications; Sutekh apparently found a gap in the time corridor the Fourth Doctor trapped him in during that story and grabbed onto the TARDIS as it flew off into the vortex, and spent all the intervening time latched on like the Dog of Wisdom on his cloud, gradually absorbing energy from the vortex and ascending to godhood. This squares the circle of Sutekh being an alien Osiran in the earlier story and a god now, and also implies that the pantheon isn’t like the Titans where they all come from one common root, they’re more like the Olympians plus the uplifted demigods plus the few Titans that Zeus and the others allowed to stick around, or maybe the Aesir and the Vanir in Norse mythology, where a plethora of origins for deities are available.
But it also means that Sutekh has had an absolutely barmy time of it. Exploding during The Big Bang! Getting hollowed out in The Doctor’s Wife! Disintegrating during Frontios! Disintegrating again during Terminus! Getting into a recursion loop in Logopolis! Getting painted pink in The Happiness Patrol! Getting stuck in a tarpit in Blood Heat and left there over the course of dozens of Virgin New Adventures novels whilst the Seventh Doctor borrowed a parallel TARDIS! Every disaster and indignity that has befallen the TARDIS from Pyramids of Mars to now has been shared by Sutekh. That scene with the three TARDISes lined up in The Day of the Doctor? Full Cerberus vibes. And as for the bit in The Five Doctors where multiple TARDISes overlap… well, dogs do like sniffing each others’ butts.
Amusing though the implications are, the fact is that bringing back a villain from a serial that’s nearly half a century old isn’t exactly a newbie-friendly move. At the same time, though, it seems to be the correct call for one of the other themes that RTD seems to be working in. Having the TARDIS be infected by a dark force is a very Virgin New Adventures move – it happens in Timewyrm, the first major plot arc, and kept being rehashed in subsequent New Adventures at that – and the bit where the Doctor knows that Susan is his granddaughter but has no idea who her parents are is not just a consequence of Time Lord family drama – it’s a plot point from Lungbarrow, the final New Adventure to feature the Seventh Doctor.
Consider further: Ruby was specifically abandoned in 2004 – the last of the Wilderness Years. This is revisited in this episode via UNIT’s illicit Time Window, a flashy bit of technology which the Doctor reacts to like it’s a pile of amateurish nonsense, which of course from a Time Lord perspective it is. And what do they use to enhance it? A VHS tape – the very medium which, for a good long period of time, was the only way for us to revisit old Doctor Who stories unless the BBC deigned to run a repeat or we were one of the privileged few who, unlike famous pauper Rishi Sunak, had Sky TV and could watch reruns on UK Gold.
And let’s dig further: the experiment with the Time Window spawns the Memory TARDIS, a lashed-together approximation of the TARDIS which is real enough to be functional, because as the Doctor alludes to, time is memory and memory is time so the memory of a time machine is itself a time machine. (This is a very silly explanation, but no sillier than past Doctors’ attempts to address the mysteries of the TARDIS.) This is a cramped set absolutely stuffed with nods to past Doctors and companions, classic and new, and was also used as the basis for Tales From the TARDIS, a spin-off in which old Doctors and companions mysteriously incarnated in the Memory TARDIS, digested one of their old adventures, talked about how things went for them after they went their separate ways and then in some cases – like with the Sixth Doctor and Peri or the Seventh Doctor and Ace – hijacked the Memory TARDIS to have a few new adventures of their own.
Apparently, the idea in Empire of Death came first – then RTD realised he could use it as the basis for the Fifteenth Doctor bringing Ruby up to speed on Sutekh (in a Tales From the TARDIS special which aired in between the two parts of this serial), and then he realised he could call in some classic actors to do some quick shoots of opening and closing segments and get the entire spin-off done at a modest price as an extra goody for the 60th Anniversary. Originally, the Memory TARDIS was supposed to be destroyed in this, but the budget wouldn’t go that far, so RTD decided that it’s probably just adrift somewhere occasionally spawning shades of its former inhabitants to reminisce and adventure in it.
Virgin New Adventures gimmicks – VHS tapes – classic Who nostalgia – a TARDIS which can keep travelling only so long as people retain fond memories of its past… this whole thing is all about being a Doctor Who fan during the Wilderness Years, isn’t it? You even have Mel – who, despite being a fun presence, was a companion for the muddled end of Colin Baker’s tenure and the least loved Sylvester McCoy season – joining the Doctor and Ruby in the Memory TARDIS and having touching reunions with the Sixth Doctor’s coat and the Seventh Doctor’s jumper. A hostile reading would regard this as commodification taking the place of emotional connection, but you can equally read it as Mel taking comfort from the memories of the past adventures she had with the Doctors the Doctor used to be – that’s certainly how it’s intended. And feeling nostalgic for That Coat takes a lot.
It’s a hard coat to love; ironically, the heartwarmingness of Mel’s moment with it does more to justify its existence than anything that happened in Colin Baker’s TV run. Even if you like Colin Baker’s Doctor, you may well think that the all-blue variant of the coat developed during his audio adventures is a just plain better look than the technicolour nightmare he was lumbered with. But on the other hand, the Wilderness Years had a funny effect on people. And the memorableness of the Coat is its strong point.
This isn’t even the only dip into nostalgic callbacks. The Mara from Kinda and Snakedance is namedropped as part of the pantheon; Susan Triad’s getup as a Sutekh puppet is a nice callback to the gaunt look and pale sartorial choices of Professor Scarman in Pyramids of Mars; some of the titles attributed to Sutekh might just imply that The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit is a Sutekh-connected story (beyond Sutekh being sat on the TARDIS like Snoopy during it). Even Empire of Death is a classic Who-styled title, though RTD chickens out of doing the Ambassadors… of DEATH! thing with the title card.
That’s not the only blow he pulls. Though the opening is vicious, it’s a bit too vicious to take seriously – with all of the UNIT regulars bar Mel plus Mrs. Flood and Cherry Sunday dying early on, and Mrs. Flood saying “I had such plans…”, RTD makes it blatantly obvious that none of these deaths are going to stick; had he shown more restraint there, it’d have felt more up in the air. I guess it’s nice that, just this once, everybody lives, but at the same time undoing literally every death that Sutekh causes over the two-parter at the climax makes Sutekh feel like a hollow threat in retrospect. Sure, he was scary in the moment, but the long-term effects of the encounter are all positive – literally nothing has been sacrificed or lost or destroyed except Sutekh and Sutekh’s dignity. (Seriously, they defeat him with a molecularly bonded doggy leash, the power gloves established in Church On Ruby Road, and a whistle, which they use in order to take him walkies across the cosmos. It’s utterly humiliating.)
Then again, at least everyone survives because the Doctor did the work to save them. And here we get to the next level of my tinfoil hat… because whether or not RTD intended this episode as a rebuke to Chris Chibnall, I think The Legend of Ruby Sunday/Empire of Death manages to be an utterly savage takedown of Flux, simply because it does right everything that Flux does wrong. Flux had half the universe destroyed, but it was an ill-defined half of the universe so everything we actually cared about is fine. Empire of Death has a progressive wave of death overcoming the cosmos, but the starting points of the death wave consists of everywhere and everywhen the Doctor has visited since Pyramids of Mars. (This gives rise to an odd situation where all life on Earth goes extinct at multiple points in time, so the Doctor and Ruby can visit 2046 because it’s one of the death nexuses, thus making 73 Yards still relevant in some interesting ways, but eh, go with it, if you enact your dark masterplan using a time machine you’re going to get stuff that.) That means that inherently, everywhere we care about gets the knife first. Instantly this feels like more of a threat than the Flux ever was.
Likewise, Flux ended with half the universe still destroyed, and the Doctor… kind of just sort of accepted that and moved on? The Fifteenth Doctor’s willingness to cry his tears already puts him in stark contrast with his Thirteenth self and her inability to emotionally engage when asking if her friends would let her visit for tea or when Graham disclosed his cancer diagnosis to her; here he actually tidies up after the universe-wrecking mess, and indeed the tidying process is part of the process of defeating Sutekh because unless Sutekh’s intervention is undone, beating him is pointless.
At the same time, beating Sutekh here feels consequential in a way that beating the Flux didn’t; Susan Triad appears to be a free and distinct person liberated of his influence, and that presumably goes for all the other Susan Twists. There’s an encounter the Doctor has partway through with a woman on some far-flung world who’s one of the last survivors, which is a tense and heartbreaking and awful glimpse of a cosmos where facts and memory themselves are dying, and it’s a scene where Gatwa has never felt more Doctor-y, and then there’s a scene where we see this woman who we’ve only ever known as a bereaved mother dying alone in a wasteland safe with her child in a verdant paradise, and that feels like an accomplishment because this person’s established in a horrible situation and then ends up in a nice situation at the end, which is meatier than just reasserting a status quo.
And on top of all that, Ruby has simultaneously discovered the identity of her mother and, at the same time, refused to let people use it as leverage over her, instead using it for her own leverage over Sutekh. Having witnessed Ruby’s mother at the very edge of the TARDIS’ perception field – thus obscuring her identity – and having been exposed to the Doctor and Ruby’s own intense interest in the question, Sutekh has become obsessed with identifying her because he – like us – is convinced she must be someone important. She very specifically isn’t – RTD revealing him as one of those of good taste who liked the “Rey’s parents can be someone unimportant, and that’s perfectly fine” plot point from The Last Jedi before Rise of Skywalker utterly ruined it. Fine – if Star Wars isn’t going to be the Disney-affiliated franchise that tells kids that your genetic heritage is not what makes you special and coming from an utterly ordinary background is no barrier to having an adventurous and exciting life, Doctor Who can fill that gap just fine.
This revelation, and Ruby’s decision to make contact with her birth mother, prompts her and the Doctor to part ways for a bit – the Doctor insisting that Ruby ought to spend some time with both her birth mother and Clara and Cherry, who actually raised her. That’s delivered in a moment where Ruby confesses her love to the Doctor, and the Doctor seems to be back on his old ways of grappling with big emotions and being a tad unavailable, but he’s got a lot to process right now – the parallel between him and Susan, and the way he’s never felt able to go back and reconnect with Susan just as Ruby’s birth mother never felt able to track her down, means that this emotional moment makes sense, and it means that the story has emotional consequences for both of our leads even if there aren’t any casualties. (Oh, and the Doctor purposefully killed Sutekh, when beyond the Goblin King he’s taken a consistently non-lethal approach this season. That seems significant; executing someone once they are comprehensively defeated seems heavier than fatally injuring them whilst stopping them eating a baby.)
If this is the end of Ruby’s time with the Doctor, it’s an interesting one, telling a companion departure story which in terms of the actual companion departure stuff is much more gentle and low-key than shunting people off to a parallel universe or wiping their memories or any of the stuff that Moffat did with exiting companions. Chibnall leaned towards more gentle departures as well, but Chibnall was, well, Chibnall; RTD tried for something a bit like this with Martha, but it didn’t land so well then, in part because Martha as a companion was kind of short-changed. This feels like the first time that new-Who has done a “mundane” companion departure right, and that’s important. You don’t need Ruby Sunday to be a space messiah on the scale of Clara. The story can just be “and then Ruby found her birth mother, and everyone was happy. Well, that’s alright then!“
Of course, the question is… is it a companion departure? Over-eager news sources claimed that Millie wasn’t going to be in the next season, but apparently she is. Whether this will be as a full-time companion or as a sort of part-time companion is another matter. RTD has assured us that we’ll see a three-person TARDIS crew including Ruby and a new companion (played by Varada Sethu, after she seriously impressed everyone during the filming of Boom). Only time will tell whether Ruby will be there full-time or whether she’ll hop on and off the TARDIS for occasional jaunt; likewise, we’ll have to wait and see whether her continued adventures further enrich her character or fumble what would otherwise have been a perfectly decent one-season arc. Remember, Martha’s departure might have been soured by the poor hand she’d been dealt prior to that, but her post-departure appearances undermined the character even more when RTD inexplicably decided to pair her up with Mickey.
We’ll also have to wait and see what is going on with Mrs. Flood. She dressed like Clara to go look after Cherry Sunday in this story, she shows up at the end taking on full-blown narrator duties and borrowing lines from Missy, and the last we see of her she’s dressed in something very reminiscent of the First Romana. Oh, and she told Cherry Sunday that she can’t have a cup of tea, which is ABSOLUTELY BEYOND THE PALE. What’s the significance of this? Months of speculation await us as we try to figure it out.
Ah, but if there’s one thing this season finale tells us, it’s that “What’s the significance?” is the big question. As others have pointed out, Empire of Death outright tells us via some of the Doctor’s lines that this season has taken place in a postmodern cosmos where the significance of anything is the significance people ascribe to it. Each story is based around stories about things which are important specifically because people have ascribed a particular subjective meaning and importance to them, not because they have some sort of hard science basis in objective physical laws. The bogeyman and the austerity policies in Space Babies, the music of the Beatles in The Devil’s Chord, the AI simulations of the dead in Boom, the fairy ring of 73 Yards, the racial barriers and social media obsession of Dot and Bubble, the Regency manners and the joy of cosplay in Rogue, all of these are just more examples of that. Heck, even the coincidences that the goblins in Church On Ruby Road feast on is an example of this – a coincidence is only meaningful if we decide that two arbitrary features of two arbitrary events suggests an underlying connection, and if we dig enough we can find coincidental connections between literally anything.
Likewise, we ourselves are only what we are because of the significance we, our peers, and the world around us invests in us. Sutekh himself was originally just an Osiran – it was exposure to outside forces that made him a god. Perhaps the Toymaker and Maestro only had their power because of the significance we put in games and music. And, in another thing you can absolutely read as a rejection of Chibnall, the Doctor’s not special because he used to be the Timeless Child, he’s special because he forgot that, stole the TARDIS, and set forth on adventures rather than accepting the stultifying restrictions of Gallifrey. But when you step outside a conservative cultural environment, you find yourself in a world where things which previously seemed to have extremely important, set meanings become loose on you. The price of escaping that restriction is stepping into a semiotic minefield… so watch your step.
Best Story: Anything from Boom to Rogue is in the running, but I am going to go for Dot and Bubble.
Worst Story: Probably The Devil’s Chord, owing to its somewhat muddled ending and tendency to rehash the whimsy of The Giggle, though Space Babies was also up for consideration here.
Most Important Story: The Legend of Ruby Sunday/Empire of Death, both for the way it gives the best payoff to a season RTD has managed since Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways, because of the foundations it lays for the future.
Least Important Story: Honestly, probably Space Babies. You could cut it from the running order and just have the Doctor take Ruby to meet the Beatles as their first journey and the season would make just as much sense.
Showrunner Ratio: This is where I offer the proportion of the season written or co-written by the current showrunner, calculated both in terms of stories and in terms of episodes. Here’s the proportion in terms of stories:
- 2008-2010 Specials/Series 13/2022 Specials/14th Doctor Specials (100%).
- Series 14 (75%).
- Series 12 (66.6%).
- Series 11 (63.6%).
- Series 1 (60%)/Series 9 (60%).
- Series 8 (58.3%).
- Series 10 (46.2%).
- Series 2/Series 4/Series 5 (45.5%).
- Series 7 (43.8%).
- Series 6 (41.6%).
- Series 3 (40%).
And here’s the proportion in terms of episodes:
- 2008-2010 Specials/Series 13/2022 Specials/14th Doctor Specials (100%).
- Series 14 (77.8%).
- Series 12 (72.7%).
- Series 11 (63.6%).
- Series 1/Series 8 (61.5%).
- Series 9 (53.8%).
- Series 5/Series 10 (50%).
- Series 7 (43.8%).
- Series 2/Series 3/Series 4/Series 6 (42.9%).
That’s higher than I prefer by quite some margin, but after a string of entries where it’s been at 100% it is at least tracking in the right direction, and if the Welsh Giant makes good on his promise to include a wider variety of writers in Series 15 the ratio should get back squarely into the usual range quite soon.
Season Ranking: OK, first a bit of housekeeping. I’d previously said I was going to slot Paul McGann’s audio seasons as the “incumbent” Doctor – ie, the Big Finish audios he did prior to the series making its big return – into the running order here. I will still do that for the purpose of those reviews – but I’m taking them out of the main television running order. Canonising the Siakha Doctor is effectively stating that secondary canon is, if not as central as TV canon, at least something which is invested with enough legitimacy that the TV show is now willing to pick from it as it wishes. It was one thing to have the Eighth Doctor name his Big Finish companions in The Night of the Doctor, and quite another to canonise a Doctor who’s only appeared on audio (well, a webcast, but the visuals in Scream of the Shalka were, like all of the webcasts, incidental enough that it can be enjoyed as an audio drama just fine).
That being the case, if I let the Eighth Doctor audios in here it becomes perilously difficult to justify leaving anything else out, so I’m going to have to stick strictly to the televised seasons for this ranking – not because the audios or novels or whatever are lesser, but because if I try to rank those this will become a massive mess very quickly, and I can’t justify putting the audios of the McGann incumbency in whilst leaving Scream of the Shalka out, and if I put Scream of the Shalka in the floodgates are well and truly open.
With that bit of housekeeping out of the way, drumroll pl…
Wait, wait, hang on, I want to do a bit more housekeeping. I’ve done some soul-searching, and also got the standard edition release of the Season 22 blu-ray set, and I feel like I did that season dirty in my review and will be revising its position on the rankings.
Now, don’t get overexcited! Attack of the Cybermen is still horrendous, The Two Doctors unforgivably wastes Patrick Troughton, The Mark of the Rani is still deeply confused, and Timelash is still rubbish whenever Paul Darrow isn’t onscreen. But at least when the season’s bad it’s frequently amusingly bad, Vengeance On Varos has grown on me, and despite my frustration with Revelation of the Daleks constantly suggesting better stories than the one Saward actually wrote, the big confrontation where all the plots come together at once is actually quite good, the Doctor gets to actually be nice and compassionate and basically Doctor-like throughout its running time, and the direction by Graeme Harper elevates it, with visuals and an overall mood which makes it compelling even when Saward’s script is hit and miss.
It was easy to slam Season 22 when I hadn’t seen the Chibnall era. Now I’ve had to recalibrate my sense of what bad Doctor Who is, because Chibnall’s stuff is often boring in a way that Season 22 rarely is; even when Season 22’s being rubbish, it’s at least excitingly rubbish, rubbish in a way which gets my blood going or makes me giggle. So, whereas previously Season 22 was down between Series 12 and Series 13 and scored a 2/10 – the lowest ranking of any classic season – I am now going to promote it.
It can slot in between Season 11 and Season 23; the former was a pretty lousy Pertwee season but at least had The Time Warrior, which beats the pants off of any of Colin’s televised stories, whereas The Trial of a Time Lord was an utterly misconceived attempt to do a complicated season-long arc when the public just wanted some solid Doctor Who stories and the show didn’t really have the chops capable of pulling it off, and to make matters worse it had only one segment that told a passable if unchallenging story (Terror of the Vervoids) and the rest was either rendered incoherent by the trial gimmick or rendered incoherent by Robert Holmes dying before he could write an adequate ending. I can imagine myself watching any of Season 22 if I happen to be in the right mood (though sometimes that might be “let’s put on something laughable and laugh at it”), but I can’t imagine watching much of Trial of a Time Lord on a whim unless I want to slog through the whole darn thing, save for the trial segment-free edit of Vervoids.
This also means the Sixth Doctor era slides in just above the Thirteenth Doctor era in terms of quality control, though honestly there’s not much in it – Saward and Chibnall can squabble for scraps at the bottom of the barrel, there’s poetic justice for you.
Anyway, with that in mind, drumroll please…
- Season 26 (10/10).
- Season 13 (10/10).
- Season 14 (10/10).
- Season 25 (10/10).
- Season 18 (9/10).
- Series 10 (9/10).
- Season 12 (9/10).
- Season 7 (9/10).
- Series 14 (9/10).
- 14th Doctor Specials (9/10).
- Series 9 (9/10).
- Season 17 (9/10).
- Season 6 (8/10).
- Season 24 (8/10).
- Season 4 (8/10).
- Season 8 (8/10).
- Season 9 (8/10).
- Season 15 (8/10).
- Season 5 (8/10).
- Series 4 (8/10).
- Season 2 (8/10).
- Series 2 (7/10).
- Season 20 (7/10).
- Season 16 (7/10).
- Season 1 (7/10).
- Series 3 (7/10).
- Season 10 (7/10).
- Season 3 (7/10).
- Series 8 (6/10).
- Series 1 (6/10).
- 2008-2010 Specials (6/10).
- Series 6 (6/10).
- Season 19 (6/10).
- Series 5 (5/10).
- The TV movie (5/10).
- Series 7 (5/10).
- Season 21 (5/10).
- Series 11 (4/10).
- Season 11 (4/10).
- Season 22 (4/10).
- Season 23 (3/10).
- Series 13 (2/10).
- Series 12 (1/10).
- 2022 Specials (1/10).
RTD has turned in the best season of Doctor Who he’s done so far, building on the success of the 14th Doctor specials from last year nicely. You can chalk a lot of that up to the eight episode structure; tighter seasons might mean we have less scope for additional voices to be represented in the writers’ room, but on the plus side it means that there’s less of a writing burden and more scope to simply reject or delay scripts that aren’t working out and the production process can be handled at a steadier pace.
The Gatwa and Gibson double act also deserve all the props for bringing together a TARDIS team whose chemistry clicks as perfectly as, say, Rose Tyler and her two Doctors, and doing so in a season where there’s one Doctor-light episode and one episode which is a tad Doctor-and-companion light-ish (Dot and Bubble). Frequently, Doctor Who has sunk or swum on whether the key actors really commit to the bit, and they commit absolutely.
The new level of consistency achieved by jettisoning filler episodes can be seen by how closely this places to the 14th Doctor specials, and it’s nice that Gatwa’s first season ends up on a par with Pertwee’s, since the Third Doctor is apparently his favourite from the classic show. To a large extent, Gatwa and RTD in a somewhat similar situation to that faced by Pertwee and Terrance Dicks/Barry Letts, in terms of offering a refreshed approach to the show with tuned-up production values and a new creative direction. Of course, the challenge has been tackled other times – it happens a bit whenever a new Doctor comes in, Tom Baker was the face of the show for two notable production leaps (the start of the Hinchcliffe era and the inauguration of JNT), and Christopher Eccleston and RTD faced the biggest leap ever when it came to kicking off the revived show.
But the Pertwee transition to colour still seems important, and I think in the long run the Gatwa era is going to feel comparatively epochal. It could be the start of another golden age of the show… or it could be a new Cartmel era, a final flowering of creativity before the revived show goes into hiatus mode. I’m excited to find out which.
Jumbled Thoughts of a Fake Geek Boy 
What are socky meeds?
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