What’s The Episode? Wish World
What’s It All About, JG? Discovering RTD has seen Wandavision (or maybe Pleasantville) for the most part. But story-wise, we start off with the Rani (Panjabi version) in Bavaria, stealing a baby who can make wishes come true. We then find ourselves on a version of Earth where the Doctor and Belinda are married with a child, Poppy, and the Doctor works at UNIT, now an insurance company. Every so often, when someone doubts something, a cup will fall through a table. This is because the Rani is trying to measure doubt (can one assign a number to such a nebulous concept?). Conrad, from “Lucky Day“, has wished this world into existence, so it’s enforced heterosexuality, disdain for the disabled etc. – the typical right-wing fascist fantasy. Eventually, to get the plot moving, Rogue turns up on telly to give the Doctor a push in the direction of something interesting and he ends up confronting The Two Ranis (Panjabi and Dobson). The “current” version reveals she is trying to find…. Omega. Oh good. Then the Doctor plummets to his apparent death while screaming about Poppy being actually real while the world disintegrates.
Is It Any Good? Nope. Mostly, what it is is boring, the worst sin any episode of Doctor Who can commit. I’ve given up on any chance that this season is going to resolve into something interesting but it would be nice if, along the way, we managed something to hold the attention but sadly, “Wish World” isn’t it. There’s always a fundamental tension at the heart of any alternative reality story, whether it’s something like this, the parallel world of “Inferno”, or the virtual world of “Forest of the Dead”. And that tension is not whether the lead characters are going to make it out of the world – because of course they are – but rather how they are going to do it. “Forest of the Dead” manages to strike a good balance here – we see Donna in her virtual world, interacting with her children that don’t actually exist and leading her idealised life but we also keep cutting back to the Doctor and River in the real world trying to survive and figure out what’s going on. With “Wish World”, we have no other world to cut back to, so we spend 100% of the episode’s time (minus the cold open) in the strange version of Earth.
This ought to give us stakes, ramping up the excitement until we find out what’s going on, with the immersion in the world adding pressure to the discovery. It doesn’t really work like that, though. We spend a lot of time just faffing about in the imposed normalcy of the world, which is intriguing enough to begin with before becoming just dull. It’s all very well constructed but not that interesting. We know none of this will stick and because there’s no tension around what’s happening we’re just waiting around for forty minutes until the Doctor eventually arrives at the plot. There’s no process of discovery, he’s just there, then we get the reveals. He has a few uncanny moments, like describing Ibrahim as beautiful and everyone reacting in horror at the notion of one man finding another beautiful but it’s not really riveting stuff. We know the world was created by Conrad by then and we know he’s a right-wing bigot so how else would anyone respond?
Indeed, the Doctor never even works out what’s going on and needs prompting from Rogue, who turns up on the telly for about thirty seconds to clue the Doctor in as to what’s going on in a way that the word “crass” barely even covers (apparently he’s trapped in a “hell dimension”, because that’s where Doctor Who is these days) then vanishes, never to be seen again. In fact, it would have been much better if it had been Susan, not Rogue, that delivered that exposition, which would at least have some kind of thematic relevance and link with her appearance in last week’s episode. She does get a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance here but hopefully next week we will get more. The Doctor, meanwhile, is almost wholly ineffective in this episode and spends the latter part of it simply standing around while the Rani explains the plot at him. There’s a presumably-funny line she gets where she announces, “it’s not just exposition!” which is unbearably smug, shit, and also inaccurate because that’s in fact precisely what it is. It’s now debatable as to whether Sacha Dhawan or Archie Panjabi have spent more time just expositing at the Doctor (it’s probably Dhawan but not by much). But in both cases this is not how plot advancements are meant to be delivered, with the Doctor just standing there while everything is laid out on a plate.
And oh yes, the Rani. After the reveal (well, “reveal”) last week we’re left with two Ranis following their bigeneration. This has the potential to be passingly interesting, since the “older” Rani (the Anita Dobson version) seems somewhat subservient to the newer one. She mildly complains about all the tasks she needs to do while the Panjabi version gets on with general scheming and whatnot but there’s actually remarkably little made of this. It’s an interesting beat swallowed almost whole by the rest of the episode and I’m doubting very much that we will get an expansion of it in next week’s season finale – there’s already too much ground to cover there. But, hey, at least it’s something.
And what of Archie Panjabi as the Rani? Well, she’s… fine but stuck with spending the majority of the episode either expositing at the Doctor, the other Rani, or the audience and that doesn’t give her a lot of range to work with. She’s not doing a Kate O’Mara impression, which is the correct decision, and neither is she mimicking Mrs Flood/the Dobson Rani. She can wear a leather jacket well and swish about the set well enough so maybe she’s a good Rani but this episode doesn’t really give her enough to work with for that to be easily established. There’s the odd moment, like her disgust at the thought of the Dobson Rani being her “mother”, but very little overall. Maybe next week, when the Rani’s fiendish plan goes into action, we’ll get more.
Although, speaking of that plan… any idea what it is? Well, she wants to rescue Omega from the Underverse (is that this version of Doctor Who‘s antimatter universe?) for reasons that don’t get explained to us and she’s doing that using the Wish World for reasons that don’t get explained to us and it’s necessary for her to harness doubt in the world for reasons that don’t get explained to us. That’s a lot of things that don’t get explained, given how much exposition there is in this episode. Is she trying to re-assert scientific rationale in a universe of magic? If so, she’s got a funny way of going about it. Her turning people into flowers in the cold open is pleasingly reminiscent of “The Mark Of The Rani” and those infamous tree mines except rather than using tech she just blows on people, which is a bit shit. Yet the interesting thing about the Rani is that she isn’t just a female Master – she’s not interested in conquest or revenge or taking over the universe or whatever. She’s an amoral scientist who is only really interested in her own experiments. But that’s not, at least so far, what we have here. I mean, maybe that’s where things will go next week, and this is either her attempt to eliminate magic from the universe or some madcap experiment she’s running but here, in this episode, she’s just a cackling baddie with typical-Doctor-Who whacky schemes going on. She’s not distinctive at all.
Oh, and Ruby’s in this, apparently able to see through the illusion of the world. She meets up with the disabled members of UNIT who seem to be living rough, including Shirley. There’s an unbearably self-important line about the way people “don’t see” this disabled, in this case literally as people walk past them and don’t register their presence at all. It’s as subtle as all the messaging has been in this season but it’s relatively confined, if no better delivered. But anyway, Ruby faffs about a bit, achieving nothing and taking up screen time that might have been better spent actually advancing the plot (such as it is). And Mel’s around too, living next to the Doctor, Belinda, and their child Poppy.
And oh yes, apparently Poppy is important because the Doctor ends the episode yelling about how she’s real while falling to his death. This, presumably will be of relevance in the next episode but it certainly isn’t in this. And that is, of course, the problem with reviewing one half of a two-parter because we don’t know where any of this is going. “Nowhere fast” might be a fair assumption but eh, who knows? The cliffhanger, in any case, isn’t especially exciting or dramatic but we have, at least, got to the end of the world at long bloody last and the visual is relatively arresting. What will happen next? Not enough to wrap up all these plot points satisfactorily, that’s for sure…
Would You Recommend It? I mean, it’s shit but it’s less offensively shit than last week’s episode so if you want to take that as a recommendation go right ahead, though it’s not meant as one. The problem with this episode is that it’s just so lightweight and basically nothing happens. We spend about a quarter of the episode knowing we’re in a false world but not doing anything with it, then Rogue turns up, then we get to the Rani’s bone palace, then we’re done. That’s it. The reveal that the cold open was the Rani getting a baby that could wish this world into existence and then using Conrad to actually wish it is just that – a reveal but it doesn’t actually chance anything that’s going on, it’s just the mechanism through which this world has been created. If the Rani had just pressed a big red button labelled “CREATE NEW WORLD!” it would have had the same impact. Beyond “it’s a bit magic”, which we know already, it doesn’t have any thematic relevance to the rest of the episode at all.
Conrad is fractionally interesting here, though. He narrates a story of the Time Lords throughout this episode for reasons that seem to boil down more to RTD needing to inform the newer members of the audience about tedious lore than because it makes any sense actually in-episode. But there’s two beats around him that slightly elevate things. Firstly, though he is responsible for wishing the fascist world into existence he still appears to be as trapped as he was in the prison cell and apparently can’t do a very good job of creating the world because doubts keep cropping up. If you want to take this as a criticism of the contradictory nature of fascism, have at it. The cups falling through the table as a visual metaphor for doubt is actually quite effective, though the line “tables don’t work like that” isn’t nearly as clever as it’s presumably meant to be – why doesn’t Rogue just say to the Doctor “this world isn’t real, its a fiction! Think about that!” rather than some cryptic line about tables? Anyway, there’s also the fact that it seems to take him real effort to keep this world going and he’s not happy about the effort it takes. Neither of these beats are expanded on but it gives Conrad a little more shade than he had in “Lucky Day”, where the only way he could have been more obviously a bad guy is if someone had stuck a bit of paper to his back with the words “BAD GUY!” written on it in big letters.
But still, this doesn’t amount to anything actually happening. It’s just more mechanism. Rogue turns up at the 30 minute mark – two-thirds of the way through the episode – before the Doctor is prompted into action and nothing of interest occurs before that. Or much after that, to be honest. The last third is just the Rani’s exposition, which I’ve already covered. And that’s it. Mel is in this but for no apparent reason and for nothing more than a cameo. Ruby is in this because apparently we just can’t get away from her but she also don’t really achieve anything, she just floats around so Millie Gibson can get another pay-check. The climax of the episode is “the Rani’s got an evil plan!” as if she was ever going to have anything else and as if we didn’t know that for the last forty-five minutes. The reveal that she’s searching for Omega is so laughably irrelevant it’s hard not to think it must be RTD taking the piss but it doesn’t appear to be. I’m not that certain we will even get to see Omega next week and, as with the Rani reveal at the end of the last episode, what are New New Who viewers meant to make of this? A character they’ve never heard of and have no reason to care about is apparently what another character they’ve never heard about and have no reason to care about is looking for. Thrilling stuff. The Rani might as well have announced that she was searching for Rolex for all the impact Omega’s name has.
There’s a very real chance, at this point, that “Arc of Infinity” might not be the worst story to feature Omega. Ponder that for a second…
Scores on the Doors? 2.5/10 Less offensively terrible than last week, the bone creatures and end of the Earth are interesting visuals, and that’s about your lot.
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