Spoilers for “The Reality War.”
The BBC and Disney chose not to share screeners ahead of “The Reality War” to preserve its numerous twists. There isn’t time to review it in the usual style, but I felt I’d be remiss not to cap off this run of reviews by talking about the finale. And it’s not as if I’ve nothing to say about what the hell happened on Saturday.
“It’s the end… but the moment has been ‘prepared for.’”
I refuse to believe that “The Reality War” was planned and written as the execution of this run of Doctor Who. I’m well aware the BBC, Bad Wolf and Ncuti Gatwa claimed the intention from the start was for him to bow out after two short seasons. I’m not buying it.
On one hand, the rumors of disharmony behind the scenes, last minute reshoots and Disney’s reported displeasure are hard to ignore. But there’s far better evidence, which is to just watch the damn episode and try to think about what happened for more than a heartbeat.
Everything after the Doctor’s triumphant return to UNIT HQ feels like it was hastily assembled and tacked on. In fact, there are times in which it feels like all of the main actors are reading from different scripts, and not interacting with one another.
Spot the join
Lara Cornell/BBC Studios/Bad Wolf
I’ve seen some people grousing about the simple way the Omega storyline was resolved, but I think it was always planned that way. Russell T. Davies’ has always ended the big dramatic plots of his finales early to make more room to show the aftermath for the characters.
Take last year’s “Empire of Death,” which dumps off Sutekh two thirds of the way in to spend the rest of the episode showing Ruby meeting her birth mother. For Davies, the big CGI space monsters are always the means through which he can spend moments with his characters.
And yet the character moments here are weird if not totally incoherent — the one highlight being the moment that Poppy disappears. The shot of the Doctor and Belinda absentmindedly handing her coat back and forth as it turns into an ever-smaller piece of cloth is sublime.
But when Ruby’s protestations are finally taken seriously, the Doctor’s decision to just hand Belinda a child comes totally out of left field. Not only does it not agree with anything that we’ve come to know about her over the last eight weeks, it’s also totally pretty outrageous.
Which is why it’s far more plausible that Davies, faced with no commission for a third season and with a lead actor looking to quit, just wrote a few pages of nonsense to justify the change.
“One day, I shall come back.”
Naturally, the rumors suggest the original ending would have seen Susan appear as a lead-in to the next season. Again, this isn’t so much a hint as something the last two years have been very clearly laying the foundations for. The Doctor openly discussed that he has a child living in London (in “The Devil’s Chord”) and the Susan Twist saga was designed to play up to that. Going to the trouble of hiring the 84-year-old Carole Ann Ford and putting her in brief cameos in the last two episodes — plus dropping references to that in “Lux” — was clearly part of the plan. Now, after the extensive, patient buildup of that storyline, it appears that we’ll not get the chance to see what Davies had intended.
Going back to the point about the BBC and Gatwa’s claim that this was always meant to be a two-season deal, it’s likely the show’s original ending will be swept under the rug. And given Ford’s age, it’s likely that we’ll never get the chance to give the actress the sendoff she really deserved in 1964.
“Davies has never been that sort of writer.”
A large amount of fan speculation this year was focused on the various structural and thematic coincidences. Each episode of this run could more or less map onto the previous one and went over similar ground. But, as far back as “Lux,” I said that Russell T. Davies wasn’t that sort of writer, building a mystery box that would resolve perfectly by its conclusion. His writing is a little more like a kid pulling toys out of a toybox and smashing them together at speed.
“The Reality War” is a great example of this approach, since while there were plenty of elements that came back, none of them were as vital to the plot’s conclusion as they could have been. Anita was a convenient way of getting the Doctor out of the cliffhanger, but did nothing else for the rest of the episode. Hell, it’s hard to take the suggestion seriously that she’d fallen in love with the Doctor but not realized he was, at least in this incarnation, more interested in men. Joy, too, from “Joy to the World” gets a mention but with little emotional attachment given the events of that episode. And on the subject of its treatment of women…
“I was this really brilliant woman”
James Pardon/BBC Studios/Bad Wolf
Doctor Who has spent much of its recent years trying to address its own blind spots around representation. This era has continued this tradition, broadening out the series’ supporting cast, especially the team known by fans as the “UNIT Family.” In “The Reality War,” every one of the Doctor’s allies, barring Colonel Ibrahim, is either a woman or non-binary. And yet, the sheer number of cast members means each one is almost aggressively underserved.
“The Reality War,” after all, is focused on unpacking a false reality called into existence by an ultra-conservative YouTuber who ignores and erases disabled and queer people. But the show’s treatment of these characters both during the action-packed finale, and afterward, is rough. When the team starts working together, the legion of people around the Doctor get little to nothing of note to actually do.
Anita is quite literally reduced to the role of a human doorstop (she holds the door to the Time Hotel open to counteract Conrad’s wish). Kate orders Shirley to fire the lasers. Susan (Triad) builds the zero room. Mel does quite literally nothing once she’s sneered at the Rani. And then there’s Rose.
Rose’s brief inclusion would have been extraordinarily poignant if she’d helped defeat Conrad once she’s been pulled out of oblivion. Instead, she’s just there so the Doctor can point out she was erased because Conrad hates (and/or ignores) nonbinary transfem people. And after that moment, Yasmin Finney essentially disappears from the episode once again, making her less a character and more a prop.
It gets worse with the treatment of Ruby and Belinda — the former marginalized and almost aggressively ignored by the characters to the point that I assumed their rejection of her claims was a sign the reality hadn’t actually been fixed. But the latter goes from not having a child, to having a fictional child in Conrad’s world, to forgetting she exists when Conrad’s wish is undone. When the timeline resets and she no longer has any memory of a child, the Doctor then opts to sacrifice his life in order to bring that child back into existence. I mean, what? Given Davies’ politics, and the (ostensibly) pro-abortion subtext of “Space Babies,” the Doctor suddenly re-writes the universe to force his companion — without her consent — into motherhood.
“It’s funny, but is it going to get them off their tractors?”
I’m a Brit, reviewing a uniquely British show for a predominantly American audience, and so try to view the series through that lens. Doctor Who has been a fixture in the US since the ‘70s and was a mainstay on PBS through the ‘80s and so it’s not an unknown property. The revival series may not have been an instant hit, but quickly built a respectable audience on BBC America. But while in the UK the series is a mainstream hit, its US demographic can be roughly broken down into genre nerds and anglophiles.
Consequently, there was a degree of nervousness about how the revitalized series would be received by the far broader audience on Disney+. Davies’ had spoken about the need for the series to recruit new fans, downplaying the series’ six-decades-long backstory. But despite that aim, it never felt that the series was making many concessions to its potential audience. Don’t forget, the Ncuti Gatwa series is playing out in the shadow of specific events from its 2021 series and the second and third of its three 2023 specials. And yet, rather than starting from a clean(-ish) slate, the series threw itself headlong into a multi-year story about its broken reality.
“In the ‘70s or ‘80s depending on the dating protocol…”
The Two Ranis / Two Ronnies gag was great, but did anyone over the age of 30 get it?
BBC Studios/Bad Wolf
And on that subject, I don’t think we really needed to see the Rani or Omega again, especially as Conrad was a compelling enough villain on his own. I’m the sort of Doctor Who fan who bleeds TARDIS Blue if you were to cut me (but don’t do that). But I’m also sufficiently interested in new experiences that I’d rather the show avoid relitigating and revisiting the same coterie of classic series villains.
Omega wasn’t a mainstay anyway, and his second appearance (in “Arc of Infinity”) was tedious enough that his absence wasn’t missed. Similarly, while the Rani offers a different spin on the homegrown foe trope, it’s hard not to just write her as a female Master. And, let’s be honest, as much as I’m trying not to invoke Steven Moffat here, Missy was so well done we didn’t need to go back to that well ever again.
Similarly, I can’t help but wonder how many folks who persisted with the series until this point bailed out. The late Craig Hinton coined the term “Fanwank” as a catch-all term for the sort of self-indulgent storytelling that exists to satisfy the author’s own obsessions. You know, fan fiction that makes Captain Kirk the father of Jean-Luc Picard or that Han Solo and Luke Skywalker were secretly friends in childhood. Having the Rani bi-generate to rebuild a new Gallifrey with Omega as its progenitor is the sort of self-indulgence most people grow out of.
Doctor Who isn’t Star Trek
James Pardon/BBC Studios/Bad Wolf
Several times this season, we’ve seen Doctor Who smash its face into the limits of its own storytelling. Its premise is far more elastic than many others, but there are themes it simply cannot meaningfully engage with. “Lux,” “Lucky Day” and “The Interstellar Song Contest” all gestured toward big real-world topics (structural racism, abuse and radicalization, genocide and reputation laundering) that are simply beyond the capacity of a science fantasy show about a quasi-immortal clown solving problems. And here we’re learning another big fact about Doctor Who: It’s not Star Trek.
The battle between UNIT and the big dinosaur skeletons was shot and edited as if we were watching the crew of the Enterprise. Now, I’m not watching Doctor Who for the gritty realism but there’s a moment when you can go through silly fun and into ridiculousness. And when the UNIT tower, consciously modeled on the Avengers’ Stark Tower, starts spinning around to shoot its lasers, you have to wonder how many people had to sign off on that image thinking it was okay.
Eating its own tail
Doctor Who’s critical and popular success has always waxed and waned, and that’s nothing to be worried about. There was, however, a sense during Chis Chibnall’s era that he wanted to recapture the glories of Davies’ era. After all, David Tennant’s initial tenure saw the show become the biggest thing on British TV with ratings often passing the 10 million mark. I suppose it comes as no surprise, then, that Davies would repay the compliment by giving Jodie Whittaker’s 13th Doctor a cameo. It’s a shame that it’s as equally incoherent as the rest of the episode’s finale, but it does a far better job of addressing the #Thasmin plot — the implied romance between the Doctor and her companion Yaz – than Chibnall’s own era does.
Naturally, Davies was better able to capitalize upon this nostalgia, recruiting the stars of his own era — David Tennant and Catherine Tate — to come back for the 60th anniversary specials. That was a nice piece throwback to help get the series back on track ahead of its rejuvenation with Ncuti Gatwa at the helm. Obviously, while hiring one of the stars of the series’ most recent heyday for a short tenure for the anniversary was a nice treat, the series now needs to strike out on its own. Or, at least, that was the thinking until Ncuti Gatwa regenerated into Billie Piper.
Billie Piper
BBC
I was 20 when Doctor Who came back and was as sneery as the rest of the country when Billie Piper was announced as the show’s companion. Piper was a teenage singer — the youngest UK Number One act — and while not a one-hit wonder, her music career stalled. Aged 18, she married the 35-year-old radio DJ and TV presenter Chris Evans and became tabloid fodder. Naturally, the whole country had to eat crow when it turned out she wasn’t just a fantastic actor but a true powerhouse and star. Her return for “The Day of the Doctor,” as the psychic interface of Gallifreyan superweapon The Moment, was a joyous one. And while the leaks had revealed Piper would be replacing Gatwa, it was still nice to see her appear on screen.
Given Piper was not credited as “And introducing Billie Piper as the Doctor” it’s clear that her inclusion is another hedge. If nothing else, she can take the role for the revival series’ 20th anniversary and hopefully pull in more eyes to whoever replaces her. But as desperate as the move seems, I’d be happy to see her remain in the role for an extended period of time — she’s brilliant, clearly has plenty of affection for the show, and has enough star power to carry the series on her back. So, if Piper is back, let her be back for a long time and let her bask in all of the adoration she so rightly deserves.
“There are worlds out there…”
At the risk of armchair psychologizing, I suspect all Doctor Who fans of a certain age carry the wound of 1989 very deeply. The show had entered a creative renaissance thanks to the work of Andrew Cartmel that had invigorated long-serving producer John Nathan-Turner. Just as it had found its feet and started to produce era-defining work in a model that could have sustained it through the 1990s, the plug was pulled. There have been many (many!) post mortems as to the causes but James Cooray-Smith’s recent essay on the subject is probably the most concise. In short, a combination of executive snobbery, personal enmity (John Nathan-Turner was not well-liked by his bosses) and budgetary issues caused the show’s demise.
1989 to 2005 was beset by false dawns, the BBC’s self-sabotage and fans essentially taking ownership of the property. Virgin Publishing had the license to publish tie-in novels that evolved into the New Adventures line. In the gap, the need for new Doctor Who was filled by writers: some professional, some fans who would go on to become professionals with a monthly book series. And then, in 1999, a production company called Big Finish secured the rights to produce new audio adventures featuring classic Doctors. But aside from the abortive (and mostly awful) 1996 TV movie that served as a pilot for a US version of the show, Doctor Who was dead.
It wouldn’t be until the second series of the reboot, when David Tennant took the role and it became the biggest thing on TV, that the worry the show would go away again started to fade even as ratings and public enthusiasm declined with Steven Moffat at the helm. But those fears have returned in the last decade, especially given the lukewarm critical and audience reception to Jodie Whittaker’s tenure. And with Disney pulling back and the BBC’s own budget crisis, the risk to Doctor Who’s future — with no new series confirmed to be in the works — is grave.
On one hand, the BBC has said we may see the situation change in a year, but then it said that in 1989 as well. I’m going to hold off writing an obituary, however, because if Doctor Who is to go back on the shelf, it’s going to be taken very good care of. After all, many of the fans who kept the flame alive during the first wilderness years would go on to make the series proper. And I’m sure the next generation of fans are ready to cut their teeth on their own projects that’ll one day grow into whatever Doctor Who becomes in a decade or more.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/12-thoughts-about-that-doctor-who-finale-150032038.html?src=rss
