Doctor Who Season 15/2 Episode Eight, “The Reality War”

What’s The Episode? The Reality War

What’s It All About, JG? Wondering if RTD has ever seen Doctor Who before, strangely. Anyway, following on from last week, the Doctor escapes the falling balcony because Anita from “Joy To The World” opens a Time Hotel door which he can then step through. The Time Hotel doors allow actual reality to start breaking through, so UNIT becomes UNIT again.

The Ranis manage to release Omega, who eats one of them (Panjabi) while the other legs it. Conrad gets confronted by Ruby, Poppy is the Doctor and Belinda’s child and also somehow real, Mel turns up for a bit, there’s a big battle with the bone creatures that seems to have been left over from an Avengers movie, and the world is put right. Then – with half an hour still to go – the Doctor sacrifices himself very slowly to save Poppy while the 13th Doctor drops in for a cameo and Gatwa bows out to be replaced by… Billie Piper? Blimey!

Is It Any Good? Nope (again). It’s mostly incoherent rubbish, then occasionally just to shake things up a bit, it will be all fankwanky and rubbish, then it goes back to being rubbish under its own steam again. I hate to start off sounding so negative but the truth of the matter is, with a couple of notable exceptions, there’s very little here that qualifies as even decent, never mind good. There was no chance that this episode was going to satisfactorily resolve the season but it didn’t have to be this dismal.

It’s hard to know where to start, to be honest. Let’s get the Doctor’s escape via Time Hotel door out the way because we were barely 45 seconds into the episode before I let out an, “oh for fuck’s sake“, and there was plenty more swearing to follow. This feels like such a cheap, lazy cop-out, up there with the old classic of having a cliffhanger be resolved by the Doctor shouting, “wait!”, throwing up his arms (see “The Visitation” for an especially ripe example). And sure, it’s nice to see Anita back but that’s not the same as having a satisfying way out of the cliffhanger. Actually, nice though it is to have Anita, the one thing this episode didn’t need was another character cluttering up the place, so it’s as well she does nothing but open a few doors and make the occasional self-deprecating remark about working in the hospitality industry. What a waste.

Right, what’s next. Er, Ruby. Ruby is simply in the way in this episode. Or maybe Belinda is. What the episode doesn’t need is two companions, dividing focus and attention, and one of whom is literally stuck in a box isolated from the story to get her out of the way for a while. There’s a real feeling this whole storyline was put together for Ruby but because of whatever reason that caused Millie Gibson to not be in this season full time, much of it got dropped on Belinda and doesn’t really fit. Poppy is the perfect example of this. Poppy is the same child from “Space Babies“(Captain Poppy back then) and as a wish or half-remembered event from Ruby, it makes sort-of sense that the child that she and the Doctor have might look like that. But it makes no sense for Belinda, whose sole interaction with Poppy was that blink-and-you’ll-miss-it scene in “The Story and the Engine” where Belinda briefly sees a child, then quickly moves on. It’s the sort of incoherence that doesn’t sit well.

One of the better scenes in the episode is where Ruby confronts Conrad in the bone palace and the way she effectively tears apart his every argument is possibly Millie Gibson’s best moment all season. This scene makes sense for her and what Ruby has been through. As does the theme of motherhood that runs through this episode. We know about Ruby’s two mums, we know about her adoption, we know that these are all important character attributes. But instead, it’s Belinda that ends up with the baby for Reasons when it would obviously make more sense for it to be Ruby. Belinda is fine in this episode and Varada Sethu is typically great but she’s largely sidelined and it’s hard not to feel that she’s done dirty when she’s literally shoved into a Zero Room (sigh) to get her out of the way. She might be the most wasted companion of the entire New (and New New) Who era, in fact – this iteration of the show’s Nyssa. Either way, the need to juggle two companions just doesn’t work at all.

The episode also really wants you to invest in the idea of Poppy but honestly, it’s quite hard to. That’s partly because there’s no real sense of build-up to Poppy – she’s just there in the previous story and just a reason for the Doctor to regenerate in this one. In the meantime, she gets moved around the story from pillar to post but never with much sense that it’s meant to matter, beyond us being told that she self-evidently does. And if you don’t immediately just go awwww! over the mere presence of a young child – which I don’t – then we’re not given a lot of reason to care. It’s also a slightly odd decision to have Poppy be mostly mute. I mean, I definitely didn’t want a return to the uncanny valley of the speaking babies in “Space Babies” but the child is visibly old enough to at least manage a few words. Or some happy gargling sounds. Or any form of emotional expression at all, in fact. But Poppy is weirdly blank and not in an intentional way, I don’t think, which also makes her hard to invest in. Oh well.

I guess we better talk about Omega. I speculated in the previous episode’s review that we might not even get to meet Omega here. And while I wasn’t completely right, I also wasn’t completely wrong either. Because here, all Omega amounts to is a big Marvel special effect. No matter how much the Doctor (inaccurately) rants about him being a Mad God or (inaccurately) tells us about how he was cast out, at the end of the day there’s no actual character present here. Omega crawls out of the vault, the Doctor shoots him with what is essentially a big gun, and that’s it. He’s on screen for about two minutes. It might as well be any CGI monster. Also, quick sidebar: didn’t RTD say the reason he redesigned the sonic screwdriver was to make it not look like a gun? If so, why is the climax to this episode’s plot the Doctor just shooting something? Word of the week: incoherence! Anyway, we can now definitely be sure that “Arc of Infinity” is no longer the worst story to feature Omega. At least he was in it.

So Omega is a complete bust. The background we get contradicts both “The Three Doctors” and “Arc of Infinity” but even putting that aside, the whole point of Omega is that he’s steeped in tragedy. He’s not the “first of the Time Lords”, he’s the one who sacrificed himself so Gallifreyans could become Time Lords. He is the one that gave them the power of time travel but was forever locked away in another universe as a result, unable to benefit from the sacrifice he made and leaving it to Rassilon to build Time Lord society. And it’s not like RTD wouldn’t know this, so… why bother with the change? It strips the tragedy from the character and makes him just another generic bad guy. There’s so much exposition in both last week’s episode and this that another couple of lines to cover his history wouldn’t have made much difference and it’s easily explained (you can tell, because I’ve just done it). But it links in with the fact that Omega isn’t a character here, he’s just a plot device, the thing the Rani needs to rebuild Gallifrey.

Because apparently that’s her plan. She wants to use Omega to rebuild Gallifrey and… blah blah blah. Who cares? I would be the happiest Doctor Who fan in the world if we never, ever, ever went anywhere near fucking Gallifrey ever again. It’s just so boring, and has been since at least “The Invasion of Time”. The Rani has a whole eugenics rant about how the Time Lords are the highest race and (in one of the few genuinely funny moments of the episode) everyone just rolls their eyes at her. She thinks Poppy is “contaminated” because she’s been created by a Time Lord and human (which makes Poppy half human on her mother’s side, a TV Movie reference I was not expecting) etcetera etcetera. It’s all standard stuff and the Rani gets eaten a minute or two later anyway so it doesn’t count for much.

Oh yes, the Panjabi Rani gets unceremoniously eaten by Omega which is slightly amusing but also just incredibly shit. What an absolute waste. Presumably, it’s meant to be ironic – at the moment of her plans coming to fruition, she gets destroyed. But it doesn’t look like that on screen, it’s just a cheap way out of the character. At least the Dobson version escapes with a corny line. On the subject of which, why did the Dobson version keep breaking the fourth wall? We will never know. Or, more accurately, this episode isn’t going to bother explaining it to us. Maybe it’ll come up later but, again, who really cares at this point? Oh and we also hear, in passing, that all Time Lords are now sterile thanks to the Master’s genetic bomb. Sterile Time Lords is old lore from the New Adventures novels (where Davies started his Doctor Who association) and what was then called the Curse of Pythia. For a moment, I thought that’s what we were going to get and that RTD might go full Looms on us, but nope. There’s a bit of lore just sitting there waiting to be used and it’s ignored in favour of giving us the same bit of lore anyway. What? And sure, a casual viewer isn’t going to know that but what’s the point of introducing the sterility anyway? Can the few remaining Time Lords now only bigenerate? It’s anyone’s guess.

And look, there’s a lot of negatives here so I’m going to touch on two things that are positives. And one of them – and the single best moment in the entire episode – is the appearance of Jodie Whittaker in a very unexpected 13th Doctor cameo. I mean, it’s just glorious to see her back and such a reminder of what an amazing Doctor she was, even when the material wobbled. She’s on set for about three minutes but acts Ncuti off the screen and just reaffirms that she really is the Doctor and any issues with her era are nothing to do with the lead actor. The moment the 15th Doctor says, “you never do” when the 13th says she should tell Yaz she loves her is just the right amount of heartbreaking and it’s a genuinely great use of the much more emotionally available Gatwa version. It’s the one thing he can say that no other iteration of the character would ever be able to and the whole scene just sings. Anyway, she’s just brilliant and it’s an absolute joy to have her back even for just a couple of minutes.

And then there’s the regeneration. Look, if there’s one thing that this era of Doctor Who has pretty much established, it’s that RTD is a one-trick pony. And the one trick in question was brilliant – I literally couldn’t imagine how the return of the show could have gone better (other than another Eccleston season, maybe) and he deserves all the praise and plaudits in the world for doing such an outstanding job. But he did it, left, and the return has been a shoddy disaster. At this point, I’d actually argue that Chibnall was a better showrunner than RTD2, which is quite the statement. The mess of stories, the incoherent plotting, the waste of Belinda, the “it’s magic, don’t think about it!” way out of pretty much anything that doesn’t make sense as if that’s good enough… it’s just been ghastly. The Timeless Child storyline was crap but at least it was crap on it’s own terms, trying to come up with something new, rather than just rehashing tedious nostalgia-bait from the past like Sutekh and Omega and then getting most of that wrong anyway in a way that’s meaningless to new fans and guaranteed to piss off older ones.

So to have the regeneration, and have it be Billie Piper grinning in the TARDIS doors is… quite the choice. Trolling? Maybe – the credits pointedly don’t refer to her as the Doctor, just “and introducing Billie Piper”, whereas Whittaker and Gatwa both get “as the Doctor” credits. But it also speaks to a fundamental lack of imagination, that after bringing back Tennant for three hit-and-miss specials, the best he can come up with is to go back to the same old well of his era (by the way, where is the 14th Doctor when all this is going on?). It was genuinely quite a shock to see Billie standing there – in a good way – but once you get over that it’s all just a bit sad, really. I’m sure Billie would make an outstanding Doctor, it’s absolutely nothing against her, but I’m really hoping RTD won’t be the showrunner if and when she is (personally, I’m kind of hoping she’ll be the Watcher, but that’s just me).

There’s plenty here I’ve not touched on yet but the overwhelming feeling here is just one of exhaustion. The show feels exhausted. RTD feels exhausted. Murry Gold and his Stupid Musical Overstatements feels exhausted. I feel exhausted getting through it. There’s been no news (at time of writing) as to whether the show is going to be recommissioned, of if there will be specials, or indeed any news at all. It’s possible this is where the modern version of the show comes to an end. And if that is the case, watching this, it’s hard not to think that maybe it does need a rest before coming back again after all. The classic show bowed out on “Survival”, a feminist parable, a conclusion to Ace’s emotional journey, and a meaningful, political condemnation of Thatcherite survival-of-the-fittest right-wing politics, capped off by a rather beautiful speech from McCoy’s Doctor. It did what Doctor Who does best as the show wandered off into the interregnum. This era ends with stupid Marvel CGI, a story that’s meant to be “about” motherhood but isn’t really about anything at all, absolute mountains of fanwank, boring nostalgia, and no emotional investment whatsoever. I hope the show comes back, because I’ll always hope that, but if it doesn’t, I quite understand.

Would You Recommend It? Well, only to someone I didn’t like. That’s unnecessarily cruel but also how I feel about things. I mean, what is there to recommend here? The CGI is decent but so what? You can see that anywhere. The UNIT building now has the trick of transforming into something from a Marvel movie, pivoting about and opening fire and whatnot. It’s superficially entertaining but nothing more. It’s a nice effect when the bone creatures get hit but that’s about it. None of the plot beats feel original or inventive and if you aren’t deeply invested in Doctor Who lore (or even if you are) then there’s just not much to get a handle on.

I’ve been relatively harsh on Gatwa throughout the reviews for this season and unfortunately there’s not much here to change my mind about him. He’s not bad in places but there’s a certain something missing and it’s hard to put a finger on what it is. But I think what it might be is the difference between being an actor and a movie star. Gatwa has masses of charisma but that’s all he has and there’s not often much of a sense of him actually inhabiting the character. When Jodie pops up, she simply is the Doctor in a way that Gatwa rarely manages. And when 15th Doctor tells the 13th Doctor that it’s been a joy being the Doctor, he really doesn’t sound like he means it. And his final moment in the TARDIS just seem very… muted, perhaps, and not from a character perspective, he just doesn’t seem to be giving it all that much. There’s a few moments that shine here, as usual when he downplays a little bit, but for the most part he’s sufficient but little more. Which does, I would suggest, make a recommendation a little tough.

And nice though it is to see Mel, and good though Bonnie Langford is, the question does rather remain as to why she is in this at all. Her presence made a bit more sense in the last season finale which did actually use her as an important plot point but here she seems mostly to be in the episode because they can get her. And to be clear, that’s nothing against Our Bonnie, who at least gets a terrific entrance into UNIT HQ on her moped. And she gets a confrontation with the Rani! Well, another one, since this calls back to “Time and the Rani” and Mel expressing her loathing for the Rani from that story. Except… isn’t this just the same scene of Tegan confronting the Master in “The Power of the Doctor“? I mean, at least Tegan had a reason to loathe at the Master, what with him killing Aunt Vanessa and all. Mel was just mildly inconvenienced in a camp runaround while having to put up with the indignity of Kate O’Mara doing an impression of her. It looks for all the world like RTD is now cribbing Chibnall for ideas. Make of that what you will.

I’d love to try and dig out some more good points to try and find something to recommend but it’s really, really tough. This is all just so facile. There’s a line about Poppy being made of wishes and dreams and the Doctor saying, “that’s what all children are made of”. It’s presumably meant to be profound but it’s just so incredibly cheap and… well, facile. And that’s what so much of this script is. None of the themes of motherhood land at all and this used to be the sort of thing RTD was good at, drawing thematic threads together. After all, you’ve got the Rani wanting to birth an entire new race of Time Lords and you’ve got Poppy The Imaginary Child (Except When Not) and Ruby’s Mums all in the mix, it ought to be fairly easy to make these things work together but nothing is ever made of it nor any parallel ever drawn. The Rani’s scheme is just a Mad Plan^TM and Poppy isn’t much more than a McGuffin for the Doctor to sacrifice himself for. The Doctor being willing to sacrifice his regeneration to save just one person is a proper character moment – it’s the same one from “The Caves of Androzani” – which is good but it’s not like the Doctor was ever going to get stuck with a child. And right enough, Poppy gets offloaded to Belinda in quick-smart time. The Doctor’s sacrifice doesn’t carry an awful lot of weight even though he’s very clearly doing the right thing and Poppy deserves to get saved because she’s meant to be a person and not a plot point.

And the weird weighting of the episode, where the first two-thirds take care of the Actual Plot and the remaining third Just Tidies Stuff Up isn’t a structure that works. The actual structure itself is fine and RTD has used it effectively before but that’s because the split is usually about four-fifths of the episode is the plot plot and one-fifth is the wrap-up. Here, the plot concludes, you look at the run time and you realise there’s almost half an hour left of the episode. Even the 10th Doctor’s “reward” didn’t drag things out this much.

Anyway, let’s address the big question before we draw a veil over this era and it’s this – where the fuck is Susan? Why is she not in this? What was the point of getting Carole Ann Ford in for a bit of a cameo then not actually doing anything with it? It’s just so… strange. Was the 13th Doctor’s scene maybe meant to be Susan? It might make more sense in the episode, not that I want to lose Jodie. But there’s absolutely nothing here, not a flash of Susan on a screen, not an acknowledgement of her being in earlier episodes, just… nothing. And in a story that features the Doctor’s Actual Daughter, his granddaughter being present also feels like it would make sense yet she’s nowhere to be seen. I just… don’t get it. Even if, for some reason, Carole Ann Ford couldn’t record a scene she was meant to, a line might have been appropriate, or an image on a screen, or something. But to just ignore it? It’s insulting to the audience, to Ford, and to Susan the character.

So what are we to conclude at the end of this era? Well, mostly that it just hasn’t worked. There have been a few good episodes but they are very much the exception rather than the rule. Gatwa’s been sufficient as the Doctor but rarely much more. Belinda and Varada Sethu have been thoroughly wasted and Ruby might be the most generic companion since Peri. Mostly, though, it’s that whatever magic RTD had that made the first iteration of New Who work has long, long since departed. You can see him trying to pull a few of the same tricks across the two Gatwa seasons but he just can’t do it any more. And, you know, TV has moved on in the last twenty years. You can’t get away with pulling the same old rabbits out of a hat, in the same way that the revival wouldn’t have worked if it had been made the same way as the classic series with a three-camera setup and lots of slow, talky scenes. But RTD doesn’t seem capable of moving on and just saying things like, “oh it’s all magic! Don’t ask!” is an affront to viewer intelligence. This whole misbegotten era just hasn’t worked at all. At least Chris Chibnall can take comfort from the fact that he no longer holds the award for the worst season finale.

So it’s over. Good. Let’s hope that whatever comes next will be better. It’s hard to imagine it being that much worse.

Scores on the Doors? 1 / 10 for Jodie and Billie, in the main.