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

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

Plot:

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

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

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

Context:

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

Me at the foot of Torchwood Tower

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

First Time Round:

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

Reaction:

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

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

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

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

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

Connectivity:

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

Deeper Thoughts:

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

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

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

In Summary:

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

Torchwood: Children of Earth

Chapter the 339th, where other members of Torchwood discover they don't know Jack. 

Plot:

One day, across the world, all children suddenly stop moving for a few minutes. Later, they do the same again, but this time they go on to speak, in unison. This keeps happening; each message they speak is eerier and eerier, warning that something is returning. Some force is controlling them, and a branch of the UK government (represented by civil servant John Frobisher and technician Dekker) seems very clued up on it. They start making preparations for a visit by aliens known to them as the 456 (a number relating to the frequency they broadcast on). The government did a deal with the aliens in the 1960s, giving them twelve children under threat of the release of a virus that would have wiped out millions. One adult is also controlled by this unseen force, and speaks along with the children. This is Clem McDonald. He was the only one of the twelve who managed to escape. Captain Jack was one of the handlers delivering the children back then. An order is given by Frobisher to kill him and the rest of Torchwood as part of a cover-up. Gwen and Ianto manage to get away before the Torchwood Hub in Cardiff is destroyed. Jack is blown up, but his remains are taken away, as his death-defying abilities cause him to slowly reform. Gwen and Ianto (assisted by Rhys) break his rebuilt self out of where he was being held, and (assisted by PC Andy) they collect Clem too. In hiding, they work with a political aide Lois Habiba whom they've recruited to use Torchwood tech to infiltrate and record the government's dealings with the 456. The aliens demand ten percent of the world population of children. Lois records discussions between politicians on how to choose which children to be handed over.

As part of negotiations, it is revealed that the 456 hook themselves up to the children to imbibe certain chemicals from them, for their narcotic effects. Using the threat to release the recordings as a bargaining chip, Jack and Ianto talk their way into the room in Thames House where an ambassador of the 456 is based: they confront the alien and it releases a lethal virus. Jack is resurrected, but Ianto is dead. The 456 also kill Clem, who they refer to as the Remnant, by remote control with a sonic signal. The government starts to round up children from poorer families, with a cover story of a mass inoculation programme to stop the children from coming under alien control. Gwen, Rhys and Ianto's sister and brother-in-law help some children to evade the army who are gathering up the kids. The Prime Minister informs Frobisher that his children are also to be given to the 456 to demonstrate that it is not just ordinary families that are making the sacrifice. To avoid this, Frobisher shoots his wife, two children and then himself dead. Jack realises that the 456 killed Clem as otherwise he might have provided an opportunity for them to be killed. He needs to send a signal but needs a child that's hooked in to the 456's control. He uses his grandson, the child of a mother who was herself the issue from a decades old dalliance. The solution works, and the 456 leave Earth, but Jack's grandson is killed and his mother swears she will never see Jack again. Consumed by guilt, Jack decides to leave Earth and travel the galaxy.

Context:

It was mid-September 2025, and my eldest (young man of 19) was a week away from returning to university for his second year. He's a huge Peter Capaldi fan, mainly from his work in The Thick of It, but from his performance as the Doctor too. I mentioned that I was about to blog a story that featured Capaldi and that the actor was very good in it; he was persuaded to join me. The two of us watched the five episodes stripped across a week, one episode per evening, just as it was originally broadcast. I'd wanted to blog a Torchwood story (and thought I may as well blog the indisputably best one) as I'd covered at least one story from all other Doctor Who spin-off series. The only issue was that it failed the very first of my canon test questions: Does it star the Doctor? It stars an actor that would later go on to play the Doctor, but that doesn't cut it. Given that I will in future, just for completeness, cover the as yet unaired spin-off The War Between the Land and the Sea - which now looks to be coming in 2026 rather than 2025 - and that won't feature the Doctor either, I will have to tolerate a very occasional relaxing of this rule. The character anyway has something of a presence in Children of Earth just because of his absence. The rest of the canon questions were fine. Was it released as an official Doctor Who or official spin-off story (i.e. its not an unofficial fan-made proposition)? Yes. Is there a dramatic context to the story (i.e. it's not just a skit)? Yes. Was it released with the intention of being the main attraction for audience engagement (i.e. it's not just an extra on a DVD or Blu-ray)? Yes. Have I already covered it in passing with another connected story? No.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now approaching the point where I catch up. Aside from spin-offs like Torchwood: Children of Earth, 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:

As I've mentioned when covering stories from 2009 for the blog before, Doctor Who's so-called 'gap year' (2009 was the first year since the 21st century return of the show that a full series was not broadcast) was really nothing of the sort: there were several goodies for Doctor Who fans spread across the year that meant only ever a few months' at a maximum elapsed before one could see something new. In July, this Torchwood story was one such goodie, broadcast an episode per night across a week (matching the narrative structure of each episode being set over the course of a single one of five consecutive days). I watched each one live as they went out on BBC1. I think it's fair to say that the strength of reaction surprised a lot of people; the story was a steep step-up in quality from the previous two seasons, and it attracted a reasonably large audience. That was nothing, though, compared to the size and surprise of the fan backlash regarding the death of series regular Ianto Jones; the main memory I have from first time around is, alas, all of that nonsense (more details in the Deeper Thoughts section below).

Reaction:

Let's start with Peter Capaldi, whose presence in the cast was one of the major reasons I picked this story to watch. His performance as John Frobisher - an ordinary man thrust into extraordinary situations, a man who goes to extraordinary lengths for somewhat tawdry aims; a man who's ruthless and determined but weak, and yet aware of his own weakness - is not just the best performance he's ever given in any 'Whoniverse' story, but might also be Capaldi's best work in anything ever. I know this is a bold claim, but just watch him over the course of these five episodes. Every expression, every twitch, every tiny movement of a muscle, all are completely under his control and finely calibrated. Sometimes he's giving this acting masterclass without even appearing to be moving; it's like his skin is able to act independently of any other body part. He embodies the role, in every sense of that word. It's not as showy as this sounds. The prevailing tone of the piece is fairly realistic, but this is no kitchen-sink drama. It's Torchwood: there are pyrotechnics and car chases and aliens. Capaldi's aligned with that overall tone, but grounded enough that one never sees - not from his first appearance all the way up to the character's devastatingly tragic final moments - any Capaldi on screen, only John Frobisher, worrying himself to death as he tries to do his job while gradually running out of options. This wasn't a rehearsal for playing the Doctor (no doubt there are some fan-fics out there that posit it, but its very hard to reconcile that final scene with John Frobisher being the twelfth Doctor in disguise); the actor had already played a guest character in the main show, and now was doing the same in a Who spin-off, he probably thought this was his last roll of the dice. It was lucky that the show carried on long enough that he could play the main role eventually.

With such a powerhouse performance from one member of the cast, it's perhaps surprising that Capaldi doesn't stand out that much. He's just one of an incredibly strong guest cast, none of whom equal him, but many come close. There's too many to mention them all but a few to pick out: Nicholas Farrell as slippery Prime Minister Brian Green, the real villain of the piece; Ian Gelder as Dekker, the amoral techie with a keen sense of self-preservation; Paul Copley bringing the pathos, as well as the humanity, as Clem McDonald, the only adult affected by the 456's control; Cush Jumbo as Lois Habiba, the slightly unwilling rookie recruit to Torchwood. Then there's a pre-Ghosts Katy Wix as Rhiannon Davies, Ianto's sister. The scenes of Ianto and his family are some of the funniest and most real that Torchwood ever had. Every member of the guest cast in whatever role, big or small, is taking the excellent material in the script and making it even better. A good example of this is the chilling COBRA scenes, where politicians and civil servants sit in Cabinet Office Briefing Room A and discuss the vast Trolley problem scenario with which they are confronted. Nicholas Briggs, who's usually heard but not seen on Doctor Who as he voices Daleks, Cybermen and many other creatures, has a rare in-camera role, and shines with only a few lines of dialogue. All this talent is a good buffer protecting the regular cast. The narrative sees the Torchwood team isolated and mainly working on their own (they barely interact with Capladi's Frobisher, for example). Without meaning to be too negative, this is possibly a reason why this story tends to be more well thought of than other Torchwood tales. The - somewhat arch and fabricated - dramatic world of the regular characters does not dominate the running time, and we continually cut to other characters to keep the action grounded in reality.

With no offence meant to them or any of their fans, the actors playing the surviving members of Torchwood (John Barrowman as Captain Jack, Eve Myles as Gwen Cooper and Gareth David-Lloyd as Ianto) don't have great range. What they can do they do well: they can do action, they can do sass, they can do standing and staring mysteriously into the middle-distance as they contemplate what action or sass is just about to happen. It's a stretch to expect much more than that (and it is generally enough, to be fair). There's a couple of times that Barrowman is asked to go beyond this into grief and anguish, and the moments don't quite convince; neither do Myles and David-Lloyd's depictions of the betrayal of Jack turning out to have been involved with an earlier grubby scheme to placate the 456 from decades before (but this shouldn't have come as much of a surprise to them if they stopped to think about it - why else would the government want him killed?). Doing much better are the semi-regulars of Torchwood, Kai Owen as Rhys Williams and Tom Price as PC Andy, who both get given softball comedy material (and - to give both of them their due - knock it out of the park). It doesn't really matter too much, as the story has so many groups of characters to cut to, all of them being put through the ultimate in dramatic twists and turns. Kudos is deserved for Russell T Davies and the other writers: what's on the page is so strong that any cast would have looked good delivering it; that it's a top drawer guest cast, and pretty likeable set of regulars, elevates this to a special level.

One of the key strengths of the script is the simple but effective ideas that drive it: every scene of the possessed kids acting and talking in sync is instantly and eerily effective, and doesn't trouble the effects budget. Apart from some body horror based on the indestructible Jack reforming after being blown to bits, the terrors of Children of Earth are pretty low tech, and all the more striking because of that. This extends to the conception of baddies the 456 on page and on screen. It's a straightforward analogue: they are gangsters who deal in drugs pulling a protection racket; unknowably more powerful than the human race, they have us at their mercy. The visuals of the creatures are also perfect: shrouded and mysterious in clouds of vapour, expressing themselves with thrashing alien limbs and splats of expectorated goo. That motivation for an adversary, and the scary visuals, would not have been possible to do in the more family-friendly main show; with this story, Torchwood is finally utilising its post-watershed status effectively to work for the drama, rather than just add sex and swearing to sci-fi tales. Children of Earth is bleak, with many reprehensible characters surviving to the end without any comeuppance. Ideas and visuals are perfectly framed by the structure, the relentless nature of each episode covering a day brings the audience in inevitable increments, closer and closer, to the dilemmas and compromises inherent in the story's basic premise: what would - what could - any of us sacrifice for the greater good? Ultimately, Frobisher and Jack are shown as the only ones brave or ruthless enough to sacrifice their own progeny, the former to escape a terrible fate for his family, the latter to save the world at an awful cost.

The devastating ending somewhat makes up for the only weak point of the narrative, the ending of the fourth episode. The violent retribution of the 456, including Ianto's death, is effective at upping the ante, but it involves both him and Jack acting out of character: they meticulously plan infiltrating the government meetings using all technology they have to use; but, they abandon all that once they get into a room with the 456; it seems suicidally remiss of them to have given no thought to what they would do once they have confronted the baddies. The shock of a regular character getting killed off covers this up on first watch, but with each repeat viewing this gap in character logic makes the event seem more and more pointless. It is most uncharacteristic of Torchwood of all teams to go off half-cocked. This is a minor flaw in the scheme of things, though, and the rest of the story stands up there with the best that Doctor Who and all its spin-offs have to offer. It's certainly odd, though: one of the greatest stories in the Whoniverse is a Torchwood story; who would have guessed that before the story aired? It seems unbelievable even at the time of writing, 16 years on.

Connectivity:

Both Torchwood: Children of Earth and Exploration Earth: The Time Machine are Doctor Who spin-offs with the word Earth somewhere in the title.

Deeper Thoughts:

Ianto, we hardly knew ye. At the time of writing this (2025), the internet is ever prone to go into meltdown; it barely takes a whisper. In 2009, before the mass adoption of social media, it was less common; nonetheless, 2009 saw a meltdown take place related to the events at the end of part four of Torchwood Children of Earth. I could have put lots of spoiler warnings above about Ianto's death at that point in the narrative, but it would have been pointless. There's a shrine. There's a f**king shrine, for chrissakes. Almost immediately after the broadcast of the episode, fans started to leave flowers, photos and messages in the Cardiff Bay location where the entrance to the underground Torchwood Hub was fictionally based. And they haven't really stopped since. The shrine is still there after all these years; it's become a tourist attraction of sorts and has its own Tripadvisor entry and wikipedia page. It is one of the manifestations of fandom mentality that I most struggle to understand. For a start, these offerings aren't being placed at the site of the character's demise - he dies in Thames House in London, so really the shrine should be there. Wherever these fans choose to do it, though, they are paying tribute to a person who doesn't exist. Clearly, the character meant a lot more to many than he did to me; he must have meant more to people than the characters of Tosh and Owen (regulars who were killed off in the series the year before Children of Earth and got not even a single bloom left for them anywhere in the Cardiff area). People buy or pick flowers, write or draw, bring photos and even merch and go some distance out of their way to travel to a dockside wall, all to commemorate the life and death of someone who doesn't exist. Believe it or not, though, this is not the strangest reaction people had to Ianto's passing.

In 2009, I knew James Moran - co-writer of one of the episodes of Children of Earth - a tiny bit. He was the most successful of a group of screenwriting bloggers, of whom I was also a (much less successful) member, a friend of a friend, and I'd socialised with him briefly in person at a screenwriting festival in 2008. He was not a bosom buddy, nor even much of an acquaintance; so, perhaps it was presumptuous of me to take a tiny bit of personal offence at the torrent of hate that was directed at him online after Children of Earth's fourth episode aired. Given that Moran is a real human being, and the people directing hate at him were taking a huge chunk of personal offence about the fate of an entirely fictional person, I feel I should be forgiven for my presumption in this instance. It was just horrible. As I said at the start of these thoughts, there's been many a virtual pile-on in the years since, some of which probably make 'Ianto-gate' look like a tea party; nonetheless, it was the worst I'd witnessed up to that point (I was a web savvy Doctor Who fan too, so I wasn't unaccustomed, alas, to online bile). To summarise for those unaware of the history: immediately after the tragic end of Ianto aired, Moran was bombarded on twitter and in the comments section of his blog by fans expressing in strong terms their unhappiness at the events of the episode. He was accused of misleading, manipulating and mocking fandom, and much else besides. He had to suspend comments on the blog and disappear from the web for a while. If the shrine was the more positive side of the overreaction, this was the ugly side. It's worth pointing out that Moran didn't write the fourth episode, he co-wrote the third in which no beloved characters die. He just happened to be the only one of the writers with an online presence, and hence was the only person available to whom the baying mob could vent their ire.

There was more activity beyond the shrine and the online whine; there was a Save Ianto Jones campaign that demanded that the character be brought back somehow and encouraged readers of its website to inundate the BBC with complaints (they also raised a large amount of money for charity, let it be noted). Why was it Ianto that inspired such feeling? He had something of a status as an LGBTQ+ Who icon, because of the plot arc threaded through Torchwood before and including Children of Earth about his attraction for and relationship with Captain Jack. A number of commentators in the immediate aftermath of the character's death mentioned that destroying a same sex relationship in such a dramatic way was disappointingly heteronormative (some even reportedly said is was homophobic / biphobic). I've got a small amount of sympathy with this point of view, but as mentioned it wasn't exactly rare for Torchwood to kill characters off. From its very first episode, it was made very clear that Torchwood operated in a part of the Whoniverse that was a lot more dangerous and less cuddly than Doctor Who's snug corner; people - off all ages, colours, creeds and orientations - were likely to die. Nobody was calling for the old guy or the young lad killed off by the 456 to be brought back (and nobody knew anything definitive about their sexuality). No, I suspect the concerns about Ianto's status as an LGBTQ+  icon were a post facto rationalisation; the disproportionate reaction came first. It's a mystery. Torchwood fans obviously adored him, and maybe even they themselves didn't fully know why. That's no excuse for attacking people online, of course. Ianto was never 'saved' but he'll never be forgotten: the shrine remains as an enduring reminder of the character and that moment of fan excess.

In Summary:

One of the greatest stories in the Whoniverse is a Torchwood story - go figure.

Exploration Earth: The Time Machine

Chapter the 338th, a tiny bit more of Tom.

Plot:

The Doctor and Sarah Jane hover the TARDIS in space, and use a two-person capsule to float outside the ship and watch the formation of the planet Earth, taking many time jumps forward to see the progress of the planet, oxygen forming, life starting. Occasionally during this, the Doctor is harangued by Megron, lord of chaos. Megron believes that what is being witnessed is chaos, but the Doctor insists that on the contrary it is order. Eventually, the Doctor and Megron have a mental battle; the Doctor wins, and Megron is banished from planet Earth.

Context:

I wanted to link a blog post to the 20th September BFI Southbank Terror of the Zygons event tying in with the Blu-Ray release of classic Doctor Who season 13 (see Deeper Thoughts section below). I chose the only story that I hadn't previously covered (and as we shall see, describing it as a story is a stretch) featuring the season 13 team of Tom Baker and Lis Sladen. But would it pass the test questions I use to validate spin-off worthiness? Let's see... Does it star the Doctor? Yes. Was it released as an official Doctor Who or spin-off story (i.e. its not an unofficial fan-made proposition)? Yes. Is there a dramatic context to the story (i.e. it's not just a skit)? Yes, there's a villain and a confrontation, albeit in scaled-down form. Was it released with the intention of being the main attraction for audience engagement (i.e. it's not just an extra on a DVD or Blu-ray)? Yes; like the last few curios blogged, the Shada webcast and Search Out Space, it did end up as an extra on another story's disc eventually, but that wasn't how it was first pitched. Have I already covered it in passing with another connected story? No. I covered the similar Tom and Lis audio story The Pescatons in passing in the Deeper Thoughts section of this blog post, but have not done the same for Exploration Earth: The Time Machine. That was a full house of correct answers, so I watched it from the Blu-ray disc featuring it (see First Time Round below) one day in mid-September 2025.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now approaching the point where I catch up. Aside from niche items like Exploration Earth's Doctor Who episode, 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:

I wasn't yet a fan of Doctor Who in October 1976 when this story was broadcast. Even if I had been, though, it was unlikely I would have heard it. I was only four years old; at that age, I might just have been in front of a TV at teatime on a Saturday, but would not have been played a schools' radio programme on BBC Radio 4 VHF. I first heard the story when it came out on CD. From 1999, a Doctor Who audio range on shiny disc started up, mostly releasing the soundtracks of missing stories with linking narration. Amidst these, a soundtrack for a wholly un-missing story was released in July 2001. This was a Genesis of the Daleks audio based on an abridged version of the story with linking narration released on record in the late 1970s. Added as an extra to this CD release was Exploration Earth, as it was labelled on the disc's packaging. Technically, Exploration Earth was the name of the educational series in which Doctor Who happened to be featuring just the once, and the episode in which that happened was called The Time Machine. As Doctor Who has endured in public consciousness and Exploration Earth has not, by 2001 it wasn't felt necessary to be so exact. I am using the complete title here, but it makes me realise that I should have labelled the similar curio blogged a few posts back as Search out Science: Search Out Space, and that will bug me now, possibly forever. At least that means Exploration Earth: The Time Machine has a chance of sticking in my memory. I couldn't recall anything of that first listen in 2001, nor of when I listened to it again as a Blu-ray extra in 2020 (when the Season 14 box set came out, it was included on The Hand of Fear disc as a special feature).

Reaction:

Given that I'd blogged another 20-minute long educational programme starring Doctor Who characters in Search Out Space, it would have been unfair to skip this one, which is essentially the same concept from a decade and a half earlier, but on the radio. The 1976 story is extremely slight, though, so there might not be that much to talk about: the Doctor describes some astro-phenomena relating to the formation of the planet Earth to Sarah. Sarah's job is only to listen, and occasionally offer some descriptive dialogue to aid the listener. She doesn't get to ask any intelligent questions. Given that asking questions is a big part of her role, and would mean she was representing the schoolkids listening in, it seems like a missed opportunity. Then, a Doctor Who villain turns up, but doesn't do very much, just booms a lot at the Doctor. They ultimately have a mental battle, pitting their strengths by "telepathic will deployment" - this might mean that the writer of the radio show Bernard Venables had seen recently aired story The Brain of Morbius, which ends with a mind-bending contest, and it stuck in his mind when he came to write this episode of Exploration Earth. It is a generic enough idea to be just a random coincidence, of course; this is a shame as there is no other evidence that Venables has ever seen an episode of Doctor Who, and it would be nice to pin that down.

The story has the opposite problem to Search Out Space. That programme had the recognisable characters of the Doctor and companion in an uncharacteristic setting. Exploration Earth's production team at least make it worthwhile sampling the format by having the TARDIS team go to space and confront a baddie (even if they possibly got there more by luck than judgement). The characters of the fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane, though, are not as recognisable as were the seventh Doctor and Ace. The Doctor tells his friend to "Stop wittering" at one point, and later snaps "Not now, Sarah, I'm busy" at her. Sarah's first line is the very out of character "Oh, the great Doctor in travail, hmm?". Nobody talks like that, certainly not Sarah Jane Smith. One wonders why the actors didn't push for dialogue changes. I'd hazard a guess that the time and money allocated to a kids' educational radio show didn't afford the scope for such niceties. Tom Baker would get much better later in his career at challenging poor material he'd been given to perform in a sound recording booth - google "Tom Baker distilled whippet shit" for more details (NSFW). 

Connectivity:

In both Exploration Earth: The Time Machine and The Interstellar Song Contest, the Doctor floats in space outside his usual craft, the TARDIS, with meagre protection provided by something else (a capsule or a bubble).

Deeper Thoughts:

The South Bank Shows. I couldn't attend the 20th September BFI Southbank Terror of the Zygons event, but as there are very few stories left to blog, see Milestone Watch above, this felt like it could be the last time I get to write in the Deeper Thoughts section about the Doctor Who BFI events. They have become a regular treat and source of content during the years I've been keeping this blog (see the final three paragraphs for a summary). I chose Exploration Earth: The Time Machine to tie loosely in to the event, and hoped I could relay information passed to me by the group of fan friends with whom I often attend these events, as they were planning to go. Unfortunately, they couldn't get tickets. I adore everything about the BFI apart from its website: the functionality of this site when queueing for tickets that have just become available, selecting those tickets, putting those tickets in the site's shopping basket. and finally paying for those tickets - in other words, every step of the journey - is sub-optimal, and having to engage with the functionality is a stressful ordeal. This time it fell to Trevor, long-term fan friend mentioned many times before on the blog, but it defeated him (as it has all of us at some point in the past) - the seats appeared in the basket, but had disappeared again before he could pay for them. By the time he tried again, the remaining tickets had all sold out. I'd been slightly more successful in getting a single ticket to a different September event at the BFI, so I will write about that instead. It wasn't a Doctor Who event, but it will be interesting to compare and contrast (plus there are no photos available related to Doctor Who's Exploration Earth episode, so at least I can include some visual material and not just have a big block of text here).

The event was a double bill of films featuring Pet Shop Boys music held on Friday 5th September 2025; first shown was It Couldn't Happen Here, the feature film they made in the late 1980s with writer-director Jack Bond; second, silent classic Battleship Potemkin with the score they wrote for it in 2004 (the score was performed live at a screening in Trafalgar Square that year). In between, there was a Q&A with singer Neil Tennant. The first thing that contrasted with a Doctor Who event was the very fact that I was able to get a ticket. As far as I'm aware, there hasn't ever been a Pet Shop Boys BFI event before (there was one planned in April 2020, but that had to be cancelled because of Covid); Doctor Who events happen several times a year, but of the two it was the Doctor Who event that sold out faster. Maybe Doctor Who is just a bigger draw (there is no monthly publication in newsagents called Pet Shop Boys Magazine after all); the band can still fill arenas around the world, though, so I think it's probably just that - because they have been happening with some regularity - the Doctor Who events have built up a reputation and a following. As soon as the event began on that Friday, another difference was immediately apparent: there was no Justin Johnson and Dick Fiddy. The host introducing proceedings was John Ramchandani, the BFI's Head of Video Publishing & Online Programming (the event was tying in to the release of Potemkin on Blu-ray). Though Ramchandani gave a heartfelt tribute to Bond (who died late in 2024) and wished "All the West End Girls and East End Boys" in the audience an enjoyable evening, he couldn't match Johnson and Fiddy for repartee. There was also no quiz (the BFI presumably not having the budget to give any copies of their Blu-rays away as prizes).

John Ramchandani

PSB fans can certainly match Doctor Who fans regarding how critical they can be. It Couldn't Happen Here is not generally well regarded (I love it), and in the gap between the two films waiting for Tennant to take the stage, I heard a plummy voiced old gent say to a friend "Wasn't that tedious ... I think the phrase is: what have I done to deserve this?", then a middle-aged woman nearby said to her neighbour "It was like Christmas, there was so much turkey". Neil Tennant settled into his seat on stage addressing the audience with "Well, you all survived" (it's not uncommon for those on stage to take affectionate pot shots at the Doctor Who stories that they were involved in either). Tennant was interviewed by Paul Tickell, a filmmaker and friend of both Tennant and Bond; it was an informative, if short, interview, but wasn't quite as witty and irreverent as Doctor Who audiences have come to expect. During the chat, which was recorded and can be seen at this link, Tennant revealed an exclusive: he and bandmate Chris Lowe are finally recording A Man from the Future for commercial release. A Man from the Future is a piece inspired by the life of Alan Turing that was performed at the Proms in 2014, so fans have been waiting over a decade to get a copy for their collections. News like that about Doctor Who would have been up online within minutes on fan and entertainment news sites. At the time of writing, more than two weeks after the event, it hasn't been published anywhere that I can find. In other ways, the fans were less restrained: Tennant got a standing ovation when he left the stage, which I've not seen for any Doctor Who guest. Audience questions tended to be prefaced with almost tearful paeans to everything the band had meant to the questioner; in one case, the questioner ended just by asking for an autograph, getting a slightly irritable reply from Tennant that they were supposed to be talking about the films.

Neil Tennant takes to the stage

All in all, it was an enjoyable event, but it did demonstrate that those arranging the Doctor Who events do put in a little bit extra. There have been screenings at the BFI (or National Film Theatre in old money) going back a long time, but the current versions emerged out of some special screenings that took place for Doctor Who's 50th anniversary in 2013. Fan friends David and Trevor attended a few of those (the website was terrible even in those days, but they managed to bag tickets to some of them). It went quiet for a bit, but then in 2016 there was an event to showcase The Power of the Daleks animation; about a year later, there was a similar event for the partly-animated Shada. Not long after that in January 2018, there was a screening of The Day of the Doctor accompanied by a panel including Steven Moffat. There's usually a product release to justify the sessions, but The Day of the Doctor was an exception; it formed part of a John Hurt retrospective season. The launch of the Blu-ray collections meant more product, which meant more events. A screening of Earthshock tied in with the season 19 box set launch (see Deeper Thoughts section of this post for details). There was a showing of Logopolis in February 2019 ahead of the season 18 set, but I managed to miss it being advertised - there's at least one write-up online if you google. Though they never gave away expensive limited edition box sets, the animation events included the story's DVD as part of the BFI ticket price up to and including The Macra Terror, which was showcased at the BFI in March 2019; thereafter, they stopped that.

(L to R) Neil Tennant, Paul Tickell

2019 was a busy year, with a Planet of the Daleks screening following in June (see Deeper Thoughts section of this post), Mindwarp in September, and The Curse of Fenric in June (see Deeper Thoughts section here)  - these were linked to the collection sets for seasons 10, 23 and 26 respectively. Alongside The Curse of Fenric was also for the first time a separate screening of a feature-length documentary from the same set (this was Showman, about producer John Nathan-Turner). There were two screenings in the first quarter of 2020, The Faceless Ones animation in February (see Deeper Thoughts here) and The Talons of Weng-Chiang in March for the launch of the season 14 box set (which also included Exploration Earth: The Time Machine as mentioned above). The pandemic then meant a hiatus. Things resumed with a Covid-friendly screening of Dragonfire from the season 24 box set in June 2021. Two animation events followed later in that year, The Evil of the Daleks in September, and Galaxy 4 in November (see Deeper Thoughts here). There was also a City of Death screening in December to tie in with the season 17 set; I had a ticket, but had to give it up as I had finally succumbed to a variant of the aforementioned coronavirus. Friends went and guest Julian Glover was reportedly very good value. Season 22 set taster Revelation of the Daleks (see Deeper Thoughts here) followed in March 2022, and The Abominable Snowmen animation in September.

I couldn't attend season 2 set tie-in The Time Meddler in October of 2022, and this ushered in a short period where I always seemed to have a clash. I missed the Sea Devils / season 9 set and The Five Doctors / season 20 set events in March and September 2023. I might not have got a ticket to the latter even if I'd been able to go, though - it was much sought after, and sold out within minutes. Later in the year, I was able to see the animation of The Underwater Menace (see Deeper Thoughts here) in October, and an event about the TARDIS (see Deeper Thoughts here) in November. In February 2024, there was a screening of Horror of Fang Rock as well as a Graham Williams documentary (both from the season 15 box set, and both covered in the Deeper Thoughts section of this post). A month later, there was a showing of animated The Celestial Toymaker (see here). Later in the year, The Happiness Patrol infamously got two screenings - the as transmitted version in August (see here) and a new special edition version in September (see here). February 2025 saw both Spearhead from Space (see here) and The Savages animation (see here) showcased at the BFI. As an unfortunate impact of avoiding all social media I missed that there was a screening of new series story Father's Day in May 2025 to mark the 20th anniversary of Christopher Eccleston's season launching the new series era, only finding out about it after it had been and gone. That brings things up to the Terror of the Zygons screening. I'm sure there will be more events at the BFI (there are still eight seasons to release as Blu-ray box sets, and many stories left to animate), so I will no doubt be wrestling with that website for years to come, even if I probably won't be writing about it here.

In Summary:

Not quite distilled whippet shit, but not a very effective encapsulation of Tom Baker's Doctor and Lis Sladen's Sarah Jane. Well, except, I suppose, if one is pedantic, there's the part of the narrative where the characters are in a capsule - they're encapsulated quite well (and very literally) during that bit.

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?