Space Babies

Chapter the 302nd, is not the first time a snot monster has appeared on TV.

Plot:
[Warning: this is a story from the current series at the time of writing, and there will be spoilers ahead.] The Doctor takes Ruby on her first trip in the TARDIS. They go to prehistoric times and see dinosaurs, and the Doctor manages to narrowly avoid Ruby changing her timeline by treading on a butterfly. They then go to a space-station in the far future. It houses baby-producing technology to help populate the planet below, but it's been abandoned (under protest recorded by the crew when leaving) because the company that ran it withdrew funding. The law says that the machines can't be switched off, though, and a few years back it ran out of control, accelerating the growth of a group of babies, who now crew the ship. The babies are very happy that someone has come to rescue them; they have been alone apart from Nan-E, seemingly an automated system that talks to them over the ship's PA system. The Doctor is concerned about the babies' safety as there is a build up of pressure on the station, but he can't get them away in the TARDIS as an aggressive and fear-inducing creature is roaming the lower levels. The creature turns out to have been created out of built-up nasal secretion waste by the same machinery malfunction that accelerated the babies' knowledge, keying in to the need for stories with monsters as part of education and growth. Nan-E turns out to be the last remaining member of the crew Jocelyn, hidden elsewhere on the station, talking to the children through a filtered comms system. She tries to eject the creature into space, but the Doctor saves it, as it is a unique lifeform. He releases the pressure build-up (methane from discarded nappies) to propel the station to a planet that accepts refugees, then takes Ruby home so she can see her Mum Carla for Christmas. At one point it snowed inside, like a memory of the moment baby Ruby was abandoned at the church on Ruby Road coming to life.

 

Context:

I watched this from the iplayer in early June accompanied by the eldest child (boy of 17) who had not yet caught up with the story, and was taking a break from revising for his A-level exams. His brother and sister had been a bit cool on this story, though not outright hating it, so he went in with low expectations only to find it wasn't nearly as bad as he had been anticipating. He mentioned that he thought Gatwa's Doctor was "very Tennant", which is as expected when both Doctors were written and exec-produced by the same showrunner, Russell T Davies. He also commented - like many a long-term fan did too, I'm sure - on the repetition of story moments from the beginning of Davies's last tenure; both the scene of Ruby and the Doctor opening a screen out onto a vista of space and the one of Ruby's phone call across thousands of years and light years to her Mum are direct swipes from The End of the World.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially. This post marks the second of the recent - and still ongoing at the time of writing - Gatwa season episodes to be blogged, leaving five stories remaining (the last being a two-parter). Beyond that, 26 out of the total of 40 seasons to date have been completed, classic seasons 1, 3, 4, 7, 8, 10-12, 14-18, 20, 21, 23-25, and new series 2, 4, 6, 7, 9-11, and 13.

First Time Round:

The nature of the end stage of my randomly ordered journey through TV Doctor Who, as the available pool of unblogged stories gets smaller, means a wide disparity of gaps between first watch and current watch for the blog. I first watched the previous story covered, The Monster of Peladon, nearly 30 years before writing about it. For Space Babies, it wasn't much more than 30 days. I first saw this story on the 11th May 2024, a few minutes after midnight when it dropped on the BBC's iplayer (as it did simultaneously on Disney+ for the rest of the world outside the UK). I remained awake to watch the second episode in the double bill that day. It was a novelty to watch the stories in such a way then, and I've come to appreciate it more as the season has gone on - it's a nice way to finish a working week, staying up and tuning in to watch an exciting and highly anticipated episode of Doctor Who, before turning in for the night. Tuning in then turning in has been my process these last few weeks, and I look forward to the same in the future, presuming that this pattern remains for next season.

Reaction:

Assuming that the big finale of the season (see Deeper Thoughts section for more anticipation of that) doesn't disappoint, Space Babies will turn out to be the least strong story of the 2024 run, in my humble opinion. I still love it, though. With every other story, perhaps because of the more abbreviated run compared to previous years, the scripts are doing something radically different with Doctor Who's format. The show is supposed to be ever flexible and expandable, but it has always tended periodically after any shake-up to settle into a formulaic format. In Ncuti's first season, there's not been any big contemporary Earth invasions yet, nor any established monsters or villains from the show's past returning (though there is speculation about both these things happening in the two-part finale, see Deeper Thoughts again). Perhaps Davies took it as a challenge that the previous showrunner, his friend Chris Chibnall, produced an opening season for Jodie Whittaker without any returning elements from Who's back catalogue, and is replicating this to keep the series seeming fresh. Whittaker's first year lacked a bit of oomph because of this approach, mind; Davies looks to be avoiding that trap by making every story high-concept (i.e. based on a premise with an attention-grabbing hook that can be summed up in a simple sentence). Putting in a narrative reason to bring in more purely supernatural stories was also a good move to help with this. A story like 73 Yards, say, is pushing at the boundaries not just in terms of subject matter but narrative structure too; but, it's just the most obvious in going about it: many of the others - though they might seem superficially traditional - are doing the same, leaving Space Babies to be the most straightforward as the 'set-up' episode.

There's a slightly leisurely beginning where the Doctor gives Ruby all, and I mean all, the information she (and newly joining Disney+ viewers) will need to keep up. This is radically different to the last time Davies ran the show. In his last 'jumping-on point' story Rose in 2005, there isn't even any time travel bar a brief mention at the end; concepts that the Doctor tosses off in Space Babies were teased out slowly over the many stories and seasons that followed Rose. That was a different time, though; Davies has fewer episodes per year to play with now, and streaming viewers tend to be more enthusiastic about lore than perhaps were the sceptical UK Saturday night audience 19 years previously. The section isn't just dry exposition anyway. I fear that Space Babies is a story whose jokes are going to be sneered at in years to come, with the default unthinking consensus being the story is not much cop. But Ruby stepping on the butterfly and transforming herself into Rubathon Blue of the 57th Hemisphere Hatchlings is funny, just as depicting a Star Trek-style crew in Doctor Who except that they're all babies is funny; the boogeyman being made of bogies is funny, the nanny filter auto-correcting Jocelyn's swearing is funny, the solution to the space-station's propulsion towards its safe haven being a release of methane (i.e. a big ol' space fart) is funny. It's supposed to be - for the most part - funny. It's not all unsophisticated humour either. The line in there that satirises a certain attitude to abortion law ("So, the planet down below will refuse to stop the babies being born, but once they're born, they don't look after them?" / "It's a very strange planet" / "It's not that strange") is killer.

It also helps that Ncuti Gatwa is charismatic and energetic, and can take any decent line of Davies dialogue and make it even better, such that some of the dialogue here becomes iconic. Lines such as "There's no such things as monsters, just creatures you haven't met yet", "I'm not saying things are connected, but things connect" or "Most of the universe is knackered, babes" deserve to act as slogans for this new new Doctor Who for years to come. The main story is slight, but affecting. Beyond the humour, there is a lot of emotion here. The babies - like many a child in the real world, alas - have never been hugged, and think they have grown up wrong. The scene where the Doctor talks to Captain Poppy about a person's uniqueness being their superpower -  linking it back to his own status as an abandoned child as set up in Chibnall's Timeless Child backstory, which Davies has found an interesting way to build upon - is one of the first big Doctor moments for Gatwa. It all took a lot of effort to get to screen too (the clever casting of the youngsters, all the effects work and the multiple takes to get so much footage of talking babies means it would be ghastly and inaccurate to call anything about this story lazy). The climax, intercut with flashbacks to the Poppy scene, where the Doctor saves the Boogeyman from the shellshocked Jocelyn's knee-jerk action to jettison it from the ship to protect the children ("It is one of the children, Jocelyn!") is truly marvellous: exciting, but also - in its small way - political.

It's not perfect: it's a bit of a stretch to imagine that the scenario the Doctor and Ruby arrive into could have been caused by one malfunctioning machine; the running joke where the Doctor corrects himself every time he says babies and makes it "Space Babies!" gets a bit wearisome; there's an unfortunate bit of editing / framing where Ruby responds to writing on a screen being in English, but it looks like she's reacting to the name of the planet that the Doctor's just read out from the screen and saying that's English; as the name of the planet is Pacifico Del Rio, that jars a bit and makes her character briefly look a bit silly. This is fairly insignificant stuff, though. Ultimately, in its own way, the story does go beyond the simply straightforward - there's no monster, and no villain (apart from the off-screen company), for example. Even if one doesn't like any of the babies - Space Babies! - stuff, there's still all the intriguing hints at the arc of the series to come. Another great moment is the Doctor dictating the terms and conditions to Ruby, that he can never take her back to that Christmas where she was abandoned to find out her mother's identity (all the while we're watching this, we of course know something like that is almost certainly going to happen). That Ruby neatly counters this, and explains that she will get to meet her Mum at Christmas (meaning her adoptive mother Carla in 2024) is the final nice moment in a story replete with them. I fear that everyone will just remember snot and fart gags, but that's on them.

Connectivity:

In both Space Babies and The Monster of Peladon, the Doctor is accompanied by a single female companion and visits a planet he's been to before. In both, there is an appearance of a somewhat mythological monster (the Boogeyman and the 'heat ray' Aggedor) in an area below where the majority of the characters usually operate, and these manifestations turn out to both have been created by machinery.

Deeper Thoughts:

There's always a Twist, There's always a Twist... [Warning: this involves speculation about the un-broadcast - at the time of writing - end of the current series, and though it'll probably turn out to be clownishly incorrect speculation it nonetheless might be considered spoilerific.] There is one story of Ncuti Gatwa's first season, which started with Space Babies, to go; this is a two part finale that it's fair to say has been pretty hyped up. The final episode will be getting a midnight screening in cinemas across the UK. Writer and showrunner Russell T Davies has been quoted saying that it would be "the biggest finale ever" "devastating" and that " you will be screaming". He has also hinted that there will be major revelations involved, and as such has advised fans to watch it as soon as possible to avoid spoilers: "If ever you're going to stay up until midnight with a bottle of cider or a box of chocolates and sit there and watch Doctor Who, I would recommend it for that one". The previous most recent series of Doctor Who with Davies as showrunner was in 2008, and culminated in the recently blogged and massive two-part finale The Stolen Earth / Journey's End, so - you know - he's got form in this area. In between he produced specials, both in 2009/10 and 2023, and they culminated in big finales in both instances, but when Davies delivers a series, he does things in a slightly different way. There are emotional arcs, of course: can the Doctor keep Rose safe? Will he ever notice Martha's unrequited love? What will be the culmination of Donna's growth as a person? As well as that, though, and sometimes interlinked, is an observation game being played with the audience.

Susan Twist as Mrs. Merridew

Probably the most successful of these was in the first year of the returning Doctor Who; in most of the episodes, there was a visual or audio reference to two words, "Bad Wolf", and the explanation for this came explosively in the two-part finale. Davies is replicating this in a slightly different way in the 2024 run for all the adherents of the repeated meme watching at home. Cast without any in-story explanation in a different small role in each episode is actor Susan Twist: a face reappearing, haunting the Doctor and Ruby in different places and times. Her first appearance was in Wild Blue Yonder, back when David Tennant was still playing the fourteenth Doctor. Twist played Mrs. Merridew who exchanged a couple of lines with Isaac Newton in the pre-credits scene before the Doctor and Donna arrived. Looking back, this should have stood out more - the scene adds nothing and the episode could quite happily start with Newton already under the tree and save the money of hiring another actor. It didn't in fact go completely unnoticed at the time. As relayed in the blog post for WBY,  the story had little given away in advance publicity because of its minimalist nature. This meant some wild speculation grew that old Doctors or old companions might be appearing. The name "Susan Twist" being released in the cast list in advance of broadcast became part of that wild speculation. Was it a pseudonym, and was Carole Ann Ford, who played the very first companion in 1963, the Doctor's granddaughter Susan, going to appear? A cursory glance at imdb.com could undermine this theory, as Susan Twist has been acting since 1980. Could Davies deliberately have cast someone with a name that would initiate intrigue? It seemed unlikely, but not impossible.

Twist's appearance in Space Babies

When Twist didn't turn out to be Susan in Wild Blue Yonder that theory seemed to die. But from The Church on Ruby Road in December 2023 onwards, Twist kept showing up. In that Christmas story, she's a heckler in the audience watching Ruby's band. In Space Babies, she is one of the space-station crew on a screen expressing their objections to the order to abandon the babies. In The Devil's Chord, she appears for the first time in a shot interacting with the Doctor and Ruby, playing a tea lady in EMI's studios, though neither of the show's stars look directly at her. The biggest appearance to date was throughout third story Boom when Twist played the friendly face of the homicidal Villengard ambulance AI. When she appears in the following three stories (a hiker in 73 Yards, Lindy's Mum in Dot and Bubble, and a portrait of the "Duke's late mother" in Rogue) Ruby or the Doctor recognise her and comment. From the look of the trailer at the end of Rogue, The Legend of Ruby Sunday is going to address this fully. Twist plays a character called Susan Triad, and snatches of dialogue offer some surrounding explanation: the Doctor is heard to say "Everywhere I land, a woman appears", Twist's character says, apparently in agony, "In every dream I'm there" and finally the Doctor adds, seemingly referring to Twist's character, that she "doesn't know why, but she remembered them". So what does it all mean? There are two main theories. One points out that 'S. Triad' is an anagram of 'Tardis'. Twist started appearing only after Donna spilt a cup of coffee onto the time machine's newly reconfigured console, so maybe she is a manifestation of some time disturbance, or even the ship herself. Triad technology has been seeded in too (mentioned in dialogue in The Giggle, advertised on a bus in The Church of Ruby Road) so may be part of the long-term gameplan.

S. Triad

The other main theory is the original theory again. The character in the finale is Susan Triad, after all, and the Doctor made a glaring reference to his granddaughter in The Devil's Chord; was that just fan-pleasing background info or is it leading to a major revelation? Fanning the flames is a mysterious new edition of Tales of the TARDIS scheduled for broadcast on BBC4 and iplayer on the 20th June, shortly before the second part of the finale, Empire of Death, lands. There was a series of six of these spin-offs available in the UK in November 2023, newly made framing sequences starring a pair of Doctor Who cast (for the 20th June one, it's Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson) that wrap around edited omnibus versions of classic series stories. It could be a coincidence, but the timing suggests a tie-in to the events depicted in the series finale. Will it be a story featuring Susan or a TARDIS-centric story (or maybe The Edge of Destruction, which works as both)? Is it unconnected to the mystery of Twist, meaning some other old character is returning? Is it not going to feature old material at all and just be a recap of the season so far (if so, it's odd that it's on the 'heritage' channel of BBC4)? We should know soon enough, but there will likely still be questions left unanswered. Are we going to uncover all the mysteries of Ruby? Who was the cowled figure seen leaving her at the church when she was a newborn baby? Why does she have the Carol of the Bells playing in her soul somehow, and why does it snow indoors when she's sad? Who's the "one who waits"? Who's the Meep's boss, and is it the same new boss that Rogue mentioned he is now working for? Is the universe ever going to be righted such that the word 'mavity' is pronounced 'gravity' once again? Who is the mysterious Mrs. Flood, Ruby's neighbour? It feels like Doctor Who will need to run for at least ten more years to answer all that lot; bring it on, says I.

In Summary:

Space Babies!