Rogue: Ranking - N/A (but around #220ish)

 

"Rogue”(15^th Dr, 2024)

(Series 14/1A episode 6, Dr 15 with Ruby, 8/6/2024, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writers: Kate Herron and Briony Redman, executive producers: Julie Gardner, Jane Trantor, Joel Collins and Phil Collinson, director: Ben Chessell)

Ranking: #N/A (#220-ish) reviewed 9/6/2024

How those other Doctors might have behaved at the ball: 1 - Hmm, all these young people, preposterous! I'm going to have a sit down on my stick and...unhand me sir! I have a grand-daughter!' 2 - Dance? In a straight line? Look smart? Oh no - I'm going to crimple my hair up and hang around the fringes lurking. A kiss? Oh no, I think you want my lovely assistant. The one in the skirt? He's Jamie. I can give you his number if you like... 3 - Right on, old chap, just let me have some cheese and biscuits first! A kiss? Hai! Learn to respect my boundaries young man, there's a good fellow. 4 - [trips over own scarf and knocks everyone around the room over] 5 - Well I say, it's the one occasion when I don't feel over-dressed. Does anyone have any good celery I can stick in my buttonhole? A Kiss? Me? Oh dear, brave heart Doctor... 6 - Of course you want to kiss me, I'm the best dancer in the rom. Watch my foxtrot. I invented it you know... 7- Hmm, I'm beginning to suspect all these dance moves are a secret game of chess by Fenric! A kiss? No, I never liked you, I have to break all respect you have for me just in case... 8 - [smooches in Gallifreyan] 9 - A dance? I do dancing! But a kiss? With these big ears? Who are you kidding? 10 - Sorry I only have eyes for the ladies. You're not a secret lady are you? 11 - Wowsers. I was only expecting a peck on the cheek. Oh well. Geronimo! 12 - Never mind whether I'm a good man or not, tell me...Am I a good dancer?  13 - Brilliant! You're quite dishy aren't you/ Just so you know, though, I'm quite socially awkward so here's a list of 150 reasons why you shouldn't go out with me. War Doctor: Bloody kids! Fugitive Dr: Bloody kids! Shalka Dr: Bloody kids!'

When I was little I got a secondhand copy of the 1985 Dr Who role-playing game for Christmas, when – despite the Doctor currently being played by Colin Baker – it had the 4^th Doctor and Leela on the front. It looked very me: three thick manuals all of which were the biggest you’ve ever seen (one of which was a ‘field user’s manual’, whatever that means), crammed with tiny text full of endless rules for creating your own stories. I like to think that the three modern showrunners still have a copy under their desk for whenever they get stuck (especially Moffat, usually after writing himself a cliff-hanger he can’t get out of with logic). It was based on the popular Star Trek role-playing game manuals of the 1970s where you could create mostly variations of the same story: either Kirk, Spock or Bones would get into trouble on a ship/planet/Earth’s past in trouble full of gorgeous women/hideous men/revolting Romans. The Dr Who variation never sold that well though and after trying to play it I kind of worked out why: playing the game the way it was meant to be played was kind of boring. ‘Dr Who’ is a show that’s all about breaking rules, that comes with no templates, where the brilliance of it is that next week you’ll be doing something utterly different to what you did the week before. The only way I could ever make it work was to go against the rules and use it as the launchpad for something completely left-field that felt far more like Dr Who to me: A modern planet that suddenly has an archaic ballroom, The Master suddenly being turned into a Cyberman, a Cybermen suddenly turning into a Dalek, K9 in danger being saved by the world, instead of some drippy local villager its Leela getting the love interest on an alien planet (but a lot moe plausibly than the one she got in ‘The Invasion Of Time’), the Doctor marrying Leela, The Doctor marrying The Master, the local Humans from the past suddenly turning out not to be just aliens but alien wildlife.

I was reminded of that when I saw ‘Rogue’ yesterday: it’s the sort of story no other series could do. The legend (and even though it happened all of two years ago it already feels like a legend) is that shortly after announcing that he’d decided to run Dr Who again Russell T Davies talked in an interview about how Regency costume drama ‘Eastenders in Ballgowns’ ‘Bridgerton’ was the best thing on TV but joked how the only thing it was missing to make it perfect was the presence of blood-sucking aliens. When the interviewer followed Russell up by asking Russell if he ever watched anything from that year’s other surprise hit (the - almost literally - thousands of superhero films coming out of Marvel) said that ‘Loki’ was his favourite but he’d been disappointed by the representation of the LGBTQ community. Soon after Ncuti was cast in the role direct from the comedy ‘Sex Education’ – where he’d been working with Loki executive producer and director Kate Herron and said good things about her. Behind the scenes Herron and her co-writer Briony Redman got in touch: maybe they could have a go at putting things right for the Dr Whoniverse and perhaps take him up on that idea of Brigerton with aliens? Russell couldn’t exactly say no after that and so ‘Rogue’ was born, a rare story in the modern day by writers who aren’t necessarily fans of the series with a vast knowledge of the franchise who throw out all the rules and do something very different with the characters we know and love. It’s very like the games I used to play asking all the big questions: well why can’t it be the Doctor who falls in love - not with the usual drippy love interest with the character you think is going to be the baddy (and as close to ‘The Master’ as you can get in this game)? Why is it always the companion who has to be rescued – why can’t she fool the aliens by her own brilliance, without the Doctor knowing and thus spoiling his plan? And why does this regency ball have to be a real regency ball? Why can’t it be, say, a cosplay by aliens dressing up to be human? And why can’t those aliens look like birds?!?

‘Rogue’ is,, even for series 1A or fourteen or whatever we’re meant to be calling it now, absolutely bonkers. It felt like someone had been playing around with the set roleplays in the game and had somehow crossed ‘The Faceless Ones’ (aliens in disguise stealing human identities) with the setting of ‘The Girl In The Fireplace’ – and then ignored every single other Dr Who story there has ever been. It ends up as ‘Love and Monsters’ but with a different sort of love, a different sof monster and absolutely no in-jokes. Although what this series resembles most isn’t Dr Who at all but ‘Casanova’, the wickedly funny romp that Russell T wrote for David Tennant as his last job before doing Who, a world where everyone is bonking everyone else in ways that make even our modern heads spin but where for protocol nobody is allowed to talk about it out loud. I’m honestly not sure what I think about it: I mean it’s the sort of fan-fiction I was writing when I was nine, but is that the sort of thing I actually wanted to see on telly, as ‘canon’? I don’t know.  I mean on the one hand it was a lot of fun. So many of the worst Dr Who stories are so bad precisely because they give you the same tired old recycled plots without anything new to offer so that plodding through them seems like a waste of everybody’s time (especially yours for watching it – and even more me for reviewing it, stories like ‘Monsters Of Peladon’ ‘42’ ‘Voyage Of The Damned’ and far too many stories with ‘Time’ in the title): ‘Rogue’ definitely doesn’t do that. So many of the worst Dr Who stories imagine a future that they can’t possibly do justice to on screen with a script full of technical jargon and gobbledegook that’s taken so earnestly it seems like comedy (‘Arc Of Infinity’ ‘Orphan 55’ ‘Voyage Of The Damned’ again). Others are just plain wrong from the outset, with a message so alien to Dr Who and with such a fundamental misunderstanding of the series it feels as if it was written by somebody holding the role-playing game manual upside down  (‘The Timeless Child’  ‘The Dominators’ ‘The Rings Of Akhaten’, err ‘Voyage Of the Damned’). Others are sunk by terrible guest stars (‘Voyage Of The Damned’) or messed about with genres it knows nothing about (‘Voyage Of The Damned’ really did get the short straw didn’t it?!) ‘Rogue’ doesn’t do any of that. There was nothing in there I disliked, nothing that made me cringe and it was forty-five minutes that passed quicker and more enjoyably than some.

What ‘Rogue’ really lacked was a plot. I mean there was one, of aliens wanting to take over a ballroom and take over Human bodies, but beyond that the Chuldur’s motivations were sketchy throughout and it was a shame that we got the tacked-on ‘Android Invasion’ ending that it was all part of a ploy to take over the Earth: this story would have been more fun if it had stayed as aliens harmlessly cos-playing for fun. It felt as if everyone was running around for no good reason this week with lots of scenes that would normally be ‘additional filler’ to the main plot and that nobody really learned anything, except the Doctor and heartbreak (and he’s no stranger to that, despite what Russell T seemed to think about this pushing the character in ‘new directions’ in the ‘Unleashed’ documentary). It all felt a bit pointless by the time we got to the end. ‘Rogue’ wasn’t the sort of story you could ever take seriously, an oddball far odder than other acknowledged oddballs like ‘The Happiness Patrol’ or ‘The Greatest Show In The Galaxy’ (that actually had a point to make) or this series’ own ‘Space Babies’. It’s the sort of story you skip on re-runs and never ever show to non-fans who just wouldn’t understand why anyone would find this curious mixture of screwball comedy, farce and scifi entertaining. 

The Chuldur were disappointing too: some of the least scariest villains we’ve seen in the series they mostly seemed to want to use their powers to dance and looked ridiculous in their final reveal: the sort of thing I’d have rolled again for during my adapted role-playing game as being far too ridiculous: birds without many feathers but with sort of pipe-cleaners attached to their faces. We don’t get any real back story as to what they’re doing or why and no great sense of the threat they pose: what happens to the Humans they take over? Are their memories erased, as if you’ve wiped someone’s save on a virtual reality game? Can their memories ever be put back into their bodies? Are any of these real people anyway? Without any sense of jeopardy it’s hard to judge what a threat they are. Or take them seriously looking the way they do. And why do they look so bad? If you’ve got a room-mate you hate who still allows you to talk about Dr Who try showing them this story back to back with Peri’s bird-scene in ‘Vengeance on Varos’ sometime and ask them to guess which one was made on a BBC budget forty years ago and which was made with Disney big bucks. Truly, much as I worried about the Disney crossover, I thought we’d been spared ‘what the?’ monster moments like this forever. We’ve had some pretty peculiar aliens on Dr Who over the years but this is the episode that makes you think this series is becoming strictly for the birds.  

At the same time, though, at least if my time was wasted it was done for something fun and (largely) enjoyable. The writers look hard for a way to throw a romance into Dr Who without simply doing ‘The Time Traveller’s Wife’ again like Steven Moffat did so often and come up with a story about disguises. Love is a game that comes with a high cost, especially in the regency period when reputations and livelihoods were at stake. Everyone knew that the dumb rich boy was going to end up marrying the rich dumb girl because that’s how society worked back then but that didn’t mean they couldn’t have ‘fun’ with other people and cast long lingering looks over the ones their hearts cried out for. Minus the frocks and dowries (and wigs: the ultimate disguise of what hair really looked like and an early attempt to ‘cosplay’ at being a different person; rumours are it was taken up after a Queen’s hair fell out nd everyone wanted to copy her as well as to cover up nests of hairlice) it still happens today: that’s why people watch soap operas and why being the only sober student in a university halls of residence is so entertaining: every generation plays out the same games trying to work out who to fall in love with, then eventually settles down to fins stability away all the turbulence of their past, often without realising that everyone else is playing the same games with you. Everyone in this era is keeping their real feelings hidden behind a veneer of respectability and even though everyone gossips about what’s really going on not many people are direct about the ‘truth’. It’s the perfect place, then, for a group of aliens to hide out: practically it’s a raging nest of hormones and feelings that are highly entertaining when the Human is taken over (a sort of real version of ‘The Sims’ computer game pretending to be someone else for a time) and to keep their own secrets, because everyone else is so used to keeping theirs too. The revelation when it comes, that everyone in this world is an alien (bar Ruby of course) is a clever way of pushing that scenario even further. I just wish there was an actual episode of ‘Dr Who’ going on at the same time. 

That said, a lot of the things ‘Rogue’ did are long overdue: Ballrooms were such a focal point of older worlder life (at least in Europe and for a couple hundred years) that it seems amazing we’ve only ever had the one in ‘The Girl In The Fireplace’ before now, as a short scene in something else (the story that ‘Rogue’ resembles most, both in being a romance and in breaking all the rules we never even knew the series had). Weirdly enough ballrooms were only truly killed off by The Beatles and other rock and roll bands in the 1960s, so if ‘The Devil’s Chord’ ending hadn’t restored the timelines Ruby would have probably grown up dancing in one! Ever since ‘The Android Invasion’ in 1975 teased us that it was going to be a far more interesting story than it turned out to be I’ve been waiting for a world that as simply put together as a game by aliens pretending to be Human (as opposed to a mock-up invasion plan). ‘Rogue’ is kind of like ‘The Androids Of Tara’ too in that it fools you into thinking you’re genuinely back on earth’s past before you’re left going ‘eh? I don’t remember a Taran wood beast in the history books’ and realise you’ve been fooled; this story goes one better though by taking most of the episode to offer the grand reveal.  One of Ruby’s big character points is that she’s always being under-estimated by everyone around her, tied to her foster mum and Gran out of loyalty but with a soul that wants to explore the universe and a brain clearly capable of more than looking after foster babies. So far the Doctor trusts her enough to let her do her own thing but is always hovering to rush over and help her like an over-protective mother hen, even when he’s been more in danger and needs rescuing more than she does. We don’t know how long they’ve been travelling together but some stories at least hint that it’s been a while: he really should know to trust her by now and the moment she reveals that she’s in ‘disguise’ as part of her own trap for the Chulder aliens is a nice surprise. All these twists and turns feels nicely Dr Whoish, even though they’re all things the series has never quite done before.

The big thing that’s set the cat nurse amongst the Chulder pigeons though: that kiss. We’re now nineteen years on from the infamous ‘gay kiss’ scene between the 9^th Doctor and Captain Jack in ‘Parting Of The Ways’ that caused so many tongues to wag and which seemed to put Russell T off from putting forward any more of the ‘gay agenda’ the newspapers all seemed to assume he’d brought to the series and here we are, with the Doctor (a bi-regenerational Doctor don’t forget, whose kind of gender fluid) falling in love with a bloke and getting a full-on snog. The great irony, of course, is that this is the one episode of the series Russell had no creative hand in(except a bit of editing): it was written by two girls best known for series that, by Russell’s own jokey accusations, are relentlessly heterosexual. It’s like a fresh pair of eyes came to the series, saw past all the hang-ups and challenges that come with trying to drag a series that’s sixty years old and its long-standing audience into the present day as if it had just been commissioned. And that’s great: one of Russell’s big reasons for wanting to come back to this show was to move representation on and make the most of the changes that have taken place in TV and society across the past two decades and make sure that every minority group knows that this series is for them, that a series about a time-travelling alien with two hearts really is for absolutely everyone. After all, if it’s happening out there in the world somewhere then it ought to be in the series somewhere too, while Dr Who traditionally became a refuge for gay kids in the 20^th century who felt ‘alien’ amongst their peers and wanted a male figure to look up to that wasn’t a muscleman superhero.

Talking of which: that felt as if it was the sub-plot this week, almost as if the two writers took up Russell’s challenge and decided to write a story ‘about’ what it meant to be gay, especially in the past when it was illegal and you couldn’t declare your love openly. I mean talk about having secrets: at a time when you could be ex-communicated or executed if caught love was even more of a game of hide-and-seek for gay Humans, never quite sure who to put their trust in. I mean, it was an open secret that a lot of the Kings on the throne had ‘favourites’ they saw in their bedrooms more often than they saw their wives and they were the ones with money to cover it up: nobody ever wrote what the peasants were up to anyway. The boy you loved was probably married (to a girl, to keep up appearances) and you can forget your dowry or chance of income if word got out. Gay people felt like ‘aliens’ hiding, pretending to be ‘Human’ like everyone else, disguising who they truly were in fear of being caught and with a ‘secret’ world of their own that they could only share with fellow ‘aliens’. The rest of the world didn’t understand you, only your own ‘kind’ – but how did you ever find out who your ‘kind’ were? The stakes were so ridiculously high that it’s a surprise any homosexual relationships lasted at all – and yet many did, hidden away in history books under euphemisms and hints. It’s the perfect unexplored world for Dr Who to investigate, to tell the ‘truth’ of  what was really happening back in the past that you won’t learn from history books and to have the Doctor and his randy lover Rogue subvert every tradition through their love affair. Why are they birds? Erm, ahh, got me there. Birds of a feather that flock together perhaps? Or maybe they were just the sort of glamorous animals that would seem to like ballrooms?

 All great on paper, but since when was ‘Rogue’ the Doctor’s ‘type’?  He’s very much in the ‘Captain Jack’ mode (flirty, dirty, looks about thirty, and a bounty hunter to boot) – so much so that many fans who saw filming or rushes or simply the series trailer automatically assumed it was him back again - and those two rubbed each up the wrong way so much I got the impression the 9^th Doctor would have preferred to share a Tardis with a Slitheen. While the Doctor isn’t immune to falling for ‘bad girls’ and ‘bad boys’ (I mean, River Song wasn’t all law-abiding was she?) he does very much have a type and that type is Rose: young, pure (ish), optimistic, brave, feisty, generally blonde, above all kind. Does that sound like ‘Rogue’? I mean, it would be an interesting idea that each successive Doctor felt drawn to a different set of people but just look at how quickly the 15^th Doctor embraced Ruby, someone whose very much in the ‘Rose’ mould. What’s more what does Rogue do that’s appealing anyway? He sulks, banters insults with the Doctor (calling his beloved Tardis a ‘shed’ – some villains have been destroyed for less), plays ‘guess whose spaceship is bigger’ and is so used to being round dead bodies and has lost so much of his humanity he doesn’t flinch. That’s a natural crush for The Master perhaps but not The Doctor. Why this man, out of every man (or woman) in the universe? I’ll forgive ‘Rogue’ the series for playing round with all the traditions of Dr Who in an effort to tell a different series, but ‘Rogue’ the character plays with the tradition of the Doctor as a character and it all feels so wrong. The speed of this romance, too, is so un-natural: the Doctor has learned to be careful, to watch love unfold slowly. It wasn’t that long ago he spent billions of years grieving Clara. Even as a crush, a bright spark that catches his attention and makes the Doctor excited, this is way too fast to be believable. Where exactly is the point when he stops seeing Rogue as repellent and falls in love? I play this story back and I keep missing it: all of a sudden they go from genuine insults to flirting and that’s so out of character. It all seems very one-sided too: where is there the slightest sign, up until that kiss, that Rogue likes the Doctor and doesn’t just see him as a rival? I mean, when they first meet he’s convinced the Doctor is the criminal alien he’s after. What changes his mind? I know they only have 45 minutes to tell this story and The Rogue’s sacrifice and the Doctor’s shock then insistence to Ruby that he’s alright (when she knows him well enough to know he isn’t) are well handled, more palatable than all that moping that used to go on with Drs 10 and 11, but it feels like we’re watching a Richard Curtis rom-com at high speed rather than a properly unfolding bit of romance-drama. As big a coup as it is to get an actual Hollywood actor Jonathan Groff to play him (we’re a long way from the days when anyone wanted to do Who, Russell quipping on ‘Unleashed’ that he said ‘sure if you want to waste my time’ when the writers suggested calling his agent) he’s badly miscast: there’s nothing going on behind those eyes, no spark of anything extra. Instead he just looks like a bored extra that wandered out of ‘Downton Abbey’, nothing to suggest why a timelord with all that experience and knowledge would be interested in him. He clearly hasn’t got a clue what’s going on: confessing to Russell he’d never heard of Dr Who before the showrunner enthusiastically sent him five DVDs, but there are no signs here he ever watched them. Ncuti does well to invest us in the romance, acting like a giggly schoolboy until he reverts back to being impossibly ancient at the end, but there’s not enough spark between them to make this come alive. Heck, flipping Peter Davison and Matthew Waterhouse had more sexual chemistry than this.

It’s a tough story for Ruby. By which I don’t mean a shape-shifting alien nearly stole her identity. No: she gets in barely one dance with the Doctor (nice reference to the Tardis translation circuits giving them fancy footwork to blend in by the way, surely a Russellism if ever I heard one) before she’s called away to meet a scoundrel named Lord Barton who tries to chat her up. No sooner are you cheering on Ruby for putting him down so spectacularly (fulfilling the idea that Dr Who historicals should bring the past alive in ways that people from the present will understand) than the Doctor is falling for someone just like him across the balcony. And then he leaves, leaving her stranded. I mean, its not like she’s having a nice time particularly by then. It feels a little like ‘The End Of The World’ when the Doctor dumps Rose at the earliest opportunity so he can flirt with talking trees: yes there’s no romance going on between the two but the Doctor is her best friend, guardian and chauffeur rolled into one: he could at least tell her where he’s going (I mean, it’s not like he doesn’t have a tradition for getting into trouble). Typical: all those years of telling companions not wander off and then this Doctor forgets it all in a moment of passion and does exactly that. His reaction to her apparent death is to look slightly sad rather than horrified. The his reaction to the fact that Ruby is smart enough to work out what was going on and slide into the Chuldur’s body instead (how???), hiding in plain sight until the Doctor decides to turn the floorboards into a dimensional transporter (a sort of cross between ‘The Adventure Game’ and ‘Knightmare’, just to add to the virtual reality feel of the episode), is horror, rather than to tell her how brilliant she is (because she is at this point: what other companions would have been smart or savvy enough to do that?)  In ‘The Church On Ruby Road’ the companion was a drag, a Susan peril monkey without much going for, but they’ve really turned things around and shown how street smart if inexperienced Ruby is and how she’s the perfect plucky companion who just hadn’t been outside her comfort zone yet.  The Doctor clearly saw something in her to offer her a ride that no one else saw though (including Ruby), so why does he suddenly believe in her enough to abandon her, yet under-estimate her ability to get herself out of trouble minutes apart?  It’s as if Ruby changed character from first draft to last for some reason. Given the strong hand Russell had in all bar two of her episodes so far, did he simply not know himself and changed his mind whole writing for her?

Not much Susan Twist this week either, bucking a trend where she was getting more and more to do each week. Does this mean she was a bird-alien in all her other appearances too? Are these different people, perhaps clones, with nothing in common with each other? Or has she fallen through the Doctor’s timelines a la ‘Name Of The Doctor’? The ‘throw-forward’ trailer hints at some revelations to come next week. Suffice to say that, for now, having her face pop up again felt like the only bit of stability to tie ‘Rogue’ in with the rest of the series. Honestly after this episode she could turn out to be absolutely anything – including Rogue in another body. I hope they end up sticking rather than twisting next week though and properly tell us who she is because spot-the-cameo is getting monotonous. One last thought: they worked at some speed to add a tribute to William Russell, our own Ian Chesterton, who died this week at 99. It was a sweet gesture I wasn’t sure they’d do as not all actors get one (only Jon Pertwee and Nicholas Courtney off the top of my head). He deserved it though, helping to create a programme so long-lived it could go from where Who started in 1963 to a story that is still breaking so many rules now (and would absolutely positively be William Hartnell’s least favourite episode for multiple reasons, such is progress). Who at its most romantic, a love story between races, is actually very fitting to be the story that contains his tribute if you know his story (especially William’s second marriage late in life).  One moment from the past that does get an odd reprieve: the Doctor desperately tries to show Rogue who he is, thanks to a lot of familiar looking faces: Drs 1-14 plus John Hurt’s War Doctor, Jo Martin’s Fugitive Doctor…and what looks like Richard E Grant’s animated Doctor from ‘Scream Of The Shalka’. Is this website project from 2003, the one Russell’s comeback series effectively replaced  and which Russell himself was deeply sniffy about in interviews, proper canon now (despite not being on BBC iplayer along with the other stories?) Is it a clue from a showrunner known to keep us on our toes? Or a mistake caused by a CGI artists who didn’t quite know what the memo about ‘all the Doctors’ meant when he was asked to do this special effect?   

On every main point you’d care to make, then, ‘Rogue’ falls apart. It’s not a good romance, it’s not enough like any other Dr Who episode to rank highly there either, the drama is all over the place driven by twists and turns that come out of nowhere and jokes that fall too flat to be comedy. There are some truly awful moments, such as the Doctor’s psychic paper saying he’s ‘hot’, that suggest the new showrunner has turned into a teenage boy. There’s almost no action and what there is consist of dancing, while because of the nature of the plot nobody is giving anything away so most of the dialogue is deflection and  obfuscation rather than emotional speeches. By virtue of all that I ought to hate it and yet I don’t. Those twists and turns might come out of nowhere but they’re clever, little tricks that change what we think about this world that I for one didn’t see coming. It’s obvious that, little as they might know about Dr Who, we’re dealing with writers who are clever enough to juggle metaphors and bigger ideas. It’s rare these days to have a Dr Who historical set in a time and place we’ve never properly been to before (although ‘The Haunting Of Vila Diodati’ is a sort-of romance set three years later that tells a very different sort of story in a very different setting). It feels like exactly the sort of thing Dr Who ought to be doing, a Georgian romance with a twist at the end. It’s just that fans maybe wouldn’t have done it quite like this. Had there been a full plot to go with it instead of aliens hiding in plain sight, it could have been great Dr Who. Instead it’s a rogue story, one that doesn’t do anything the way any previous episode would have done it and as such is kind of hard to judge against the others because of that.  

 
POSITIVES + How it looks: as you’d expect with a Who historical its positively gorgeous. Tredgar House in Newport, a genuine 17^th century mansion, was where the bulk of the inside was filmed and famous to Who fans as Madame De Pompadour’s sitting room and bedroom in ‘The Girl In The Fireplace’ (though, weirdly enough, not the ballroom scenes). The grounds, meanwhile, are actually Margam Country Park (once owned by ‘The Talbot Family’ and a possible inspiration for ‘Black Orchid’) . The costumes are perfect too: costumer Pam Downe had already worked on multiple series and films set in this era and clearly knows her stuff, while Ncuti and Millie both look more comfortable in their period costumes than they do in their modern clothes (the 15^th Doctor looks very like the 3^rd interestingly, similar velvet smoking jacket and all). The ballroom scene, choreographed by Brigerton’s own Jack Murphy, is impressive too: given the intricate camera shots the actors had to do it in one take.

NEGATIVES - How it sounds:  No one is having as much fun making this episode as Murray Gold and he simply goes too far. The Doctor feels a flickering hint of romance? Bering out the soppy violins? His lover seems to have betrayed him? Go dark and menacing with tubas. That moment of cruel heartbreak? It’s time to unleash the choir! It’s as if, faced with a Dr Who story that’s doing different things to normal all the way through, he decides to write the most obvious Who score he’s ever written, hitting every cliché he’s ever hit in the space of 45 minutes.  

BEST QUOTE: ‘You stole my heart – now leave me my reputation!’

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