Doctor Who offers up what's promised to be an entertaining, if fluffy, throwaway romp, but instead turns out to be a thoughtful meditation on the effects of weaponized bigotry with a few massive reveals thrown in toward the end.
One wonders what Rylan made of it.
At first glance this episode appears to be exactly what the advance advertising led us to expect; a 'terrorists attack a public event' action story in which individual small pockets of resistance fight back and eventually defeat them. And sure, that's definitely part of the mix in what we get here. But as tempting as it is to describe this as Die Hard, but at the Eurovision song contest in space, there's a lot more going on beneath the surface.
The script, written by Doctor Who newcomer (and relative newcomer to the industry as a whole) Juno Dawson, is an impressively sleek and well-structured entry in an already impressive season. For an example of what I mean by sleek, look at the way we're initially introduced to the character of Cora. It would have been perfectly serviceable to just have Rylan introduce her from the stage, and be done with it, setting her up for the role in the rest of the story. Although that would beg the question of why he wasn't introducing the other contestants and definitely would have drawn attention in a very clumsy fashion to the fact that they didn't really have any other notable contestants in the cast.
Instead, the script has Rylan's earpiece go silent as a result of the attack on the production booth, which quite reasonably drives him to desperately look around for anything to talk about, which leads to him seeing a familiar face and throwing the attention to her as a way to buy himself a little time to try to get his earpiece working again.
It's probably worth acknowledging that the reason this moment stood out so strongly to me is that I occasionally do appear on live television during pledge drives for public television in the US (I'd be one of the people interrupting your program to beg for money. You're welcome) and I can personally verify that losing contact with the booth can be a source of some panic. Even more so, one imagines, if the production staff didn't bother defrosting you for the dress rehearsal, leaving you completely dependent on the voice in your ear to tell you what sort of things to say next.
Not, I should stress, that public television currently has access to cryogenic technology, allowing them to keep pledge talent in suspended animation between pledge drives. Believe me, if that was the case, you'd be seeing Bob Ross, Lawrence Welk, and the Lovely Lennon Sisters on the regular. But I digress.
This is just one example of the script working plot points and character beats in tandem with one another in order to subtly achieve moments that neither could do as well on their own. A bigger example would be the very clever way that the episode handles the initial attack, leaving both the Doctor and Belinda unaware whether the other is dead or alive. The Doctor's near certainty that Belinda had been killed is what drives him for the rest of the episode, getting into the control room itself and allowing that rage to drive him to literally torture Kid for no purpose other than revenge.
Speaking of which, there was almost certainly an earlier draft of this script in which Belinda seeing the Doctor threaten and then commit literal torture caused a much bigger rift between them. The way that that plot element is structured, with her first hearing him threaten it and responding, '... that's not him...' and then later walking into the control room to see it happening and being confronted with the fact that no, it can be very much him, never really pays off in the way that the plotline appears to be structured to do. As things unfold, Belinda just sort of accepts it without really calling him out on it very much, and the scripting of her walking in to find the torture happening is very much structured in a way that begs her to call him on it. That feels like it got dialed back for the sake of resetting their friendship before the finale.
Another thing that feels like it got dialed back is the robot servants. It's telling that I can't quite remember what they were even called, but they were essentially identical to the Heavenly Host back in 'Voyage of the Damned,' except with less personality or plot function. Literally the only contribution to they made to the plot was to bring in the big glowy box that was going to send the deadly Delta Wave out as soon as we hit song 14, and there was no particular reason that it needed to be them that did that. Kid could have taken it out of a duffel bag for all the difference it would have made to the plot. I strongly suspect that they had a lot more plot function in earlier drafts, but then someone either noticed the similarity to the Heavenly Host or just needed to find a portion of the script that could be easily trimmed out for any number of reasons, and that was that.
But all the while that we're being told the story of how space terrorists threaten to blow up Eurovision in space, we're also being told a much sadder and more interesting story. Little by little over the course of the script we're being told the sad and ongoing story of the planet Hellia and its people. First, we're told by the producer that generally no one will hire anyone from Hellia, but she doesn't go into details. Then we get a few references to how people believe that, while their planet was destroyed, it was the Hellions' own fault for it happening.
Then we get the general public's belief that the Hellions were evil and had psychic powers and were cannibals and general boogiemen (or Bogeymen, depending on where you are). And finally, we get the reveal – brought about by her letting slip just a little too much information about Wynn and Kid – that Cora isn't in fact from Trion as she said but was instead a Hellion who was 'passing' in order to be allowed to sing in the contest. At which point the man who had appeared to be her closest friend immediately throws her away in disgust. Which, for those who might have missed the irony, goes kind of a long way towards explaining why she was hiding it in the first place.
Look, I don't want to get too heavy-handed with a discussion here about what is and is not an appropriate way to deal with living your life as a persecuted minority, but it is worth a brief mention of the three coping mechanisms we see being used here. Kid, as the Doctor points out, is using the injustice as an excuse to act on the murderous impulses he already carried and justifying it as revenge. Wynn has become radicalized by Kid's cause and has convinced herself not only that he's right but that his way is the only valid way to respond. And Cora hid herself away, leaving behind the people she loved who weren't willing to hide to suffer. And the script does an admirable job of letting all of those choices just sort of exist, without really telling us how to feel about any of them. Even Kid's embrace of violence is left at least understandable, if not condonable. Particularly when the episode goes out of its way to show the Doctor clearly going too far and torturing him out of grief from his believed loss of Belinda.
It's messy and dark and is made so much worse by the final revelation of what actually caused all of this in the first place. The Poppy Honey corporation bought not just the entire planet but also the entire population of Hellia just to make honey flavoring. Not even proper honey. Honey flavoring. For honey flavoring they laid waste to an entire population and then spent the next decades slandering the very people who had lived there in order to make the story be about how terrible they were, not the company.
That's obscene. And far too plausible.
Bits and Pieces:
-- After however many episodes, we finally get confirmation that Mrs. Flood is, in fact, the Rani. Personally, I was far more excited to see that she spent most of the episode with Barbara Wright's hairstyle, but it is nice to have a conclusive answer. Now I just need to spend some time wondering if this revelation really tracks with everything we've seen Mrs. Flood do. The fourth wall breaking, for a start, still needs some explanation.
-- I kind of wish they'd just done a straight up regeneration from Mrs. Flood to the Rani instead of the bi-generation. Is everybody going to just bi-generate now?
-- It was a wonderful choice for them to show us the history of Hellia while the song was sung in a language we couldn't understand. Beautiful and tragic. Having understandable words probably would have led to bathos.
-- They leaned way in to the 'Mavity' reference in this one, what with the Doctor triplicating it and all the other mentions. Okay, seriously, they have to be finally getting around to explaining the point of that in the two-part finale, don't they? Don't they?
-- I should also mention that the general atmosphere in the booth during the live broadcast was amazingly accurate, barring the presence of threatening robots, which might actually help the production of a pledge drive.
-- Cora mentions that she didn't cut off her horns herself, but that they were cut off by force. But then the episode never gives us any more information. That kind of complicates the accusations of her 'passing' because she doesn't have horns, if that was something that was done to her against her will. Was that something that got muddy during rewrites of the episode? I'd love to know.
-- The visuals in this episode, as in so many others this season, were just gorgeous. The sight of all of those hundred thousand beings rising from the space station like a cloud against the glowing backdrop of space was simply beautiful.
-- It was wonderful set design that every section of the space station was the same set, slightly redressed with the cubby holes being filled with different things and being used for different functions. That's essentially how stadiums are built here now.
-- Hologram Graham Norton confirmed that the Earth is still going to die on May 24, 2025, and that all the old Earth information we see here was sifted out of the rubble. That does beg the question of how Rylan ended up in the cryo-tube. And how old is Rylan at this point, if he's defrosted for about 2.5 hours once a year?
-- It's interesting that it turns out Mrs. Flood was patiently waiting for them to collect Vindicator readings because she needed them as well. I wonder how that's going to play out.
-- I have no doubt that Archie Panjabi is going to be a wonderful Rani, but if I'm being honest, the character has really never done much for me. We'll see how the finale goes.
-- Seeing Carole Ann Ford as Susan again, however, was a wonderful surprise. Surely, she'll turn back up in the finale and this won't just turn out to be a tease for future seasons' storylines, right? Right??
Quotes:
Belinda: "Oh, we’re so staying."
The Doctor: "We’re staying."
Rylan: "Not again."
Kid: "I’m only doing the things you expect of me."
Belinda: "I don’t even know where I am."
Cora: "You’re on the Harmony Station."
Belinda: "Where’s that?"
Cora: "Sector Diamond Five."
Belinda: "But where’s that?"
Cora: "West of Vangossiter."
Belinda: "But where’s that? Where the hell am I??"
Susan: "Grandfather. Go back!"
The Doctor: "Did I just fly through space on a confetti cannon?"
Mike: "Yeah."
The Doctor: "Camp."
Len: "Weird lot. They say they practice cannibalism and witchcraft. They’ve got these horns. People say they give them psychic powers."
Cora: "Yeah, people say that a lot. About species they don’t understand."
Graham: "I’m Graham Norton. Long since dead. Aw, sad face."
Cora: "She’s called Wynn. He’s called Kid."
Belinda: "As in... baby goat?"
Cora: "As in, his mother was shot before anyone asked her his name."
I expected a fun action romp and instead was moved by the plight of a people wrongly maligned by a corporation that destroyed them and their world for honey that wasn't even real. And got the Dugga-Do song.
This was just a really great episode of television. I hope Juno Dawson comes back and writes lots more.
Twelve 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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