What’s The Episode? Rogue
What’s It All About, JG? The Doctor and Ruby travel back to Regency England where they say the word “Bridgerton” a lot, in case the audience don’t get it. There they encounter mysterious bounty-hunter Rogue (Jonathan Groff) who is there to… er, stop the Chulder? They’re shape-shifting aliens who enjoy cosplaying but also suddenly decide they want to destroy the world for a bit of added jeopardy. The Doctor and Rogue have a bit of a romance while Ruby largely gets lost in a typical love-plot of the era. Eventually (very eventually) the Chulda are defeated, the world is saved, Rogue sacrifices himself to save Ruby, and that’s pretty much that.
Is It Any Good? Nearly. Not really, but nearly. It’s the through-line of this season all over again – elements that are decent constantly fighting with elements that very much aren’t. This does, at least, feel like a fairly typical Doctor Who romp through history along the lines of, say, “Tooth and Claw” but this time with bird-like aliens who like to cosplay rather than kung-fu monks and werewolves. Both reflect, to a certain extent, the cultures of their times – the kung-fu monks of “Tooth and Claw” invoke the likes of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (or any number of wire-fu movies that followed in its wake) just as the Regency setting here relates to Bridgerton.
The difference is that “Tooth and Claw” trusted the audience to pick up on its cultural reference points and “Rogue” very much doesn’t. “Tooth and Claw” never had Rose turn round and say, “hey this is just like that movie starring Michelle Yeoh!” whereas here Ruby and the Doctor can’t say Bridgerton often enough, just in case anyone misses the great bit clunking reference. It shows a fundamental lack of trust in the audience – if they can’t be trusted to pick up the reference we’ll just beat them around the head with it until they get it. One off-handed line would have been sufficient but we get so, so much more than that to the point where it starts to feel exclusionary. A vague Regency setting allows anyone who’s watching to go, “oh right, we’re visiting a bit of history with nice frocks and slightly contrived love stories” but to constantly batter the audience with, “hey, we’re doing Bridgerton now!” can be extremely isolating if that’s not actually a show you’re familiar with or like.
Which is not to hold “Tooth and Claw” up as some perfect episode but it’s strange to see the show have so much less trust in his audience in 2024 than it did in 2006. This isn’t written by RTD of course but it still bears absolutely all his hallmarks and his editorial fingerprints are all over it. Everything here is written in a very maximalist style, which rapidly becomes rather exhausting. And sure, some of that is importing from the source material but even so having everything dialed up to 11 from the word go doesn’t really give the material any space to breathe. That’s not to say there aren’t any quiet moments, because there are, but they’re then rushed on from so quickly that they never get much of a chance to land.
Take the romance between the Doctor and Rogue. There’s a few sweet moments but it all happens so blisteringly fast it’s hard to buy into. We go from “hello” to an apparently-genuine proposal in about 25 minutes flat. Even Captain Jack had a few episodes under his belt before he got to lock lips with the Doctor. And Rogue, as a character, is just straightforwardly Captain Jack but as presumably nobody wants to give John Barrowman any work these days he’s been swapped out for Jonathan Groff. Who’s fine and all but it’s also just a bit boring to have what amounts to exactly the same character just played by someone different. It might have been more interesting to have someone who isn’t a, erm, roguish, dashing, handsome character with a murky past since we’ve, y’know, already had one of these and other Stock Character Types are available. But because the romance is so rushed (and compressed in to a single episode) we get to see little of the character or why Captain Jack #2 might be an interesting proposition. And it might be but there’s not enough in this episode to say it is.
It also unbalances Ncuti Gatwa a bit, who really isn’t much playing the Doctor this week. We’re wholeheartedly back in The Adventures of Ncuti Gatwa In Space and, while he’s clearly having a ball, there’s not that much sense he’s really playing the Doctor and because of that it makes the episode difficult to invest in. He’s not bad, and there’s nothing wrong with giving the Doctor a one-episode whirlwind romance like this – we’ve seen it before in episodes like “The Girl In The Fireplace”. The problem is Gatwa just doesn’t feel like he’s much channeling the Doctor, entertaining though he is to watch. He’s just messing about, flirting, generally having fun and so forth but not a lot of it is getting past the screen. It’s Gatwa that’s enjoying this, not the Doctor. And yet again we have an episode where Ruby and the Doctor spend a huge chunk of the episode apart so we don’t have the Doctor/companion relationship to fall back on to help shore up that side of things.
Ruby herself gets to fall face-first into a classic Regency romance, interrupting declarations of love and caddish behaviour all over the place. Millie Gibson is fine at this – it’s not the most demanding of material but her thrill and being able to dance in a Regency ball or just enjoy being in the time period comes across reasonably convincingly. Ruby as a character still isn’t a lot beyond “generic companion” but while there’s not a lot to get excited about here, there’s also not a huge amount to complain about either. Steady competence is about the best we could hope for, though the “feint” of whether she’s dead and being cosplayed towards the end of the episode is woeful (not, to be clear, Millie Gibson’s fault).
And that’s the episode. All of the above contain potentially interesting elements but none of them are really assembled in a way that makes for a compelling episode of Doctor Who. It’s a romp, obviously, so it’s not meant to be taken that seriously but even romps need to be put together in an interesting way and the problem with “Rogue” is that it isn’t. It’s not awful but it’s very, very far from being actually good.
Would You Recommend It? I guess if you’re a Bridgerton fan who also enjoys time travel, then maybe? I don’t know how big the overlap on the old Doctor Who / Bridgerton Venn diagram is but while I’m sure it’s very much non-zero I’d also be surprised if it was massive. And that’s also part of the problem – this feels like it’s being written for fans of Bridgerton and absolutely nobody else, not even really Doctor Who fans. That doesn’t seem like a way to really land what you’re hoping is Season One of a rebooted show because, as mentioned earlier, it feels exclusionary.
Well, maybe it’s also for fans of cosplay because boy does the episode beat us about the head with the fact the aliens are cosplayers. It’s mentioned again. And again. And again. It’s exactly the same mistake with the Bridgerton references – not that it’s there but simply that there’s no trust that telling the audience once is sufficient so we get told repeatedly. How much the word “cosplay” even resonates or means anything to an audience not directly into it is also very much open to question but rather than taking a broader approach – “hey these aliens like to dress up as humans and pretend to be them!” – and allowing the audience to infer the cosplay angle, instead we must be lectured about it. Combined with the endless Bridgerton riffs it becomes suffocating.
And the extent to which the episode mimics Bridgerton is significant, right down to using modern pop songs played on string quartets as incidental music. If you don’t like this – and I hate it, with “Poker Face” being especially egregious, though that’s very much a YMMV thing – it’s incredibly off-putting. But more than that, it’s also not really necessary. We’ve been battered over the head enough with what the episode is trying to do, we don’t need this as well. Never mind gilding the lily, we’ve gilded the entire garden at this point. At least the Kyle song on Rogue’s spaceship is a little cutesy – we know Kyle exists in the Doctor Who universe and it’s an easy short-hand for gay as pop culture background radiation while Groff and Gatwa make goo-goo eyes at each other. It works well enough in context and while it’s certainly not subtle, it’s not the sledgehammer referencing we get elsewhere. It does a little of the work to make something genuine between the Doctor and Rogue, in other words, so actually serves a purpose within the narrative rather than just being a smug reference.
Groff’s Rogue seems purpose-built as a character who’s going to return. And again, though Groff is fine (if nothing more than that) a handsome, dashing, bad boy as a recurring character isn’t the worst idea Doctor Who could have. It’s just one it’s already had. The much-vaunted Season One isn’t really targeting long-in-the-tooth fans like me, and that’s fine, it’s clearly focussing on a younger audience and, with Disney in play, appealing to a new audience and getting them on board makes eminent sense. You need to bring new fans in if your show is to continue, as 1989 and the original cancellation eloquently proved – making Doctor Who for nothing but Doctor Who fans is suicide.
But… it’s hard not to be frustrated at just seeing the show do the same thing it’s already done, and this brings us back to the weirdly exclusionary tone of this episode. Because it feels like Doctor Who being made for Bridgerton fans and nobody else and that’s just as much suicide as making Doctor Who for Doctor Who fans because that’s not a big enough subset to keep your show on the air. And look, this is one episode and one episode isn’t going to derail either the season or the show. Except the season is already derailed and struggling, both creatively and in the ratings. Generally I don’t give a toss about ratings beyond them being good enough to keep the show going but this approach doesn’t seem to be paying dividends and that’s a real problem.
The show desperately needs to broaden its horizons and find solid ground. It’s good to have a new writer on board – Doctor Who desperately needs them – but the first results of this aren’t good. And getting in a new audience doesn’t mean having to reject the existing one – the fact we’re talking about Doctor Who in 2024 proves this because Davies already got this right. The Eccleston season is by no means flawless – though it’s very, very good indeed – but it perfectly balanced bringing in new fans while keeping older ones on board. Much of this season feels like it’s been unable to strike that balance. Not because of “woke”, “gay stuff” or whatever the idiots of the right-wing press are screeching about this week but simply because the storytelling hasn’t been very good, Davies has largely forgotten how to conclude a script, and because there’s just not, in the end, been a huge amount to care about.
This episode isn’t responsible for that but it does continue the trend. It feels superficially like an old-school Doctor Who romp in history but just can’t get out of its own way enough to allow the pleasures of that to come through. It’s extremely well made, the make-up and effects are terrific – including Rogue’s ship, which has a great design – and all the basic elements are in place. It’s just that none of them are really assembled well enough to make compelling television. There’s little sense of the Doctor being present in these episodes and though Gatwa is clearly a great actor, “Rogue” shows the limits of how much he’s really inhabiting the character at this stage. All in all, this is another disappointment in a season that’s apparently designed to be little else.
It’s a season-closer two-parter next. Please be better.
Scores On The Doors? 6.5 / 10
JG Judgementally Comments... 