Wish World / The Reality War

Chapter the 343rd, features a world and society from wish.

Plot:

Just like a Doctor Who producer in an anniversary year, the Rani wants to bring back Omega. He can apparently help to restart the Time Lord race - the only known surviving Time lords (her two bi-generated selves plus the Doctor) having become sterile following a "genetic explosion". Omega is trapped in a dimension that can only be reached by trapping the Doctor on Earth and then destroying the fabric of reality on that planet, over and over until it wears thin, using the power of doubt. To facilitate this, she travels back to Bavaria in 1865 to collect a baby who is one of the pantheon, the god of wishes. She has freed Conrad Clark from prison (after the events of Lucky Day) and has him wishing an approximation of Earth society into existence, warping reality for humans, and repeatedly replaying the 23rd May 2025. [Just as an aside: the Rani once ridiculed the Master for his plotting of silly, labyrinthine schemes - what a hypocrite!] On this version of the world, the Doctor believes he is John Smith, with a wife called Belinda and a daughter called Poppy. Conrad can't imagine a whole world, so people's experiences are created from their warped memories; this includes Poppy, who looks like the baby of the same name from Space Babies. The world adheres to Conrad's old-fashioned and heteronormative values (women should be wives and mothers rather than have paid work, a man can't find another man beautiful, disabled people are kept out of sight, trans people don't exist). Conrad appears on every TV as a cross between a Cbeebies presenter and God, telling stories of Doctor Who and the Rani. Anyone with doubts about this reality is carted off by the police. There are also giant dinosaur skeletons called Bone Beasts roaming about (don't ask why).

Ruby Sunday knows that something is wrong with the world and doorsteps John Smith, but he doesn't remember her. Smith goes to work at a drastically changed UNIT HQ (UNIT is an insurance company in this reality) where everyone but Shirley and Rose has an office job (Susan Triad is the tea lady). Shirley lives in a urban camp with other disabled people, and Rose isn't around at all. On John Smith's TV, Rogue appears, breaking through Conrad's transmission, and explains something about the falseness of Smith's reality. The resultant doubt gets Smith and Belinda carted off to the Bone Palace, the Rani's lair. The Rani explains her plan, and the Doctor realises who he is. She locks him on a balcony as the collective doubt of the populace tears the world apart. The balcony crumbles and the Doctor is falling to his doom when a portal opens, and Anita pulls him through into the safety of the Time Hotel. The day resets again. Anita explains that she has been searching for the Doctor through time, and found him stuck in the Rani's trap. The day keeps repeating, ending with the destruction of the world, but each time reality is wearing thinner, and soon the Rani will be able to free Omega. Anita opens another Time Hotel door into UNIT HQ and keeps it open; this brings reality to everyone there, and they all realise their true identities. Rose appears. The Doctor has a plan to restore reality, but he's worried that it will mean Poppy, who might be his actual half-Time Lord daughter, will cease to exist. Susan Triad (very rapidly) builds a zero room, which Belinda and Poppy get in. The Rani gets the Bone Beasts to attack UNIT HQ and there's a big battle.

The Doctor confronts both the Ranis at the Bone Palace. They have located Omega and free him; he's become a giant ghoul; Omega eats one Rani, and the other one flees. Ruby uses a UNIT transmat to reach Conrad and the wish god baby. She makes a wish and ends Conrad's world. The Doctor fights off Omega with the vindicator, then rushes to find his TARDIS as the Bone Palace disappears. Everyone returns to UNIT HQ, and opens the zero room. Poppy's still in there with Bel. The Doctor leaves the wish god baby, his power removed by the Doctor wishing for no more wishes, with Carla and Cherry Sunday to look after. He and Belinda plan to travel with Poppy in the TARDIS, but they start to forget her as does everyone else except Ruby. Poppy vanishes. Ruby persuades the Doctor that Poppy should exist, and he knows there's only one way to get her back: to use his regeneration energy to adjust the timeline. He goes off alone in the TARDIS and sees his previous Jodie Whittaker incarnation, who gives him a pep talk then disappears. He forces a regeneration, but doesn't change yet - he floods the TARDIS with the energy streaming out of him, then finds himself in a garden (somehow). He finds Belinda and her daughter Poppy. In this timeline, Poppy is 100% human and is Belinda's child with an ex; she has been wanting to get back to Earth on the 24th May 2025 as Poppy needed looking after. The Doctor says goodbye, then materialises the TARDIS in space near to the star that used to be Joy Almondo, and his regeneration takes place: he changes into a body that looks exactly like Rose Tyler, "Oh hello!".

Context:

I watched both episodes back-to-back from the Blu-ray box set on an evening early in December 2025. I viewed it in this way to see how well, or how not so well, both parts cohered as one story, given the major reworking of the ending that I know about now, but didn't know to quite the same level of detail on first viewing (see the Reaction section below for more on that).

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now approaching the point where I catch up. This story completes a season (new series 15, as I call it) and another Doctor's era. Ncuti Gatwa makes it 14 Doctors whose televisual eras have been completed (Doctors 1-4, 6-15), and 40 out of the 41 seasons completed to date (classic seasons 1-18, 20-26, and new series 1-15). Of the 892 episodes of Doctor Who from An Unearthly Child up to The Reality War, four now remain. There is also at the time of writing a new 5-episode spin-off that has begun broadcasting.

First Time Round:

I first watched Wish World on the BBC iplayer around 10am on Saturday 24th May 2025 (the day which the episode revolves around); I was accompanied, as I was for most of the series, by middle child (boy of 16, 15 at the time). The two of us also watched the second and final part The Reality War together, but not on the TV. We occupied two seats in a full house of people watching the episode in the Duke of York's cinema in Brighton. As for the previous year's finale, there were cinema showings across the UK. I couldn't interest either of the other children, though the eldest - back from university - joined his brother and I for a meal in the next door pub The Joker before the screening, then afterwards went out with mates for the evening rather than watch Doctor Who on the big screen. Once we'd said goodbye to him, the two of us went to the cinema and settled in our seats just as the introduction by Varada Sethu was starting. The crowd, including the two of us, made all the right noises of enjoyment throughout. We gasped in amazement at the surprise appearances (Anita from the Time Hotel! Rose Noble!), and were shrieking in amazement by the time we heard Jodie Whittaker's first line of dialogue. I think most people had lost their voices to amazement by the time Ncuti regenerated into Billie Piper at the end. One audience member still mustered decent projection, though. At the very end, as the lights came up - he had held it in through the full credit sequence and the teaser for The War Between the Land and the Sea - he very loudly and in heartfelt fashion exclaimed "What the f**k?!" to everyone in the cinema, and we all chuckled with understanding at his shellshock.

Reaction:

I obviously have to give my reaction to the version of this story that ended up on screen, but before that I'll briefly cover the version that didn't. For Who's 62nd anniversary, Sunday November 23rd 2025, deleted scenes from Ncuti Gatwa's second season were released online for fan appreciation. Not all the deleted scenes, though. As fans instantly pointed out, the clips package had an omission as big as an elephant in the room. Many of those involved had leaked the nature of The Reality War's original ending, but the production team still seemed to want to pretend it didn't happen. The Doctor and his friends were to have finished up in a club dancing in celebration and happiness (an accidentally uploaded promo picture showed a moment from this scene), watched from afar by the Doctor's granddaughter Susan played by Carole Ann Ford, accompanied by Poppy. Both observers would have then slunk away, with Susan saying to Poppy 'Come on, Mum'! It would have been a wonderful moment. The puzzle remains as to what connective story tissue would have joined that final scene to the earlier narrative. It's hard to tell exactly what's been added later, but I think there may be a hint from paying attention to the presence or absence of Rose Noble. The character appears once reality is reintroduced to UNIT HQ, to be emblematic of people of whom Conrad's narrow worldview can't conceive. The character isn't given enough to do, just as she wasn't in the previous year's finale; but, she's there, alongside the rest of the UNIT gang, helping to rescue Poppy (who might cease to exist). This is the first time that Poppy needs to be rescued after the first threat of non-existence. The second time this happens (this egregious double story beat is no doubt a side-effect of the rewrite), everyone else from the gang is still present at UNIT HQ, but Yasmin Finney obviously wasn't free and Rose is absent.

So, everything up to Poppy's miraculous survival in Susan Triad's zero room was probably material from before the rewrite. Then, perhaps, everyone forgot about Poppy in a similar way to how they do in the final version, but without Ruby as the lone dissenting voice. Poppy wouldn't have vanished, and would instead have met up with Susan for the original ending. This would explain loose ends in the final version; the cameo appearances of Susan earlier in the season, for example, end up going nowhere and linking to nothing, as does the stand-out line from 2024's finale where the Doctor explains that he has a grandchild but no children (as Time Lords tend to do things out of chronological order). A neat little tie-up that we did end up getting is Ruby's awareness of parallel realities because of her experiences in 73 Yards. This is used to good effect in Wish World to explain her distrust of Conrad, then used again in The Reality War as an explanation for why she alone still remembers Poppy. Unfortunately, this creates what for me is the most unfortunate impact of the rewrite. In the - rather wonderful, horror-inflected - scene of Bel and the Doctor passing Poppy's coat between them as it gets smaller and smaller, Ruby sees what is happening, and knows what they've forgotten. Was this scene in the original version? Could have been, but I think probably not. The next sequence can't have been, though: the Doctor arrives at UNIT HQ and - with persuasion from Ruby - goes off to realign the universe to bring Poppy back, with a hint that it will cost his life. The surprise of Jodie Whittaker's cameo, and the scene where the Doctor returns to normality and finds that everything has changed, with Bel always having had a child to whom she has been trying to get back all this time, distract one on first watch from the the devastating truth that the Ncuti Doctor never says goodbye to Ruby.

Millie Gibson might appear instantly that the Christmas special starts in 2026, of course, but the damage is done. Ruby was Gatwa's first and most important companion. She sends him on the mission to save Poppy, but by the end of The Reality War hasn't seen him again, and knows nothing of whether he's been successful or not. His sole goodbye scene is with more recent companion Bel, who - unlike Ruby - was blissfully unaware that anything was wrong before. If he had had the choice, I don't think writer and showrunner Russell T Davies would have structured the story like this. Wish World / The Reality War as a whole is therefore compromised, and doomed always to be seen more as a set of scenes than a story. Luckily, most of its individual scenes are great - imagine if they weren't? - but there will always be the lingering impression whenever one watches it that they don't quite fit together. The story has forced upon it the job of completing a Doctor's era thematically, and instead summarises the last two years of Doctor Who more as a highlights package. Everyone significant returns for at least a brief moment. All the many UNIT regulars are there, as mentioned, including Susan Triad and Mel, who hadn't returned earlier in the season. They are given fun alter egos in Conrad's world as employees of the Unified National Insurance Team. It's great to see Rogue appear on John Smith's TV to alert him to the inconsistencies of his current reality, and to say "I love you"; Ruby's mum and grandmother get to adopt the wish god baby at the end, which is a perfect fit and harks back to Ncuti's very first full story The Church on Ruby Road; best of all for me was the unexpected return of Anita from the time hotel, one of my favourite characters of recent years. The Doctor regenerates in the presence of the Joy star (like Anita, returning from the last Christmas special). Even the Giggle is heard from the story in which Ncuti first made an appearance.

Another regular guest star returning who's featured throughout Ncuti's two seasons is Anita Dobson as Mrs. Flood, one of the Two Ranis (Dobson's exit line doing a gag about The Two Ronnies got a good, groanful reception in the cinema where I first watched the story, though I'm sure a lot of the audience were too young to have got the reference). She's very good value as we've come to expect, and has great screen chemistry and interplay with Archie Panjabi as the lead Rani. Every scene with Panjabi is lifted by her presence, the costume is great and it's great to see her zooming about the sky on her space jet-ski. It's also great to have a brief flashback to Kate O'Mara playing the character, and to have a Mel-Rani face-off . It seems a shame for Panjabi to be killed off, but maybe she could survive being eaten by Omega and return one day. The Omega creature is nicely realised, but it does seem odd to bring him back not looking or acting anything like the character previously did. At least the difference is explained in the script, and it is hard to think what other Gallifreyan MacGuffin could be the Rani's goal. Also unfortunate is Gatwa's stressing of a different syllable when pronouncing Omega's name compared to everyone else in the story (and everyone through Doctor Who's history); but, he's a Time Lord, so can say things however he wants. The larger-than-life villainy on display somewhat overshadows Conrad Clark, but the script makes a virtue of this. Conrad finds some measure of goodness and humanity within himself in wishing his world (as Ruby says, it could have been a lot worse) and he gets a happy ending. There's freaky visual interest provided by the Seekers and the Bone Beasts, as well as a nice action set piece involving the latter when they attack UNIT HQ.

Varada Sethu gets less interesting, and less effective, material here than Millie Gibson: the moment where she runs from her house into the woods of Conrad's world and screams in despair is great. If she has such doubts, though, then the various moments where she seems disproportionately aggressive at the idea of Poppy not being her daughter don't ring true. Sienna-Robyn Mavanga-Phipps as Poppy is astonishingly good, though, and Sethu works well with her. With any time-travel story where history is altered, there is always uncertainty about whether things have been put back as they always should have been at the end, or have changed. Which was the prime timeline? Did Bel always have a daughter, and the initial timeline was the one that was out of whack? Maybe it doesn't matter, but personally I'd like to know one way or the other. Talking of the end, I'll finish by looking at the denouement as it finally ended up, rather than the one in a parallel universe of potential story energy. The accumulation of returning elements already there before the story had to become a regeneration story look difficult to top, but Davies pulls out all the stops such that the last 20 minutes or so achieve an operatically unhinged energy. With everything else seeming to leak, the production team's keeping Jodie Whittaker's appearance secret was a major coup. Every moment and every line of the scene of her and Gatwa is wonderful. She was always a more awkward Doctor when dealing with emotions than Gatwa's take on the Time Lord, and this is addressed in the final exchange where Whittaker feels she should tall Yaz that she loves her, and Gatwa replies "You never do... but she knows". Just when one might think that the surprise level has peaked, Gatwa regenerates into Billie flippin' Piper. As the man in the cinema suggested (see First Time Round section above) the story ends with the consummate WTF moment.

Connectivity:

This is irritating; the connection between Wish World / The Reality War and Redacted could have been the slam dunk that both have surprise appearances by Jodie Whittaker as the Doctor towards the end. Unfortunately, that's only true of Redacted series 1, not series 2. Oh well. Instead, it will have to suffice that both stories feature displaced people living in a makeshift community ruled over by a cruel female villain (the Rani, Honour Bray).

Deeper Thoughts:

Ncuti in summary. In the first month or two of 2025, it didn't feel (at least to me) like the year would see the end of an era. 2024's Christmas special Joy to the World was fresh in my mind, Doctor Who was gearing up for the second season of a bright, young and relatively new Doctor, paired with an intriguing new companion. At that point or thereabouts (the producers of Doctor Who are being a bit cagey about the exact timing), Ncuti Gatwa had already finished filming on the series. As mentioned in the Reaction section above, it's common knowledge that the ending originally planned for The Reality War would have seen some loose ends left to be tied up about the Doctor, his granddaughter and daughter; but, at the end of it, the Doctor would be unregenerated and celebrating with his friends. The next season, which was already at least partially scripted, would have picked up from there. It didn't come to pass: either Disney+ delayed too long in making a decision on whether to coproduce that next season, or they had already made a decision but it wasn't communicated publicly, and the BBC needed time to decide what to do next with Doctor Who. It doesn't really matter why or how, the important thing is that it was too much of a delay for Ncuti Gatwa and, no doubt, for his agent. Put yourself in the agent's place: your client is a hot property, and he's getting offers for movies. As I said on the blog back in 2023 (see the Deeper Thoughts section of the Boom Town post for more details), Gatwa was probably "the most up-and-coming" of any actor on taking up the Doctor role, "young and exciting, and clearly has the potential to move on to greater things". A man in a hurry, in other words (even if he hadn't had an agent pushing him onwards).

Ncuti was clearly up for doing a third year (likely no more than that) if and only if he could go straight into making it after his second season. The delay scuppered that, and so the finale needed to be rewritten and reshot to divest him of the baggage of association with a high-profile role, letting him move on. I can forgive showrunner Russell T Davies's white lies stating that Gatwa's two-year stint was "always the plan": hell hath no fury like a mass of Doctor Who fans scorned, after all; it's not Gatwa's fault the plan changed, and nobody sensible wants him to be hounded by those fans forever more. The pronouncement had some traces of truth, anyway: the plan probably always was for Gatwa to film his regeneration in 2025, but he was almost certainly expected to film another season's worth of episodes first. In that Boom Town post's Deeper Thoughts section, I drew parallels with Gatwa's and David Tennant's profiles when they were cast as the Doctor. It's an intriguing counterfactual to consider what might have happened if Tennant in 2007 had faced a delay before his third season went into production: would his fan love for Doctor Who have made him hang around for an extended period associated with but not playing the role of the Doctor? It's nice to think that fandom would conquer all, but Tennant too was a young actor with bags of promise, and he too would likely have bowed to pressure from his agent. The November 2025 comments from The Rest is Entertainment podcast (amidst an otherwise even-handed reaction to the Disney+ decision) that Gatwa wasn't sufficiently ambassadorial - with the hint that this was because he wasn't sufficiently invested in the hugeness of the role - were therefore a bit unfair. Could anything Ncuti have done in promoting the show have got more people subscribing or watching on Disney+? I doubt it.

I think the situation probably arose simply because the first few Gatwa stories didn't land with a lot of the audience. I didn't mind any of his opening three stories (The Church on Ruby Road, Space Babies and The Devil's Chord), but I nonetheless look back and think they are probably the weakest three stories of any that he did. Even when his first series hit its stride (with 73 Yards and Dot and Bubble, stories that were - for me at least - up there with some of the best that Doctor Who of any era has had to offer) Ncuti Gatwa was barely in it. With hindsight it's easy to suggest it was a bad move to cast someone who couldn't start straight away (Gatwa had commitments to Sex Education, the series that had first brought him to the public notice, that overlapped with the recording dates for those first Who stories made for his era, meaning they had to be 'Doctor lite'). I'm terribly conflicted on this: 73 Yards wouldn't work if the Doctor was in it throughout, and it's marvellous exactly how it is. Did the programme win that battle only to lose the war? People carp about the finale of that first year (I think both parts, The Legend of Ruby Sunday and Empire of Death, are cruelly underrated), but was its quality irrelevant? Had people already given up because the first part of the season featured stories that were either a bit naff, or didn't feature the Doctor, or both? We'll never know for sure. At the end of 2024, Joy to the World came along and was simply joyful (as mentioned above, the character of Anita from that story returning unexpectedly in The Reality War was a glorious high point for me, and I'm sure for others too). No matter how good any story was from then on, though, the series was a lame duck as far as the press was concerned.

If the first season was under-Doctored, the second was overshadowed. From months before its first episode aired, the tsunami of speculation about Doctor Who's future could only ever drown out anything positive about the 2025 run. By that time, those reshoots had been done to change the ending of the final episode, and some details of that had leaked. This was a shame as - despite some issues with script logic in a few of the stories, though nothing bad enough to impact their initial viewing - the series had corkers enough for everyone: if you liked action, there was The Well; if you liked quirkiness, there was Lux; if you liked camp splendour, there was The Interstellar Song Contest. As detailed above, the finale proved to be a bit lumpy and bumpy, with the story equivalent of crunching gear changes happening in a number of places towards the end of the second part. This was probably unavoidable given the behind-the-scenes reworking. I'm still fixated on just how extensive those reshoots were. Behind the scenes footage shows producer Vicki Delow paying tribute to Gatwa as he wrapped on the series. This takes place on the UNIT set, which is hosting a veritable gang show - not just the UNIT regulars who might have been around anyway then for production of The War Between the Land and the Sea, but also Steph De Whalley as Anita and Susan Twist as Susan Triad. That's a lot of people to pay, and they also got Jodie Whittaker in for a day too. Given time, maybe Andrew Pixley will get sufficient access to document the truth for posterity. Or maybe not (there are still details from Christopher Eccleston's turbulent time filming his single season of the show that are tantalisingly unclear over twenty years later). Anyway, I doubt they'd have faked Delow's tribute just for Doctor Who Unleashed. (Side note: Unleashed and its energetic presenter Steffan Powell are a highlight of this era; I hope both show and presenter return when the main show comes back in 2026).

Whatever else one thinks of the creative decisions of showrunner Russell T Davies, one has to concede that he made original choices during his second tenure regarding the use of returning elements from the show's history. If you truly had the Toymaker, Sutekh and the Rani on your returning foes bingo card before the Bad Wolf Studios era of Who began in November 2023, then I salute you. This desire to do something a bit different, though, leaves Gatwa as the only Doctor never to have stories fighting against any of the 'big three' forces of antagonism of the Whoniverse (the Daleks, the Cybermen, the Master) and only the second not to have faced off against the Daleks. David Tennant's 14th Doctor at least got the Children in Need short with a Dalek (and, you know, he'd already played the part and had three full-on Dalek stories first time round). For Paul McGann, though, Skaro's finest only featured as off-camera voices. He only did the one story, though. It would be a shame if this dented Gatwa's legitimacy in anyone's eyes. Ncuti himself covered this in a The One Show interview in July 2025, saying "I never got to fight a Dalek. A Dalek or a Cyberman. I mean, just the crux of Doctor Who", then adding a tease: "So, might do that! Might go fight a Dalek!". He won't, of course. Even if he was serious, his agent wouldn't let him, much as I'd love to sit down on Christmas Day 2026 to a surprise reappearance of Gatwa allying himself with Billie Piper to defeat the dastardly dustbins. What about a few years after that? I suspect that Gatwa is going to be as busy in that time as Matt Smith - who has never returned to Doctor Who despite seeming quite enthusiastic about the idea. So, even if enough time passes to pacify an agent, it seems improbable. Nothing's impossible though, and Gatwa's Doctor clearly has unfinished business with his granddaughter Susan: one day, he could come back - yes, one day...

In Summary:

What the f**k?!

Doctor Who: Redacted (series 2)

Chapter the 342nd, which poses the question 'Is Apex a predator?'. 

Plot:

The Blue Box Podcast is still going strong, but there's conflict within the three woman team who run it (and who recently saved the world from the Redacted virus). Ally and Shawna are now an (imperfect) couple; Cleo feels a bit isolated: she's sad that she didn't get to travel the universe with the Doctor, and feels that the other two are not taking her seriously. Ally and Shawna are investigating a spate of burglaries of alien tech from different locations across the country; Cleo is looking into mutant rats in Docklands; she's almost attacked by these, but is rescued by Apex. He is an alien who protects endangered species across the universe, and is looking for the Doctor. He has brought various aliens to sanctuary in an underground shanty town hidden somewhere on the Bakerloo line in London. But Apex isn't as nice as he's making out. He's the one behind the thefts, and the aliens living underground are being charged for the privilege by the avaricious landlord, and Apex's ex, Honour Bray. Honour wants to own the TARDIS, and Apex has been trying to get to the Doctor through Cleo to obtain it. When Honour tries to evict all the underground dwellers, Cleo stands in her way. With the help of Rani Chandra, Abby and Shawna use computer Mr Smith to fight off Honour's robots. Apex sort-of redeems himself, and Cleo manages to persuade Honour to do the right thing. 

Context:

As covered in more detail in the Deeper Thoughts section below, not only am I reaching the end of any official stuff to blog, I've also now run out of things I haven't ever watched (or in the case of Redacted, listened to). Redacted series 2 is - at least until something new is broadcast after the time of writing - the final Whoniverse story previously unexperienced by me that also qualifies as per my standard canon questions. Does it feature the Doctor or key characters that have appeared in Doctor Who? Yes. Was it released as an official Doctor Who or spin-off story (i.e. its not an unofficial fan-made proposition)? Yes. Is there a dramatic context to the story (i.e. it's not just a skit)? Yes. Was it released with the intention of being the main attraction for audience engagement (i.e. it's not just an extra on a DVD or Blu-ray)? Yes. Have I already covered it in passing with another connected story? No. With all that confirmed, I listened to the six episodes of the story from the BBC Sounds app over the course of approximately a week in November 2025, finishing on what some brand manager somewhere and a lot of excitable fans call Doctor Who Day (i.e. the 23rd November, the anniversary of Doctor Who's BBC1 debut in 1963).

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now approaching the point where I catch up. Aside from occasional side trips into spin-offs like Redacted, the blog has seen 13 Doctors' televisual eras completed (Doctors 1-4, 6-14), and 39 out of the 41 seasons completed to date (classic seasons 1-18, 20-26, and new series 1-14). Of the 892 episodes of Doctor Who from An Unearthly Child up to The Reality War, six now remain.

First Time Round:

This is my first listen to the second series of Redacted. It was originally made available to stream on BBC Sounds from the 18th September 2023, a couple of months before the Doctor returned to TV screens after a short gap between The Power of the Doctor in 2022 and the 60th anniversary specials with David Tennant and Catherine Tate in November and December 2023. I am sure I knew that it had become available at the time, but I hadn't then caught up with series 1 (which I finally listened to earlier in 2025), so wouldn't have been in a position to jump to the second run anyway.

Reaction:

The second Redacted series is markedly different to the first. My main reservation about the former was that - at 10 episodes - it was too long, and the action to fill up that lengthy running time got repetitive. The second series comprises a comparatively svelte six x 30 minute episodes. One of the things that has been jettisoned to get the overall running time down is baggage from the history of Doctor Who and its spin-offs. That first run was crammed with many different surprise cameo appearances from across the Whoniverse, including ultimately the Doctor herself. It was fun, but I'm glad not to have so many distractions this time. Only Rani Chandra (in the universe of Redacted, Rani is a rival investigative podcaster looking into weird phenomena) and computer Mr. Smith appear to assist the Blue Box Podcast team towards the end. There's no Doctor - it would have been difficult as this was broadcast before the 14th Doctor (and second David Tennant Doctor) had been properly featured onscreen. The script suggests there's something wrong with the Doctor's timeline, but this is never resolved and doesn't seem to relate to anything from the TV. Maybe it was planned to be the lead-in to the plot of a Redacted series 3 that hasn't come to pass. Even without recurring elements, though, the series still manages to weave itself into the Doctor Who tapestry with throwaway continuity gags. Cleo's pollution-affected, oversized rats in Docklands are linked in dialogue to similar cases of Spiders (from Arachnids in the UK) and maggots (from The Green Death), and would also have echoes to any fan in the know of the giant rats in the same London location as featured in The Talons of Weng-Chiang.

The three central characters of Redacted are now firmly established, and it's much more interesting to focus on them. The structure of the narrative means that the three aren't all together much across the six parts; in the tradition of many a Doctor Who story, they are split up early on, and occupy parallel plots - the action intercutting between them - that gradually come together. The reason Cleo is off on her own, and Abby and Shawna are investigating separately, is because of intra-team conflict. This is a dangerously difficult line to tread in an adventure drama. The key conflict should be between the team and external forces; the longer they don't cohere into a single unit, the longer they bicker at one another, the less effective it is. There should have been the satisfying (and maybe hackneyed, but clichés are clichés because they work) story beat where all three forgive one another, put their differences behind them, and unite to fight the real enemy. It doesn't happen quite that neatly. Even Abby and Shawna have some moments where they argue - at humorously inappropriate points - about their relationship. It would be fine if it was all ironed out by the end of the penultimate episode, but it continues into the climactic action. Obviously someone was thinking along the lines that 'conflict = drama' but there is more than enough conflict already without putting in material that might make it more difficult for an audience to warm to the central characters. For example, Cleo is paired throughout with the slippery character of Apex, and their interactions keep listeners on their toes for all that running time: how trustworthy or not is Apex? How much does he care for Cleo, or is he just using her? We see him doing seemingly altruistic acts, but how much is that for money or expediency, rather than heroism? The series comes to an end with these questions still not 100% answered, which I think is a strength.

The other villain of the piece is similarly painted in shades of grey rather than black and white. This is Honour Bray, played with relish by Dervla Kirwan (in fact, all the voice cast delivers the goods, particular Charlie Craggs as Cleo). Characterising a villain as a slum landlord who exploits refugees is something new for the world of Who, and is sadly very relevant to the real world. The relationship triangle between Honour, Cleo and Apex is a nice way for the script to frame the scenes between the three: that this tale of intergalactic refugees ends up with three characters discussing the vicissitudes of love while eating vegan nuggets in a fried chicken shop is so Doctor Who (in the best possible way). As the main show often does, Redacted samples existing texts to great effect: aliens living amongst humans unnoticed, forming their own communities in an urban space, and the existence of covert authorities and commerce connected to this secret world; it's all very Men in Black. This allows for some colourful characters appearing for a scene or two (a sentient room, a time-travelling black marketeer that links the supply and demand of different historical periods). There's some laugh out loud dialogue too. The only issue is that it ends leaving lots of potential unrealised. It doesn't look like there is going to be a Redacted series 3, which is a shame.

Connectivity:

Both Redacted series 2 and The Well feature a guest appearance from a Whoniverse character that first appeared in 2008 (Rani Chandra in the audio story, the Midnight entity on TV).

Deeper Thoughts:

All Ticked Off. So, this is it. Now I've listened to the second series of Redacted, I have seen and heard it all, every official piece of Doctor Who entertainment produced by the BBC. I am something of a completist Doctor Who fan (had you noticed?!); as such, reaching this milestone is bittersweet, but nonetheless an achievement that is worth stepping back and reflecting upon briefly. I have watched every available main series Doctor Who episode from 1963 to 2025, and listened to every audio for those where the pictures are not known to exist; I’ve watched the animated or reconstructed versions of all of those that have had official imagery made to accompany those audios (and I’ve watched quite a lot of the unofficial versions out there too). I have watched all the webcasts that debuted online in the early 2000s, including the fully-animated Scream of the Shalka. I have watched the two David Tennant animations made at the height of his ‘rock star’ pomp in the late 2000s. I’ve listened to all the Doctor Who stories like Redacted made for BBC radio or audio. Of the spin-offs, I’ve watched every episode of Torchwood, Class and The Sarah Jane Adventures. I’ve also watched every episode of K9 and Company, but that only takes 50 minutes so isn’t as impressive. I've watched every Doctor Who charity quickie made for Children In Need or Comic Relief. I've watched every episode of tie-in factual shows Doctor Who Confidential, Totally Doctor Who and Doctor Who Unleashed. I’ve watched every special feature on every BBC DVD and Blu-ray (there was the odd extra on videos on occasion, and I watched all of them too). I even watched or listened to a couple of BBC educational shows, and an online video recording of a theatre production. All of these have been covered on the blog in some form or other, some in depth, some just in passing.

This is all evidence of my being something of a completist. If I were a true completist, I'd have listened to all the Doctor Who Big Finish audios, and all the many Big Finish spin-offs that feature characters from the Whoniverse; I'd have read all the 1990s New Adventures and Missing Adventures, read all the BBC Doctor Who books, and all the books by any publishers featuring characters from Doctor Who. Maybe some fans out there have found time for such a rigorous endeavour, but I doubt they'd have found time to do much else. For the blog, I've again covered a little of these surrounding texts, again some in more depth, some more in passing. I've sent the odd probe out into the extended universe, but not attempted to start a colony there. At the time of writing, I have two more stories to blog before I have done everything that's available according to the remit I set myself. There's also spin-off series The War Between the Land and the Sea; it is still in the future as I write this, but it will be broadcast in December 2025: not too soon in my opinion, as it's got an overlong title that I've had to type quite a few times as I've anticipated its arrival in blog posts during 2025. I'm tried of typing all that, and am lobbying all fans to start using the initialism TWBTLATS, even though it looks a bit rude somehow. Anyway, I should be able to post about all three before the end of 2025, and then I will be done. Or will I? Even if I were to use the year long gap to cover all the books and audios mentioned above (and I'm not going to, don't worry, life's too short), more would be made. Then there's comic strips. I forgot the comic strips - there are so many comic strips (at least one publication, and often more, has been publishing a Doctor Who comic strip since 1964, only a year into the life of the TV series, and continuously thereafter - they didn't even stop during the wilderness years).

There's also The Daleks and The War Games in Colour. I wrestled with whether they count as versions different enough to be covered separately to their originals here, and eventually decided they didn't. I'll mention them in passing on the blog now, so we can consider them done: they're fun enough as alternate versions, and its neat to have things like the Daleks' Exterminate catch phrase retroactively added to their debut, a Troughton Pertwee regeneration, and fan in-jokes about the War Chief being an incarnation of the Master; what they most demonstrate to me, though, is that what might be considered padding by some is to others vital character and colour. The range is sort-of continuing with a new updated omnibus of The Sea Devils having been made for broadcast before TWBTLATS. It suggests that it was the editing more than the colourisation that was perhaps the motivating factor. It would get quite boring quite quickly to cover every alternate cut of a Doctor Who story, as there have been quite a few and there will likely be more in future. So, the definition of 'done' is only ever going to be where one chooses to draw a line. Even, then, though, one can't define away the future. And why would one want to, given that - for the Doctor Who fan at least - the future's looking brighter. New Doctor Who will be back on TV a year after I reach my imminent temporary pause, and then the whole shebang should get going again. There's even the very real possibility of new old Doctor Who turning up in that time too. The pre-announcements from the Film is Fabulous organisation (see here) are suggesting it's not an if but a when for that good news. Who knows, I could be doing a new blog post for [insert your favourite missing story here, if I name one hypothetically it will only spark speculation] in 2026. I'll never be done, but on some level I'd be sad, maybe even a little ticked off, if it were any other way...

In Summary:

I want more Redacted (and not to have more stuff to blog, just because these characters have more to give)!

The Well

Chapter the 341st, well, well, well - what's going on 'ere then? An Aliens homage with a twist.

Plot:

[A relatively recent story of the streaming era, so beware of spoilers ahead.] Approximately 500,000 years in the future above a planet designated 6-7-6-7; the Doctor and Belinda leave the TARDIS to immediately find themselves on a craft in orbit surrounded by space troopers suiting up. The Doctor and Bel do the same, before they are ejected to freefall down to the planet's surface. The craft has to make a slow descent and it will be hours before the TARDIS is accessible. The Doctor and Bel inveigle themselves in the party using the psychic paper, and they all investigate a mining colony on the planet where contact has been lost. They find only one survivor, Aliss Fenly. Some entity came out of the colony's 5-mile deep well. It can only be seen in brief glimpses behind each host it settled on, one by one, making them homicidal. When each host was killed, it attached itself to the killer, and has finally ended up attached to Aliss with everyone else dead. Tempers fray, and second in command Cassio orders a trooper to do a 360 degree walk around Aliss. As soon as the trooper is directly behind Aliss based on an observer's POV, they are flung upwards by unseen forces, smashing back down to the ground, dead. As Cassio stumbles around in the aftermath, he inadvertently lines up more and more troopers who suffer the same fate. Shaya kills Cassio to stop the carnage. The Doctor discovers that 6-7-6-7 used to be called Midnight, and the entity is the same one he encountered there before. He sets up a reflecting surface behind Aliss causing the entity to leave her. Everyone makes to escape, but the airlock can only take half the party at a time. While waiting, Bel is taken by the entity. Sharp shooting by Shaya leaves Bel close to death without killing her outright. The entity moves on to Shaya, and she runs to the well and jumps down it, killing herself. Bel recovers in the TARDIS, and she and the Doctor leave. But the entity seems to have come aboard the trooper's craft and attached itself to one of them...

Context:

Watched on my own from a disc in the increasingly inaccurately named Season Two Blu-Ray box set one evening in November 2025. (Given that the era of Disney+ seasons is officially over, will the next season of Doctor Who restart the numbering again? Only time - and contractual wrangling - will tell.) 

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now approaching the point where I catch up. This is the penultimate story to be covered from the latest season of Doctor Who (at time of writing), leaving only the two-part finale to be blogged from Ncuti Gatwa's second run. Beyond that, the blog has notched up 13 Doctors' televisual eras (Doctors 1-4, 6-14), and 39 out of the 41 seasons have been completed to date (classic seasons 1-18, 20-26, and new series 1-14). Of the 892 episodes of Doctor Who from An Unearthly Child up to The Reality War, six now remain.

First Time Round:

One doesn't have to be on social media to fall foul of spoilers. As mentioned a few times before on the blog, I make one exception to my general rule of not consuming any social media or news online: I occasionally google 'Doctor Who' just in case there's any news I wouldn't want to miss out on regarding my favourite TV show. As I'll go into in more in the Deeper Thoughts section below, there's always some news online on any day about the programme; although, most of it is not really news, and a lot of it is clickbait. Around the broadcast of new stories, a lot of it is speculation. I should know better, but couldn't resist clicking on some links the day before The Well aired, and an online article (by someone who, to be fair to them, hadn't seen the episode yet) accurately extrapolated from the known evidence and blew the major twist of the episode. I wish I'd gone in knowing none of that. I watched on the Saturday this landed on the BBC iplayer, 26th April 2025, early afternoon (around 2pm, if memory serves), accompanied by the middle child (boy of 16, 15 at the time). I did not give anything away to him, and he was pleasantly surprised to see a sequel to the story Midnight. His reaction wasn't as big as when he heard Lux's laugh for the first time in the previous week's episode, mind.

Reaction:

A couple of potentially contentious views: I much prefer Alien to Aliens, and the most important parts of that 1979 film are the parts not designed by H. R. Giger. The grounded reality of the Nostromo and its crew are what make the weird visuals and rules of the Xenomorph work. The crew are not aloof or elite space people, they're ordinary schmos like you and me, and are depicted doing their jobs with verisimilitude before all hell breaks loose. The script bases them not on astronauts, and certainly not on heroes of sci-fi stories gone by, but on truckers - that for me is the spark of genius that made the film so impactful. The space marines of Aliens don't behave like real marines, and they're not based on such people: the Aliens script builds those characters out of a specific idea of a soldier, rather than a reality, depicting for satirical and allegorical reasons a troop of arrogant grunts out of their depth (taking its cues from the Vietnam war). The problem, though, is believability: make the ordinary characters too unbelievable and the alien happenings are not thrown into sharp enough relief. These are only minor issues in the Aliens script, and the film is made and shot so well that it manages to be almost as good as the original, even for a doubter like me. Later films in the franchise moved too far away from this basis (who the hell understands or associates with any of the characters in Prometheus?!) and subsequently the films have been less notable, despite any amount of fancy visuals they might include. The troop in The Well meanwhile are inspired not by real troops, and not by a satirical idea of real troops, but instead by the characters of Aliens (I don't think this can be denied given that one uses the phrase "Nuke this site from orbit" during the Who story).

The risk is that its characters are abstractions of abstractions. It's not the first Aliens homage in Doctor Who, won't likely be the last, and the story at least goes all in (a rescue party going to visit a colony on a planet where contact's been lost, and it turns out everyone's been killed by alien forces bar one sole survivor - it's ringing a lot of bells). It is also stunningly well put together with great visuals, great costumes, great sets - it's the first time that Doctor Who's riffed on Aliens and what's ended up on screen is as visually exciting as the inspiration. Does it manage to have sufficient grounding based on character, though? Largely yes, and the key reason for that is Aliss Fenly as played by Rose Ayling-Ellis. A little bit of backstory for troop leader Shaya (including childhood flashback) or casting a charismatic actor like Christopher Chung to breathe life into the one-note character of Cassio, as he is on the page, is all very well, and everyone's performances are perfectly good; Ayling-Ellis is the essential ingredient, though. The character as written is beautifully ordinary in the style of the Nostromo crew, describing her thankless job as a cook, heating up ready meals for the colonists. Ayling-Ellis is a bright, mesmeric presence on screen, her movements and expressions adeptly projecting emotion - a lot of vulnerability, but also moments of toughness, shiftiness and guilt. The character's deafness becomes key to the plot (the entity drives people to violence with whispering, but she cannot hear this) which is nice, though it's even nicer when the casting of disabled actors is unconnected to the plot (another member of the cast has a prosthetic leg, but this is irrelevant to the story and not commented upon, which I think is a good thing).

The Well is of course not just a homage to a sequel, but also a sequel in its own right. The revelation that the Doctor is on the planet Midnight, where the 2008 story of the same name took place, is seeded in effectively (there are some subtle and less than subtle music cues harking back to the early days of the new series in the score). The scene where the penny drops for the Doctor is impactful and dramatic, and was no doubt a hit with all long-term viewers. It's odd that the way the entity operates in The Well, though with some similarities (it's an invisible and unknowable presence, only seen in brief flashes that might be a trick of the light), is very different to how it operated in Midnight. In the earlier story it could steal someone's voice and leave them immobile and powerless. One wonders why it doesn't do that again, as that would be more effective than just throwing people into the air. The Doctor suggests that the creature's just playing some sort of sick game, but he's only able to say that because the entity hasn't nicked his voice. It's been hundreds of thousands of years, so maybe it's lost that power - best not to think too much about it. The same advice probably goes for the method the Doctor uses to get the entity to leave Aliss. The reflection of the creature acts the same as the entity being behind itself, meaning it is thrown into the air? Is that what the suggestion is? Does that work? First time round, this is done at such speed that it doesn't cause confusion. That's testament to Amanda Brotchie's dynamic direction; she also makes the manoeuvring look perfectly natural, getting characters into the positions around Aliss they need to be in to set up the explosive action later - that can't have been easy.

Another moment that didn't cause problems first time round, but puzzles me after this watch, is the horror movie coda where the entity looks to have escaped with the surviving troops onto their craft. There is a lingering shot as people escape of the airlock's display indicating four people are inside, when there are only three we can see (Aliss and the two troopers with her). The set up of the airlock's capacity and this indicator have been done so carefully that this must be significant. The clear hint is that the entity is in there with them; if that's the case, though, then it can't still be with the Doctor's, party, attaching itself to Bel. The only explanation that fits is that there is more than one entity, but that undermines the story as a whole. Driving out the entity from Aliss to save her, and Shaya's self sacrifice to save Bel and destroy the creature - all of that was pointless because another entity was just waiting to slip into the airlock when nobody was looking. I don't care for that reading, though I do appreciate that there being more than one adversary this time fits neatly with the homage: it truly makes The Well the Aliens to Midnight's Alien. The arc plot moments don't intrude too much to upset the homage either, just a few intriguing moments where nobody in this future period has heard of Earth or the human race. It's nice to see the developing dynamic between the Doctor and Bel too. Early on, the Doctor makes a promise to Bel, despite her protestations that he can't guarantee any such thing, that "I will meet your mum and dad, and I will make your dad laugh, and your mum can whistle at my behind". It's a nice line, but the rest of the season came and went, and Ncuti bowed out without doing any of that. Perhaps he would have if the finale had gone head as originally scripted, but that's another story (of another story).

Connectivity:

The Well and Utopia / The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords both see the Doctor on a craft hovering above a planet's surface, surrounded by people with guns; both stories are structured around the return of an enemy of the Doctor last featured in a story over a decade earlier - the Master returned in 2007, 11 years after his last appearance; the entity on the planet Midnight first turned up in 2008, a whopping 17 years before The Well in 2025.

Deeper Thoughts:

Back for Good? Whatever he said, whatever he did, he didn't mean it. I'm talking, of course, not of Gary Barlow but Robert Shearman. The writer of Dalek, and many other marvellous things both for Doctor Who and elsewhere (see here for more details), was quoted in Doctor Who Magazine in the autumn of 2025 saying that the show was "probably as dead as we've ever known it". This sparked the predictable raft of online articles with clickbait headlines suggesting he was putting the boot in, or knew something we didn't. Jane Tranter from Bad Wolf Studios, an exec on the Doctor Who episodes broadcast since 2023, even got drawn in. She called the comment "really rude... and really untrue". One can't blame Tranter too much as she was presumably presented with Shearman's quote out of context. One can blame the so-called journalists involved, though, as his views had been misrepresented. He was talking only about the capacity for producing extended universe narratives when the show is off air. The context of his comments was an interview about his 2025 novelisations of a couple of his acclaimed Big Finish audios. Those stories were originally created in the so-called wilderness era, and one of them - The Chimes of Midnight - featured the current incumbent Doctor of the time, Paul McGann. His point was that when the show was off air in the early 1990s, Sylvester McCoy's Doctor was still the Doctor; as such, original stories could be written for him that moved the overall Doctor Who story forward; in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the same was true of McGann. Following The Reality War in 2025, until any new Doctor Who got made again, there was the unknown quantity of the Doctor - or possibly not even the Doctor - as played by Billie Piper. Nobody knew what that would be like, and so nobody could move the story forward. Any stories written in that period would of necessity be backward-looking.

This is what online coverage of Doctor Who can be like. As mentioned above in the First Time Round section, one can find new articles online on any particular day about Doctor Who; it's very like other big franchises such as Star Trek or Star Wars in that regard. Even if there's nothing to write about, people are still writing, and more negative content tends to get more hits. It's therefore not surprising that some slightly poorly chosen words by Shearman caused a brouhaha; after all, the official news that Doctor Who was coming back even without the co-production partnership with Disney+, and that there would be a Christmas special in 2026 (see here) - which one would have thought on balance was a largely positive story - was met with mainly negative headlines. The many articles going into detail about what a terrible decision the Mouse House had made in the first place suffered from what is known as outcome bias: the quality of a decision being judged solely on its outcome, rather than the situation at the time the decision was made and the process involved in making the decision then. (An aside: there's a great book called Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke covering outcome bias, amongst other things; I'd thoroughly recommend giving it a read.) Reasonable, even-handed coverage of this topic can be found in a podcast episode of Marina Hyde and Richard Osman's The Rest is Entertainment (a youtube video of which can be found here). In summary, they propose that Who is an intellectual property with bags of potential (which I'd say was clearly indicated by it getting the same level of fervent internet coverage as those bigger franchises mentioned earlier), so - even though it didn't work out - the original Disney+ decision makes sense and made sense at the time. This means there's every reason to be optimistic about a new co-production partner being found, if one hasn't been already. The BBC must think this, or they wouldn't be announcing the show's 2026 comeback.

The 'Disney+ should have known better' style stories at least had a smidgen of honesty somewhere in the mix. The other main type of story that emerged in reaction to the comeback announcement were about Doctor Who's failing UK ratings. By whatever metrics are important to them, Disney+ didn't feel that Who had done the business. This was extended in some online article writers' minds to the show being a failure for the BBC too. These articles quote the show's ratings, but always fall foul of two mistakes / inaccuracies. First, they never include figures for specials, which do much better than episodes of a series like The Well. Specials don't tend to be streamed in advance and usually get scheduling and publicity such that less committed audience members find and watch them, showing that there's an audience that won't necessarily seek out regular episodes urgently after broadcast, but who could still watch them and find them entertaining later (this is a good thing). Second, they ignore the context that audiences of Doctor Who, in common with those of every other TV show, have gradually reduced every year as audiences have fragmented. Doctor Who having that 'long tail' of later discoverability, though, gives it advantages over other shows. Doctor Who was in the top ten of Christmas Day programmes in 2024, and compares favourably to others in that same list: it has longevity and adaptability built in (Gavin and Stacey can only do so many reunion shows, it's linked very specifically to one cast and writing team), it has massive franchise and merchandising potential (quite a bit more than Call the Midwife, say); it has significant appeal beyond a specific time or territory (unlike Eastenders, for example). Put simply: the Beeb would not be bringing the show back - and certainly wouldn't be bringing it back at Christmas - if it wasn't valuable to them.

Further proof of this was the announcement that The War Between the Land and the Sea will be shown in the UK during the run up to Christmas 2025 (the official site's item is here including a quote from Russell T Davies calling the spin-off series a "Christmas treat"). Disney+ haven't confirmed when the series will be shown outside of the UK, and given they have ended the relationship there's a small possibility, I suppose, that it may never get shown at all. But the BBC are hot for it. For UK fans, it will be a Whoniverse stop-gap during the 17 months that Doctor Who is off air between the series in which The Well featured and the 2026 Christmas special (17 months is too long to wait, bring back the Doctor - or at least the Doctor's extended universe - don't hesitate!). This all means the show will continue with a festive presence as well as having at least one episode shown in every calendar year since its return in 2005. And, just maybe, it could indicate that Doctor Who is back for good, and that nothing can stop it (except if a certain orange grifter successfully sues the BBC, then all bets are off!). These are positive things to report on (aside from the orange grifter). If they're generating negative content, there's clearly some other agenda involved. For fans, this is likely to be summed up in three words: Russell must go. Some people haven't enjoyed Davies's second run as Doctor Who showrunner - they are desperate for any hint that he's screwed up (but he really hasn't, and will no doubt stop being involved in the show at a time of his own choosing). For non-fans writing for certain publications / platforms, it's a different three words: abolish the BBC. There's also something more insidious, likely coming from those same publications / platforms - but fans aren't necessarily immune either - about wanting things that are 'woke' to do badly (stemming from a fear or hatred of diversity). Resist this nonsense and celebrate. Doctor Who is no longer as as dead as we've ever known it - it's back, back, back!

In Summary:

Good casting and direction turn what could have been a little bit too much like an Aliens rip-off into something a bit more special.

Utopia / The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords

Chapter the 340th, which demonstrates that decimation's what you need if you wanna be a world dictator. 

Plot:

The Doctor lands the TARDIS in Cardiff to refuel with time energy from the rift. Captain Jack, who has been waiting near there to catch up with a chronologically-aligned version of the Doctor, runs towards the TARDIS, grabs hold and clings to the outer Police Box shell as the ship travels through the space-time vortex. Jack's immortal nature, bestowed on him by Bad Wolf Rose, sparks a reaction in the ship, and it flies forward in time 100 trillion years to the end of the universe. The Doctor, Martha and Jack find themselves on the planet Malcassairo. In a compound besieged by savage Futurekind, a band of surviving humans there await transportation to Utopia, their last hope of refuge. The Doctor helps the kindly Professor Yana and his assistant Chan-tho to get the rocket ready. While the Doctor and Jack are off fixing the rocket's power source, Martha notices that Yana has a pocket watch exactly like the Doctor's when he turned himself into a human. She runs to tell the Doctor. The rocket takes off, bound for Utopia. Yana - his attention finally drawn to the watch and breaking through its perception filter - opens the watch and becomes the Master. The Master turns on Chan-tho, killing her, but not before she shoots him. He regenerates and takes the Doctor's TARDIS, leaving him with Martha and Jack as the Futurekind break into the compound and surround them. The Doctor fixes Jack's vortex manipulator allowing the three of them to transport themselves back to contemporary London. The Doctor managed to lock the TARDIS controls before the Master escaped, meaning it can only travel to and from the last two visited locations, the far future and contemporary Earth.

Because of a margin of error, the Master has been on Earth for 18 months before they arrive, has styled himself as Harry Saxon, got married to Lucy, and become Prime Minister. The Doctor and his friends are wanted criminals. The Master has created a satellite network around Earth called Archangel, and has used this to hypnotise the populace into voting for him. The Doctor fixes his party up with perception filters linked to the network that allow them to go unobserved and investigate. The Master announces that he has made contact with an alien lifeform - the Toclafane, floating spheres with childlike voices - and they will arrive on Earth the next morning. The Master is aboard a UNIT skybase called Valiant when first contact happens. The Doctor, Martha and Jack come aboard the Valiant and discover the TARDIS there: it has been turned into a paradox machine. They go to the Valiant's bridge as the paradox machine activates, and millions of Toclafane arrive on Earth. The Master has been able to see through the Doctor's perception filters. He kills Jack and ages the Doctor into an old man. The Master orders the Toclafane to decimate Earth's population. While this is happening, Jack revives and gives his vortex manipulator to Martha so she can escape. The Doctor whispers something to her. She leaves, then spends a year walking the Earth, hidden from the Toclafane by the perception filter. The Master has spent the year using slave labour to build a fleet of ships to conquer the universe, and also torturing (in a low level camp way) the Doctor, Jack and Martha's family aboard the valiant. He ages the Doctor again, turning him into a tiny wee shrivelled form. Martha goes to meet with a scientist in the human resistance. They capture a Toclafane.

Opening it up, they find a human head - the Toclafane are the humans from the end of the universe. They never found Utopia, and instead turned themselves into decapitated heads in techno-spheres (as one does). The Master has promised that they can conquer the universe such that their desperate future will never come to pass. He took Lucy Saxon with him to see this bleak future, and this broke her mind. Martha lets slip to the scientist that her mission for the last year has been spent assembling a gun that can kill the Master. The scientist turns traitor and informs on her. It's all a bluff, though; Martha just wanted to be brought back aboard the Valiant around the time the Master is launching his fleet. The Doctor knew that he would not be able to resist a countdown, and he'd tasked Martha with spreading the word to everyone she's met in the year to think of the word Doctor during the countdown. This collective thought is amplified by the Archangel network, which the Doctor has spent the last year mentally tuning in to, and he's able - somehow - to use the mental energy to de-age himself and float threateningly towards the Master. Jack destroys the paradox machine. Time reverts to just before the Toclafane descended en masse, with only those on the Valiant remembering the year that never was. The Doctor plans to take the Master into his personal custody. Lucy shoots the Master, and he supresses his regenerative powers to avoid becoming the Doctor's captive. Captain Jack returns to his Torchwood team, Martha decides to stop travelling with the Doctor, and everyone goes on with their lives. Except for all the people in the year 100 trillion who die a horrible death as the universe ends, obviously.

Context:

As you'll see if you glance below at the Milestone Watch, I have very few stories left to blog; as such, why would I cover as one what some people - including the writer of the scripts, Russell T Davies - consider as two separate stories? I hate to disagree with Davies (but Doctor Who Magazine agrees with me, so there!) but I can't see it that way. Although a different director handles the first part, the three parts are tightly connected covering the return of the Master: there are plot questions left dangling in Utopia that only get answered in the other two parts, and there are many moments in those other two parts that only have meaning if one has seen Utopia. I considered binging all three parts in one go, but kept getting interrupted. In the end, I watched the three parts over the course of about a week, with irregular gaps in between. To my surprise, the Better Half joined me for all three parts. She very rarely watches Doctor Who of any era any more, but hadn't seen these episodes since they were first shown, and was curious how they held up. She made a few comments during the running time, but gave me instructions not to share them on the blog (instructions accompanied by a stern look, so I took them seriously). What I will share is that she was disappointed at the end that "John Simm didn't win". After watching the episodes, the fam went away for half term and stayed in a few places in the UK, meaning I couldn't write up the blog post immediately. One of the places we visited was Cardiff, and I finally found time to go to the bay, take a photo in Roald Dahl Plass (where the TARDIS materialises at the beginning of this story) and visit Ianto's Shrine (see the Deeper Thoughts section of the previous blog post for more details).

Me at the foot of Torchwood Tower

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now approaching the point where I catch up. This story completes another season and another Doctor's set of TV stories. That makes it 13 Doctors' televisual eras completed (Doctors 1-4, 6-14), and 39 out of the 41 seasons completed to date (classic seasons 1-18, 20-26, and new series 1-14). Of the 892 episodes of Doctor Who from An Unearthly Child up to The Reality War, seven now remain.

First Time Round:

I watched each of the three parts on their broadcast debuts on BBC1 in the UK, accompanied for each as I was on this watch by the Better Half. That was back in June 2007. I remember the blogs and message boards exploded into paroxysms of excitement over the final 15 minutes of Utopia, and then everyone online being much less enamoured of the other two parts. For Last of the Time Lords, friends Alex and Rachel (mentioned a few times before on this blog) joined us in our then home in Hove for the weekend, and watched live with us. I remember the Better Half and Rachel discussing the high 'eye candy' quotient of the episode with Simm, Tennant and John Barrowman all found to be visually pleasing to one or both of them.

Reaction:

Perhaps some fans like to split this three-parter up (see Context section above) because of the differences in general enthusiasm that met the episodes when they first aired (see First Time Round section above). They can mentally salvage Utopia at the expense of The Sound of Drums and Last of the Time Lords. Utopia is directed solely by a hero of Doctor Who's production (old and new) in Graeme Harper. It has a barnstorming (albeit dramatically incomplete) ending. It avoids inclusion of a few camp, silly moments - of the kind that are usually anathema to the serious-minded fan - from the later episodes, including some aspects of John Simm's performance (it could be the Master that's enjoying himself a little too much, or it could be Simm - I'll come back to that in a moment). In the first part, the viewer mainly gets to enjoy Derek Jacobi's two contrasting - but both solid and traditional - performances as Professor Yana and then the Master. The former is a delightful balancing act with the script and the acting giving tiny hints at Yana's true identity so that the last 15 minutes of Utopia seem inevitable, though still surprising. The cherry on the cake is having the professor's loyal assistant character Chan-Tho, used throughout the episode up to that point as comic relief, become the Master's first victim on regaining his identity. The climactic sequence of Utopia is magnificent, and rewards multiple viewings: the reveal of the pocket watch Time Lords can use to transform themselves into humans, the revelation of what the Face of Boe's dying words mean, the Master's regeneration with John Simm's very Doctorish post-regeneration dialogue, and the cliffhanger with our heroes trapped without the TARDIS, stranded and surrounded. All of this underscored by urgent, driving Murray Gold magnificence.

What about the the 30 minutes before the climactic sequence, though? Yana and Chan-Tho aside, there's one nice character / long-term continuity moment with the Doctor and Jack's conversation about what happened to make him immortal, how the Doctor instinctively reacts to that, and Jack's explanation of what he did next to end up on contemporary Earth waiting out the Doctor's reappearance. The rest of Utopia is not as memorable: the final humans awaiting their trip to Utopia are a dull bunch, and the Futurekind are a pretty uninspired 'monster', looking as they do like a musical theatre punk gang. It also harms the reveal of the Toclafane's true nature later on to feature another tribe of antagonists who were humans but who've degenerated into savagery. What Utopia still has by the end is hope. Alas, for all the camp - and there's quite a lot of camp - in the latter two thirds, by the end of part three there's not much hope left for humanity. It's very bleak, and so probably needed those moments, such as the Master dancing around to a Scissor Sisters song, to lighten the mood. 100 trillion years into the future, the last surviving humans have their final hope dashed, become trapped with the universe collapsing around them, cannibalise themselves, and regress to childishness and psychopathy. That is Doctor Who's canonically established final fate for the human race. Not only that, but a human from our time (Lucy Saxon) is made to witness this and loses her mind and her soul in consequence (it's only on this latest watch that I fully realised how well Alexandra Moen's performance captures all that). If the Master keeping the Doctor in a dog kennel or turning him into a house elf rubs you the wrong way, just consider how depressing this story would have proved if played more sombrely.

John Simm's performance as the Master has come in for some criticism over the years since this story; love it or not, though, his take on the character has become the standard approach for the 21st century. Those that followed him in the role all accentuated the manic rather than the more suave antagonism that was the template for the 20th century. To answer the question I posed earlier, I do think it is the character rather than the actor having the fun in all the many scenes of Simm's screwball villainy. This is the portrayal of someone who's been imprisoned for decades in the body and mind of a different personality (one the Master considers a hapless dope); seen as depicting the Master's behaviour after such captivity, the choices Simm makes seem believable to me. There's also a certain desperation in the character's actions: he's practically begging for the Doctor to notice and engage with him (and this is very consistent with how the character acted in the classic series too). Plus, of course - and this is again in line with what had come before - he's crazy. Davies adds to the character's mythology by suggesting he's been driven mad by hearing a constant drumbeat in his head. I was a bit dubious of this when I first watched the story, but the subsequent explanations in David Tennant's finale The End of Time made it work for me retroactively. The moment in that later story where Simm and Tennant react in shock realising the noise in the Master's head is tangible and not just a symptom of madness is so wonderful that it's worth all three parts of the Toclafane story just to set it up. His interplay with Tennant, and lots of little moments - the big thumbs up to people as he's killing them with poison gas, the in-joke where he appreciates some kids' TV (Teletubbies here, calling back to a scene where he watched The Clangers in a 1970s story) - make him one of my favourite Masters of all.

To take on some other criticisms: the 'reset' at the end - where time is wound back for everyone but the Saxons, the Doctor and his friends - is not a cop-out, but is carefully plotted and earned. The Toclafane are destroying their own past, and the paradox can only be sustained with TARDIS shenanigans, as is underlined repeatedly. The dramatic question is how will the Doctor reverse all this, not how the planet will rebuild itself, and that's clear before the Master operates his paradox engine and before he starts decimating people. The aged Doctor's CGI form is a bit silly, but that's about the execution not the concept; if Doctor Who started playing it safe and not overreaching itself regarding what it can depict on screen, it wouldn't be Doctor Who anymore (and besides the Dobby Doctor is very cute). The device of everyone chanting the Doctor's name and him using the psychic energy of that through the Archangel network to rejuvenate himself makes sense, just about. The network being connected to people's perceptions and therefore able to channel psychic energy is well seeded; it's only that energy being able to be absorbed and used by a Time Lord that's a bit of a leap and we've certainly seen Time Lords do stranger things over the years. I'll grant that, once restored, the Doctor does get a bit messianic (it's a theme of this period - in the next story he's carried aloft by a couple of angels). This is more than made up for by the scene of the Master's death in the Doctor's arms, the former refusing to regenerate despite the pleading of the latter.

I'm not saying it's perfect by any means, just that I don't see that much of a difference between Utopia and the final two parts: both are at the same high level of quality for me (and for those fans that can't rate any work as highly as that directed by Graeme Harper, please note that he did uncredited work on the latter two parts when their director Colin Teague was injured during filming). One issue is that there's almost nothing for Captain Jack to do in the final part: he's kept chained up in a side room for swathes of the running time, like Nicola Bryant in Timelash. This isn't just bad for the character, but it also highlights another flaw: why doesn't he go with Martha at the end of The Sound of Drums, rather than sending her off on her own. We've seen that his time travel bracelet is capable of carrying more than one person at a time, and he's got to be more use with her, as the man who can't die, than he is imprisoned by the Master. Dramatically, it's because Martha needs to be on her own, of course (though she's ably supported by strong performances from Tom Ellis and Ellie Haddington in the final part). Freema Agyeman is a very capable supporting actor, but not a lead; nonetheless, the final episode works reasonably well structured around her (her bits are better than the somewhat pointless 'loop scene'' where the Doctor and the others attempt an escape from the Master, only to be foiled and end up exact where they started). Balancing out these small flaws, though, are the moments that give loads of pleasure throughout all three parts: the look on Jabobi's face and the little turn of the head he gives to show us he's transformed (and the way Harper frames the shot), the first ever glimpse of Time Lords and Gallifrey in a new series flashback accompanied by Murray Gold's transcendent cue, all of Gold's music, including some rock guitar during Utopia, loads of funny Captain Jack lines ("Was someone kissing me?") and lots more.

Connectivity:

Both this three-part story (yes it is!) and Torchwood: Children of Earth feature Captain Jack and have scenes set in Cardiff and London. Both feature scenes where the UK government's cabinet meet in Downing Street rooms, and the Prime Minister at the heads of both those governments is villainous, to a greater or lesser degree.

Deeper Thoughts:

A Master for All Seasons. The Master is a character often in search of a raison d'être. This might have something to do with how he was originally created. 1970s producer and script editor team Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks wanted to create the Doctor Who equivalent of the Moriarty character in Sherlock Holmes stories. The character was always envisaged to be a recurring foe, not just a single story adversary (unlike, say, the Daleks who had only originally been intended to feature once). So, the Master's villainy did not arise from a specific circumstance. Letts and Dicks added the character to every one of the five stories of his first season. During that span, the Master allied himself to Autons, Axons and Daemons, tried to hijack a missile, successfully hijacked a prison, created mischief on a colony world, tried to locate a superweapon, and much more besides. What underlying motivation could marry up all these different nefarious activities into a coherent plan? None, obviously. Generally, production teams have explicitly or implicitly favoured one of two slightly lame explanations. One is that all these activities are just seen by the character as game playing with the Doctor, trying to score points or get his attention. The other is the usual fallback for any genre villain with inadequate motivation: he's cuckoo bananas. The Toclafane 3-parter hints at the former, but more explicitly plumps for the latter. In the early days, the character was a lot calmer and so it's difficult to believe that he's being driven insane by a drumbeat in his head (but as that only starts to happen when the Master's personal history is altered by the Time Lords during the Time War, it's perhaps logical to think that hasn't happened to any of the pre-Simm Masters anyway).

There's an argument to be made that a villain being a villain just for the sake of it doesn't hurt the sort of genre stories Doctor Who deals in - it may even help. Heck, even all Letts's and Dicks's Moriarty talk is somewhat overblown compared to the character's actual genesis. What seems to have happened is that they thought it would be a good idea to cast Roger Delgado as a villain, and - quite frankly - that was already more than enough: he proved them right in his every appearance. When relaunching the character, the 21st century production team again killed it with the casting. Coming straight off Life On Mars, a time travel show in which he was the lead, John Simm was exactly the sort of person that one could see getting cast as the Doctor one day, and this created a very slightly different conception of the character: he's just like the Doctor, but bad. Simm's debut hammers this point home by having him accompanied by his own companion, wielding a (laser) screwdriver, and even offering someone a jelly baby at one point.  It's tapping into something that's been there from the beginning in an unspoken way (cf. Delgado in the final episode of Claws of Axos, helping UNIT arguably more than the Doctor does in the same story) and always would be to some extent. All that really changed was the casting as successive teams over the years found the right person to pair with whoever was playing the hero at that point; sometimes the look or performance of the Master was counterpoint, but often it was more a dark reflection. Just as some Doctor companion pairings work better than others, there's a chemistry in specific Doctor and Master pairings too. Delgado with Pertwee, of course - one white-haired, one dark, one wearing colourful dandyish clothes, the other wearing sombre suits. They started things off so successfully, the role of the Master looked like it might not ever be recast.

When Delgado's tragic death robbed the series of the character, it took a good few years for a return. Even then, the character had been remodelled as a monstrous walking cadaver - the Master in name only - and featured in just a single story during nearly a decade following Delgado's passing. It was only as Tom Baker was handing over to Peter Davison that time enough had passed, and - in a three-part relaunch just as would be done in 2007, across stories The Keeper of Traken, Logopolis and Castrovalva, the Master played by Anthony Ainley emerged to become the principal returning nemesis of the early 80s. Although he appeared with other Doctors, it was Ainley with Davison that was the key pairing. There's a picture (see above) of them both that exemplifies this: one fair, one dark, with their costumes mirroring this. Paul McGann and Eric Roberts both got to play the characters for one night only; again, they are paired well, with Roberts getting a costume change so he can do fabulous camp as well as the Terminator-inspired black leather jacketed look. Simm - though he also returned later with another Doctor - is perfectly paired with Tennant. The next - and, to date, final - two pairings used the gender-swapping possibilities of regeneration to create counterpoint: a male Doctor in Capaldi paired with a female Master (or Missy, but given that the villainous handle is deliberately an academic title like Doctor, then of course Missy can go on calling herself the Master) played by Michelle Gomez; then both roles swapped gender and Jodie Whittaker's Doctor was perfectly paired with Sacha Dhawan as the Master. Both these versions of the Master dressed - and acted - a lot more colourfully than their corresponding Doctors, which is an interesting development. What will happen next? Now that the future of Doctor Who has been confirmed, it's fun to be able to speculate again...

In Summary:

Not perfect, but not nearly as bad as its reputation - all three parts of it!