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?!

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.

The Interstellar Song Contest

Chapter the 337th, where Graham Norton finally appears in a Doctor Who story (after a couple of previous attempts to gatecrash).

Plot:

[A recent story of the streaming era, so beware of spoilers ahead.] The Doctor and Bel materialise in Harmony Arena, a space station in a protective transparent bubble, in the year 2925. The arena is playing host to the interstellar song contest, presented by Rylan Clark (who's been revied from cryogenic freeze). The TARDIS team stay to watch the show, but soon the Doctor suspects something is wrong. Behind the scenes, one of the broadcasting crew Wynn from the planet Hellia is in cahoots with a terrorist from the same planet, Kid, and they have taken over. The audience in the arena including the Doctor are all ejected into space. They are still contained in the bubble, but frozen. The Doctor almost succumbs to freezing, but at the last second a vision of his granddaughter Susan inspires him to propel himself back. He meets up with Mike and Gary Gabbastone who help him hack into the arena's systems. Kid plans to use a delta wave to kill all the trillions of people watching as revenge against the corporation that sponsors the contest, who ravaged the planet Hellia for crops to make their product. The Doctor defeats Kid using a hard light hologram of himself. He is uncharacteristically rough with Kid, using the hologram to repeatedly hurt him. Kid and Wynn are arrested and taken away, and the Doctor, Mike and Gary work together to bring back and revive all the ladies and gentlemen floating in space. In a historic exhibit about the contest, a hologram of Graham Norton tells the Doctor and Bel that the Earth was destroyed on May 24th 2025. They have all the vindicator readings they need to travel back to that date; when they arrive, the TARDIS doors open and there is an explosion. Meanwhile, one of the last people to be revived is Mrs. Flood. She turns out to be an old enemy of the Doctor's, the Rani, and has been in the cold of space too long. She bi-generates, becoming two Ranis.

Context:

The Blu-ray box set of the ever-so slightly misnamed Doctor Who Season Two was delivered through my letterbox in late August 2025. This was not the William Hartnell nor even the David Tennant season two, but instead the second - and presumably final - series of Ncuti Gatwa's Doctor that was broadcast earlier in 2025. Since the blog started in 2015, whenever a new box set of recently-aired episodes arrived I would take the opportunity to use a random factor in deciding whether I would blog a story from the set, and which one if so. As this may be my last chance to do such a thing (for a while at least), I couldn't pass it up. There remained three stories from 2025 left un-blogged, The Well, the Interstellar Song Contest and two-part finale Wish World / The Reality War. I therefore rolled a d4, the first three numbered sides representing each of those three stories in turn, the fourth meaning no story would be blogged at this time. It came up as a two. I therefore skipped the earlier episodes and watched the sixth story on the set first, on my own one evening in late August.

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. Beyond the six stories now completed from the 2025 series, the tally stands at 12 Doctors' televisual eras completed (Doctors 1-4, 6-9 and 11-14), and 38 out of the 41 seasons completed to date (classic seasons 1-18, 20-26, and new series 1, 2, and 4-14). Of the 892 episodes of Doctor Who from An Unearthly Child up to The Reality War, 10 now remain.

First Time Round:

Through the previous five Saturdays of the 2025 run, my viewing was generally getting earlier and earlier. Episodes became available at 8am in the UK, but I like to sleep in a bit at weekends, so I never watched one quite that early. The Interstellar Song Contest was probably the one I watched soonest after it landed. At approximately 9.15am on the day it became available on the BBC iplayer (the 17th May 2025), Scott - fan friend mentioned a few times before on the blog - commented to our fan WhatsApp group warning the rest of us that we shouldn't go online until we'd watched the story as there would be spoilers everywhere. I viewed it as soon as I could get the middle child (boy of 16, 15 at the time, and the biggest Doctor Who fan in the house after me) settled in front of the living room TV with me.

Reaction:

Just as in his first term as showrunner, Russell T Davies seems to have a structure for each season of his second era. Each corresponding one of the eight episodes of 2024 and 2025 have similar shapes: the first two stories of both are relatively lightweight introductory tales, the first set out in space, the second in Earth's past. Those second episodes both feature a new villain from the Big Bad band that is the Pantheon of Discord, a taster for the two-part finales that will feature a returning villain from Doctor Who's history that has become a member of said group of titanic nasties. Third is a futuristic actioner with lots of hardware; the fourth stories are Doctor-lite, contemporary Earth stories centred around Ruby Sunday and featuring UNIT (teeing that organisation up for a return appearance in the two-part finale too). The fifth story is the thoughtful one, leaving the sixth - the last before that big finale - to be the camp one. Rogue filled this space in 2024, and in 2025 The Interstellar Song Contest manages to out-camp Rogue (no mean feat). The Doctor even uses the word to describe one moment during the action (using a confetti cannon to fly through space back to safety) - one of a few moments where the story comes as close as it can to a wink at the camera. In a way, though, this is misdirection. In the same way as long ago in 2005 episode Bad Wolf, the audience is presented with a high-concept idea (extreme futuristic versions of contemporary game shows in that instance) to disguise a twist involving the return of a classic Who enemy.

The 2025 high-concept idea ("Die Hard meets Eurovision" was the brief according to writer Juno Dawson) has us looking one way, when from another direction we're suddenly surprised by the return not just of a classic Who enemy, but a classic Who ally as well. Unlike in 2005, the surprises were not blown in the Coming Soon trailer the previous week either. These significant revelations from the season's arc plot (see Deeper Thoughts section for more on them) don't come at the expense of the story of the week. As well as being camp, The Interstellar Song Contest is pacey and fun. After several stories fumbling the motivations of their 'toxic' male villains, Kid is given a solid, straightforward rationale for his actions, and Freddie Fox brings the character to life excellently. Unlike with Alan Budd and Conrad Clark, the audience can legitimately feel sympathy for Kid's cause even though they don't agree with the murderous plans he makes in its name. The scene near the end of the Doctor ('ice' put in his heart by his time in the cold of space) torturing Kid shows the Doctor as the more toxic of the two males involved. It's a nice counterpoint tonally to the rest of the piece, a bit of grit in the oyster. The only issue is that it doesn't feel resolved; the Doctor doesn't face any consequences and barely even reflects. This is one of a few loose ends. The company that destroyed Hellia presumably faces no comeuppance, and the planet's unfair reputation remains in place. With the antagonists still alive at the end and all that unfinished business, there is potential for Kid and accomplice Wynn to return (if Doctor Who starts up again sometime soon).

Another good aspect of the season-wide plot shown here is Bel's character arc; this story sees her fully embrace the companion role, with her "Oh, we're so staying" at the start when she realises where she is, and the early scenes of her enjoying the contest. Again, this feels unresolved by the end of this story and the season: the trajectory feels like it's leading to a choice of whether to stay home once she gets there, or continue travelling with the Doctor; that's not what transpires (although it may have been part of the original plan before Ncuti decided to leave). All these loose ends are forgotten as the end blows everything away (somewhat literally) and moves on to the next thing. Does it make any sense, though? With the vindicator readings, the TARDIS is finally able to travel back to the 24th of May 2025, but when it reaches there, there's an explosion. This is the destruction of the planet caused by the Rani, evidence of which has been scattered through previous episodes. In the finale, though, we find that the Doctor is a part of the Rani's plans; his doubt contributes to the gradual destruction of the planet seen in the following episodes. So, how could it have happened before the TARDIS took him to Earth? This is more an issue arising from Wish World and The Reality War than the story that preceded them, though, so it might just need to be chalked up to 'timey-wimey' and put to the back of our minds when looking at The Interstellar Song Contest.

Even though it briefly features and leads in to Time Lord friends and foes and their universe-scale machinations, The Interstellar Song Contest's strength is in showcasing ordinary people / aliens. The story isn't really like Die Hard; in that movie the hero is operating alone, trapped in the enclosed area where the action's taking place. Here it's a slightly different trope: the plucky band of misfits who seem totally out-gunned, but who come together to win the day. Each one of these is written and performed well: the married couple having a realistic row, Mike and Gary (played by Kadiff Kirwan and Charlie Condou) turn out to have the tech skills and nursing skills to help the Doctor; the singer harbouring a secret and her manager (Miriam-Teak Lee and Akemnji Ndifornyen); the director behind the scenes (Kiruna Stamell). Then there are a couple of people gamely playing themselves, Rylan Clark and Graham Norton. Production values are consistently good: design, CGI and physical effects and prosthetics combine to make an expansive and diverse set of aliens in a consistent, believable world. Composer Murray Gold rises to the challenge of creating some Eurovision-like songs as well as his usual incidental music. There are some great lines in the script ("You'd need to be some sort of insane genius." "Hello. I'm the Doctor."). It all adds up to a very enjoyable experience.

Connectivity:

Both The Interstellar Song Contest and The Two Doctors include an appearance from a 1960s companion, appearing in the series again for the first time since The Five Doctors in 1983 (Susan, Jamie). Both feature female villains that first appeared in the Colin Baker era of Doctor Who (the Rani, Chessene).

Deeper Thoughts:

Never overlook the obvious. Unless you're busy. Sometime in 2005 before the first run of the new, returned Doctor Who was complete, there was an article or maybe a released synopsis that described eleventh episode of that year Boom Town. It said that it would involve the Doctor running into a woman from his past, or words to that effect. Immediately, a lot of the fan community speculated that it was the Rani, or Susan, or Romana (in that order of perceived likelihood). Needless to say, everyone that speculated wildly was then equally wildly disappointed when it turned out to be Annette Badland returning as Margaret Blaine, a character seen a few weeks earlier in Aliens of London / World War Three. Thereafter, various hints or non-hints caused similar bouts of speculation to occasionally break out. The trailer running ahead of Peter Capladi's second season finished with a brief clip from The Woman Who Lived: Maisie Williams's character unmasks, an astonished Doctor says "You!", and she replies "What took you so long, old man?". There was a short period of fevered imaginings about who Williams could be playing. The perceived order of likelihood this time was Susan, Romana, the Rani, mainly based on the actor's age. The disappointment was the same, and for the same reason: it turned out just to be a recurring character from that particular season, not the return of some longer-term character from the show's history. Over the years, it wasn't even necessary for any particular event to spur on the speculation, Every year from 2005, someone somewhere - probably multiple someones in many places - were fervently expecting the return of the Rani, or Susan, or Romana.

For every fan speculating there was a least another folding their arms and telling that first fan that they were mistaken. The Rani, to pick one example, was never coming back according to this second group. I have to admit I leant more towards their way of thinking. One reason for this was the Rani as a character doesn't have much definition beyond 'villainous female Time Lord'. Any individuality came from the performance Kate O' Mara gave in the two stories she appeared in as the Rani in the late 1980s. The creators of the character Pip and Jane Baker had put down on the page that she was amoral rather than evil. She was only interested in science and saw humans as experimental fodder, but she wouldn't harm a human if it didn't advance her studies. O' Mara didn't play her like that, though, she played her (impeccably) as a hissable panto villain. It didn't seem worth bringing the character back unless you could bring the actor back too. O' Mara, though, wasn't really doing television acting once the show was back (she only has two imdb credits post-2005). She then passed away in 2014. The same year, the Master was returned to Doctor Who regenerated into a woman. So, the female Time Lord panto villain gap was filled. What would be the point after that in bringing back the Rani? Of course, the fun of the character's return in Ncuti Gatwa's era is that there is no real point. The speculators had been assuming every female villain in the show was going to turn out to be the Rani for nearly 20 years, it would be far too obvious for the mysterious Mrs. Flood to turn out to be the Rani. The arms-folded naysayers like myself, though, had been so consistently proved right about the character's non-return, over and again for nearly twenty years, that it flipped things and the most obvious reveal turned out to be the most surprising.

Susan then returns in the self-same episode. Russell T Davies had put a reference to Susan in The Devil's Chord in Gatwa's first season. The Doctor telling Ruby that he has a granddaughter was the most explicit reference to the character in decades. Later in the year, there were hints and speculations by the characters that the mysterious woman whose face the Doctor and Ruby keep seeing across the universe was Susan. That character's name was Susan, and she was even played by an actor called Susan. It was far too obvious that she would turn out to be the real, actual Susan. And she wasn't; it was too soon for everybody's guard to be down such that the obvious return would still be surprising. Davies waited until the next season when everyone had forgotten, and then brought her back. Not in a big finale, just in the middle of the penultimate story of the year that everyone might have assumed was all about Space Eurovision. The series has pulled similar switcheroos before. For example, in 1980s story Remembrance of the Daleks, there is a character that looks and sounds a lot like Davros who turns out not to be Davros. Davros then returns anyway, but not where a viewer might have expected. Writer of that story Ben Aaronovitch originally only had the first twist; he realised during rewriting that the audience would feel shortchanged, and included Davros after all. Davies has done the same, but over the course of a season rather than a story. Where can the show go from here (assuming it comes back)? There's still Romana, of course, but I can't see any particular reason to bring her back (time travelling companion whom the Doctor fancies has been done with River Song). I was wrong about the Rani, though, so what do I know? 

In Summary:

Camp and fun, just like Eurovision, but pacier and with added Doctor Who continuity: what's not to like?

The Robot Revolution

Chapter the 334th, which features a Schwup! And You Know Who.

Plot:

[A recent story of the streaming era, so beware of spoilers ahead.] In 2008, Belinda Chandra had a star named after her by a boyfriend, Alan, who she dumped soon after; she kept the certificate, though. Seventeen years later, after her nursing shift at a London hospital, Bel's back at home when a rocket descends into her back garden and some heavily-armed robots emerge. They are from the planet Missbelindachandra One, which orbits her distant star, and have come to take her there. She will be queen and marry the great AI Generator. They pull the star certificate from the wall, and present it to her: a binding contract. The Doctor, who has heard about Belinda Chandra (from Conrad Clark in Lucky Day, continuity fans!), pursues the rocket in the TARDIS, but as both ships approach the planet, they fly into a time fracture. Schwup! This only sends Bel back a few seconds, when she's mid-rant about how the robots should press-gang Alan to be their leader instead of her, as he was the one who named their star. The Doctor meanwhile goes six months into the past. Separated from the TARDIS, he works with rebel humans who have been trying to overthrow the robots since the machines revolted ten years before. When Bel arrives six months later, the rebels attack, but they can't defeat the more powerful robots. The Doctor, with the surviving rebels and Bel, retreats to a makeshift hospital for the wounded, where Bel helps out.

Knowing that the attacks will keep coming, Bel gives herself up to the robots and is taken to the AI Generator. This is revealed to be Alan, melded with the machinery. The robots took Bel's instruction and went to get Alan, but because of the time fracture arrived with him on Missbelindachandra One ten years earlier. He started the robot revolution (his controlling personality influencing the world once he was plugged into the machinery). Somehow, the planet had previously come across the star certificate, and with the version that Bel has with her from home, there are now two time-displaced versions of it in the same place and time. The Doctor gives Bel the idea to touch them both together - this causes a time explosion. The Doctor pulls Bel clear, but Alan is regressed back to a sperm and an egg. Freed from his influence, the people and robots of Missbelindachandra One can live in harmony. The Doctor tries to return Belinda home, but something is stopping the TARDIS from getting to the 24th May 2025. After an unsuccessful attempt, the Doctor dematerialises the TARDIS before seeing that the area of space he was just in contains lots of familiar Earth detritus, almost as if the planet has been destroyed... 

Context:

The Robot Revolution came up in a random selection just a day before the novelisation of the story popped through my letterbox alongside some other books retelling Ncuti Gatwa TV stories (see Deeper Thoughts section below for more details). As such, I did the story twice over in quick succession: I watched the TV version from the BBC iplayer in mid-July, and then experienced the story in prose form over a few days after 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 is the fourth of the seven Ncuti Gatwa stories of 2025 to be blogged. Beyond that, the tally stands at 11 Doctors' televisual eras completed (Doctors 1-4, 7-9 and 11-14), and 37 out of the 41 seasons completed to date (classic seasons 1-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, and 4-14). Of the 892 episodes of Doctor Who from An Unearthly Child up to The Reality War, 14 now remain.

First Time Round:

I was excitedly looking forward to Ncuti Gatwa's second season, but sometimes I felt like I was the only one. On Friday 11th April, the day before The Robot Revolution, opening story of the run, all I could see around me were online tabloid news stories forecasting doom for my favourite show. This then impacted fan conversations and speculation too, with everyone talking about the end before we'd even seen the beginning. I got caught up in it to a certain extent, musing on a WhatsApp group with some fan friends that they had perhaps got Ncuti in to record a voice-over for the very end of the season finale, as Sylvester McCoy had for Survival in 1989: "Somewhere out there are space babies, and the Interstellar Song Contest, and somewhere else the tea is getting cold; come on, Bel, we've got work to do...". I watched the story from the BBC iplayer quite late on the following Saturday, only a smidge earlier than it would have been broadcast on BBC1. Before then, I'd read two online reviews in advance; one said the show was in rude health and the plot developments were audacious, the other said that the show was corny and the plot developments were ridiculous. The WhatsApp group was similarly divided, and ultimately so was I. The first time I watched - when, for full disclosure I have to tell you, I'd had a couple of beers - I enjoyed it very much. I watched it back a couple of days later, and a couple of script issues irritated me. What would I make of it on this latest watch...?

Reaction:

The pre-credits sequence for this story is fairly lengthy (by the time it's completed and the credits have rolled, seven minutes have elapsed), and it's magnificent (for the most part). The central idea - someone has a star named after them and because of that ends up being dragged off to a planet around that star to become their monarch - is inventive and fun, a perfect fit for Doctor Who. The sequence is nicely paced, starting with a sedate two-hander scene when young Belinda gets the star certificate, then jumping forward to 2025 and a high velocity sequence of Bel working as a nurse in the hospital while the Doctor tries to track her down; this introduces us to the new character (and the existing lead too, for those joining the show for the first time). Then, we're in Bel's home and there's some funny flat share comedy before everything explodes and spaceships and robots crash into her life and change it forever. There's even time for a cameo from Mrs. Flood (the over-arching mystery of this season and the last) before Bel zooms off in a beautifully designed retro rocket, with the Doctor shouting her name after her as the rocket disappears into the sky.  It's six minutes and 55 seconds of brilliance. There's just that five second duff moment, though, when Alan Budd - Bel's boyfriend in 2008 - explains the distance to the star she's had named after her; he says "I know girls aren't good at maths, but that's a long way". That's a bit on the nose, isn't it? It's hard to rationalise why anyone would say something like that in any scenario, particularly one where they're giving someone a gift. It's cartoonishly on the nose, in fact. Watching first time we don't know anything about Alan nor the tone of the piece as a whole; cartoonish might well turn out to be in keeping. Plus, it's only the briefest moments; so, it's easy to let it go.

Unfortunately, and particularly on any subsequent viewings, more and more such moments stand out, and collectively they are more and more damaging. Mostly the duff moments are centred around Alan Budd, who's revealed to be the villain of the story. Because of a quirk of time, ten years before Bel's arrival he has become the part-man, part machine overlord of this world, and caused the robot revolution. The reveal of this includes two jokes that are just bad. First, it's not the AI generator, it's the AL generator, Because his name's Alan, which could be shortened to Al. But why would it be called that - it's not generating any new versions of Alan? And when and why would it have been labelled such? And who would have done this if not the robots, so why don't they remember? It's only been ten years, not long enough for every robot to have forgotten that one day they painted a name onto the generator (seemingly for no reason other than to set up a clumsy and lame reveal in a decade's time). Second, there is the joke that Bel thought Alan had moved to Margate, when it was actually "Stargate". But he didn't travel through any stargate, and even if he had Bel wouldn't know this and neither would anyone else on Earth. So, the joke isn't about some silly corruption of language through retelling, the joke is just that Margate sounds a bit like Stargate. Sheesh. Writer of the story, and showrunner of Doctor Who, Russell T Davies can usually do jokes and emotion well; he's having an off day here, as the emotion is just as illogical as those two gags. The script wants to say something about toxic masculinity, but it can't decide exactly what. Alan was a bit bossy with Belinda when they dated, and this is described as coercive control. It's not coercive control, and if it's supposed to be some cartoonish version of coercive control suitable for inclusion in a Doctor Who story, then that's just offensive.

Within a breath, though, Bel has described Alan's fiefdom as the "Planet of the incels". Incel behaviour and coercive control are very different types of toxic masculinity. Not completely incompatible, of course - an incel could probably be coercive and controlling of their Mum - but generally you have to have a partner to control, and incels can't get partners (or at least feel they can't). That's the whole point. So, is the idea that Alan had Belinda as a girlfriend, got too controlling and lost her, has never been able to get a date since, and that's caused him to become angry and radicalised? This is too detailed a psychological make-up to get across in the cartoonish style of the story. Anyway, I'm not buying it. When we see Alan in a flashback arriving at the planet, he doesn't seem angry or hate-filled: he's treating everything as a lark. There's the hint in the dialogue at this point that he feels the people of this planet are just so many non-playing characters in a computer game; this also doesn't fit with any of the previous attempts at nailing down the psychology of this character. Then, he calmly orders someone to be shot dead. Oh, so now he's a psychopath (but still a cartoonish one): where did that come from? As ugly as it might be, the logical extension of incel behaviour is for Alan to be a danger only to Bel, the person who turned him down, ruined his life, etc. Why would he have any beef with anyone else? And the logical extension of coercive control would not escalate to killing people so quickly. There's just nothing about the character that's psychologically consistent or true, so the next handbrake-turn of the script where we are supposed to feel some sympathy for Alan can't possibly work. The script forgets all about it instantly anyway; once the plot climaxes with a big timey-wimey explosion and Alan's regressed to a fertilised egg, he's literally wiped out of existence, and it's treated as a joke.

Usually, a protagonist is only as good as the antagonist. Luckily, this isn't the case in The Robot Revolution. Belinda Chandra is a much more rounded and well-written character, and Varada Sethu plays her well. This is achieved because the more interesting antagonism is between her and the Doctor; she calls him on some of his stuff, which works well. The story is a good showcase for character and actor, and that's almost all of what it was intended to be. The jokey references to the topical - Netflix's acclaimed Adolescence, a much more serious treatment of those topics, had landed with a splash only a month before The Robot Revolution - expanded Who's online publicity, so probably would be seen by the production team as 'job done' too. With some more discipline regarding Alan Budd's characterisation and a few other tweaks, this could have been something much more special. For example, the moment where Bel hands herself in to stop the violence meted out on the planet's populace is done by her betraying the rebels' position, and bringing the robots to a battlefield hospital. It's such a stupid risk for her character to take: the robots could have immediately killed all the wounded and the carers. It wouldn't have taken any effort at all to rework such that Bel can do the self-sacrifice where she's only sacrificing herself, therefore not making her look careless / callous. Other aspects are better, for example the device where secret messages can be snuck in to normal speech as the robots don't hear every ninth word. The mysteries are nicely set up at the end too, to be resolved later in the season. The question of how the certificate got to be on the planet might have been better resolved as part of this robot story, however, as the wider mystery of what's happened to the Earth is enough of a hook, and the eventual certificate pay-off is prosaic and disappointing.

Connectivity:

Both The Robot Revolution and Shada involve a lone male antagonist that uses technology to control others on a mass scale. Not quite a link to Shada, but to its author Douglas Adams: Belinda is unexpectedly taken off world in a spaceship while still wearing her PJs, just like Arthur Dent in Adams's most famous work.

Deeper Thoughts:

Right on Target: Book Reviews. A new Target tranche was published on the 10th July 2025. Like the two batches released in 2024, it comprises prose adaptations of up-to-the-minute stories, with no revisiting the first 59 years of the show. The furthest delve back into the archive is a story from 2024; apart from that, there are books for the first three stories of the 2025 run. Una McCormack, a very experienced writer of Doctor Who and other Sci-fi books, tackles The Robot Revolution. The main structural change she makes is to take the scenes that occurred on TV as flashbacks and put them into chronological order. The story starts with Bel as a newborn receiving her jathakam astrological chart from an aunt, which predicts that she will travel. This may have been a scene in the original that was cut, from either script or shot footage, as there is still a brief reference in the finished TV story about Bel's destiny. The prose works to ground Bel's character more than the whistle-stop scenes that TV required: as the chapters continue, Bel grows up, meets Alan, their relationship develops and then falters, but not before he's inadvertently set up her destiny with the star certificate. During this, there are glimpses of a mysterious stranger appearing randomly. This is the Doctor flitting through Bel's timeline as a result of the time explosion at the climax. It works very well, more intriguing for showing rather than telling (which was all the TV version had time to do). Also improved by the chronological ironing out are the main characters on Missbelindachandra One, Sasha and Manny; seeing their history play out linearly brings home the devastation that the robot revolution has wreaked. McCormack also puts a lot of effort into fixing the contradictions of Alan's characterisation mentioned in the Reaction section above. It's a good stab, but doesn't quite come off. This is wholly the blame of the original script, of course.

James Goss's novelisation of second story Lux has no such challenges, as the motivations and psychology of its characters are much more clear and consistent. Goss runs with this; there's a little bit of Douglas Adams-esque omniscient cosmic narrator (covering the competition between humans' capacity for creativity versus destruction over the centuries) but mostly his prose gets into the characters' heads. There are sequences from the perspective of projectionist Reginald Pye and Lizzie (hosting a Doctor Who viewing for her fan friends Hassan and Robyn). A memorable passage late on shows Lux the God of Light's POV too. Most of the action, though, is from the viewpoint of Belinda. This is her second story and a lot of the thoughts Goss writes for her involve her gradual acceptance of the madcap life she has suddenly found herself living. As in his adaptation of The Giggle (see Deeper Thoughts of this blog post for more details), there is much use of typography, white space and illustration between the text to help tell the story and capture the TV version's tone. There are also numerous lovely in-jokes and continuity references, none of which I'll spoil here. One significant addition is the prose retelling of a "deleted" scene during the section where the Doctor and Bel try to escape Lux's celluloid trap: a widescreen recreation of a famous moment from North by Northwest. Was this really a deleted scene from the script, or something Goss invented? I think I'd rather not know, and leave it deliciously ambiguous. The only tiny criticism of the book is another additional scene of the three Doctor Who fans inserted in the middle where they pause the story in order to have a tea break. Goss obviously wanted not to have too big a gap before returning to these characters (who appear at the start of the book), but I can't think that any sort of fan would pause a brand new episode for long enough to boil a kettle. I can believe a cartoon coming to life easier than I can believe that!

Unusually, this batch of novelisations includes none authored by the original screenwriter. Acclaimed Sci-fi and horror author Gareth L. Powell is the person who got the gig to turn Sharma Angel-Walfall and Russell T Davies's script for The Well into prose. It's a gig he was pleased to get; as outlined in his Acknowledgements section at the back of the book, he has been a Doctor Who fan since watching Tom Baker in the 1970s, with the reading of Target novels being a big part of that fandom. Even without that confirmation, I would likely have suspected he was a fan: he uses an apposite Jon Pertwee Doctor Who quote as the novelisation's epigraph, and takes evident pleasure in getting inside the Doctor's head in writing passages with the titular Time Lord as the viewpoint character. This always needs careful handling by any author, as it risks subtracting from the mystery of the character, but Powell manages it with verve. He effortlessly captures the energy of Ncuti Gatwa's fifteenth incarnation. Particularly good is a passage where the Doctor is just about to face off against the antagonist and gives himself an internal pep talk. At even more potential risk of depleting the mystery, Powell has a few sections from the antagonist's point of view too; he gets away with it. As well as sometimes being privy to their thoughts, the reader also gets backstory of the trooper guest characters in the form of their personnel files, interspersed within the middle chapters of the book. This all changes the story to be more ruminative than the high velocity actioner that was the TV version. The material just about stands up to this scrutiny, but any deficiencies are from the original script and not down to Powell (I haven't reviewed the story for the blog yet, but - despite its popularity - I'm personally not sure it's all that).

Scott Handcock novelises the two-part finale of 2024's season (the novel going by just the second episode's title). In his role of script editor for the telly version, he was familiar with cut material he could reinstate. There's a new opening section with the Doctor and Ruby tracking down a Susan Triad in the US in 1946; that's just one of many new versions of the mystery woman that appear, some of which might have been budget-busting on TV, and one of which is a reference back to a classic Who story that will be recognised with a smile by long-term fans. All these then reappear later to spread Sutekh's dust of death, which gives a more epic, universe-wide feel to that section. The prose is peppered with continuity references, but they're subtle enough that none that will trouble the uninitiated. It's overall a much less playful approach than James Goss in Lux, but nonetheless Handcock does mess a little with conventions: the prologue turns up after a couple of chapters as an illustration of the out-of-order nature of time travel; also, there's an interlude in the middle to get the reader up to speed with Sutekh's history that uses some of the surrounding material from the Tales of the TARDIS omnibus of 1970s story Pyramids of Mars. Despite the book not having the excellent vocal work of Gabriel Woolf' (to whom the book is dedicated, by the by), Sutekh is still alive on the page, A passage about his plans for those few soldiers who made it to the bunker in UNIT HQ is memorably chilling. Latter sequences are extended or alternate versions of those in the original - it's thorough, but at the expense of pace. If you're going to buy only one of these four, Lux edges it for me; but the other three books all have something to offer. Even just as artefacts, they are eminently collectible - an excellent design bringing together Dan Liles's retro artwork and a smart foil-embossed Doctor Who logo.

In Summary:

A great idea, great design, and a great new companion, but the antagonist is sketchily written, and this damages the story as a whole.