Doctor Who: The Reality War

"Well, now you're going too far."

OK, that was a lot. And then a second helping of 'a lot.' With 'a lot' sprinkles on top.

You just know there's about to be a spoiler manatee.

First off, yes. We're going to talk about it.

Whichever of the three things you might think I'm referring to, we're going to talk about it.

I actually went back and forth as to whether it would be a better plan to do a straightforward review of this episode here and then do a follow-up article discussing the other issues. But on reflection I decided that they're too intimately connected with what does and doesn't work in this episode to parse them out. So, for the moment let's just acknowledge that there are a few elephants currently in the room, set out a large bowl of peanuts for them to enjoy, and circle back to them later.

That established, let's invoke the spoiler manatee –

Spoilers cannot harm you here, land-friend.

Pretty much everything that works and everything that's frustrating about this episode can be represented by the fact that Ncuti Gatwa mispronounces 'Omega' about half of the time. Even when other characters in the exact same conversation are pronouncing it correctly.

Now, I can't even begin to imagine how that happens. I have a vague suspicion that it's somehow tied into reshoots, and that someone corrected his pronunciation between the original shoot and the follow up, but I don't have any real theory that explains it satisfactorily. For the record, the character Omega, first appearing in Doctor Who in 1973, pronounced his name OH-meh-ga, with the accent on the first syllable. Ncuti, for a little over half the times he uses the name in this episode, pronounces it oh-MEG-ah, instead.

And yes, we should acknowledge that oh-MEG-ah is how the word is actually pronounced in the real world, so it's completely understandable why Ncuti says it that way. But either way you slice it he's saying it wrong about half of the time, so for once we can safely leave pedantry out of things and just get to the point.

And here's the point. The only reason that you bring back Omega into Doctor Who for the finale is to give a great big thrill to the longtime fans who remember him from 'The Three Doctors' and 'Arc of Infinity.' And those are the exact same fans who are going to be irritated beyond description by the fact that the Doctor keeps mispronouncing his name, but not every time.

This is, obviously, a very minor quibble that we should be able to just brush off and enjoy the story. After all, Matt Smith had something very similar happen when he repeatedly mispronounces 'Metabelis' back in 'Hide.' But whereas in that one it's just an Easter Egg that gets spoiled by mis-delivery, here it's emblematic of the broader problem of the entire episode. They bring back so many references that can only be there to please the long-term fans and then use them in a way that only long-term fans would be irritated by.

Let's start by looking at a relatively minor one and work our way out to the biggies. Let's talk about Anita.

I freely admit that I openly cheered when Anita first appeared. Partially for reasons I'll get into in the Bits and Pieces section, but mostly because I just really love both Anita as a person and everything about her relationship with the Doctor back in 'Joy to the World.' And for a bit, her return is perfect. She and the Doctor were dear, close friends, and she showed up when he needed her most and rescued him. That's fantastic. That's awesome. I'm here for that all day.

But then she tells him that she's been spending all of her off time from the hotel looking for him (which is fine) and we see that when she finally found the version of him that she was friends with, she sees him falling in love with Rogue. And in that moment we see her heart break. And she closes the door back up behind her, leaving the Doctor to his new love.

And that's not the relationship that she had with the Doctor at ALL. Not even a little bit. She asked him, directly, about his boyfriend. She clearly had no romantic hang ups about him when we last saw her. He was her best friend, and she accepted letting him go without hesitation because it was what he needed to do. Re-tooling that into her pining for him with unrequited love, only to have her heart broken by the sight of him falling in love with someone else and having that be the catalyst that pushes her to move on and start a relationship with the guy who runs HR (who admittedly sounds nice, but seriously – head of HR dating an employee is incredibly dodgy). That's just comprehensively NOT the Doctor/Anita relationship that we fell in love with last Christmas.

So, again, they brought back a fan favorite character from the past and then immediately used her in a way that would only be irritating to the people that they were bringing her back to please.

Which is exactly what they did with Omega, however you want to pronounce his name.

Just to be clear, I don't want to be, and am not, one of those fans that complains about continuity being ignored, or things being brought back from the original series in a substantially different way. As long as you're telling a story worth watching, I honestly couldn't care less about that. But it's pretty obvious here that the entire point of bringing Omega back is so that the show can shout 'Look! We're bringing Omega back! Remember Omega! You love Omega, and he's back!' That's the entire point of bringing him back in an episode that includes Kate, so that she can give the Lethbridge-Stewart seal of approval on 'Omega being back.' Except that the Omega we see here is completely at odds with anything to do with Omega, the character we knew before.

And at this point it would be tempting to accuse me of hypocrisy, I get that. Last season I was only too happy to accept the changes of Sutekh from 'random powerful alien' to 'Oh, he's the actual God of Death now.' But the crucial difference is, with Sutekh, not only did they give a justification for why he was so different now, but they also went out of their way to acknowledge THAT HE WAS DIFFERENT NOW.

While they justify the changes in appearance and motivation for Omega in this one by saying 'Oh, he's been in the Underverse and it's warped him into this huge monster' – which works perfectly well, for the record. If they'd just said that and not even bothered to address any of Omega's earlier life it would have hung together just fine – they also spend WAY too much time giving us the backstory of Omega's character, and it's completely, 100%, comprehensively wrong.

OK, right and wrong are probably not useful terms when I'm complaining online about a 50-year-old fictional character. Let me rephrase that.

Omega, as appeared in two stories of the classic series as well as being referenced in a couple others: a brief history. Omega was a scientist from Gallifrey who undertook a dangerous experiment with a supernova in order to make time travel possible. From the perspective of the newly minted 'Time Lords,' Omega was killed in the process by his own experiment and was remembered forever as a noble scientist who gave his life to fulfill their Time-Lordy destiny.

The twist of the story, as revealed in the tenth anniversary story 'The Three Doctors,' was that he wasn't killed in the experiment at all. Instead, it had flung him into the universe of anti-matter, where he'd been alone for so many millennia that he'd eventually gone completely bat-shit crazy and could no longer rationally accept that his returning to the universe of regular matter just wasn't possible without killing everyone and everything. He's an interesting tragic figure, because he's one of the few Doctor Who villains who doesn't even know what he wants to achieve. He's just so lonely that he's gone comprehensively off the rails and swings wildly between wanting to rejoin the universe, wanting to destroy it, and wanting to form a three-man recorder jam band with Jon Pertwee and Patrick Troughton.

Then he comes back ten years later to work through exactly the same issue, but with Michael Gough. It's honestly kind of endearing.

So why on Earth did they not use that as their starting point? It's very clearly established and way more interesting than the back story they use here.

One explanation could be that they thought that it would be too complicated and time consuming to explain that much backstory. Well, what they go with in this script is 'The Time Lords betrayed him and locked him in the Underverse and that location is either his prison or his tomb.' But how is that any quicker or cleaner than 'He was a great scientist whose experiment gave us time travel but also trapped him forever in an anti-matter universe, where loneliness drove him insane. The genetic explosion that killed the Time Lords must have dropped him into the Underverse.'

That's a so much more interesting and compelling backstory, and it also has the virtue of being the previously established Omega backstory, which the long-term fans of the classic series would know very well. By changing that backstory for no good reason, the episode again goes out of its way to irritate the exact people that they were trying to please by bringing Omega back in the first place. Also, there's a really interesting seam to be mined from the thought that the thing that killed the Time Lords back in 'Power of the Doctor' actually succeeded in granting Omega's wish of bringing him back to the universe of matter at last, but only after all of his people were dead, which means he's alone all over again. They could have done something fascinating with that.

But instead we get, find what's either Omega's tomb or possibly just where he enjoys hanging out, only for that to result in 'giant monster Omega' eating the Rani and abruptly foiling her dasterdly scheme with about thirty minutes left on the episode's runtime. Which is disappointing, because 'find Omega's corpse and use his DNA to cultivate an entire new race of Time Lords is so TOTALLY a thing that the Rani would do,' and 'Oh dear, once she found him, he's less a corpse and more a giant monster that eats her' is the absolute perfect resolution to that plotline.

It seems pretty clear that the 'find Omega' plotline was never really what the episode was interested in, as it's disposed of so perfunctorily, so early on in the episode. Instead, the episode is much more interested in 'is Poppy's continued existence valid, or isn't it?' Which is, to be fair, an interesting question. Particularly when you think about how the Doctor would usually be on the other side of the debate. But it's clear that the story that RTD is interested in telling is the tale of how this Doctor sacrifices his life in order to bring one girl back from non-existence and give her a life to live.

Whether that was always the story that this one was intending to tell is a question for debate. And crap, we're getting perilously close to having to deal with those elephants, so let me just throw out a couple of other things before we get to them.

Poppy is, apparently, amazing because she's the child of a Time Lord, and Time Lords are sterile. Fine. Except the script went out of its way to clarify that the Rani was looking for Omega's body to harvest DNA to remake the timelords, AND that Poppy can't be used to harvest DNA for this purpose because her mother is human. And the only way that both of those sentences can be true is if the Rani's plan was – and apologies in advance for the crudeness of this next sentence – to find and have sex with Omega's corpse in the hopes of getting pregnant by his 'pre-genetic explosion' man-seed. Because the Rani also makes clear that the Time Lords became sterile in the genetic explosion. You know, the genetic explosion that killed all the Time Lords except the Doctor and the Rani (who managed to escape at the last moment). I don't know about you, but 'made sterile' strikes me as an odd way to say, 'killed everybody.'

Clearly this is a scar in the script left over by some radical re-tooling, and for the love of crap we're back at the elephants. Quick, what else do I want to say before we get there... Oh hell, I'll pick them up in the Bits and Pieces section later.

The Elephants:

For long enough now to become really irritating, certain sectors of the internet have been shouting loudly about a few things that they just KNEW were happening. A lot of this was coming from right-wing dipshit trolls declaring how they were right about everything and that 'woke' (whatever the hell they imagine that to mean at any given moment) had killed Doctor Who, and blah, blah, blah White Replacement Theory and gay people are shoving something down my throat and I've never had a proper hug.

Obviously I don't have any interest in engaging with or dignifying any of that. But it must be acknowledged that a reasonable portion of people discussing these things were actually coming from a legitimate place of interest/curiosity/enthusiasm for the show. So let's just talk about them.

1: Doctor Who is being cancelled. (Go woke, go broke!)

Is Doctor Who being cancelled? Honestly? I have no idea. And unless you're Russell T. Davies or a high-level Disney Exec, neither do you. Nor do any of the 'think piece/hot take' bros claiming that it's true. My personal opinion? It's certainly possible that Disney is deciding to pull out of the co-production deal for whatever reason they do these things. It's certainly not the ratings, which have been fine. But who knows. I fully expect that if Disney does decide to get out of the Doctor Who business that the BBC will just start making it themselves again, although it will probably take a year or so to get the logistics worked out and new episodes into production. If you've been a Doctor Who fan for any length of time, this sort of thing is pretty much par for the course. Whatever happens, we're not going to have to wait 16 years again.

2: Ncuti Gatwa quit because Disney was taking too long to renew the show.

See the answer for number 3, because I don't want to type it twice. Although as far as I can tell, this one is closest to being accurate. It isn't entirely, but it's ballpark-ish.

3: Ncuti Gatwa was fired because ratings were bad because he's not a middle aged white guy. (Go woke, go broke!)

I have no doubt that Ncuti Gatwa fully intended to stay longer. Probably a lot longer. He seems to love the part. The important thing to remember is that they announced Ncuti Gatwa as Jodie Whitaker's replacement very early so that when she regenerated into David Tennant it would, theoretically, be a huge and enjoyable surprise. Also, Jodie's final episode aired about a year after the one immediately before it. All of which meant that Ncuti Gatwa had a very long time to wait before he started filming. And while he was waiting, he blew up into being a huge star. This happened through the combo of Sex Education finally getting some notice, his announcement as the next Doctor getting a lot of press, his appearance in Barbie, and Ncuti just being endlessly charismatic and gorgeous. Once cameras started being turned in his direction his career took off.

Add to that that Disney insisted on dragging its feet about renewing the series for a third season, which meant even more delay before Ncuti would be offered a contract, let alone start filming. And by this point he was just way too big a name to tie himself down and not be able to accept other work.

Short version, Ncuti became too big a star to have the time this part requires in the interim between casting and when season two was being finalized. I'm doing my best to be happy for him on that point, although I really loved his Doctor and am sad to see him go.

All of which is very visible in the final script which clearly shows the seams from a regeneration episode being grafted on to whatever the ending of the earlier draft was. It's unfortunate, but there it is.

And just one last time for the trolls in the back – the ratings, once you factor in all the exigencies of streaming versus live broadcast, were fine. More or less exactly in line with what they were hoping for.

Bits and Pieces:

-- It would be interesting to know at what point they knew that Anita was going to be returning for this episode. Because it really felt like they'd finished her story in 'Joy to the World,' and once she got the Doctor out of the cliffhanger, they had no idea what to do with her in this episode outside of holding a door open. It wouldn't surprise me at all to learn that her part was originally just a random employee of the time hotel.

-- This was an example of the very best type of cliffhanger resolution. Things get resolved by revealing some information that the audience previously didn't know, which changes our entire understanding of what's going on. In this case, Anita in the Time Hotel allowed them to reveal that the world doesn't end at midnight on May 23rd, it resets to 12:01 AM, on May the 23rd. The day is repeating, not exploding. That's clever.

-- I wonder if RTD included the 13th Doctor cameo just because he wanted the chance to write Jodie some dialogue. It wouldn't surprise me.

-- The visual of reality cracking was very nicely done. Loved how invasive it felt.

-- My, but there were a lot of callbacks to old things in this one. Time rings, the Indigo Device, the Zero Room, Parallax (it's a Big Finish reference), Rogue, just SO many callbacks.

-- One of my absolute favorite things about this episode is how Ruby responds to Conrad. When it comes right down to it, she's kind. As much as I hate Conrad, I love that she gave him grace.

-- I liked that the Doctor took a moment to acknowledge that Mel was going to have particularly strong feelings about the Rani. I hadn't even thought of it.

-- Also, apparently that's the meta-reason that the Rani was dressing up all those times in the outfits of old companions. Just because she'd pretended to be Mel in 'Time and the Rani.' My favorite was her take on Barbara in 'The Interstellar Song Contest.'

-- Mrs. Flood grabs the time ring and leaves, which means she can always return and regenerate into Archie Punjabi again at a later date. I'd like that. Archie Punjabi actually made me like the Rani for the first time ever.

-- Ruby just got forgotten and didn't get a proper goodbye.

-- Anita very pointedly mentioned 'The Boss,' just like Rogue did in 'Rogue' and the Meep did in 'The Star Beast.' Seed for a future plotline?

-- So, we just totally dropped Susan Foreman and the running 'mavity' bit. They ultimately meant nothing.

-- I think RTD is just toying with fans on a massive scale with the Billie Piper reveal at the end. And don't think that he didn't deliberately leave off 'as the Doctor' in the credits after 'Introducing Billie Piper.' The man loves to toy with us.

Quotes:

The Rani: "A magic door? He had an actual MAGIC DOOR?! The little..."
Mrs. Flood: "Too late."

The Doctor: "This is Anita."
Anita: "I just work in hospitality, really."

Kate: "Mr. Smith, what on Earth do you think you're wearing?"
The Doctor: "The future!"

Ibrahim: "I'm wearing a suit!"
Kate: "I'm wearing tweed!"
Susan Triad: "I'm wearing Nylon!"

The Rani: "You really are ridiculously handsome. I could tilt you on your side and serve olives in those dimples."

The Doctor: "We half remembered ourselves, living Conrad's version of an ordinary life. All crushed and stifled and appalling."

The Rani: "I thought you'd be dead. I thought, there's no way that painted doll of a princess could ever survive."
Mel: "I never thought about you once."

The Rani: "She's not real. She's made of hopes and dreams and wishes."
The Doctor: "That is every child."

The Doctor: "If we die here today, I love you lot."

The Rani: "I know you haven't arrived with a weapon. Only a speech, some dazzling words, maybe a pun, and then some lachrymose little tug-the-heartstrings mimosa-scented platitudes about the power of love."

Ruby: "Conrad's World, it could have been so much worse. A fantasy world, I'd expect guns and whiskey and girls. But yours is nice. It's actually nice."

Ruby: "Conrad, I wish you to be happy."

The Doctor: "No more wishes."

Thirteenth Doctor: "Cause and effect is getting a little bit out of order."
The Doctor: "I'm surprised it's not the other guy. He is always turning up."

The Doctor: "Beautiful things can be forgotten and gone. But they still happened. Somewhere."

Despite a lot of flaws and a lot of very visible script patching, there's a lot to like in this episode. And on the whole, I think season 15/2 is superior to season 14/1. I think Millie Gibson probably got a raw deal somehow behind the scenes, but I also think that Varada Sethu's Belinda Chandra was the better companion for this Doctor between the two of them.

It's almost like this episode inspires me to hold a lot of mutually exclusive beliefs together in my head all at once.

However long it takes to get here, I'll be here looking forward to the next season. Ten out of Fifteen Doctors.

Mikey Heinrich is, among other things, a freelance writer, retired firefighter, and roughly 78% water. You can find more of his work at the 42nd Vizsla. If you'd like to see his raw notes for this and other reviews, you can find them at What Was Mikey Thinking.

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