Space Babies: N/A (but somewhere around #210ish)

 

"Space Babies” (15^th Dr, 2024)

(Series 14/1A episode 1, Dr 15 with Ruby, 11/5/2024, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Russell T Davies, , director: Julie Ann Robinson)

Ranking: #N/A (but around #210ish) 

  'Dr Who Babies! Watch the Doctor and his sonic rusk crawl down some corridors on the run from the Cybertoddlers and master Master in his time-travelling cot while wearing Tardis nappies (Time and Relative Diapers In Space) in 'Doctor Wah! and the Goo Goo Ga Ga...Of Doom!'  

>Back in the distant days of the 2000s Russell T Davies’ series always fit a pattern: the first episode of every series was the silly one, a runaround that reminded the audience of the basics of time travel and worked as a primer for anyone (particularly children) new to the show before (hopefully) hypnotising them into staying as the series grew increasingly darker and darker (think ‘Rose’ ‘New Earth’ ‘Smith and Jones’ and ‘Partners In Crime’). Russell II Davies has already shown us during the 60th anniversary specials and Christmas Day return alike that he’s using Disney money to do exactly what he did before but bigger and bolder (if not yet necessarily better) and so again we get that traditionally silly opener to an even bigger extreme. So this time we don’t just get a gentle reminder that this is one of the most imaginative series on Earth we get an episode that no other scifi series would possibly think of. We don’t just get a few gentle continuity references for newcomers to drop into we get multiple scenes about time travel/The Tardis/a phonecall that lets Ruby call home in her time even when in the far future/the Doctor’s tragic past that means he’s an orphan just like his companion, all within the opening few minutes. The lightweight plot that wraps itself around these basics is right on the verge of being nonexistent. And Russell’s not just going after children as his target market this episode but babies. Yes, space babies. As The Doctor says at least a dozen times more than he needs to know in this episode.

All of those opening episodes are a mixed bag. For every good moment that ought to be silly but are genuinely chilling and adult (a shop full of plastic mannequins coming to life/a hospital full of cat nuns treating the sick/a Judoon on the moon that looks like a Rhino in a spacesuit/the threat that tissues of fat can turn into people!) there will be another that really doesn’t land and seems far too childish (Burping wheely bins! A talking bit of skin inhabiting the Doctor and Rose/Ann Reid sucking patients’ blood through a straw/did we mention fat turning into people?) ‘Space Babies’ is that formula again, but with an even bigger gulf between the bits that work and the bits that don’t. Often in the same scene. Exhibit A: babies that actually talk, a really silly idea thanks to the wonders of CGI in a highly creepy yet silly way that looks like the 1990s CGI used on animals in films like ‘Babe’ and which is nevertheless oddly affecting when baby Eric wheels his pushchair out to certain doom, telling himself in a baby voice that he’s going to be brave (it seems an odd quirk of the inhabitants of this universe that they all have the voices of six or seven year olds and act around that age too, despite looking like Human babies and still being in nappies: apparently aliens potty train at different speeds in the universe. Which isn’t a thought I can say I‘ve ever had before despite this being my 321^st review). Exhibit B: the all-too literal bogeyman made of real bogeys, taken from the wiped noses of all the babies and turned into a real living monster because…well…just because it does alright? And yet the silliest, cheapest, daftest most outrageously juvenile baddy in all of Who still made me really sad when it was hanging out of an airlock about to die. Which is not to be sniffed at: I mean, it’s an art form making you care about people in a relatively short amount of screen time and I felt more for that poor creature in five minutes of Russell’s writing than I did full seasons of characters under Chris Chibnall. And yet…space babies who talk? Seriously, that’s the plot? I spent half the episode watching in horror, expecting the television to burn out of sheer sacrilege for what my favourite series had turned into – and the other half feeling strangely proud that something this weird was actually going out in primetime as part of one of the BBC’s flagship programmes. I mean, so much for the worry that the Disney money was going to make Dr Who lose all it’s quirks and become ‘normal’; it’s as if Russell went the other way and decided to make the show quirkier than ever. And I’m sort of here for that (or at least I was until the ‘exhaust fumes from old nappies’ joke that was one too far).

One thing the story did get right was the interplay between the Doctor and Ruby. We didn’t get a lot of it in ‘The Church On Ruby Road’ and Ruby herself was a bit bland, a combination of being stuck on her own for much of that episode, the Doctor getting all the best lines, Millie Gibson acting in a very ‘Coronation Street’ (i.e. artificial) way and the fact that there’s only so much brilliant acting you can do surrounded by singing CGI goblins. This episode had more time to work out who these characters are and how they respond to another. This Doctor is more naturally cooler than the others, freer with his emotions and less the natural outsider, which is I think a clever way of handling the fact that the lead part is being played by the first ethnic minority actor. Ncuti continues to be eccentric and likeable in a very Doctory way despite having more natural confidence and brashness than his predecessors though and it’s a relief to have a playful Doctor who just wants to have fun (he’s at his weakest when asked to do the ‘I lost all my family in a time war’ emotional baggage that Eccleston and Tennant used to do in their sleep). Ruby has been turned into Rose mark II, but thankfully the original Rose when she represented the best of us rather than the smugger less likeable version from series two when she stopped representing us at all. Ruby finally clicks as a character when she stops being slightly dazed and one step behind the Doctor or asking the Doctor lots of questions or being in peril and picks up a baby because it needs comforting, with no thought to picking up alien germs or the weirdness of the situation she finds herself in. It’s her equivalent of Rose ignoring the local celebrities to talk to and befriend the local servants. ‘Church’ was all about Ruby as a mystery, a Clara-like conundrum to solve and I was worried Russell was going to continue that line of thinking (actually I’m still a bit worried about that after the scenes of her memories making it snow). Russell isn’t that sort of a writer and, as ‘Wild Blue Yonder’ proves, his episodes go a bit wrong when he’s trying too hard to be like his friends, but here he makes Ruby flesh and blood.

Alas Russell still isn’t writing plots with his customary three-dimensions. So far the only plot worth mentioning since his comeback has been the one he borrowed from a comic book (‘The Star Beast’) and this one too is on the lighter side. The plot as a whole: some babies were abandoned, their nanny’s been looking after them and the computer maintaining them conjured up a monster out of their bogeys because children like being scared.  It’s a big ol’ two fingers at Mary Whitehouse and the idea that children should be protected from being scared when it’s such a natural and necessary part of their development (just about the only thing the three different Who showrunners have agreed on is that their biggest memories of the series they love are the scariest ones). But whereas Moffat would have made it all super scary and Chibnall would have linked the scares into a moral Davies ends up making this more about the emotions. Yes being scared is a natural part of human nature, there even in babyhood, but so is courage (Eric is quite happy to die when he thinks he’s going to save the others and for one awful moment we think they’re actually going to do it – the pauses between the peril and things working out really are getting longer, after the similar one of Donna being ‘abandoned’ in ‘Yonder’). And so is mercy: the babies start crying when they think their bogeyman is about to die and seem sadder at his potential death than they were at their own. It is, if I may be so bold, a continuation of the specials (and Rose Noble specifically) with Russell thinking about the new series of gen Zs who’ve come along since he was last in charge of the show and how they differ from the millennials he was pitching his series at. More grownup in some ways growing up in a hardened era of austerity wars and environmental collapse,  more childish and coddled in others as parenting styles become more protective and children become independent later in life, the younger generation freer and more comfortable with their emotions than their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, a combination of being ‘snowflakes’ who can’t tolerate the hardships their elders went through (say their detractors) and who are less willing to put up with stuff and prepared to make a fuss rather than cow down to potential parents and bosses (say their supporters).

Ruby, agonisingly young (she casually drops into conversation that she was born in 2004 – and thus born at exactly the time Russell would have started writing Who’s comeback season) was born right in the middle of Gen Z and is them all over: it feels as if she needs saving and a hand to hold more than most recent companions and yet at the same time she’s first to dive into trouble when she thinks she can help, actually pushing the Doctor out the way to rescue Eric much to his admiration. And if all of that sounds far-fetched and high-falluting, remember it’s where Dr Who began, as one of the few ‘family’ shows of the 1960s written equally for parents and children, that helped bring up awkward conversations about the generation gap and parental fears about what their children might grow up into when let loose on the world as adults (see ‘Space Museum’ for a pro-youth story, ‘The Dominators/Abominable Snowmen’ for a pro-adult one and all the Terry Nation Dalek stories for the fears that the children of WW2 might grow up causing WW3 although ‘The Chase’ is very much Nation’s realisation that they’re smarter and kinder than that). Of course if I was Gen Z I wouldn’t be too happy at being portrayed as an actual baby, which is what this story is hinting at too, with it’s actually rather sweet message about how all our youngsters need is love and hugs (I mean, the eldest of them are in their mid-twenties now). Actually that’s a great message perfect for Who: a lot of this show has been about trying not to pass on generational trauma and to make life better for their children, when they’re mostly powerless to. Whether that be the parents who fought in WW2 or the miners who knew the misery the Thatcher strikes were going to inflict, who then realised what damage David sodding Cameron and his successors were going to do (please turn him into Davros or something!) It’s the sort of theme Dr Who has hinted at a lot in the past but never as strongly as here and the scene of abandoned children, asking for a hug and some attention (surely the children abandoned under the conservative government with libraries shut, schools falling into disrepair and leisure activities abandoned) is exactly the sort of thing that Dr Who is for. This is a series that’s at its best when giving a voice to people who don’t have one – and who could belong in that category better than babies who haven’t learned to speak yet?

There’s another theme hidden away in this story that gets a bit lost under the talking babies and snot jokes. One of the big news stories of the past few years has been America’s gradual descent from the rich and bountiful in-place every child in Britain secretly wanted to grow up in (‘The Chase’ again, ‘The Gunfighters’ and many more) to the sort of place we look on with increasing pity. One of the biggest shocks to the ingrained British idea that America is ahead of us came with the Roe vs Wade debate that reversed a woman’s rights to pre-term abortions in certain states of America. Abortion is a much much bigger issue in America than it is in Britain and as well as having half an eye on the younger generation Russell is also clearly thinking about the big launch Disney promise to make Stateside. He doesn’t pack any punches here: there’s a wicked and very Davies stinging barb in there about a regimented system that will do everything it can to make sure that babies are born come what may and shrieks about the rights of all foetuses to be born, which then abandons children after birth into potential poverty without a second glance. You can just feel the venom at such a contradictory absurdity dripping from Russell’s computer as he writes these lines and has Ruby comment on what a backward society this must be. Let’s face it, there aren’t many opportunities to take potshots at abortion laws in a series like Dr Who  but it’s clearly an issue that’s got under RTD’s skin (I mean, it’s weird enough that this is the second story in a row to centre around babies;  funnily enough the only other babies we’ve ever had playing such a central role in the plot both came in the same era, that of the 7^th Doctor, with Delta giving birth to a baby covered in green goo amongst running for her life from ‘The Bannermen’ and Ace befriending her own mother as a baby in ‘The Curse Of Fenric’).

That coincidence has set me off thinking and made me put my finger on since the specials too: we’re in a time-warp heading back into the McCoy years of the modern show. Or to put it another way we’re hovering around the twenty year mark all over again. When Dr Who returned in 2005, with Russell at the helm, it was like the 1960s all over again: a show that above all things was about learning and curiosity and imagination that could go forwards, backwards and sideways and reinvent the wheel. It was a film noir, however it was shot, nig on shadows and character and dialogue. The Moffat years were the 1970s: more colourful, more stylistic, more Earth-based (thanks to the credit crunch limiting the BBC budget) and a lot scarier. It’s typical of 1970s telly, making the most of the new colour and being full of images and ideas and monsters. Chibnall’s are the early JNT years when the show became more defined by what it wasn’t than what it was (remember the first year when we had no returning monsters?) and the show became more about the characters around the doctor than the doctor him/herself. It either looked like intelligent adult TV made by children or children’s TV made by adults, with nothing in between (a lot of my childhood in the 1980s was spent watching shows like that). And now here we are, in an era that seems suspiciously like 1987 all over again, a big bright cartoon painted in broad strokes with daft monsters that seem designed to make half the fanbase cringe and storylines best described as ‘whimsical’. It’s modern Who’s equivalent of the Rani laughing manically (much more of this when maestro turns up the following episode), of the pool cleaning robots, Richard Briars gurning, Ken Dodd directing green-skinned aliens to Butlin’s holiday camp and a toddler befriending a dragon in a world made of ice (‘Dragonfire’ is arguably the closest story to this one for that reason, because as well as following a simpering toddler around it also features some of the most horrific moments in the series with Kane’s melted face, immediately after such cutesie moments). It’s not my favourite phase of the series. I don’t think it’s anybody’s favourite phase of the series. But I can see what they were trying to do. I’m hopeful that the next phase of the show (the late McCoy era) will see it all come right again (and hopefully without the cancellation this time around). And stone me if I don’t actually prefer it to a lot of the playing-safe Davison and shouty Colin Baker stories that came before it, even though fandom generally accepts they're worse.

 The bogeyman might be a stupid idea but it’s a really impressive design – like ‘Star Beast’ the extra Disney money has clearly gone on the monsters rather than the sets or the special effects (although there is also an impressively long corridor to run down). It really does look like its made up of bogeys when you look close and yet not so obviously it gives the game away. The ‘sleep’ monster in ‘Sleep No More’ was easily the best thing about that episode too, but this one beats it in every way. Just one regret: it would have been so Dr Who to defeat it with a giant handkerchief!

All that said there’s a lot I didn’t like. The babies talking are meant to be sweet but are more creepy than anything. Even with Disney money the production team don’t have the time of a Hollywood blockbuster film to simply follow the babies around and capture all the expressions they need for around half an hour of screen time, so what we have are babies saying one thing with their mouths and another entirely with their eyes (let’s face it, most of them are looking round for their mums and dads and confused as to why they’ve been left in the middle of the room with two bouncy strangers under hot studio lights). None of the babies get enough time to do anything much bar whinge; it looks when we first meet them as if Russell is going to do his usual thing and give a crowd lots of contrasting yet easily identifiable personalities –and then he stops to concentrate on Eric. The sight of him wheeling down a corridor in his pushchair with his little legs flapping, off to certain danger, is simultaneously a really sweet moment and the silliest moment in a really silly story (I mean, how slow are the Doctor and Ruby if he could wheel himself so far away from them at his speed?) The plot makes little sense when you break it down (I mean, who built this space station exactly? And what happened to the parents? It might be explained in a future episode…but I doubt it); worse yet there isn’t a proper ending: yeah sure the Doctor saves the bogeyman and they all live happily ever after but it seems so out of character that the Doctor doesn’t at least try to reunite them with their families and instead saunters off, job half done, with the nanny whose proven to be a sub-murderer (albeit in unusual circumstances) left in charge.  Even an actor as natural ebullient and natural as Ncuti is also clearly struggling to stay in character when bouncing an errant baby on his knee, his eyes plainly saying, to quote a phrase, ‘would someone tell me what the hell is going on?!’ (Millie is far more natural: I’m willing to bet she either had a lot of younger brothers and sisters or did a lot of babysitting growing up. One idle thought: we know the Doctor is an only child, as indeed all timelords seem to be given the weird way they were ‘loomed’. But do they have babysitters too? Did the Master-Doctor feud start when the elder Doctor told the younger Master (in all-black nappies, natch) to stop pranking him and laughing like a maniac and to get to bed already? )

A lot of the specials and ‘Ruby Road’ felt like Russell had come back solely because he was jealous of his successors getting to play with all the toys he established and wanting to do a bit of the same, only more so. I can’t help but feel that this entire story was written around the repeated 11^th Doctor gag, written by Steven Moffat for ‘Closing Time’ and ‘A Good Man Goes To War’, that the Tardis translator circuits allow him to ‘speak baby’. I’ll be honest, it wasn’t my favourite Who joke even when it was clearly a joke (just look at the sly grin on Matt Smith’s face when James Corden as Craig is so utterly bewildered he can’t work out if his friend is laughing at his gullibility or not). The bogeyman monster too is uncomfortably like the ones made out of the sleep that gets in our eyes in Mark Gatiss’ ‘Sleep No More’. Half an hour of watching babies wheel themselves around in prams when we could be anywhere in time and space is really not my idea of a good time. It might be just a genetic fault in me but I’ve never found babies that sweet or cute: they look like children that have been sat on by the Abzorbaloff and been squashed out of all proportion. You can’t talk to them, you can’t play with them, you can’t show them your Dr Who collection or play toy Daleks with them…Babyhood seems like a genetic waste of time in so many ways. The episode seems to take it as read that we all want to cuddle a baby but I’m not sure I do, especially with all the references to snot and nappy changing. I mean, personally, given the choice I’d rather go sit with the bogeyman because at least he looks as if you could actually have a conversation with him. Traditionally one of the largest audiences that make up Dr Who fans are teenage boys. They don’t seem like natural baby-lovers either. Is putting this all-important episode first in the run really the way to recapture a whole new audience? I mean, it’s not fun with plastic mannequins is it?   

One other issue I have with this story is the opening. Back in 2005 Rose discovered what life as a time traveller was like gradually. The viewers might have had a million questions about how this world works but they weren’t answered all at once; indeed, the last time I re-watched the episodes in order I was struck by how late it was that the issue of ‘how come I can understand alien lingo when I didn’t even get my French GCSE?’ and the like first cropped up (series four’s ‘Fires Of Pompeii’). This story reportedly leads straight on from ‘The Church At Ruby Road’. Ruby  should be in shock: there she was having an ordinary day and suddenly she’s been asked to believe in goblins, aliens, time travel and the tardis being bigger on the inside and out in quick succession. That, surely, is enough for any companion to be getting on with for a few stories (indeed I put it to you, dear reader, that Tegan spent three years suffering from culture shock and only quit the Tardis in ‘Resurrection Of The Daleks’ when the numbness wore off. But then she did see her aunt murdered too). Next thing you know Ruby’s already delivering random number co-ordinates like she’s done this sort of thing all her life, asks if her foster mum is dead now she’s in the future, gets her routine one phonecall home (to discover she’s just left) and doesn’t seem surprised in the least to actually be on a space station in the future (instead she makes a quip about Star Trek, further muddying the ‘is Trek real or a TV programme in the Whoniverse?’ debate that’s been raging on and off for fifty years). Next episode she’ll fill in the other blanks that generally take companions a full year: learning about the Doctor’s family, the fact he has two hearts, asking about a Tardis wardrobe and getting her own Tardis key. I mean, I know this regeneration is more trusting and open than the 10^th but when you think what Martha had to go through to prove she was worthy of one – I mean, what has the Doctor even seen Ruby do so far, except chase a goblin over a roof? I understand that the Disney audience of newcomers are impatient to know all these things, but so we were in 2005 and it felt right the slow way Rose got to grips with everything. Had they cut maybe five minutes of this opening and spent more time fleshing out the baby plot then it would have made the episode more palatable all round (was this scene padding to compensate for just how costly animating baby faces turned out to be?)

Alright. I can’t hold the joke off any longer…’Space Babies’ isn’t the great stretch into the new direction fans were hoping for now that the anniversary nostalgia was out the way, but it is perhaps baby steps into that direction. This isn’t a modern masterpiece of subtlety and depth to match highs like ‘Midnight’ and ‘The End Of The World’ that show off what this series can do at its best, it’s a broad cartoon full of one dimensional characters, a one dimensional plot and paper-thin ideas that unravel like a cheap nappy when you try to pull them apart. And yet there are moments here when it all comes together and becomes grownup despite the setting, when the Doctor and Ruby are sparring off each other, when little Eric is being oh so brave or when the Doctor is risking his life for the baddy because life is precious and death is a last resort always, even when you’re an artificial creation made out of bogeys. And if that isn’t the true spirit of Dr Who I don’t know what is. We really didn’t need the joke about the nappies (sure to become as notoriously poor in taste as Russell’s one about Ursula’s paving slab sex life in ‘Love and Monsters’) or the puerile humour that ran through most of it (of course Ruby gets covered with snot, as if we’re watching a bad episode of ‘Fun House’), nor did we need quite so much ‘babies’  at the expense of ‘space’, but  even though this was an episode that seemed almost designed to make the natural fanbase gag in so many ways it still felt like ‘proper’ Dr Who in a way that some of the specials and the Christmas episode didn’t. I mean, at least it didn’t close with a musical finale right? Putting another one of those in would be silly. Hahahahahaha, um,  ha. See you tomorrow for the review of ‘The Devil’s Chord’!

POSITIVES +I love the opening gag about going back to prehistoric Earth and Ruby accidentally treading on a butterfly before turning round as a completely different alien and the Doctor’s frantic attempts to undo it by fixing the ‘butterfly effect’ lever in the Tardis. So very Who and such a clever way of spelling out the paradoxes of time travel without having to do the whole ‘father’s Day’ emotional shebang all over again. The alien Ruby looks great (it’s clearly what Phillip Martin was thinking of when he wrote in a feathered Peri to ‘Vengeance On Varos’)and Ncuti plays his sudden moment of horror as he looks over really well. Had the episode stayed on prehistoric Earth I’d have been very happy!

NEGATIVES – The Davies et machina plot resolution tradition strikes again: someone is being sucked out of an airlock and is solved by the Doctor pressing a big red button. Just as in ‘The End Of The World’. And ‘Doomsday’. And ‘The End Of Time’ to a certain extent. I know Russell likes his big buttons but there are other ways to end a story you know.  

BEST QUOTE: ‘I don't have a people, I don't have a home... But I don't have a job, either. I don't have a boss, or taxes, or rent, or bills to pay. I don't have a purpose, or a cause, or a mission, but I have...freedom. That's why I keep moving on, to see the next thing, and the next, and the next. And sometimes it looks even better through your eyes’.
 

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