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?!