Boom: Ranking - N/A (but around #130ish)

"Boom” (15^th Dr, 2024)

(Series 14/1A episode 3, Dr 15 with Ruby, 18/5/2024, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Steven Moffat, executive producers: Julie Gardner, Jane Tranter, Joe Collins and Phil Collinson**, director: Julie Ann Robinson)

Ranking: #130ish reviewed 19/5/2024

'You put your left leg in, your left leg out, shake it all about and...Boom! Gee, I guess this wasn't the right planet to start doing the hokey-cokey on after all!'

There we were, thinking that we had the Davies-Disney Plus era of Who sussed as a colourful cartoonish romp where the most bizarre things happened and it was all joyous fun and made for a new audience of hip six year olds with the Doctor footloose and fancy free then in comes Steven Moffat, writing his first script since ‘Twice Upon A Time’ seven years ago and suddenly, boom!, suddenly the Doctor’s put his foot in it and the universe is a much darker, scarier and more adult place again. Just like the last time Russell T was in charge in fact: Moffat’s episodes tended to be the darker, scarier ones that pushed Russell’s likeable characters to their limits to discover their bad habits and unresolved trauma, the landmine that was always waiting for them. I don’t know any hip and trendy six year olds watching Dr Who (and if I did they wouldn’t be hanging round with me in any case) but if I did I’m willing to bet they had the same whiplash I did trying to work out how we could from the brutal realism of ‘Remembrance Of The Daleks’ to the gaudy kitsch of ‘The Happiness Patrol’. Honestly the series needed it by this stage, after three specials, a Christmas episode and two season openers that felt as if they could have been Christmas episodes too and early signs are that this episode has gone down better than most later for confronting the darker side of nature in a story where, far from having a cartoon villain, the monsters turn out to be ourselves.

The story goes that Russell phoned Steven up to tell him he was taking over the show again and had cast his new Doctor though the former wasn’t yet looking for writers and the latter wasn’t looking for work the discussion naturally turned to what sort of Dr Who stories they’d both spotted in the world (which at this point was circa 2021: Davies is a long way ahead of himself with current filming). Moffat’s first question was what the new Doctor was like and when he was told Ncuit was energetic and youthful and always seemed to be moving decided that a good contrast would be to see what might happen to Dr 15 if he was forced to stand still. Which happens quite literally when the Tardis lands and the Doctor rushes out to embrace a new planet and steps out in the middle of a great big war onto a whacking great mine (one likes to imagine the ghost of Harry Sullivan yelling ‘the Doctor is an imbecile!’ right now, but to be fair to him it is rather well camouflaged). It’s very Moffat: The Weeping Angels in reverse and continues his belief that an attack in slow motion is more scary than one that’s swift: only this time it’s the Doctor who can’t move not the threat.And that’s it: that’s the plot, for 45 minutes tense minutes, as the Doctor stands on one leg, tries not to lose his cool and works out how to save himself and the planet from certain destruction. So much for all the extra Disney money spoiling our show: far from being an expensive extravaganza this is Dr Who pared down to basics again: not many characters trying to avoid certain death in a single (albeit rather impressive panoramic) set that is, to all intents and purposes, made to look like a quarry.

Once again Dr Who goes back to basics trying to bring peace to a war-torn society the way he’s been doing since the very beginning (and, indeed, in Moffat’s last episode 2017’s ‘Twice Upon A Time’ set in a similar battlefield in WW1). In stories past we might have learned a lot about this society at war – we get a few details sketched in, with a world full of ‘Anglican minister’ soldiers who seem to be humans in the future but for all we know it could be world war three, the cold war, a rogue human army in the glorious battle of the Sontarons empire against their Rutan enemies or a re-match of the Daleks and the Thals or the Movellans. In a sense, though, it doesn’t matter what the wars are about because all wars seem the same and in an era when Russia is at war with Ukraine and Israel and Palestine are lobbing great lumps out of each other and America is at war with itself and Britain is at war with itself and goodness knows what might happen next it could be any or all of them. This is a story that complains about how we really should be over this by now and doing better, moving on to a great united peaceful future not squabbling over land and money and resources. The children who grew up on the Who of the 1960s and dreamed of flying to the stars are really resenting still being here, taking the show over a second time, because their work still isn’t unfinished while humans remain Earthbound and petty.  Moffat even weaponises the ‘thoughts and prayers’ message, which has become so synonymous with 21st century conflicts, used by people in general but politicians in particular to sound like they care when really they know that nothing will ever change. For, like a lot of Moffat stories, though, the real villain is capitalism: countries make more money out of war than they ever do out of peace and somehow always find the money for illegal wars and costly invasions when they can’t find a few pounds extra to spare to their starving, suffering children. By the time the Doctor works out what’s going on (spoilers) we find out that there isn’t even an enemy on this planet – that they’ve long since died but the war is still being fought because it makes commercial sense to sell weapons to the fighters. So far so Dr Who but there’s an extra twist of the knife that even our own deaths can be turned into commercial gain, with futuristic urns that project costly holograms with final messages and social media feeds that you can pick and choose downloadable ‘memories’ from. Honestly it’s a wonder the war doesn’t come with its own sponsor. It’s more than a little like the capitalism message of ‘Oxygen’, only better and – despite the mine the Doctor stand on and (more spoilers) Ruby getting shot – far more nuanced and far less brutal in the way it handles the subject the knife wielded with surgeon’s precision rather than as a blunt instrument. 

Moffat’s on slightly shakier ground when it comes to the question of faith. This is something that’s turned up a lot in past Dr Whos too, the role that religion has in the universe and whether religions that are at their core usually about peace really ought to be used as an excuse for war. It is, if you will, ‘The Crusade’ 59 years on, asking the same questions about whether you really want to believe in a God that believes you should kill unbelievers. It’s a line that equates this story even more with the Israeli-Palestine conflict, which is interesting because given the length of time between the filming and broadcasting of stories now Moffat must have been mighty hot off the press writing about this. He makes the soldiers must closer to home by having them be Anglicans though, with the pithy line from the Doctor to Ruby when she expresses surprise that traditionally most soldiers have been religious – she’s just been brought up in a slim pocket of time when wars appeared to be about other things. There’s nowhere for the message to go beyond that though: Moffat tries to square the question of belief versus proof out by having the soldiers question the Doctor in a way they won’t their religion and by having the Doctor himself embrace the comfort of faith when an orphaned little girl believes that death isn’t really a final goodbye, but it all feels a little stuck on the top of this episode, not integrated as well as it might. There is one great line though: ‘faith means never having to think for yourself’.

There is, I believe, a third protest going on – one that’s well hidden amongst the metaphors and leads on nicely from the idea of having ‘faith’ in governments to look after us when we’re better off looking after each other. The biggest change that’s happened in the world since Russell and Steven last played with their Dr Who toys on national television, of course, is the covid pandemic. There seems to be a mass hypnotism worthy of The Master around the subject now because no one talks about it, even though it was a massive universal trauma we’re all still recovering from and hundreds of people still die of it around the world every day and thousands more are disabled by its after-effects and the longer we move away from our mass lockdowns the more the figures go up not down. Given the simple format of this story it wouldn’t surprise me if this story actually started life as one of the ‘lockdown’ videos made by old writers and actors from the show’s past to comfort children before a mass tweetalong every week during the early days of the pandemic in 2020 before the politicians decided it was over and everyone had to go back to work (because it was costing too much to stay at home), only it’s been disguised. Covid was described from the beginning in terms of a war: it was something to ‘battle’ said Boris as he utterly failed to comprehend the seriousness of what was going (or, in the early days, walk down a single flight of stairs at Downing Street to sit in on early panicked meetings following the outbreak in Wuhan). The people who died were described as ‘casualties’. Many people died who didn’t need to because of economics: the governments messing around giving ppe contracts to their friends and cronies, who might as well have spent the money on hand mines for all the good it did people. Those of us who were and remain vulnerable were sacrificed in the hurry to get back to normal and have people buying things again – we were suddenly expendable again, no longer shielded at home, even though most of us had disabilities that wouldn’t have stopped us living full lives without a pandemic (just like the blind soldier John Francis Vater). We were unable to say goodbye to many of our loved ones in person, just through video – something which happens when John’s little girl Splice turns up and sees a hologram of her daddy, the contact nearly blowing everyone sky high. Because the landmines are set off by contact: the only we can stay safe and avoid blowing each other up is to remain in isolation, even in the middle of a war, even with a battle raging, even when we want to hug our loved ones, because it’s the only way we can keep each other safe.  And who is the first line of defence injured because he rushes in to save everybody, not realising the full danger? The Doctor of course (so many healthcare practitioners were disabled or killed by covid).More than anything else, though, Moffat captures both the evils of capitalism sending us out to fight while the danger is still there, from governments perpetuating a war that should have ended long ago but would cost too much to fix, while being forced to stand still in a world that’s changing far too fast. The only thing he’s missing is some zoom quiz nights and Ruby making banana bread and we’d have the whole package. Since when was there such a thing as an ‘acceptable casualty rate’ Moffat rages: we should all be trying to save each other and ourselves, even when the people in charge don’t want us to, in war or in plague, or what does that say about our humanity?After all, most TV studios – including Who – are still masking: programmes run to such tight deadlines that a delay from cast or crew being off sick would cause more problems than it would in most workplaces. Overall it’s a neat metaphor, cleverly hid – so cleverly hid I don’t think many people have picked up on it yet (unless of course I’ve just been on the wine gums again: gluten-free ones these days thanks to the price my digestion system is still paying for the damage done to it by covid). 

Moffat also gets to grips with the way big events in our lives like wars and covid speed up the normal human processes and there’s another very Dr Whoy theme about our mortality and the need to make every minute count. There we are bumbling along, thinking we have all the time to fall in love and dodge round the question of whether the person you like likes you back and that we will live to see our children grow, when a big moment suddenly mkes everything much more intense and urgent. The Moffat children who were still at school when their dad was showrunner (and helped shape his scripts by throwing in ideas for phobias and monsters and historical timezones) are now all grown up but you never forget what it is to be a parent and the relationship between the soldier and his little girl is one of the best. While the closing appeal from the Doctor for his hologram to put things right is a bit of an easy solution (albeit a clever inversion of ‘War Of The Worlds’ by having a computer virus save us from our invaders) it works well in the sense that early on Moffat sets up the problems raising children in a war (or indeed in lockdown) and there are lots of sweet links between the two (the hologram’s final goodbye comment that his girl should remember to brush her teeth is such a dad thing to say and neatly mirrors where the story started, ordinary life continuing on as it always does). The soldiers figuring that facing certain death is a good time to admit their love for each other rings true too and is a little more believable than when Chris Chibnall tried a similar trick in ‘Resolution’. All in all, with its dramatic opening and its moving climax, I can see why so many fans are calling the best story of the Disney era so far, with many saying it’s the best since Capaldi was the Doctor eight years ago.

I’m still not quite convinced (I have a very soft spot for ‘The Star Beast’ and there were a few of Jodie’s stories I rated highly too, even if it was a very inconsistent era): ‘Boom’ starts well and ends acceptably but it goes a bit weird in the middle. And honestly those centre fifteen minutes or so were pretty dull. And if you can’t be exciting when the lead character is standing on a mine about to be blown to bits when can you? In its aesthetics and brutality its ‘Caves Of Androzani’ twinned with ‘Genesis Of The Daleks’, a story with big stakes that is somehow too small to match the ambition and layers of those past classics. There’s only so much drama that can be rung out of a timelord trying not to put his foot down and a lot of it was rather overdone: particularly the moment Ruby is shot just as she’s about to save the day and put things right (the moment we nearly had covid under control before being sent back to the office, perhaps?) There are a few loose storytelling devices left hanging: for instance we’re told early on that the mine’s don’t just react to weight but subtle clues in a person’s blood pressure and heart rate so the Doctor has to stay calm and not get angry. Sometimes the lines do indeed flicker round when Ncuti raises his voice – but not always. And frankly hearing that his companion has just been shot (without being able to see how bad she is) and bawling ‘sorry!’ to all and sundry would have blown all the lights on the mine to kingdom come. Weirdly, even though ‘The Devil’s Chord’ specified that Ruby had been travelling with the Doctor for six months by now, this story claims that this is Ruby’s first alien planet: I really hope there’s a series arc about messing up with time or this would be the biggest continuity blow since the toy of Davros had the wrong arm amputated. In keeping with the new musical companion The Doctor has suddenly started picking up a habit of singing songs to calm him down out of nowhere – 20th century Earth songs, which seems a bit weird (wouldn’t it have made more sense for him to sing a new Murray Gold composition masquerading as a Gallifreyan lullaby? Although it did warm this fannish heart to hear the Doctor actually sing the words to ‘The Skye Boat Song’, the tune the second Doctor was always tootling on his recorder when he got the chance). In another neat link the Villenagrd systems were mentioned in chatter between the 9^th Doctor and Captain jack in Moffat’s first Who TV story ‘The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances’ (in case you’re wondering he turned everything off in the wilderness years before he met Rose, which is why he doesn’t then turn everything off again at the end). It seemed rather inevitable too that if there were four spaces left on the mine before it blew up that we would use them all up before the end, even when things seemed under control. The closing remark, about how we’re all like snowmen waiting to be erased when the only thing that survives of us is love is incredibly tacky, the Hallmarks Greeting card version of love and death that runs through Dr Who (Moffatt can mess up on the odd line: what with a fan-pleasing reference to ‘fish fingers and custard’ this episode really is like a sampler album of all Moffat eras more than it’s like a Greatest Hits).  The Anglican soldiers who turn up don’t really add much to the story either – they felt more like filler to pad the plot out a bit longer.

One of them is actress Susan Twist making her fifth appearance in seven stories. I’ll admit I hadn’t even noticed it was the same actress until the fanbase pointed it out online, thanks to a dose of face-blindness and the clever makeup and costumes that have changed her appearance so much (I feel a bit better given the Doctor and Ruby haven’t spotted her yet either!) In this episode she was the ambulance driver, while other stories have seen her play Mrs Merridew (Isaac Newton’s maid) in ‘Wild Blue Yonder’, the woman who asks Ruby’s band to ‘give it some welly’ in ‘The Church At Ruby Road’, Gina in ‘Space Babies’ (the communications officer) and an Abbey Road ‘tea lady’ in ‘The Devil’s Chord’. Most of the time the parts are so small she’s uncredited but eagle-eyed  viewers recognise her from other things: surely the name ‘Susan Twist’ has to be a clue? Especially given the amount of times the Doctor keeps mentioning being a father and grandfather lately (Susan was his grand-daughter if you haven’t caught up with the earliest Dr Whos on the Whoniverse i-player yet: hint – you absolutely should, the 1960s was the show’s peak for me. Although it would seem a weird time to do it, given that her ‘creator’ Anthony Coburn’s son is the one holding up ‘An Unearthly Child’ from being added to i-player, much to Russell’s chagrin). And not forgetting the finale of ‘The Devil’s Chord’ mentioning how ‘there’s always a twist at the end’. And how does she link to the theme of time being changed so often and so bizarrely in most of the episode since the 60th anniversary in November last year, Ruby’s confusing beginnings (abandoned on the local church steps one Christmas) or the snow that’s fallen on three stories in a row now, including on a battleground in the blazing sunshine? Compared to the subtlety of ‘bad Wolf’ it’s a clue that’s beginning to scream we pay attention to it by now. And yet it would almost be more Dr Who like to plant all those clues and then make out afterwards that it was all just a coincidence, while the writers absolutely knew they were taking us for a ride and perhaps diverting our attention away from what was really going on. All will be revealed soon. Maybe...  

We haven’t really had enough time in any of these appearances to see if Susan Twist can act but we can the other characters and honestly the acting was a bit variable this week. Caoillin Springall wasn’t one of the more convincing child actors we’ve had in the series (though better than some) and Joe Anderson was a bit one-note as her dad (ironically enough he was rather good singing Beatles songs in the fab four equivalent of ‘Mama Mia’, the under-rated 2007 film ‘Across The Universe’, so maybe they should have got him in as one of the band for ‘The Devil’s Chord’ last week?) Millie and Ncuti continue to be class, though, with Millie continuing to be brave and helpful and the Doctor adding new shades as that ebullience from his regeneration in ‘The Giggle’ continues to wear off. Ncuti doesn’t quite nail every line this week the way he did the last three episodes but given he’s been robbed of the ability to act with his hands and legs (he’s a naturally very physical actor) he holds up very well (it’s a shame Moffat didn’t come up with this story for the 11th Dr though, can you imagine the fate of a planet resting on Matt Smith’s ability to stand still?! Tom Baker too!) The soldier Mundy is an interesting one: we know, given how far these episodes are being made in advance now, that actress Varada Sethu returns as a full-time companion next year (alongside Ruby despite rumours that Millie Gibson was being replaced for being a ‘diva’, rumours I’m amazed and a little dismayed Russell didn’t stamp out immediately). Is Mundy the new companion? Is her presence here part of the story arc, perhaps a Clara-style plot about someone keeping an eye on the Doctor to make sure history turns out the way it should as it’s being re-written by someone? (The Toymaker? The Master? Heck ‘Space Babies’ mentioned The Rani for the first time in ages so maybe it’s her?) Or is it as simple as the fact that Russell enjoyed her work on this story and decided to work with her again? After all, it’s not unprecedented having characters appear in other roles before the one they become known for – including Nicholas Courtney, Ian Marter, Colin Baker. Karen Gillan and Peter Capaldi.

Oh and one more (probably unintended) link. You remember The Beatles from last week? The last song they recorded their split (well, three of them anyway – Lennon didn’t turn up) was…’I Me Mine’. If the next few episodes feature a Ram, a Band on the Run and a utopia with no heaven, only sky (we already had the gnomes from ‘All Things Must Pass’, well goblins) then I’ll know that Russell T has been more inspired by The Beatles recently than he’s let on!

Overall  maybe it’s a good thing that we have so many of these extra things to think about because, as basic plots go, ‘Boom’ is one of the simplest. In a season where too much seems to be going on by far each episode it’s made for a refreshing change and the darker aspect, with the first deaths of a humanoid character in, what, four stories now (three if Goblins count) one of the longest gaps in Who without anyone dying on screen, a nice change of pace. There are a lot of worthy points in this story, most of them well made, and though Dr Who polemics about the stupidity of war and the dangers of capitalism used to be common it’s unique having the two woven together so tightly. I do wish there had been another layer on top of this plot though, perhaps a sub-plot for Ruby to solver given that she doesn’t get an awful lot to do this week – it feels as if ‘Boom’ is missing a layer to be a true classic of the modern age. Even so it’s still a really strong episode and proof that Moffat’s still got it following a difficult few years (Moffat threw his lot in with Netflix after Who and they’re going through a tough time of it lately so many of their newly commissioned series were paused or cancelled including ‘Dracula’ which ran to just there episodes in 2018, ‘The Time Traveller’s Wife’, a promising adaptation of Niffenhogger’s excellent and very timey wimey book, got dropped after one series in 2022, while stage play ‘The Unfriend’ was scuppered by covid and delayed two years). Steven had already gone down in Who folklore for having written more episode of Who than anyone, yes even Terrance Dicks and Robert Holmes and Russell (this is his 49th – apparently a 50th has already been filmed, the Christmas special for 2025!) It really was like he’d never been away (there’s a sweet tale that at the tone meeting Moffat felt so natural he forgot he wasn’t in charge and started haggling over costs that could be pinched from other episodes, before the team awkwardly pointed out it wasn’t his show anymore!) For all my criticisms this is a writer who earned his stripes with this show long ago and he’s already nailed the 15th Dr the way he did 9, 10, 11 and 12 so the more we see of him in the future the better. For even if this episode isn’t perfect it’s undeniably a step in the right direction and moves the programme on again: all of which is quite ironic really when you realise that it’s about someone standing very still.

+POSITIVES Unless something turns up on a future DVD commentary/i-player special to contradict me I’m pretty sure this is the first Dr Who story to use a new computer software device called ‘Unreal Space’ created by Dan May for use in computer games, so that programmers can use a much bigger space and see where their sets all fit in with one another across previously impossible distances. To the best of my knowledge it’s not been used on TV before, which makes this a watershed moment for not just Dr Who but television in the same way the first chromakey was back in the 1970s or the first handheld cameras and Nicam stereo were in the 1980s (Dr Who has always been the guinea pig for new techniques). It works really well: the moment Ruby stares up at her first alien sky, a huge Jupiter-like planet dominating the skyline along with purple aurora borealis (not unlike the very alien sight we had in our own skies last week!), revealing that the actors weren’t just standing in a tiny set but in the middle of a vast battleground, is a really impressive shot. In time I suspect we’ll view it the same we do the Tardis’ first dematerialisation or the Tardis turning corners on a space wheel at the start of ‘The Trial Of A Timelord’: a real ‘money’ shot that’s there to show off just what the series can do. Given how much of this episode pared things back to basics (with no other sets) a shot like that to show off is money well spent I say.

- NEGATIVES Seriously though, all these however many years in the future and the holograms of the dead and dying still look like worse than ‘Star Wars’ from 1977? The circle of past pictures to download was done better by ‘Black Mirror’ too (in the episode ‘The Entire History Of You’ where Jodie Whittaker first came to fame no less). The only way I can square it is to imagine the people of this planet have had to invent an alternative to wifi (as I shouldn’t think there’s much chance of a decent internet signal) and started over again.  

BEST QUOTE: ‘Give it time – everywhere’s a beach eventually’.
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