What’s The Episode? “Space Babies”.
What’s It All About, JG? Babies. In Space. You can’t say the title doesn’t give you the information you need. The Doctor and Ruby land on a space station and are immediately chased by a monster. Escaping in a lift, they discover the entire station is run by babies, having been abandoned by people so pro-life they’d rather let the babies die a horrible death than turn off the machine that makes them (in a baby farm, of all things). The Doctor and Ruby faff about a bit before discovering that the computer looking after the babies, Nan-E, is actually a person called Jocelyn who couldn’t bear the idea of abandoning the babies and stayed behind to protect them. After trying to eject the creature into space, they realise that it’s a) made of snot (a literal bogeyman) and b) the only one of its kind so the Doctor gets to do all that Last of the Time Lords stuff we left a good fifteen years ago. Great. (Not that he is the Last Of The Time Lords. Actually, he’s the first, but let’s not get into that right now.) Anyway, the snot monster is saved, the babies are rescued by letting off a massive fart and all’s well that ends well.
Is It Any Good? Well, after the disappointment of “The Church on Ruby Road”, what the episode needed to achieve was a reason for viewers to keep on watching. Or indeed to start watching. This is the much-touted “relaunch” of the series, which will apparently form a clean break with the show before, reset everything, and provide (yet another) entry point for newcomers to the show. Festive specials are always a bit apart from the main show, so if you didn’t catch it (and there’s no great reason to) then this is your first point of contact with a brand new Doctor and a brand new companion. So…
… why isn’t this better? It struggles in vain to try and get over something that will connect with the audience but never quite manages it. This isn’t, to be clear, the fault of either Ncuti Gatwa or Millie Gibson, both of who bust a gut trying to put something into material that just doesn’t give the much of anything to do other than run around being Terribly Enthusiastic At Stuff. This is appealing enough in the beginning but it rapidly becomes a bit wearisome. Neither are ever bad in the episode but there’s very little range for them to play here. Even the Doctor’s bafflement as to why he’s scared of the monster and runs away ends up landing more as slight confusion that’s quickly shrugged off rather than something that gives Gatwa the chance to stretch his acting abilities.
Saying that, he does remain a delightful on-screen presence and if the only thing he’s ask to do is sashay about the sets and boggle a lot, well it’s not like he’s the first Doctor to have that as his default setting and it’s not that he’s bad at it because he very demonstratively isn’t. He’s got a nice vibe with Millie Gibson’s Ruby too, and if she’s still playing things a bit Clara-lite that’s because the two scripts she’s been involved with haven’t really given her much else to do. What’s she supposed to do when she’s consistently written as perky, someone with A Mysterious Past, and very little else? The rapport between her and Gatwa is saving things now but, as we saw with the Eleventh Doctor and Clara, that can’t be the only thing to keep things together.
The whole script here has the same knocked-off quickie feeling as something like “New Earth”, which is a weird feeling for the first episode of a season to have. You want something that’s going to grab the audience, not leaving them mildly shrugging. “New Earth” is actually a fairly good point of comparison, given that it’s also a season opener hoping to pull in viewers who may not have picked up the Christmas special, and also because it’s not very good either. As with “New Earth”, the plan seems to be simply to throw the Doctor at the screen and hope that his personality overcomes any sloppy plotting around cats curing all known diseases with fruit juice (is that what happened? It feels like that’s what happened) or rescuing babies with a big fart. In both instances, despite vastly charismatic actors playing the role to the hilt, this approach flops.
Because there’s just so little effort put into anything else here. The “politics” of the episode amounts to little more than two lines, which is a shame because there’s plenty of scope for an episode like this to have some real political bite. Instead, it’s fairly typical RTD lazy political inclusion along the lines of, “weapons of mass destruction that can be launched in 30 seconds”, where we get one pointed line then everything gets shoved aside for campy adventures and running up and down corridors. Now, obviously this is Doctor Who – campy adventures and running up and down corridors is practically what the show exists for. But things have moved on since RTD vacated the role and to see this return to default operating procedure isn’t encouraging. This would be a great place for some satire with real teeth but it’s not to be.
So is it any good? It should have been but, annoyingly, no.
Would You Recommend It? I really want to be able to but just can’t. It’s not that this is a catastrophe – it’s not the worst things RTD has written even though it’s absolutely light-years from his best. But in order to recommend it, there would have to be something in it to recommend and that’s where it all falls short because there just isn’t anything. What can you point to in this episode and say, “that’s great, this is why you should watch then show!”? There’s Gatwa, but he got more to do in the Christmas special and it was rubbish.
I mean, you could point at the budget and say it looks very pretty. Which it does, but we also have the babies and they look like the word “yikes!” made visual, and not in an intentionally-scary way. Having dolls with lip-synched CGI mouths just looks wrong. Sure, it’s uncanny valley stuff but it’s also much worse than that too, somehow. Whatever the logic behind this thinking is – presumably it makes filming easier if you don’t have to use actual kids – it didn’t work. A failed special effect in service of a great story can be forgivable (again, this is pretty much what Doctor Who is built on) but a failed special effect in service of this piece of irrelevancy is much harder to excuse. The babies just don’t work, either as something we’re meant to be concerned about because of the threat to them nor as a piece of look-what-we-can-do effects work. If the central thing you’re meant to care about proves to be impossible to invest in then the episode around just isn’t going to work, no matter how good it is.
Not that it is, though. The literal bogeyman is one of those concepts that probably looked great on paper (and a soft rebuke to Mark Gatiss following “Sleep No More”? Probably not but it’s still odd to have two snot monsters in the same show) but there should have been someone to quietly take RTD to one side and say, “er, yes, that sounds clever but it’s not so don’t do it”. I don’t get the feeling there’s a lot of people to tell him no around though. Maybe it’ll appeal to younger viewers as a way to hook them in but I have my doubts… Anyway, the visual effects for the monster are fine, though given the hullabaloo about Disney money not noticeably better than what we’ve had before. Shots of the exterior of the space station, the planet, and so forth, really do look better than we’ve had before though – they’re remarkably for a TV show. Whatever else this episode is, you can’t fault the artwork.
But that’s just not good enough. If the best think one can find to say about the episode is, “that planet sure looks nice” then something’s gone a bit wrong. To go back to the “New Earth” comparisons, the Cat Nuns look fantastic but so what if they’re stuck in a dud story (though at least that episode had the touching final scene with Cassandra, which is more than this one does)? Great, so the planet looks nice. But could we maybe have better character work or an interesting and unique situation, or… well, anything that isn’t just empty calories in a story we’ve seen loads of times before. This is just so ordinary.
If the relatively few praises here sound grudging, that’s because they are. Ncuti Gatwa deserved so much more for his first proper episode and it’s a bit dispiriting to see how little he’s been given to work with here. “New Earth” didn’t derail Tennant’s time in the role and I don’t suppose “Space Babies” will derail Gatwa’s but this is such a wasted opportunity it actively hurts. Next episode it’s the theft of music, the Beatles, and 1962 which all sounds exciting and full of potential. Let’s hope that more is done with that than was done with this.
Oh, and the, “babies… space babies!” isn’t funny. Not even once. Please don’t let this Become A Thing.
Scores on the Doors? 5/10
JG Judgementally Comments... 