What’s The Episode? The Intergalactic Song Contest
What’s It All About, JG? Eurovision in space, innit? But fine, the Doctor and Belinda turn up at the Intergalactic Song Contest, shit happens and most of it is really, really terrible (the writing, not the events, though also that). Susan pops in for a cameo (the only bit I actively enjoyed) and Mrs Flood is the Rani. Woo. The end.
Is It Any Good? Go on, guess. Apart from the bits I really disliked, it was mostly terrible. Politically incoherent, cliché-riddled, tedious, and almost completely without merit, this is one of the worst episodes of Doctor Who since… well, I was going to say “The Twin Dilemma” but maaaaybe that’s a bit harsh so let’s say “Fear Her”. There’s a couple of moments that work fairly well but they really are few and far between and I can’t actually remember disliking an episode of Doctor Who this much in a very, very long time.
Where to even start? Look, there will be some people – Eurovision lovers, presumably – who will love this as a setting. I am not among their number (despite being gay, I do, in fact, despise Eurovision). But in the same way that “The Devil’s Chord” isn’t about The Beatles, it’s just using them as a framing device, so this isn’t much about Eurovision and uses it as a framing device too. So we get a bit of a corny introduction, the RTD-patented unnecessary contemporary guest star and Belinda and the Doctor turning up to watch before things go inevitably pear-shaped. This is a pretty standard get-the-Doctor-into-trouble stuff – mild but it gets things going. But in the end, the Eurovision stuff amounts to very little. It’s a genuinely shocking moment when the entire audience are apparently killed and it’s a striking visual – the best in the entire episode, in fact. But after that… eh. It might as well be any group of people that are in danger and need to be saved. This time it’s a song contest crowd but nothing would be materially different if it had been… oh I don’t know, a sports arena or something like that. Later on, we get a supremely hacky moment where Cora gets to sing her Special Song, there’s silence, then one clap, then two, until it becomes thunderous applause. Not only is it about as shit a cliché as is imaginable, it actively drags us back to the framing device that we had, mercifully, been able to largely put on the back-burner.
Both the Rani reveal and Susan also act as framing devices, of a sort, too. But honestly, the big question here is, “so what”? And look, I’ll be honest, I got a massive jolt of fannish excitement when Susan appeared, because of of course I did. It was thrilling for an old school fan. Susan is almost the last classic-era companion who really deserves to appear and for this incarnation of the Doctor to be materially interacting with the very earliest iteration of the show is genuinely meaningful. Whether it goes anywhere good is questionable at this stage but Carole Ann Ford deserves that chance to put some meat on Susan’s bones and it looks like, finally, she will get the chance. But… isn’t this era of the show meant to exist to bring new viewers into the fold? Without knowing all the backstory what are they supposed to make of some old lady in the Doctor’s mind and the reveal of the Rani, about whom we have heard literally nothing of since Dimensions in Time “Time And The Rani”. In 1987. We get a reveal but absolutely no reason why viewers – even New Who viewers – are actually supposed to give a shit. Susan got mentioned a couple of times last season but not enough that there was any real real for a new audience member to make the connection between this person and the one mentioned then.
So the framing devices are crap. What else (I mean, apart from “almost everything”)? Actually…. the answer really is almost everything else. Belinda’s characterisation is weirdly incoherent. While it’s possible this is a hangover from the possibility that Ruby was meant to be in two seasons but then wasn’t, it’s fairly hard to imagine the character we’ve come to know being interested in a song contest at all, let alone an intergalactic one. As ever, Varada Sethu is working hard to lift material that doesn’t really deserve her talents and as ever, she remains criminally wasted in this era of the show. There’s an attempt to give her something to do later on, and her fury at the Doctor torturing someone presents another chance for her to really show off what she’s capable of. Her actual dislike and fear of the Doctor in the moment is incredibly well played and that questioning of who the Doctor is to her is just the sort of moment she can really land. Then the whole thing is glibly, crassly, and insultingly dismissed out of hand by the Doctor saying he was triggered, as if that somehow makes it alright (and Gatwa’s performance doesn’t come close to selling either the idea that he has been triggered or that the Doctor is using that line as an excuse to quickly cover his actions). Then a minute or two later, they’re best friends again and watching Graham Norton deliver some in-the-moment exposition. It’s a beyond-horrible moment (not Norton, to be clear).
Actually, speaking of Norton, weren’t we told back in “The Well” that nobody had ever heard of humanity, they were gone from history, and everything about them lost? Well, not here, since apparently both Norton(‘s image) and Rylan Clark have somehow been rescued, along with a whole bunch of Eurovision/Interstellar tat, and that’s just tickety-boo. And look, maybe there’s an explanation for this but if so, neither “The Well” nor this episode bother to tell us what it is. Just like last week we ignored any queer issues in Nigeria because it Didn’t Suit The Story, here we just ignore that all of humanity has been completely lost for exactly the same reason – it Didn’t Fit The Story. If you need to ignore big chunks of what you yourself are setting up just to get your story to function, you’re not doing it right. This isn’t nitpicking, it’s fundamental to trying to run an ongoing story.
And this, more than anything, is the massive flaw of this season specifically and this era generally. There’s just no explanation for anything. We’re just expected to Accept Things As They Are, no matter what or why, and are somehow a killjoy for pointing out that this isn’t how drama works. It’s just completely incoherent. One of the whole running threads of this season has been humanity vanishing from the cosmos and Belinda’s shock at that but here, because that won’t fit with this episode, it’s simply abandoned without so much as a line to cover it. You can fanwank your way around it, because you can fanwank your way around anything, but there’s not even a token attempt in-episode to make any of this stuff stick together. It’s shoddy, it’s lazy, and it’s frankly unworthy of RTD either as writer or a showrunner. Whatever golden touch he had during his first time helming the show has long, long since faded and what we’re left with is amateur fannish writing that even Chibnall might look askance at.
I mean, the politics of this episode are just horrific too. Want to read this as a comment on the Palestinian conflict, with refugees being killed by a faceless corporation (for honey flavouring, of all things)? Well, you can, absolutely, but where does that leave Windt and Kidd? Are they starting a revolution? Is it “good people on both sides”? Their cause is fair but they’ve taken it too far? But also they way their species can “pass” by cutting off their horns also makes them seem more like Jewish analogues rather than Palestinians. How does that make any sense? Please, for goodness sake, don’t hope to find answers here because you certainly won’t find them. We get slo-mo shots of burning fields that suggest the Gazan tragedy but they’re facile and manipulative (and that’s before we get to the cheap song and clap cliché). The Doctor tortures Kidd because of what he tried to do but does nothing to address the Corporation that’s leading the attack which caused him to strike out in the first place. Think back to “Oxygen” and remember it didn’t always work this way.
It’s all just surface level. In fact, facile is about as good a word as it’s possible to find to describe this episode. Appropriate for something based round Eurovision, really.
Would You Recommend It? Not to anyone, no, nor for any reason. Doctor Who has had plenty of low points but I can’t ever remember a low point making me quite as angry as this one. “Kerblam!” is rubbish and also politically incoherent but it’s fairly clear that what the episode accidentally ended up saying wasn’t what the authorial intent was. Same for “The Unquiet Dead” all the way back in the other season one (well, one of the other season one’s anyway. Seasons One?) “Space Babies” is shit but it’s just a bad episode of Doctor Who rather than anything to raise one’s blood pressure. But this is so clearly, so stupidly, ignorant of any of the points it wants to raise, discuss, or mention that it’s doing active harm. It’s not just bad, it’s infuriatingly, insultingly, patronisingly so.
And honestly, that’s as much effort as I can summon to write about this episode. It’s simply dreadful and I cannot drag up the energy to think about it or write about it any further. Normally, I’ll try to at least manage a few paragraphs in this section to bulk out the word count but I just don’t have it in me. For the first time in my entire life – more than half a century at this point – I just don’t have the energy to write about Doctor Who. Thanks, “The Interstellar Song Contest”. That’s one achievement at least.
Scores on the Doors? 1/10 and that’s for Susan’s brief appearance and the visual of the bodies floating up. The rest of it can fuck right off.
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