It’s Eurovision time, and Doctor Who wasn’t about to miss out on that…
Recap
It’s 2925 and Rylan Clark (playing himself) is pulled out of cryo-freeze to host the Interstellar Song Contest (which is what Eurovision turns into down the years). The TARDIS materializes in a fancy pod booth and the Doctor takes his Vindicator readings, but when he and Belinda see where they turned up, Belinda decides they can stay for this one. Mrs. Flood is in the audience, and very pleased that the Doctor has taken the final reading needed, but she’s in no rush to leave. Outside the Doctor and Belinda’s pod, Gary (Charlie Condou) and Mike Gabbastone (Kadiff Kirwan) are trying to get to their seats, but no one will help them as said seats are already occupied. Mike doesn’t understand why this is such a big deal anyway, as it’s just silly music, hurting Gary’s feelings. On asking the Droneguard for help, they’re only told “Phase One has been activated.”
The Harmony Arena control room is broken into by Kid (Freddie Fox) aided by his girlfriend—and fellow Hellion—Wynn Aura-Kinn (Iona Anderson), who is working there. He’s armed and in control of the Droneguard, easily taking over operations from Nina (Kiruna Stamell). Wynn cues up the dress rehearsal recording of the contest (which didn’t contain Rylan, as he hadn’t been unboxed), claiming the publicity comms will say he has food poisoning, and beaming that version out to all the viewers currently watching. An alarm goes off on the sonic screwdriver, and Doctor realizes that the version of the contest being transmitted is not the one they’re currently watching. He starts messing with the pod mechanics to figure out what’s wrong. As the show begins, Kid and Wynn turn off the safety and break the air shield keeping everyone in the arena, sending 100,000 people into space. The Doctor and the TARDIS are blown out, but Wynn reactivates the pod canopies, saving Belinda. Nina is mortified by Kid and Wynn’s actions, but notes that the audience isn’t dead yet due to the mavity shell remaining in place.
Kid has a delta wave device ready for phase three of the plan and hooks it into the system. Belinda heads out into the hallway to find Cora Saint Bavier (Miriam-Teak Lee), one the contestants from Trion, out there with her manager and writer, Len Kazah (Akemnji Ndifornyen). They can’t call for help due to gambling rules in place while the contest is broadcasting. Belinda begins to have a panic attack over the thought of never getting home, but Cora calms her down. The Doctor is freezing in space, but has a vision of his granddaughter, Susan Foreman (Carole Ann Ford), telling him to go back and find her. He snaps to and grabs a nearby confetti canon, which he uses to propel him back toward the arena. Mike and Gary witness this, and open the airlock to let the Doctor in. Mike is a nurse and helps the Doctor revive. He reveals to Mike and Gary that the audience can be revived too, thinking Belinda is out there. The delta wave is set to be broadcast to three trillion viewers during Cora’s song. The Doctor hacks the system and finds Hellion code, accidentally setting off the delta wave in the halls and nearly killing them—this is what will happen to the viewers if it transmits.
Gary tries to help the Doctor hack into the arena systems from the contest museum on the station—he helped design the thing, hence his good tickets. The Doctor has another vision of Susan. Their interference get Kid’s attention, and the Doctor tells him off, promising to find him and destroy him for the horrible things he’s doing. Belinda sees this via video and is stunned to hear the Doctor sounding so unlike himself. Kid orders the Droneguards to kill the Doctor, but he easily stops them with the sonic screwdriver when they show up. Cora finally admits to Belinda and Len that she is Hellion too—she cut off her horns to hide— and that she knows Kid and Winn. She explains to Belinda that the stereotypes around their kind are false, perpetuated so that the Corporation could destroy their planet to make the flavoring for Poppy Honey, an artificial sweetener. Because the Corporation sponsors the contest, Kid has decided that anyone who is watching can be labeled an enemy. Len is disgusted to learn Cora is Hellion, telling them that he’s abandoning them once he gets the hall doors open.
In the control room, the delta wave is ready to be employed, but the Doctor shows up to stop Kid. It turns out to be a hologram version, but the Doctor is truly in the control room, switches off the delta wave device, and notes that he can make a hologram more dangerous by turning it into hard light. He does so and lets his hologram torture Kid, but Susan appears to him again and tells him to stop, followed by Belinda. The Doctor stops and begins working on a plan to rescue the audience with Gary and Mike’s help. With the audience eventually revived, groups at a time, the contest resumes. Belinda tells the Doctor that he scared her, and he admits that Kid’s actions reminded him of Gallifrey’s destruction at the Master’s hands, that his people are gone. At the mention of getting Belinda home, the museum holographic interface of Graham Norton (playing himself) is activated, and explains that the Earth, where the contest originated, ended on May 24th, 2025, and no one knows why. The Doctor and Belinda rush back to the TARDIS and get ready to head back to that very date now that the Vindicator has all its readings: The Cloister Bell begins to ring.
In a mid-credits sequence, Gary and Mike revive Mrs. Flood, who is pleased because she’s safe with the Doctor gone. Unfortunately her double brain stem froze, which is lethal for a Time Lady—she begins to regenerate with the words “Let battle begin.” Then she bi-generates, just as the Doctor did last time, but Mrs. Flood changes in the split, becoming timid and subservient to the newest version (Archie Panjabi) of herself. She explains that Flood is now a Rani, while she is the Rani… and sets about getting to work
Commentary
I’m about to be insufferable, y’all. This was my top pick for the Mrs. Flood reveal: I’ve been waiting for this character return for decades. If you’d been in my living room when this tag scene took place, you likely would have been as frightened as my dog. The screaming went on well after the episode closed out.
The Rani has been due for a comeback since the show’s relaunch in 2005: She’s another member of the “Renegade Time Lord” set that the Doctor attracts to himself, and a contemporary of his at that. See, the Doctor and the Master were best friends growing up, but they had another good buddy during school to get in trouble with, and it was this fabulous lady. While the two of them were busy pining being dramatic and awful to each other, she just wanted to do science, damnit.
She is literally here for nothing but amoral experiments, ruling over anyone with a lesser brain than hers (which is everyone), and dressing like a drag queen. (She was introduced in the ‘80s, give her a break.) Her iconic moves include pretending to be Mel Bush while the Seventh Doctor had regeneration amnesia, and kneeing the Master in the unmentionables when he messed up her dinosaur lab. She is, in short, the perfect person to go up against Gatwa’s Doctor because she is rooted in camp and understands its power. I cannot wait to see what Panjabi does with it.
And I’m still not done because this episode gave me two (2!) of the greatest gifts. It has been over forty years since we last saw Susan Foreman, the Doctor’s granddaughter, on the show’s 20th anniversary special “The Five Doctors.” Even then, she was appearing out of order: Her farewell happened in the 1964 serial “The Dalek Invasion of Earth,” when the First Doctor locked her out of the TARDIS and told her that she had to get on with her life (now that she’d found a man, natch). That heartbreaking speech always contained a promise in it:
One day, I shall come back. Yes, I shall come back.
But he never has. And he also seems to believe that Susan died with the rest of the Time Lords, interestingly enough. This is a reunion over half a century in the making, and it’s finally happening, somehow, somewhen. Maybe this season, maybe another one, but they’re coming for us. The full body chills I got when Carole Ann Ford appeared on screen, I’m unwell. Send help.
I guess I should probably get around to the episode itself, which was charming as all get-out, if a little obvious in execution. (How quickly did you guess that Cora was secretly Hellion? Or that poppy honey was the true villain here?) It was still a good excuse to give Fifteen another chance at going all Oncoming Storm, as he does have that mode if you swipe at the wrong trauma. It’s incredibly sweet to watch Belinda grow more attached to him, and more worried as a result.
Gary and Mike were absolutely adorable, and I hope this bonding event helps them smooth areas of their relationship. A little admiration and mutual respect is needed here, as they’re both highly skilled and lovely fellows. Also the Doctor noting how camp his journey by confetti canon was to them felt like a meta wink to the audience; this queer Doctor acknowledging said queerness to fellow queers. We all get to be in on that.
I wish we’d seen a little more of the music (that muppet-y song, drop the full track), but even though Cora’s final performance is the important one, I did love her initial number for getting into the unpleasantness of wearing high heels? It wasn’t surprising that we didn’t get to see much of the contest itself, but it does feel like a missed opportunity to let songwriters go ham.
The prejudices against the Hellions feel a little over-the-top without getting to see any of the propaganda generated against them, but while it’s easy to have nothing but sympathy for Cora and Wynn, the Doctor’s likely right that Kid is merely using this as an excuse for brutality. It doesn’t mean he wasn’t mistreated, of course—only that the mistreatment has twisted him into a malignant person. It’s an important differentiation to highlight: Being oppressed doesn’t mean you can never oppress others. It feels a touch oversimplified here due to the lack of detail, but it does need saying all the same.
The use of Rylan (the cyro-freeze, how plastic they make him look, it’s so good) and Graham Norton here is fabulous, and highlights perhaps my favorite aspect of the episode: In this version of the timeline, the Earth is destroyed shortly after Belinda leaves. But even taking that into account, Eurovision survives and transforms into this intergalactic party that dozens of species participate in. This weirdo music performance competition is what continues in our absence. Because if humanity went out into the wide galaxy, that is precisely what we’d gift to the universe. Our greatest legacies as a species can be found in things like Eurovision—places where we make room for skill, yes, but also absurdity and vibrancy and light.
Time and Space and Sundry
- Mavity will never die. Long live mavity.
- Cora’s cover homeworld is Trion, which is the same planet that Fifth Doctor companion Vislor Turlough came from.
- You’ve got to appreciate that right on the heels of watching Ghorman get vilified by the Empire in order to desensitize the galactic population to their extinction as their planet is destroyed for an energy compound on Andor, we’ve got Hellions getting vilified by a ultra mega-corp so that the galaxy is desensitized to their extinction over artificial sweetener flavoring. What tweaks most in these equations is that both resource options are realistic as motivators for genocide. One for power, the other for profit.
- The way the Rani treats her previous incarnations is perfectly in line with the character: The Doctor bickers with themselves and occasionally adores themselves. The Master maybe wants to bang themselves, and hates themselves, and betrays themselves, and can’t help but hatch nefarious plans with themselves. The Rani loves to have servants and believes herself utterly superior—it makes perfect sense that any previous regenerations encountered would be considered lesser beings on account of being “younger” and therefore less experienced.
- Archie Panjabi’s casting here helps to alleviate some of the awkward racist leanings around the Rani’s name. After all, the Doctor and Master are English words, but Rani is Sanskrit, basically equivalent to “queen” in that language. It’s awkward to have a white woman walking around using a title commonly allocated to India, and Indian and Pakistani people—especially considering the fact that Time Lord names should be translating into the language of the listener. It’s not like we’re hearing their names in Gallifreyan.
Next time, we should see a certain Time Lady in action…
I know next to nothing about Eurovision, so the references did nothing for me, except to make me wonder — if Earth was destroyed next week, how did this Rylan person survive to get cryo-frozen? That’s throwing logic out the window for the sake of a celebrity cameo. Which I might be slightly more forgiving of if it were a celebrity I’d ever heard of. (I was surprised when it sank in that this was someone Belinda recognized, since I assumed “Rylan” was a made-up spacey name.)
I’m also very tired of the way a lot of TV sci-fi tends to assume that loss of atmosphere makes people weightless. There is no reason why letting the air out would’ve sucked everyone into the sky like that. In a volume that large, all they would’ve experienced was a gradual thinning of the air until they couldn’t breathe. The station’s gravity (I’m so sick of the “mavity” gag) would’ve held them in place. People always assume decompressing atmosphere is some irresistible suction, but the fact is that air is much lower in mass than a person’s body, so it wouldn’t push them all that hard, and would tend to flow around them, which is why irregularly shaped objects in air cannons need to be packed in sabots to form an airtight seal or else they just kind of sit there in the barrel. The reason a hurricane is able to blow people away is because there’s a much vaster volume of air in the Earth’s atmosphere than there’d be inside a spaceship or station, where the air supply would thin out to harmlessness long before it sucked anyone into space. (There’s an episode of The Expanse that gets this right, where people in a vented airlock just float there inside the lock until the ship thrusts itself away and they drift out the door, or rather stay in place as the ship moves out from around them.)
Not to mention my other pet peeve, the myth that people quickly freeze in vacuum, which is completely backward because vacuum is an insulator. The rapid drop in air pressure would have some cooling effect, granted, but not that much.
I feel stories that call allegorical attention to atrocities are undermined when they make the victims of the atrocities into villains seeking revenge. The poppy-honey corporation was a far bigger evil than this one radical, so why weren’t they the bad guys? Although I found it chilling the way Cora’s manager clung to his hatred of the Hellions even after he’d learned that the anti-Hellion stereotypes were invented by the corporation to excuse their genocide. He knows now that it’s a lie, but he still embraces it with fervor, because it’s easier than admitting he was wrong or making the effort to change.
The lethal delta wave is a callback to “The Parting of the Ways,” the Ninth Doctor’s finale, where he rigged such a device to kill the Daleks, but didn’t use it because it would’ve killed all the humans as well.
I’m a little disappointed that Mrs. Flood’s identity turned out to be exactly what most people expected — not just because it’s too obvious, but because it doesn’t really explain why Mrs. Flood kept popping up everywhere the Doctor went throughout history. Although I think it’s amusing that they fulfilled people’s other main Mrs. Flood guess, that she was Susan, in a different way. Finally bringing Susan back is something I’ve been hoping to see for a long time. I look forward to seeing how she’s moved forward in all her beliefs and proved to the Doctor that he wasn’t mistaken in his. (One of my favorite farewell speeches. I can’t think of it without tearing up.) I’m actually kind of hoping that Susan regenerates in the finale and becomes a companion next season.
I also was left completely clueless by Rylan (did recognise Norton though). But that’s a minor blip, eminently forgivable. Because…we got Susan again! How cool is that? (Also the Rani, but I don’t know her that well, having never had a chance to see the classic series here in India. My knowledge of her, as with Sutekh and most other classic monsters, comes primarily from the Target novelisations I read as a kid. She seemed formidable and camp at the same time in those, which could be an amazing combo with the budget they have these days!)
I wonder if this means we will get other classic villains back as end of season bosses in future seasons? And other Time Lords and Ladies too – Romanadvoratrelundar, the Monk, the War Chief, Andred and Leela, Drax? One can hope! (I would give a lot to see Romana!)
Rylan, floating in space, says “Not again” before freezing. We previously saw Earth monuments floating in space. So Rylan clearly froze and was recovered/revived. I suppose aliens picked up Earth TV transmissions and that’s how they knew who he was.
No, Rylan said that because he’s cryogenically frozen between song contests, as we saw at the beginning of the episode.
In all fairness, given the character has been doing the rounds for nine centuries there’s plenty of room for both explanations to be correct (and it makes the scene much, much more funny if there’s some ambiguity as to whether he’s remembering his regular Deep Freeze or some other incident of going into outer space without either a spacesuit or a spaceship…).
Since Rylan is a celebrity cameo and thus presumably not a recurring character, it would make no narrative sense for his “not again” to be a reference to something outside the episode itself, since there would be no later payoff to explain why he said it. Therefore, the most likely explanation is that it was intended exclusively as a reference to what was explicitly established earlier in the episode.
Conservation of Detail is all very well, but I truly hate the notion that a one-episode character can’t have more to them than what we see on the screen: it’s a little too much like saying “Only protagonists are allowed to have more to them than meets the eye.”
That’s a bizarre way of twisting it. All I was doing was reminding Narsham that Rylan was regularly cryogenically frozen and that that’s what his “not again” line was presumably intended by the writers to refer to. I wasn’t making any larger philosophical point, for pity’s sake.
I did wonder how the “celebrity” cameos would play outside the UK. I barely know who he is and I am in the UK! At least with Anne Robinson back in 2005 I think there was a US version of the Weakest Link she hosted?
Bringing back Susan has always seemed such an obvious thing to do, particularly in an era where the internal lives of the Doctor and companion are such a big part of any episode, that I’m surprised it has taken so long. There’s endless drama and as show runner you have greater scope to suggest jeopardy for the Doctor, because if anyone could take over the mantle of Doctor it would be his granddaughter. The only other comeback worth doing now that I can think of is Romana. I can see why they might have thought it too complicated to have to explain about Susan (though really what more is there to it than she’s his granddaughter), but it always felt like the pay off is too great to ignore her forever. I don’t know if her being on the TARDIS set in the vision is indicative of anything about where she is or just somewhere handy to film those scenes.
Yeah, the lack of Romana all these years seems weird. Leaving aside all the audios and novels where she became president of Gallifrey or whatnot, the last time we saw her in screen canon, she’d chosen to stay permanently in a parallel universe. So it would be quite easy to justify her surviving the destruction of the other Time Lords.
On the other hand The Doctor does usually stick to the one universe – his excursions to parallel universes seem to be fairly uncommon, so far as I can tell.
I’m not talking about the Doctor. I’m saying that, if Romana was still in E-Space when Gallifrey was destroyed, that provides an obvious loophole for the writers to establish her survival. The Doctor doesn’t have to go to her universe; they can just have her return from E-Space to N-Space.
That’s a fair point, though for my money it makes sense – from a Dramatic perspective – for the only relics of Gallifrey that we see onscreen (Other than the TARDIS and her pet Time Lord, of course) to be antagonistic and/or villainous, rather than old and dear friends (At least if they want to keep running with this ‘Last of the Time Lords’ schtick, since this highlights and underpins the loneliness that makes The Doctor so eager to reach out to various new Companions and connect, however-fleetingly, with the new people they meet on a regular basis).
On the other hand it might be fun to occasionally peek into E-Space and see what sort of adventures and do-Gooding have kept Lady Romana so busy all these years.
Given that they’ve just established that Susan is alive, that ship has clearly sailed. And once again, I’m not making any kind of philosophical argument or advocating anything one way or the other. I’m just stating objectively that if the writers wanted to bring Romana back, hypothetically, there is an obvious and easy way they could do it. Which makes it a bit surprising that they haven’t already.
In the show/novelisations, it seemed implied that the CVEs were closed or inaccessible after the events of Logopolis. But I believe extended media (haven’t explored those at all, myself) has multiple stories set there so there’s hope! Justice for Romana!! :D
I had Susan’s appearance spoiled for me, so I was kind of disappointed that there wasn’t more to it than a vision. I assume he’s going to go looking for her, since the vision asked him to, but I don’t know if that’s actually happening in the upcoming finale, since they’ve got to wrap up the mysterious case of the exploded Earth, first. Some fans are actually hoping it wont, because they worry that it’ll ignore all of Carole Ann Ford’s appearances in the Big Finish audio adventures, which of course it will, but I don’t think the fact that there are two different versions of a story means you can’t enjoy them both.
I totally agree, I’m not sure that this will pay off this time round any more than Mrs Flood did last season. My concern is that if they wait too long they might miss their chance to bring Carole Ann back properly, as with Nicholas Courtney never making it on screen in the main series since it came back. I did actually see her in person at Sci Fi Scarborough a couple of weeks ago and she seemed in fine form, but I do worry with the potential gap between Season 2 and Season 3 that we might end up with an already regenerated Susan.
Is it me or is calling the villains Kid and Wynn a reference to the camp hitmen in Diamonds Are Forever?
This episode had me at “LET BATTLE BEGIN” (No, TV TROPES, those famous last words were clearly ALL CAPS).
Thing is prior to that stinger I had spent most of this episode in the awkward position of a man on a rather handsy first date trying to decide whether to characterise certain advances as endearingly-gauche or mere pestering camouflaged with a wink and a grin: whilst I liked the characters quite a bit, I had issues with this one that can best be summed up as stemming largely from issues of world-building (For one thing, with such advanced medical technology so casually available it would take far, far more than just sawing off your horns to avoid identified by species – so it makes absolutely no sense for a chanteuse’s manager of long standing to be genuinely ignorant of her origins*) and of what one feels to be issues of tonal inconsistency (Going from one of the most horrifyingly beautiful images in the history of visual media to Bucks Fizz by way of ‘Ethnic Cleansing’ and Graham Norton is quite a lot to ask of an episode).
*Two Words: Insurance Premiums.
Then they handed me ARCHIE PANJABI AS THE EVIL QUEEN OF SCIENCE and my shirt left my body so quickly the buttons flew like machine gun fire: take me darling, I’m yours! (Honourable mention to the master stroke of keeping ‘Mrs Flood’ around as her henchman in chief).
…
At this point I should confess that ‘DOCTOR WHO villain Archie Panjabi’ was still only half as exhilarating as seeing the first trailer for WALKING WITH DINOSAURS 2025: all the joy of seeing Dinosaurs AND a childhood favourite brought to life.
I shall still be deeply, deeply sorry if Mr Sacha Dawan’s ‘Spy Master’ never shows up to take the brunt of The Rani’s reminders that she was the Coolest Girl in School when he was the merest dweeb tagging along in The Doctor’s wake.
Anyway, I suspect that my problems with this episode would have been significantly less if Cora being a Secret Hellian was something of an open secret that the contest’s organisers were doing their level best to politely ignore for the sake of keeping their sponsors happy whilst holding their token Hellian close at hand just in case her compatriot actually won the whole thing (“Don’t blame us, we don’t buy into their worldview, we only take their money!”) ; this would have helped keep the focus on corporate malfeasance as the source of many ills, whilst avoiding the bizarre situation of a singer’s long-term manager being (Wilfully?) ignorant of a major complication to their career.and the management’s chance of making money.
It’s as weird as Freddie Mercury’s manager being perpetually-oblivious to the latter’s prediction for his own sex; another small modification to the episode which would have helped a great deal would be contextualising his bigoted outburst as that of somebody who overlooked their native prejudices on stumbling onto a golden prospect (Possibly even sponsoring the amputation of her horns to make his own life easier), then gruesomely conforms to type the first time that relationship is seriously tested.
I’m also reasonably confident a great many of my problems with this episode would be alleviated if the sad plight of the Hellians were used as a foundation on which future episodes can be built and not just a done-in-one plot element intended to give the episode relevance for those to whom Eurovision is a world far more alien than Harmony Station (The Doctor could stand to do some ‘banana planting’ where more than one Evil Corporation is concerned).
Anyway, I also enjoyed elements of this episode – the Old Married Couple who are so blatantly up for a little ‘Three’s Company’; our terrorist Bonnie & Clyde (I have a soft spot for Mr Freddie Fox dating back to that time he was in ‘The Three Musketeers … with AIRSHIPS!’ and his acquisition of a sexy Scottish partner in crime Does Not hurt); Mrs Flood having her hobbies as well as an Evil Plan (Delightful even without the benefit of hindsight); Belinda being a Eurovision dork and a good influence on The Doctor; ‘Auntie Graham’ Norton (We all know he secretly rules the BBC with his cadre of gossip-mongering informers and secret-seeking investigators, as well as his extensive liquor cabinet and equally extensive network of friendly acquaintances); also EURIOVISION IN SPACE!
We could have had an episode about the atrocities committed in banana republics, or we could have this piece of trash. The plan made no sense (how long does it take to download one note?), the depiction of racism was as insulting as the one of terrorism, the Doctor’s behaviour was just baffling, and the songs were plain bad (high heels? Heteronormativity? Is this where we’re at in the 30th century?). Also, who does Cora’s hair? Did they never notice the obvious stubs there?
But I won’t ever get tired of the mavity thing.
I agree that the ‘Homage to Eurovision’ and ‘Corporate Crimes Against Sapience fuels Terror tactics’ could (and should) have been better-integrated (Also that ‘mavity’ is the running joke that keeps on giving): as I may have noted above, this episode struck me as torn between a fairly straightforward tribute act and dark satire in a way that made it quite hard to root for (Despite it also including elements that I rather enjoyed).
It’s a strange coincidence, come to think of it, that this episode and the next two feature both a character named Rani and a character named Chandra, yet neither one has any evident relation to Rani Chandra of The Sarah Jane Adventures.