DOCTOR WHO: The Reality War

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We didn’t bother reviewing the last three episodes of Doctor Who for the very same reason we always wind up dropping it from our recap rotation (which we have done about a half dozen times by now): It just got too silly to review and we didn’t feel like writing yet another diatribe about how the show is failing. And when we got to the end of this episode, all we felt was the same familiar sadness we’ve been feeling for the past decade of watching Doctor Who, as we saw yet another spectacular casting choice exit the show with a string of truly terrible scripts in their wake. Like Jodie Whittaker before him (and to some extent, like Peter Capaldi and Matt Smith before her), Ncuti Gatwa was an amazing Doctor who never got the chance to be as amazing as they should have been.

We’ll take that sentiment a bit further this time: Ncuti Gatwa had the potential to be a total game-changer in the role and could have restructured and re-energized the franchise the same way David Tennant did nearly two decades earlier. That was clearly the plan when he was announced and with Russell T. Davies returning to the fold as show runner, it felt like a true return to greatness was in the offing. We won’t indulge in any theorizing about behind-the-scenes drama or how wokeness was the cause of the show’s diminishing ratings. From all accounts, Ncuti’s two seasons were shot in one go, wrapping up about a year ago. There is some indication that he was on board for a third season but Disney’s slowness in revealing the show’s fate (which is still not secure) forced him to leave the show in order to pursue other options. The regeneration part of this episode is reported to have been added in reshoots, in order to wrap up Ncuti’s tenure. All of this sloppiness and insecurity about the future was quite evident in the final product, we’re sorry to say.

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It’s hard to recap an episode like this because it’s so bifurcated and all anyone really wants to talk about is the last ten minutes. There was some sort of story there about the Rani bi-generating and then trying revive Omega, the OG Time Lord from the underverse, but dear God, was it all pure nonsense, bombast, and gibberish. There was actually a magic baby that granted wishes involved, which is just about the very best evidence that Davies desperately needs a script editor. If your entire story and its resolution rests on a magic wish-granting baby, you’re writing pure slop. We’ll give Archie Punjabi all of the credit in the world for trying to make a meal out of her lines, but ultimately, everything about her and her plan felt pointless, stale, and rushed. We couldn’t believe we were looking at yet another finale with the doctor fighting some giant digital creature who was built up to be this universe-ending event and got dispensed with in a few minutes. When the Doctor was zipping around the London skyline shooting lasers at bone dinosaurs while UNIT used Avengers Tower to assist him, it occurred to us that Davies mistakenly took the Disney infusion of dollars as a mandate to turn this franchise into a pale imitation of a Marvel movie. After two full seasons of stunning sets and special effects work, we’re ready for a return to creepy English villages menaced by a handful of dudes in rubber costumes.

Looking over the narrative wreckage, it seems pretty obvious to us that Davies originally had some sort of long-term plan in mind that encompassed all of the mysteries of last season including Ruby’s parentage and Belinda’s lookalike descendent, Susan Twist and Mrs. Flood, the return of and explanation for the Doctor’s granddaughter, why Poppy was on a spaceship in the future, the fate of Rogue, and possibly even the Time Hotel and Joy. There’s a throughline about mysterious old women, mysterious young women and mysterious babies that felt like it was leading somewhere. With Gatwa’s abrupt exit, these storylines are not likely to coalesce or get resolved, and because of the scheduling issues that plagued his casting from the start, there were too many episodes in his less-than-twenty-episode stretch where he barely appeared at all. In the end, to our intense disappointment, Ncuti Gatwa’s entire tenure as The Doctor was badly handled and then abruptly ended before any of it was resolved. We didn’t think it was possible for a Doctor to be more poorly served by their scripts than Jodie Whittaker, but Ncuti Gatwa might wind up being the greatest potential Doctor with the highest percentage of terrible episodes.

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We genuinely have no idea what to make of Poppy or what to think of Belinda’s ending. Either she was always Belinda’s child and the wish world scenario only had the Doctor believing she was also his (which doesn’t make sense because the timeline was clearly altered to make it sound like Belinda needed to get home to her baby), or Belinda and the Doctor had a wish baby together who was then turned human because the Doctor ejaculated his regeneration energy into the time vortex or some sort of nonsense. Which is all kinds of awful because it turns him into an absentee father and turns a companion into a mother pretty much against her will. Either the Doctor walked away from a child who was his own or the Doctor walked away from a child he only thought was his own for a brief period of time. Because we don’t know the answer here, we have no idea what he’s feeling or what we’re supposed to be feeling. This doesn’t even get into the oddness of watching Belinda tearfully plead for the survival of a baby that, by all indications, was only wished into existence briefly, never mind how Ruby was just yeeted from the narrative completely after also tearfully arguing for that baby’s existence. None of it makes sense or has any sort of emotional component to it; just action figures moving through dioramas.

It was a wonderful surprise to see Jodie Whittaker again, by the way. Their interaction had a strange sad poignancy to it; not just because both actors showed tremendous potential but were hampered by pretty terrible scripts, but because there’s something a little depressing about a failing franchise making diverse casting choices that wind up putting the actors in the crossfire for the show’s failings. Doctor Who has been fading and spinning its wheels for over a decade, but a lot of viewers will blame the woman and the Black gay guy for the problem. Still, they were lovely together.

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In a different sort of season, with a show runner that hasn’t used up all of their good will with the audience, we might be intrigued about where this is all going to go, but everything from Gatwa’s tenure feels so unresolved, and while it’s possible Davies still has some sort of long term plan in mind, the future of the show feels a little unsure at the moment and even if it wasn’t, we’d still be looking at years of waiting before we even get a clue as to who that actually is standing in the TARDIS at the end. Sure, it could be the next iteration of The Doctor. It wouldn’t be the first time they stole someone’s face. But the fate of Rose Tyler/Bad Wolf was left fairly open and Davies has already used his return tenure to correct or wrap up some old storylines from his first one. Piper also played the sentient time being known as The Moment in the 50th anniversary special, “The Day of the Doctor.”  There are ways and reasons either one of them could be the person greeting us and that we don’t actually know who the next Doctor is going to be. There’s also the distinct possibility that, like David Tennant’s return, she’ll be the Doctor for a special or two before handing over the reins to the next sucker. Whatever the outcome, Doctor Who is in a bit of a shambles after its Disney experiment.

[Photo credit: BBC Studios/Bad Wolf]

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