The Well: ranking - n/a (but #230ish)

 

"The Well” (15^th Dr, 2025)

(Series 15/2A episode 3, Dr 15 with Belinda, 26/4/2025, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writers: Russell T Davies and Sharma Angel Walfall, executive producers: Julie Gardner, Jane Tranter, Joel Collins and Phil Collinson, director:  Amanda Brotchie)

Ranking: #N/A *but #230ish reviewed 27/4/2025

 

Did you hear about the planet full of diamonds where a monster lay sleeping? Do you know where he/she/it’s hiding? Well well well.

I start with a joke this week because there was almost none of that sort of thing in this week’s sombre episode, seemingly deliberately made to be dark and monochrome in contrast to last week’s riot of technicolour. That’s maybe not a surprise because it’s  sequel to another famously sombre episode – I’ll assume that everyone reading this knows which one but if you don’t look away now, because that really would spoil the twist. No? Still here? Okay, ‘The Well’ is what happens when the clock strikes ‘Midnight’ a second time. It is, in Russell’s own words from this week’s ‘Unleashed’ behind-the-scenes documentary ‘the sort of story you should never ever make a sequel to – so of course we dove in headfirst!’ A lot of fans are confused and/or upset that we got one. After all ‘Midnight’ is as close to perfect as TV comes, the story that many fans consider Russell’s best work (me included) I can still absolutely see why he wanted to go back to it: that story was the last (specials aside, the first of two which were written mostly concurrently) that Russell wrote the first time around, after different episode fell through. It came at a difficult time in his life: his husband Adam was dying and he was preparing to leave the job he adored to look after him. It is a story about language, about how your words can be taken away and used against you and my pet theory, as put forward in the ‘Midnight’ review, is that it came from Russell realising that he’s got too full of himself in his ‘old’ job, that the 10^th Doctor who was his spokesman had become ‘like a God’ (being in charge of a show this big for five years will warp anyone’s brain) and could bend the universe to his whims – while the universe has just handed him a gigantic reminder that he couldn’t. So, then, I for one am not surprised he felt like ‘Midnight’ was an itch he couldn’t scratch. This time though things are different. Russell is coming to this story from a humbler place. He knows, now, that his job isn’t just to entertain and raise big issues but to protect those without a voice
We know from the first time round that the Midnight monster likes to create a ‘host’ for itself, picking on the nearest Human and that in ‘Midnight’ it jumped on The Doctor, using his own words – the one thing that gets him out of trouble – against him. What we learn in this story is that the monster jumps into whichever being it thinks is most likely to attack it. Notably that’s no longer The Doctor even though the creature seems to remember him (and whispers his real name in his ear, something only The Doctor and – at a push – River Song actually know).So this time he writes the same scenario from the point of view of a deaf survivor attacked by a monster who makes people talk in whispers, with the 15^th Doctor – his new, softer, kinder, more humanistic mouthpiece – promising that she isn’t going to be abandoned ‘because we’re here for you – we’re all here for you’. Just look at what Russell’s been doing these past two years, writing strong parts for the LGBTQ and disabled communities and casting two actors of race in the main parts: the message is no longer an angry stomp round his writer’s room that ‘I could do so much more!’ but a gratitude that he’s in a position to do so much good for so many people.

I love that angle of this story, which I say is as good a reason as any for writing a sequel, even if there are still aspects of this episode I’m not best keen on. After all, since Russell wrote that story sixteen years go, we have more whisperings going on than ever and even more human paranoia in the world (this is a story that shows it’s source material even more openly than ‘Midnight’, the brilliant Twilight Zone episode ‘The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street’, where a mob kills an innocent little boy for play-acting his innocent story about aliens from a book he’s reading). It turns out the ‘Midnight’ monster – ejected into space at the end of that story – has been sleeping (or perhaps it’s offspring have been sleeping) down the bottom of a well. The planet is no longer a tourist trap and the planet has been mined almost completely for its diamonds but it’s left a well at the bottom that’s just enough to live in. Until this latest bunch of humanoids come along and wake it up, accidentally causing a massacre. Aliss has survived precisely because of her disability, because being deaf she can’t hear anyone whisper to her. Russell is clever in making her out to be as ordinary as possible though rather than having a ‘super-power’, in a lovely line telling us that she’s the ‘cook’, though in this era all that amounts to is ‘getting things out of packets’.  The thing is, though, the massacre has taken place before we get to this base: what we see instead are a bunch of soldiers pointing their guns at her while the same paranoia starts again. What is so different about her? Maybe the monster is inside her? Or maybe it’s this mysterious thing they can just see out the corner of their eye when they look at her, hiding behind her back. Being around someone disabled makes them uncomfortable. Much as they pride themselves on being an inclusive society in the future. How I wish we had the options of suits with subtitles we could turn on) they keep forgetting what it’s like; even The Doctor has to be reminded to please turn his captions back on so that Aliss (a perpetually terrified Rose Ayling-Ellis, who seems to be in everything at the moment) can understand what’s happening. Because without them she’s scared and alone and cut off even from her peers. She’s no different to how they are, except for one thing, ‘no different except that I’m the only one left’. So why are they acting as if she’s the monster?

I would say that it’s about people turning their backs on the disabled (though, of course, in the context of the story it’s about people too afraid to turn their backs on the disabled because they might be ‘scary monsters’ despite looking just like ‘us’). As someone with an invisible illness myself I know exactly where this story is coming from. The looks you get from people who don’t understand it. The intolerance from people who only vaguely remember being sick and think it’s an easy life rather one that’s a struggle for survival each and every day. The people who think it’s a sign of weakness and little realise that it could just as easily happen to them, that everyone will end up disabled if they don’t die of something that kills them first. Some days it feels very much like being stared at with soldiers with guns who’ve been stirred up by online whispers about where your taxes are going and what you do all day (write in my pyjamas and nap mostly, if you’re wondering, it’s the best way to stay connected to the world the days I can actually sit upright and the pain stops enough to be able to think straight). Just being alive seems to make people jumpy, perhaps because they’re aware that one day they can end up like you. Though not on benefits I’ve also seen how friends of mine are affected by that discussion, by the media fixation on ‘other people taking things from you’ despite the fact that next to no one was ever successfully prosecuted for benefit fraud and even then it was pennies through mistakes for the most part (compare this to millionaires dodging the system with tax havens and getting out of paying taxes). This isn’t a world where the strongest helps the weak, it’s a world where the weak are seen as the perfect scapegoats because no one cares and they’re too ill to fight back for the most part. The thing is, though, it could be you tomorrow: getting rid of the target for the abuse doesn’t ends the abuse, it just switches people and minority groups until, unchecked, only one person is left standing. If you’ve ever read that famous Niemoller quote: ‘First they came for…But I did not speak out’ that ends with them coming for you, then that’s what this story is about: the thing that makes people hate on other people is always changing hosts. When one is killed it just jumps to another.  Until it jumps to you for being ‘different’ in some small way. We need to help each other or we all fall. One telling line is the way one of the soldiers tells Aliss to hush, that ‘you will be quiet or you will be considered a threat to life’. A lot of disabled people will identify with that, tolerated as long as you don’t speak out and make people feel awkward.   

I’ve never been deaf but I can imagine that’s even more isolating: everyone else is connected in a way you aren’t and you feel left behind, through no fault other than an accident and/or a quirk of genetics. Too often the universe feels like it’s deliberately made to keep you left out of it. So when The Doctor turns round and tells Aliss/me/us that ‘whatever the monster does to you, you’ve got us’ and that we’re not going to be left behind (because, after all, he knows what it’s like to have a mob turn on you) it’s one of those golden moments of Dr Who that I live for, that no other series could offer. The Doctor is saving us from the whispers this time rather than himself though once again it’s not him who saves us all but a human (or humanoid anyway, given that the Earth apparently no longer exists) dies through a moment of great sacrifice having realised the ‘truth’ (because the squadron leader, played with no-nonsense charm by Shaya Costallion) saves her because ‘that’s my job’, hurling the monster back down the well it was lurking in, deep in the planet (it might be significant that, like the air hostess on ‘Midnight’, if she has a name I can’t remember it: our heroes are the unsung nameless people we never get to thank. It might also be relevant that, once again in a Russell-era story, the ‘Devil’ lives down a ‘pit’ and Humans reach it when they’ve ‘mined’ it for its resources too far: see ‘The Impossible Planet/Satan’s Pit’). I love the message of ‘The Well’: we don’t need to wait for The Doctor, for an outsider, even for Russell’s wise words to save us because we have the power to protect each other. If that isn’t the true Tardis-blue message at the heart of Doctor Who then I’ll eat my scarf.

The central idea then? Fantastic. I’ll even buy the fact that Russell is mining children’s games again, with this episode an extended version of ‘What’s The Time Mr Wolf?’ (given that Aliss is the cook apparently it’s ‘dinner time!’ The script keeps mentioning the monster being at ‘midnight’ like a hand on a clock, while the stage directions set out at which angle of the clock face the soldiers spread out) even if it’s nowhere near as creepy as the ‘repeating everything you say’ game of ‘Midnight’. However in every other way ‘The Well’ is a poor sequel that misses out on all the things that made ‘Midnight’ so special. That story was claustrophobic, full of easily identifiable characters who only too believable went off like a powder keg when lit the right way. This story is a bunch of cool-headed soldiers in an open-planet (Ncuti’s first ever quarry! In Bridgehead, for a change. That has to be a record, right? Hartnell aside, back in the days when telly didn’t really do location filming, it’s never taken any Doctor as long as their twenty-first episode to have some quarry filming. And yet Ncuti still got a quarry before meeting a Dalek. If he does get a Dalek story – as I hope he does – then that will be a record too. The 8^th Doctor, obviously, is an exception to both rules given that he only got one ‘proper’ story, though even then if you count the minisode ‘Night Of The Doctor’ as a second he ticked both boxes. Sort of. I mean, Daleks were the cause of the crash that caused his regeneration after all).  Though you can see they’re spooked, it’s not in the same way. They’re also far too similar to each other. ‘Midnight’ was made to be like a play, in a contained environment, with everyone talking at once with a largely static camera shot for the most part. ‘The Well’ isn’t. We keep jumping from one character to another. The creature doesn’t use people’s words against them this time so there’s less of Russell’s delicious dialogue to go on. ‘Midnight’ was full of sudden jump-scares, ambiguous noises that could be the monster trying to get in or just the sound a space-shuttle makes in outer space, while the whole point was that the beings were stranded with nowhere to run. ‘The Well’ has no real scares, just lots of people staring around them, being petrified. The ‘Midnight’ monster was terrifying the first time round despite never being seen, one that takes over your own wordsd and personality and turns people against you. This incarnation doesn’t steal your immortal soul and personality and thoughts from you, it just hides behind people’s backs and chucks things. It’s an invisible toddler basically, hardly the greatest threat The Doctor’s ever seen and we miss the ‘worst’ this monster did by it happening before we get there.   
There are a few little niggling plot details too, such as the rather odd little bit at the beginning about the Tardis being too far to run to, which suggests it was patched on at the last minute when someone asked Russell why, once The Doctor has learned the planet’s name, there’s no reason The Doctor doesn’t simply get everyone the hell away and off to safety (surely there’s something in the Tardis that can block out a monster, however invisible? ‘Midnight’ was a budget saver, one that did a lot on a little and that was part of its charm: there’s a reason why it’s this story that’s one of a small handful of stories that have been re-created on stage (albeit without The Doctor, for copyright reasons: it still works surprisingly well). ‘The Well’ just feels cheap when it doesn’t need to be, with just the one (admittedly magical) shot of a space sky showing how far we’ve come from the 1980s days of digitally enhanced pink skies. Even so, so much for worrying that the Disney budget would ruin the series: it’s being used a bit too sparingly lately (or maybe everything is being saved for a season finale again? I just hope it’s not a big dog this time): we don’t even see the diamonds or the same sense of scale of the planet we had last time when we were on a much tighter budget. Having a companion along for the ride really changes the feel too: on ‘Midnight’ the Doctor was alone like never before, but this time Belinda’s along for the ride and to accommodate the pair Russell has to split them up, having The Doctor off fiddling with stuff with Belinda talks to Aliss, then when The Doctor comes back she barely says another word. There’s just not enough room here for ‘unlucky thirteen’ characters either, plus Aliss and the monster. After years of wishing Dr Who had proper troops, with full proper army units to look more in keeping with what a situation would really be like, now there’s too many to serve the story who get in the way tripping over each other’s feet. Typical!

Most controversially of all we actually hear and see this monster this time, albeit briefly and quietly. It’s only there for a few frames but you can see it, both in one shot behind Aliss and in another when The Doctor looks back. The monster looks like ‘Captain Zero’ from ‘The Eleventh Hour’ in its purest form (and might well have regurgitated some pixels), skeletal and reptilian. ). It turns out controversially that the midnight monster whispers in people’s ears to make them paranoid – something that’s a bit of a shame given that ‘Midnight’ works better as a ‘humans getting paranoid under pressure’ scenario rather than a ‘monsters made me do it, honest! scenario (I rather like the fact that, up until the last five minutes, there might not even be a monster – that they’ve just been in an unfortunate traffic accident that killed the two co-pilots – and contemplated murder over their own shadows). Things are complicated by the fact that the Midnight monster appears to act completely differently, no longer using people’s words or copying them and simply whispering something we can’t hear, while the standing in shadows where it can’t be seen is new (and a bit too like the Vashta Nerada from ‘Silence In the Library’). But hey ho, we’re 400,000 years of evolution down the line, this one had days to gather data as opposed to their first contact with ‘aliens’ (i.e. us) and maybe there’s more than one monster here with more than one characteristic anyway? (I mean, even invisible monsters can procreate, right? Maybe they aren’t invisible to each other?)

There are all sorts of nods back to other stories which made even the most inventive and original ideas in this story seemed repetitive: we’re back to a ‘Caves Of Androzani’ type world where people mine into the planet’s crust the way they did in ‘Inferno’ (waking up a monster that lies sleeping: I’m surprised the Doctor doesn’t point out more that it was people’s greed trying to get that last diamond that woke up the monster) with soldiers very like the ones in ‘Time Of The Angels/Flesh and Stone’, though the story didn’t quite live up to any of these (even that last, sometimes dodgy one). There were no sub-plots to give us detail and character and though the episode ran surprisingly long (forty-eight minutes to Lux’s forty three) we could easily have lost twenty without changing the story at all. They could have done a lot more with that main plot too: I wish Aliss had been just a little more proactive, just to prove that disabled people aren’t wimps who always need protecting: I totally understand the being traumatised after losing your friends part, but how much better for the message it might have been if Aliss fought as hard as anyone once she had an army round offering protection, rather than being sent home. It’s a bit of an odd idea to show something we’ve all imagined the past sixteen years and which can’t possibly match up to the image we have in our head and breaks the magical illusion for no real purpose. It’s like writing a sequel where Romeo and Juliet both wake up or ‘Waiting For Godot’ where Godot finally turns up.

The biggest problem though? ‘Midnight’ crackles with tension, each sentence pushing the story further out of control from where The Doctor could stop it until he’s a mere ‘passenger’, in all senses of the word. ‘The Well’ is just a wee bit dull. I’m not one of those fans who think ‘Midnight’ was so perfect he should never have tried re-writing it: this story does lots that’s new and worthy. But I wish that he’s made it a short story, a coda for a Dr Who annual or for a Target novelisation of the story: after coming up with the idea for the story there just wasn’t anywhere else to take it. We have the same lengthy scene in the middle that must have taken days to film, but compared to ‘Midnight’, where the energy was constant and ebbed and flowed, this story is just filled with empty space and people staring. There’s  no sense of buildup to match Russell at his earlier best and more padding than an Abzorbaloff in a fat suit. What could have been time spent getting to know the members of this base, of seeing how different they are to each other and what they’re like before a crisis hits, we just see soldiers following orders to greater or worse effect. There are moments in the dialogue that make it come alive, such as the idea that the monster is hiding behind Aliss ‘as if a clock hand was pointing to midnight’ and Belinda’s suggestion that she and the Doctor have arrived like ‘mystery shoppers’ is a great gag that would have solved lots of earlier stories full of suspicion as to who these interlopers are stepping out of a blue box. A lot of the dialogue is perfunctory though, without the spark or wit or character of ‘Midnight’ and the story drags until the two-thirds part when something finally happens (it speaks volumes that the major thing to happen – the monster attack – isn’t seen, just its aftermath).

The coda also spoils it all to some extent. Mrs Flood turns up again and while her cameo was welcome in her other stories, giving them an extra ‘lift’, it feels somewhat forced in this one. Apparently she was the one back at base in charge of things, which raises some awkward questions that may or may not be answered (although it does, at least, solve my biggest gripe for most of the story: that the Doctor and Belinda knew exactly what costumes to get out of the Tardis wardrobe, that frustratingly we still haven’t seen in Ncuti’s era despite getting lots of mentions, without seeing what the soldiers were wearing first; presumably Mrs Flood gave a memo though it’s still odd neither of them comments on it. I’m starting to wonder if the wardrobe is like Mr Benn’s shop – see  ‘Joy To The World’ – with costumes ready for every adventure. I’m also grumpy that The Doctor’s not in his old orange spacesuit for old time’s sake but a darker number closer to the frogsuits of ‘Enlightenement’). She is apparently keen that The Doctor is carrying a ‘vindicator’. What that all means we’ll have to wait and see, along with how she seems to know where The Doctor will be and can travel far further in time than we’ve seen her manage before. It’s also unclear whether the seeds of doubt that are obviously still in the minds of the survivors are caused by Mrs Flood starting whispers, human paranoia or the monster returning, which is a shame (the idea worked better when it was kept simple and seemed to be human paranoia solved by human sacrifice – throwing a possible pantheon God/timelord/bi-regenerational villain/postmodernist storyteller at it seems the wrong way to go).     

There are, at least, some really strong performances this week. Rose does well given that Aliss has nothing much to do than blub, while Caoilfhionn Dunne is one of Dr Who’s better soldiers, tough and uncompromising and all the things soldiers have to be (but which UNIT mostly weren’t!) but with enough humanity and gentleness to make her the sort of leader you follow because you want to, not because you have to. Everything she does, even when it puts The Doctor and Belinda in danger, is because she thinks it’s the best way to save people. Varadu has her best episode as Belinda yet, someone who has by now fully acclimatised to travel but still doesn’t quite trust the process yet, with a good line in looking terrified without overdoing the scared part (especially when the monster takes her and they have to shoot her and bring her back to life – a surprising ending, to say the least and I’m not quite sure what that says to the overall metaphor. That to protect people you end up with a damaged heart perhaps?) This is Ncuti’s show, though, as he shines, demonstrating all the ways The Doctor has changed since he was David Tennant.  He is no longer bossy and authoritarian, strutting in to take charge like he owns the place and is far more careful with his words. He knows when to tease (‘It’s inappropriate to call me babes’ snaps a soldier. ‘Okay hun’ he smiles’). Russell was keen enough on the plot to send the whole cast to ESL (European Sign Language Courses) and Ncuti, especially, looks a natural doing it, a reminder that this Doctor isn’t of England in the 21^st century but a traveller that belongs everywhere (it’s a surprise that shouldn’t be a surprise but has become one through familiarity, like when the 3^rd Doctor suddenly started speaking Mandarin in ‘The Mind Of Evil’. Because why wouldn’t he know it, even if we’ve never seen him use it before?) This Doctor knows what it’s like to be scared and alone, so is way more sympathetic to Aliss than anyone else on the base. Just look at the quiet smile he gives Aliss after he’s got to her safety, a sad bittersweet smile for all that she’s been through and all the trauma she’ll have to recover through, but that she’s safe now, protected from any more attacks. Though ultimately it’s the soldier who gives up her life to save Belinda, The Doctor tries to offer his first and Ncuti’s wide-eyed look of pleading innocence and care makes you believe this Doctor really would lay down his life for strangers, never mind friends. I know not everyone has taken to Ncuti’s Doctor, that they find him too emotional and flamboyant, but I’m really enjoying his portrayal, a regeneration that really wants to have fun and strut through life looking cool, but has seen too much of the sadder part of life to turn his back on people who are hurting. The Doctor has spent too long being closed off, full of anger over the timewars and afraid to let people in; I love having someone who’s open-hearted. It shows how far he’s come as a character: if he’d stayed the same hard-nosed demi-God Tennant was at the end of Russell’s run then the same story of ‘Midnight’ would just have happened again and the monsters would have won. It’s not just the Doctor either of course, Russell has come this far too: just look at all the series he’s written in between his Dr Who stints which all give a voice to the disenfranchised.  

So what we have is an odd little story, one with a brilliant concept (‘Midnight’ whispered about the power of our words to hurt but ‘The Well screams it) and some excellent acting across the board, but also one where not a lot happens and one that undoes a lot of the good work that made the original so memorable. I don’t think many people will be talking about ‘The Well’ the same way they do ‘Midnight’ in years to come because there’s no one moment that’s memorable and lodges in your brain, although it has gone down better than I was expecting (ditto ‘Lux’ last week). It’s not a story I’m going to particularly look forward to re-watching given how little happened and once the ‘Midnight’ reveal is out of the bag the story goes exactly where you expect it to, right down to the running down corridors (the whole point of ‘Midnight’, after all, was that there were no corridors to run down to get away from the monster). And yet I love what the showrunner protector in chief was trying to do, mining the well of his human compassion and writing a story that made a whole group of fandom, not often catered for, feel seen. It’s a story that screams out about the injustices of the world and does so by having the monster whisper – such things are mobs born from and from the beginning of his time in Who Russell hates humanity when they get together in mobs (though he quite likes individuals, such as the trooper who gives her life). ‘The Well’ is a worthy sequel then, dripping with compassion in all the right places, it just needed to be turned into a better story. Just don’t expect it to be another ‘Midnight’, because it very much isn’t and even a writer as gifted as Russell T Davies can’t make the clock strike ‘Midnight’ twice. Oh well. Nor could anyone else. 

POSITIVES + I might have been quite hard on Murray Gold’s incidental scores in the past, which tend to like telling us how we should feel rather than give us the space to work it out for ourselves. I wasn’t expecting much from him on a score for a story that’s all about deafness. Credit where it’s due though, his work is gorgeous across this episode and it’s easily one of his best. While Russell’s dialogue can’t quite build the tension layer by layer this time around Murray’s score very much does, filling in the silences and building the layers. It reminded me of the ‘Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?’ theme music in the way that it builds the tension subtly, layer by layer, until the tension is ready to burst by the time all hell breaks loose. However it’s subtle: you’re not beaten over the head with tears this week. It’s quite beautiful too, sparkling the way the score for a diamond planet should.

 NEGATIVES – Apparently the Earth doesn’t exist anymore, not even in records. Not again! The last series of Russell’s original run (the one with ‘Midnight’ in it funnily enough) was all about the bees going missing and the Earth being moved out of its co-ordinates. Other stories have had The Earth apparently absent. Are we really going to go through this plotline again? Plus wasn’t it just there an episode ago that we were there, in 1952 (‘Lux’ had the Tardis jumping off the Earth’s present day, not the planet itself). Did something change in the few seconds between episodes? (There can’t be any ‘missing time’ here as The Doctor and Belinda are still in the same clothes). However yet again it’s not a thrust of the story, just an extra detail we have to carry in our heads – and honestly Russell’s not as good at writing those sorts of things compared to Moffat. I agree though, ‘Earth’ is a stupid name for a planet (in case you’re wondering it’s a derivation of two Greek words, for ‘terrain’ and ‘ground’. Which is a bit rude given that most of our planet surfaces are made up of water to be honest).

BEST QUOTE: Aliss: ‘If you kill me then it goes behind you’

Previous ‘Lux’ next ‘Lucky Day’

Lux: Ranking n/a (but #110ish)

 

"Lux” (15^th Dr, 2025)

(Series 15/2A episode 2, Dr 15 with Belinda, 19/4/2025, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Russell T Davies, executive producers: Julie Gardner, Jane Tranter, Joel Collins, Phil Collinson and Vicki Delow, director:  Amanda Brotchie)

Ranking: #N/A *But around #110 reviewed 20/4/2025

‘No way, my favourite show has just fallen through the television and started talking to me! Hello Doctor, come and have a cup of tea and a sit down and a chat about all your back stories and continuity problems. So, that Russell T Davies eh? What’s he like to work with? What, you call him ‘The Master’? No seriously? Wow – you’ve just changed the channel to ‘Star Trek’. Rude! Anyway my favourite episode? Not ‘Blink’ surprisingly, it’s the one where you wander round a museum for an hour. You don’t remember it? No, nobody else does either. Anyway stay and have some Dalek crumpets!'

Well, this is new. Admittedly I can name a few other Who stories that also felt like we were watching the writer have a breakdown/coma hallucination/fever dream, but none have ever been quite as…animated as ‘Lux’, which feels at times as if Russell T Davies had a bang on the head and wrote down everything he saw, however weird (quite possibly while suffering the psychedelic experience that is ‘The Celestial Toymaker’ animation reconstruction with it’s hero, The God of Migraines). It’s the sort of episode that seems guaranteed to divide fans, to annoy the heck out of people who only like their science-fiction dark and brooding, when this is a (literal) cartoon. One which even has the audacity to point this out during a postmodernist meta middle section that breaks the fourth wall to camera quite literally (what am I supposed to do with all the glass from my TV screen over the floor, Doctor?) and has The Doctor sit down with ‘us’ for a cup of tea and a discussion of everyone’s favourite episodes. It’s a very different story to say the least and I can see why this story, a sort of cross between ‘The Mind Robber’ and ‘The Greatest Show In The Galaxy’ (the show’s two most meta stories squared) might end up in people’s  bottom five. After all, few series can get away with a (literal) cartoon villain God, a plot that has The Doctor and Belinda trapped by actual celluloid film and where they discover they’re ‘fictional’,  but I love this show when it breaks the rules and few modern stories have broken those rules quite as comprehensively as this one.

It’s worth looking at those two stories to understand that this story hasn’t come out of the blue. ‘All good empathetic writers have wondered before now about the responsibilities they have to their characters and the moment they become so real they start talking to themselves. ‘The Mind Robber’ was Peter Ling, freed of the need to write for the same old characters on ‘Crossroads’ every week for years, handed the toys to the biggest experimental toybox on telly and having great fun, asking what it meant to be a fictional character who didn’t know they were fiction, whose lives are interrupted by another fictional character who thinks that he’s real (the 2^nd Doctor). It’s a fight to stay real, to stay relevant, when everyone else wants to trap him and his companions and keep them stuck in one place forever. It’s a very 1960s flavoured acid dream, full of elements from storybooks past present and not yet written, in a world maintained through the sheer force of one kidnapped Human’s (or is he timelord?) imagination. Similarly ‘The Greatest Show’ is Stephen Wyatt’s barbed 1980s take on that same hippie dream, with the idea that all the 1960s hippie ideals that everyone used to live by have been warped and destroyed, so that a circus in the sky that used to be so fun has become tired and decayed, filled with acts who are expected to perform and judged harshly when they fail. The show fell apart because it got stuck in one place and even their biggest nerdiest fan is watching for loyalty more than anything else, before getting zapped by the television Gods along with the pompous convention bores stuck in place, the critic werewolves who were nice in the day and savage by night and the clowns who are too sad by the state of the world to be funny. If you like ‘Lux’ then you seriously need to check out both of them – you’ll find much to love there. The meta sofa of fans is also so close to the ‘Greek chorus’ commenting on the action in ‘Vengeance of Varos’ as to be worth noting, even if the main stories themselves are rather different (while it’s notable that two out of three of these stories were picked for the ‘Tales From The Tardis’ re-runs on the Whoniverse i-player masterminded by Russell). You know what all four have in common though? They all went to air when Dr Who was at its biggest crisis and closest to cancellation, in 1968, 1984 and 1988 respectively. When the audience ratings were plummeting and critics had got bored enough with the formulas to move on to something else. The first time round the show was only saved by drastic changes (moving into colour, with a new Doctor, new companions and a new Earth=-bound format); the second time the show died altogether.       

The difference was neither man knew scifi or Dr Who very well and were writing their own skewed versions of what they saw in old episodes. Russell T Davies, however is Dr Who’s biggest fan. He’s revived it from the dead twice already and has a shed full of toys living together (because it was a condition of being showrunner that he got a copy of everything). He doesn’t want Dr Who to die, especially on his watch – not after he put his career on the line to revive it twenty years ago. He’s already had a bash at his own postmodern story with ‘Love and Monsters’, which shares this episode’s similar affection for Dr Who and knowing winks to camera and features a similar dig at a nice happy community all getting along until someone (The Abzorbaloff) comes in to disrupt their fun and eat them alive, a story closer to this than you might realise. The difference now is that Dr Who isn’t something kept alive in the hearts of the faithful (the characters in that story are basically at a ‘wilderness years’ fan convention) but a multi-billion franchise everyone knows (even if a lot of people have for now stopped watching). The people watching are us, lots of us, who all have affection for this show as big as our opinions. So even though ‘Lux’ himself (Latin for ‘light’, although I did wonder if it was a return of Charlotte Abigail Lux, the little girl from ‘Silence In the Library’ using her CTV), Mr Ring-A-Ding, is far crueller than anyone in the Land of Fiction and even though the sarcasm is at times far nastier than the chief clowns, this is nevertheless a kinder story with so much more love for it. Just check out that much-discussed middle when the Doctor talks to his own fans, who tell him how much they love him and how watching this sweet silly funny courageous little show has brought such light into their world and – most importantly – brought them together. Dr Who might technically be as one-dimensional as the cartoon The Doctor and Belinda are on the run from, but for a moment, given that it’s a series of pixels, but look at what it means to people. This is almost a plea from Russell to Disney not to cancel the show because of what it means to people and the light it shines in a world that seems to have turned very dark recently. 

It could all have been nauseatingly self-congratulatory but Russell has enough humour to laugh at himself too. He’s been trapped by the one thing a timelord should never be trapped by – time – the fact that his first era of the show casts such a long shadow that people have stopped caring about his second and he can never match it, no matter how traditional or groundbreaking or meta he goes. There he was, the chief wallah-wallah who brought Dr Who back when who gets all the credit for it and Dr Who’s first ever bafta? That Steven Moffat! That’s Russell laughing at himself and his close friend when the three fans say their favourite story is ‘Blink’.  ‘Not the one with the goblins?’ asks Dr 15 (referring to ‘The Church On Ruby Road’). ‘But I met the Beatles!’ (‘The Devil’s Chord’). The highlight of the episode is Belinda’s sarcastic eye-roll: ‘What happens in that one then?’ ‘Well, you basically don’t have to blink’. ‘That sounds totally epic!’ (The Doctor, too, would surely be cross if he knew so many people’s favourite episode was one he barely appeared in!) Russell knows that his biggest obstacle is the show’s recent past, because how can he revive it again and still match the old days. Nobody knows why ‘Blink’ suddenly worked: it just did. It’s one of those once in a generational things and here Russell T is, throwing things at the series and trying to get them to stick in the same way. But times have changed and he can’t write the same stories again or we’re back in ‘The Mind Robber’, with The Doctor trapped as one thing forevermore. The problem is, he’s fighting us too: we want the show to be what we remember, not what it has to evolve to be today. If it told the same stories forever, if it didn’t go through this current difficult growing process, it might not last to the next era. ‘Lux’ goes further than even ‘Greatest Show’s whizzkid nerd by showing that the biggest enemy of Dr Who’s future right now isn’t some fictional enemy but the show’s fans themselves.

Not the trio on the sofa though: they’re a rather sweet and affectionate portrayal from a man who was once close enough to them for real to care for the people watching this show. No it’s Mr Ring-A-Ding himself, the cartoon villain with ideas above his station. For the first half of the story he’s almost normal – if a story that has a cartoon come to life in a cinema can be considered ‘normal’. He is, though, like many a Dr Who baddy: he wants the life that Humans have, to become them, to take over their immortal souls and grow into a ‘real’ person (he’s Pinocchio, with the same gameplan as The Wire in ‘The Idiot’s Lantern’, a slightly clumsier 10^th Doctor story that is to TV what this story is to cinema). The Doctor tracks him down to an old deserted building where he’s being kept alive by the projectionist who keeps ‘feeding’ him with light and people, under threat of his beloved wife being burnt on the celluloid stock (in a scene that’s stolen wholesale from the creepy-as-hell Sapphire and Steel story ‘The Man Without A Face’ from 1981, where a character is ‘burned alive’  by being trapped in a photograph that’s then set alight, which is exactly what they should have been doing in Tom Baker’s final year). It’s well-written motivation: the being if light and pixels wants to be ‘real’, the way his audience are, while the poor man who caused it all was married to his wife of twenty years and can’t let her go. He needs her memory to be preserved on film, because film (and TV) are precious): they bring back so many happy memories we don’t want to see them lost. But, argues the story, you have to let go of the past to step forward into the present or you end up trapped there forever, stuck in one place (like ‘The Mind Robber’ and ‘Greatest Show’ both). In a metaphor that would be perfect if only telly was filmed the same way as cinema celluloid can never stop turning or it would literally burn (old cinemas used to have lots of fire extinguishers handy). However I think Lux is a metaphor beyond all this too: he’s the people you see leaving comments on Dr Who boards and social media that the show is awful and past the point of watching (even though they seem to still watch it every week and leave comments). Not that people can’t have opinions: no two Dr Who fans ever agree on anything (the one way the ‘meta’ section falls down rather). No, it’s the people who take it to extremes, who make up accounts that aren’t real to amplify their feelings, who try to take ‘control’ of the direction of the show and make the fans in the middle believe that everyone thinks like that. The people who say Doctor has to be a certain set way and has to be serious (it’s not for nothing Mr Ring-A-Ding’s catchphrase when he gets angry is ‘don’t make me laugh!’)  

The irony of it all, to Russell T at least, is that they’re clearly fictional creations often only created that week without a profile picture, who don’t really exist, controlled by people who live in the darkness of their parents’ basements and who haven’t been outside in ten years. They hof the limelight but they’re a ’projection’, for what after all is Lux as a baddy but a literal projection on a screen? They spend the episode talking about their God-like powers (another part of the story and this era I’m not keen on: Dr Who is too science based to have this many immortal beings around. I always had a hard time when it was The Celestial Toymaker but now we have Maestro and Sutekh and goodness knows who else) but really all they want to do is belong, to feel important, so Russell writes in the perfect ending (however much the meta fans don’t seem to like it) whereby Lux grows into the light and id dispersed, inside every atom (because he doesn’t want to shut these fans up completely, just get a better sense of proportion of how fans feel so the ones shouting loudest don’t get their way all the time). He gives them what he thinks they secretly want themselves and what he and the fans on the sofa have always got from this show: a sense of community, of kindness, of belonging to something special, of fifty minutes of love. It works both ways though: by now Russell knows The Doctor better than most real people and wants to give him that moment of love back from the audience, a moment when he knows he’s being ‘watched’ with love and not a little awe (and if that’s too ‘modern’ for you it is basically the plot of ‘The Savages’ fifty-eight years ago!)  It’s wish-fulfilment both ways from a writer to whom The Doctor is far more ‘real’ than most of the people commenting on his adventures, who gets to tell his creation that he’s loved and his critics that they’re not hated, just hat they don’t understand this show.

Russell also has fun breaking a lot of conventions by showing that he knows and we knows that this is a work of diction, even if his fictional characters don’t. Quite apart from the debate about which is more real, the fictional Doctor and companion or the fictional characters watching him, we get all sorts of ;writing’ references in the script: ‘the third act’ when the plot is resolved after moments of tension (which was typically after the third episode cliffhanger in the ‘classic’ series four-parters), The Doctor and Belinda also manage to escape the confines of the cartoon they’re trapped in by becoming emotional and having feelings and becoming more 3D. There are more Dr Whoy ones too, such as the clumsy fashion sense (a Beep the Meep t-shirt with a UNIT badge and a Telos Cyberman print with a scarf? Good grief no!), the hash-tag ‘ripdrwho’ that has become a joke now so many fans use it so often and a reference to it being ‘like Galaxy Quest’ (a very meta 1999 scifi-comedy where a group of rather literal-minded aliens kidnap the lead actor in a ‘Star Trek’ type show in the belief that he really does have secret powers that can save them all) Oh and there’s a dig at the ‘leaks’ that spoil shows (including this one, funnily enough: the general consensus amongst fans, even those who hated this story, is more relief that it wasn’t as bad as it sounded from the bits that had leaked than anything else. But then Russell gave quite a lot away on the series trailer and ‘coming next’ throw-forward, which are nothing more than ‘licensed leaks’ anyway ).

‘Lux’ is also, in a sense, both a knowing nod to and an inevitable part of the Disney linkup that they would never have contemplated, never mind been able to afford, if purely funded by the BBC (for nothing takes more time nor costs more money than animatyion. Except animation on already-printed film). Though the company did more than its fair share of live films too it’s for their cartoons they will always be remembered. Given that Dr Who has been slowly moving into cartoon form over the past decade (with some variable quality animations of reconstructed missing episodes) so a crossover where The Doctor and Belinda become cartoons themselves briefly makes far more sense now than it would to a fan of ten-sixty years ago. The animation is well handled too, as you’d expect from Disney, with Mr Ring-A-Ding as believable as a rogue cartoon character can be and the special effect when he reaches out of the cinema screen into the audience is genuinely terrifying. He’s also played with aplomb by Alan Cumming, I’m not sure what it says about this character or the last that he’s perfect for the part, breathing so much more life into two-dimensional cartoon than he did the very real King James in ‘The Witchfinders’ (a cartoon villain if ever there was one). Right on the borders of playful and sinister, he’s incredibly creepy despite not on the surface doing or saying anything that scary. Like all the best Dr Who villains, though, it’s the fear of the unpredictability and what he might do next that makes him come alive.  I do have a few issue with him though. Where is his back story? Why did he suddenly arrive that day at that cinema? Why is he so interested in Earth? I mean, it might just be the side of the planet I live on but there’s not much light here – surely he’d be better off on Skaro and running around in a Dalek casing? Though I love the gag about a two-dimensional character not being deep enough to have a back story it would have really helped the story and a scene of that would have saved the need for so much padding in the story’s second half (such as the ‘fake’ plot resolution with the policeman in a ‘dream world’, that seemed more like Russell having an idea then changing his mind and not wanting to throw his first draft away more than anything else). 

He’s also clearly not a 1950s cartoon but a 1930s one. I know why they went with a 1950s setting (because it’s as ‘modern’ as they could get with the shock of segregation – more on that later) but, seriously, you would not get a family audience like that happily watching such a crude animation in the 1950s. Mr Ring-A-Ding is, however, perfect for the late 1920s or early 1930s when cartoons were seen as being more for adults than children and were cheekier, more subversive and sexier before regulations in the 1940s tightened up what children could watch (seriously check out as Betty Boop cartoon sometime: she gets away with things they couldn’t do now). Just check out Mr Ring’s catchphrase of ‘Don’t make me laugh!’ too (totally a 1920s style line) and his laugh that’s as close as they can get away to Woody Woodpecker as lawyers will allow. He doesn’t belong in this quickly changing more sophisticated world, seen in between Rock Hudson epics and newsreels about the atomic bomb (that’s a real one by the way, albeit cut up for broadcast, suggesting a dating of January 5^th). Now, amongst my other obsessions I happen to be a big connoisseur of old cartoons (I watched 991 of the 1000 Looney Tunes cartoons last year, all I could find) so it maybe stands out more to me than most, but Mr Ring-A-Ding belongs alongside the Boskos of the world (perhaps the greatest cartoon character of them all, forgotten as he is now) and Oswald The Lucky Rabbit (where Disney started, until he lost the franchise and cut off his bunny’s ears to turn him into the far safer Mickey Mouse). There is a ‘Tiny Toons Adventures’ where Steven Spielberg has an evil cartoon from the Looney Tunes vault that takes a similar path to this story too (Buddy, who came between Bosko and Porky Pig but didn’t last very long as audiences found him too creepy, even though he was meant to be cute). Changing the setting would have solved a few other issues too: there’s no way a Rock Hudson film would have such a juvenile cartoon attached to it (though I also know why he gets a namecheck from Russell, as one of the first actors to come out as gay and admit to an AIDS diagnosis, at a time when he knew it would cost him work) and back in the early days of the talkies a lot of people considered the cinema ‘witchcraft’ as it was. Also, can you imagine The Doctor let loose in a Marx Brothers film? That could have been perfect!  

Still, we’re lumbered with the 1950s setting because Russell wants to make a point not just about segregation but how relatively close in time it was to now, until the 1960s revolution Who was a tiny part of changed things for the better (the credits even include a ‘South Asian history advisor’, to make sure the reaction to Belinda is accurate, not something you see every week). After all, it’s the age when the grandparents of many of the children watching now were born: recent history that you can point at. This is a story all about change and not getting stuck in one place and that’s so very true of our morals too. That’s why Russell has been throwing stories making the show a safe place for the LGBTQ community and cast a dark-skinned actor in the lead role, which causes so many Lux type critics to come out the woodwork: because he knows how important television is to people at home feeling seen and how we are all made up of the same atoms of light. If the world had been left the way it was then we’d still be living in segregated world, where we wouldn’t have met many of our friends because we’d be living either side of a fictitious curtain. The world is better when we mix and know each other: it’s notable how much prejudice people have when just listen to ‘Lux’ style critics and use their nonsense to base their judgements on, instead of actually knowing people as people. It’s hard to be racist to someone you actually know is a decent person or still hate all gay, lesbian or trans people when the ones you know act just the way you do in every way but sexually. I said in my review for ‘The Giggle’ that I hoped Russell would be brave enough to use the Doctor’s new skin colour in an episode to make a point and while ‘Dot and Bubble’ got there first this  features racism that can’t just be dismissed by being set on another planet – this was the Earth and in our recent past. Though it ends up being a red herring you really feel it when the former nice lady looking for her son turns up with the policeman locking The Doctor and Belinda up for trying to help (Russell might have nixed this part as it’s too close to the best of the modern Twilight Zone episodes from the 2019 revival, ‘Replay’, about an African-American family taking their boy to college and proudly filming his journey who gets stopped by a white policeman and dies whatever he does: whether he’s nice and compliant, fights back, charms the pants off him, gets to know his family, all until the mum stops using the ‘rewind’ button to bring her boy back and presses ‘record’ so the world can see the policeman’s actions and collectively shame him instead). It’s a worthy statement, the ‘coffee bar’ recalling the similar one of Ace’s outrage when visiting 1963 Britain in ‘Remembrance Of The Daleks’ (a scene beloved by many fans)  although they still don’t make enough of it and though it’s a great line the Doctor’s comments that ‘I’ve toppled worlds but sometimes I leave people to topple theirs’ makes no sense in context: he’s brought down empires for far less than inherent racism on Earth in the past. Why should we be so special? (I mean, in reality it’s because they can’t start wiping our real history but in the context of the show it’s   a no-brainer). 

One point that rather falls apart, too, is Belinda. Varadu Sethu gives her best performance of her three so far: she’s charming, resilient, independent and loyal. But she was none of those things in either ‘Boom!’ or last week in ‘The Robot Revolution’. We even start with a scene in the Tardis with some 5^th Doctor-Tegan style bickering about how he is failing on her promise to get him home again, then suddenly they’re best friends and she trusts him with her life? How? Because rather than being at home with her feet up she’s now being chased by a cartoon? I would be trusting The Doctor a little less right now. It’s almost as if she’s a two-dimensional character made to change her emotions on a whim – which would matter less if this wasn’t a story taking so much effort to show how three-dimensional she and the Doctor are. I do like her growing line in sarcastic quips through: her question if as a timelord The Doctor comes from ‘timelordia’, her comment as a nurse that ‘Doctors always make the worst patients’ though and the observation that the Doctor is ‘just like Scooby Doo’ though and the oh so true comment, even from this ‘coolest’ of Doctors that technically he’s ‘Wilma’, the brainy nerd with the glasses who sees through everything (interesting he calls her Fred, the muscly dumb one who thinks he’s in charge but blatantly isn’t).
Not to be all ‘Lux’ about it sitting in my basement (my curtains are open, honest!) but there are a few other issues this week. That opening scene also felt wrong for the episode: Belinda is the most guarded companion we’ve had in years (since Ace?) and yet suddenly she’s blubbing about her mum and dad and offering all sorts of details The Doctor never asked for. Russell’s written a better more believable set of characters than the supporting team this week too, who all feel sketched in and, well, one-dimensional (apart from the cartoon, ironically enough). We’re clearly not in sunny Miami but South Wales again,  no matter how many unconvincing arguments are around (the outside scenes when the Tardis have landed were filmed in some of the worst conditions of any story in fact, during the biggest UK storm of the decade so far). That’s one heck of a long ninety minute song and dance Mr Ring-A-Ding has been fooled into singing by the projectionist so The Doctor can learn his back story. Had this story been part of Russell’s first run I can’t help but feel that we’d get a tear in our eye and a lump in our throat at that unexpected reunion when everyone is let out of the cinema (I mean, I even felt it in ‘Fear Her’ for goodness sake and nothing else in that episode was three-dimensional). One extra thought by the way: is the gawky lad in glasses meant to be Tommy Lee Jones? They’d have been about the right age though we never get a surname in the story. Which, given the writing clue that Russell offers up in the middle meta section is significant (the ‘fans’ aren’t real ‘because they don’t have surnames’, although a pleasing mid-credit tag reveals that they do live and indeed are given surnames on the end credits: they’re Lizzie Abel, Robyn Gossage and Hassan Chowdry if you were wondering). I’m surprised, too, that there hasn’t been more fuss about a story featuring a self-proclaimed God made up of light who enslaved us all and then went up to meet its maker in the sky at the end going out on Easter weekend, of all times (no Dalek Easter egg from the church for you this year Russell!)

So, could ‘Lux’ have been better?  Undoubtedly. The opening needs tightening, the meta shock part drops the ball a little by giving away the ending (‘in the third act’) and won’t be such a surprise whenever we watch things back, while I think I’d still take ‘Love and Monsters’ which has more ‘heart’ than this somehow and while fans don’t like it much (mostly because of Peter Kay wandering around in a green fat suit) it feels much more confident and sure of what Dr Who is than this story does. Despite being a bright and colourful cartoon ‘Lux’ feels at times more like a dark night of the soul from Russell watching the reviews from the specials come in and worried that he’s losing the audience, even though he knows that the changes he’s putting the show through are the best way to safeguard it’s future and that it’s far more Dr Whoy to lose people by being brave than it is to treat it as just another series, repeat the same thing every week and watch it die. I for one am super pleased and proud that he’s taken such risks with this episode (after several that come close to breaking the fourth wall this one smashes it) and while it’s not quite as mind-bogglingly subversive as its postmodern precedents in Who nevertheless it’s a very worthy, colourful episode with lots to say and standout turns from everyone involved. Taking risks and having those ‘water-cooler’ moments when everyone is talking about it again is exactly what Dr Who needs to be doing right now, especially if it is in trouble and about to get cancelled after the last episode airs on May 24^th. It wasn’t the series but the critics that got small I tell you! Nice of you to rub that in Mrs Flood…Although who knows, maybe all this talk of cancellation and the fact we haven’t heard anything definite yet (very unlike Russell not to come out with the truth and confirm or deny rumours; ‘The Doctor lies’ is a Moffat catchphrase not a Russell one while Chibnall never told us anything but Russell’s usually straightforward unless it gives away a story’s plot) means that the rumour is all a hoax and Mrs Flood cancels the ‘fictional’ show which magically exists in our timeline when she’s defeated. There’s definitely something weird going on there after all: how come she turned up in Miami in 1952, just when we were getting used to her only hanging around Ruby Road? Is she an omnipresent Michael Grade? Does that mean she has another Tardis? Is she Romana (her dress sense at the end of ‘The Legend Of Ruby Sunday’ looked very familiar). Or is she another God? (Another possible clue: in last year’s Dr Who proms she said ‘don’t make me laugh!’ at one point. Although for all I know Russell was working on both scripts on his laptop at the same time and got them confused). I’m so looking forward to finding out…

Assuming of course that I’m real and not a meta fictional creation who’s only function is to comment on other fictional programmes, a non-playable character who only exists within the confines of these articles and these words and…hey, let me out, I want to live!!! No on second thoughts I’ve seen the news, I’m better off as a fictional construct of your over-worked imagination, dear reader. Or maybe you are a fictional construct of mine? Or maybe we are all stories told by the Doctor?…

POSITIVES + The animation is seriously good, whether The Doctor, Belinda or Mr Ring a Ding himself. Had the Who animations been done with a quadzillionth of the care and accuracy of this rather than the ‘shaky’ look of ‘Rhubarb and Custard’ with the likenesses of a mouldy Eagle comic then I’d be one happy fan. In case you’re wondering Ncuti and Varada performed the ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit?’ way, filmed first with a two-foot acrylic cutout standing in for where the animation would go.

NEGATIVES – A rock and roll soundtrack? Chuck Berry singing ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ in 1952? Six years before he wrote it? Don’t make me laugh!

BEST QUOTE: Lux: ‘I’m a two dimensional character – you can’t expect back story!’

 Previous ‘The Robot Revolution’ next ‘The Well’ might just have a new favourite episode…’ 

The Robot Revolution: Ranking N/A (but #260ish)

 

"Robot Revolution, The” (15^th Dr, 2025)

(Series 15/2A episode 1, Dr 15 with Belinda, 12/4/2025, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Russell T Davies, executive producers: Julie Gardner, Jane Tranter, Joel Collins, Phil Collinson and Vicki Delow, director: Peter Hoar

Ranking: #N/A (but around #260ish) reviewed 13/4/2025

 

 

 ‘Welcome to the real Planet Alan. I don’t want control, I don’t want to rule by a feudal robot system, I’m a  last lone dinosaur refusing to use a.i. in any capacity and I’m certainly not going to destroy you if you don’t like me. I will, however, make you sit through some excruciating puns while listening to obscure 1960s concept albums and watching the complete run of ‘classic’ Dr Who. Some of you might prefer your chances with the robots. Oh and look out for Clandusprods…’

Viva, as Vicki would say, le Revolution! A new series of Dr Who in which the Doctor does exactly what all true do-gooders want the Doctor to do: battle the greatest enemies of our age (incel control freaks and ai generators) and win, restoring the timelines back to how they should be. The great message at the heart of this story: it takes more than just ‘labelling’ someone to keep them safe or make them feel loved: even the fabulous gift of a star being named after you doesn’t mean it’s true love if actions don’t back up the literal words (and especially if those words are generated by the ai monster), whilst even the Doctor gets ticked off for sticking up for new companion Belinda and assuming she needs protection when ‘I can look after myself’. It’s a modern revolutionary story for our times in days other lesser programmes are towing the line, flying under the radar and making demagog dictators happy and I for one am glad that Dr Who hasn’t given in to the pandering that Dr Who should ‘just’ be about telling stories. We need series like this one as the only timelord adult in the room, that comes out and tackles the bigger subjects that we’re not meant to think about, that’s inclusive and welcoming and wise and has a lot to say that I’m all here for (and anyone still saying that Dr Who has only become ‘woke’ now must have been asleep for a good two-thirds of the past sixty-two years’ worth of stories). The more the TV industries and fandom lean heavily on Russell T Davies not to tell these sorts of stories the more he tells them. The twists and turns in ‘The Robot Revolution’ earn my respect. 

I loved the central idea of the companion stranded on a planet named after her, following the gift of a certificate. Being the starry-eyed romantic that I am I may have given a few of these away myself to friends, family and relatives and it’s a nice daydream to have that maybe the stars would house planets where all your/their dreams come true. Only Russell has the clever idea of going a stage further and seeing it as a sign of ‘control’. After all, these certificates are jokes really, a way of selling money based on the sheer vastness of space (because there are, staggeringly, somewhere around a septillion known stars out there – which means every single one of the current 8.2 billion inhabitants of Earth could have nearly 122,000 stars each named after them. That’s a lot of birthday presses even if everyone you know got you the same gift). You don’t have any legal claim on them at all and while your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren might get to visit the nearest ones one day, you’ve got no chance.  It is though, when you think about it, quite rude. It smacks of ‘appropriation’, because – in the Dr Whoniverse at least – a lot of those stars are populated already by races that have already given themselves names (and I pity the poor person who got gifted the solar system with Skaro in it and got taken there by robots…shudder). It’s all a method of control, of setting a narrative, of taking a very Earth-centriclike idea of the universe, which is something – well – alien to every good Dr Who story. It’s an idea that was crying out to be made by someone at sometime and in retrospect one of those ideas, like all good simple Dr Who plots, that I’m kicking myself for not thinking up first. The way that Russell ties this into a.i. generators, that put labels on things without necessarily understanding what they are, then ties this into a plot about a cruel boyfriend who did his best to control and label poor Belinda without ever trying to understand her (best line of the episode: ‘I thought you’d gone to Margate?’ ‘No…Stargate!’)  is clever indeed. I did hope, though, that we were going to get a different storyline: one where an alien has been given Earth as a star certificate and has come to claim it (maybe next series?!)

It’s also about time Dr Who looked at the growing and confusing murky world of incels. Controlling behaviour, expecting women to conform to their likes rather than see them as human beings, then getting angry when they’re rejected, then hiding away in their basement spreading hatred is very much something the Davroses of the world do in the Whoniverse (it’s surprisingly easy to imagine the Dalek creator starting out life that way and while Daleks are generally considered asexual it’s pretty much a given that they’re closer to toxic masculinity than toxic femininity by this point). It speaks volumes that, rather than admit defeat and wish his ex well, the baddy is so wrapped up in his ex’s life that he creates a whole world in her name and spends seventeen years getting it right before kidnapping her (honestly, if a lot of the people I read about in papers and indeed used to know had the power of space travel they would be doing that too). The fact that it’s easier for some people to create and enslave their own worlds rather than treat a girl nicely on this one is, sadly, all too plausible and the idea of a new world with ‘control’ is a feature of many an incel community forum (no wonder the losers can’t get any girls in real life). My namesake might seem nicer than Davros on the surface, all manners and presents (though a star certificate still seems too…nice to be something he would think of himself), but he’s clearly one of the ‘terrible monsters who must be fought’ that the 2^nd Doctor talked about in ‘The Moonbase’ and seeing him get his comeuppance is nicely satisfying. It’s great, too, that Dr Who still defeats the bully at a time in life when the rest of the universe seems to be kowtowing to predators (and electing them into high office). Once again Dr Who finds something wrong in the world, uses a mirror to distort it into a scifi monster and helps destroy it. This can only be a good thing. Even if it takes a famously gay writer, of all people, to make the point (then again Russell’s always been good at strong female characters; you only need to look at ‘It’s A Sin’, a series about the AIDS crisis where lesser writers wouldn’t have had female characters at all).

It’s the middle that falls apart, with too much talking and not much action, as if one Russell had the idea he wasn’t entirely sure what to do with it or how to make a full episode out of it. There’s just something a little…robotic about this episode that stops it being top notch though. I noticed it last year but Russell’s newer scripts have a tendency to fall into formulas in a way they never did before and this one is particularly privvy to it: confusing opening that won’t be explained for ooh ages yet, big dramatic showpiece that uses all the budget, then looooong scenes of talking and reflection and not much happening, before all-too sudden resolution and off into the next adventure with a sort-of cliffhanger. It doesn’t feel like a proper organic story that grows out of all its elemental plot parts so much as a model fitted together.  Once again it also doesn’t feel much like a Russell T script, as if the showrunner is having too much fun playing with all the toys his successors left on the Dr Who toyshelf to do what he does best (write three-dimensional characters in a few poignant lines of dialogue who really do change across the course of a story). Russell is having too much fun playing around with Moffaty ideas (the Doctor has been saving Belinda’s life for six months without her knowing it, while the Doctor wrapping his timelines round Belinda for ‘protection’ is basically a more emotional Russell version of what Clara does for the dying 11^th Doctor in ‘The Name Of The Doctor’; It’s hard not to imagine Russell coming up with this idea punching the air when he works out a way to explain why actress Varada Sethu was in ‘Boom!’ already (as a different character- who turns out to be a great-grand-daughter), then realising it had been done before; then ringing his friend to complain and stick in a sneaky‘timey wimey’ reference too, the first time any Doctor has since 12),  some Chibnall ones too (the Alan baddy is straight out of the Kornovista and Tim Shaw handbook of cartoon villain, while the way the Doctor stands around watching the baddy rant without actually doing anything – while in turn the supposedly all-powerful baddy watches the Doctor do something clever without lifting a finger to stop it is straight out of the Dr 13 era. Belinda, too, is pure Graham so far – an older unruffled character more bemused at the stuff happening in front of her than anything else) and even a few Saward ideas from the 1980s (the plot is solved with a ‘blinovitch limitation effect’ in all but name, of two versions of the same object crossing timestreams). I have to say, too, there’s more than a little of the utterly brilliant and under-rated Australian 1990s series ‘Halfway Across The galaxy And Turn Left’ in this story, not least the red/green eyes of the baddy and the way that, to most children, most adults act like aliens, without sense,  logic or fairness. Had Russell added some more of his own softer edges and the things he’s good at (such as tidying up the sort of plot messes the other two showrunners leave when they get bored) and stopped writing in such crude straight lines, this story might have soared. The ultimate irony of all this? Dr Who has never felt more as if it was written by an a.i. generator. 

Which is a case in point: why is this world controlled by an a.i. generator? It looked as if it was going to be an all-important plot point but is just dropped, despite being ever such a clever and timely idea to base a story around (there’s  another weak pun that actually it’s an ‘al’ generator but half the letter has been covered). Dr Who has done a few stories now about the importance of creativity and expression and as early as ‘The City Of Death’ the 4^th Doctor and Romana were moaning about art made by computers as being soul-less. The fact that you can conjure up people who aren’t quite right, who look like real people but don’t have any thoughts of their own, is a scary one that deserved more screen time. And of course there are robots running the place: big chunky ones, incredibly like the ones in ‘Dinosaurs On A Spaceship’ (that settles it, Russell’s spent the past ten years staring at the telly going ‘oh I so wish I’d done that!’) that look impressive but again don’t actually do much (except exterminate a cat). Far better, surely, to have had the a.i. generator turned on itself by the Doctor managing to have original ideas that the a.i. generator could never have dreamed of. Or have the world torn down by a bunch of artists languishing in a cell somewhere for daring to have thoughts that were different to the ‘King’? Or could it be that Russell took one look at the BBC’s advertising campaign for series one (which, let us not forget was created by a.i., something that got a lot of backlash at the time but has rather been forgotten now flipping everyone is doing it) and decided to soften the blow? Either way it feels like a wasted opportunity: absolutely the right villain but completely the wrong use for it.

I’m also not sure I buy the idea that machinery doesn’t understand ‘every 9^th word in a sentence’. If anything my technology doesn’t understand anything the first eight times I ask and it’s only the 9^th time I get anything to work. The idea of hiding codes inside language is at least the most Russell T part of the story: we’re back to a story like ‘Midnight’ where a monster that can control words can control the narrative, only it’s the Doctor doing it under the monster’s nose and no one else can see it. Is this another comment on a.i. and how unsubtle it is, missing the sort of messages that Humans like sneaking in under the surface (and which certain ‘un-woke’ people don’t notice? You’d be amazed the amount of unsubtle subtexts that pass by some rightwing Whovians sometimes). The hint of the episode: as long as the rest of us can still talk about what’s ‘really’ going on behind the censorship, we’ll be fine because the censors are too dumb to see it anyway. The shock of the Doctor (after six months undercover) worming his way into a position of trust so that he can be that person giving Belinda the back story is a clever unexpected twist in the narrative too. But that’s all the language is: a trick. There’s no reason it has to be a ninth word and as fun as it is to see the characters counting down the words on their fingers, the people around them have to be pretty darn stupid not to see something is going on (is it a sort of ‘mirror’ of the way A.I. seems to have most trouble replicating fingers? So many uses, from film posters to the Duchess of Cambridge’s photos accidentally give too many). Like a lot of modern Who you think this is all going to be important later on because they’re making such a fuss about it and then it, umm, isn’t. 

Another issue is the way the story progresses makes little to no sense. There are millions if not billions of these star certificates around. Why does this one result in a world full of robots?  I can understand robot Alan (and yes thankyou for using my name Russell; I like to think he got it from the Toby Hadoke stage show ‘Moths Ate My Doctor Scarf’ where Alan is the least scariest name in the universe, or maybe he got it from the only non-mysoginist male character in the ‘Barbie’ film?) feeling like he had unfinished business. But how did he build a rocket that went schwup? Surely, surely, if this world had the technology to do such things before he turned up then surely they know better than to hand over all their power to him, however accidentally it might be and however scared they are of him? There are whacking great robots for crying out loud. There has to be an in-built protocol for when the ruler goes mad and tries to kill people. Any civilisation advanced enough to do what this world does is advanced enough to prevent interference from the outside.

But then nothing in this story feels quite ‘real’ and is more like a cartoon throughout, starting with the new companion. Belinda does not behave the way normal people do, ever. Her reaction to finding two gigantic robots in her bedroom is not to scream (as per Mel or Susan) fight back (as per Ace or Leela) or roll her eyes and be sarcastic (as per Donna or Tegan). She’s not in shock either (as per anyone in such a situation for real): she just stands there, accepting. The biggest no-no is when the robots kill her cat. Even if she hates that ct and/or it’s next doors or even if it’s a cat she’s never seen before she ought to feel…something. The only time Belinda comes close to acting ‘normally’ is on telling her next door neighbour (who unluckily for her turns out to be Mrs Flood again…What are the odds that she has two crazy neighbours? More, you suspect to come on that one…) Belinda comes in to her own later to an extent, matching The Doctor and thinking for herself in a way a.i. characters would never do. You even cheer her on as she refuses his help, telling him ‘I am not your adventure!’ and tries to solve the story by sacrificing herself for her ‘people’ she never even knew existed (odd how often that happens to the 15^th Doctor in a way it never has to any other regeneration…) Even then, however, she doesn’t feel quite right. Compare her to her close cousin Martha (also a nurse): it feels as if Martha knew what she was talking about, that she’d taken all her lessons and worked hard. If I was a patient in a hospital and had Martha walk up to take my temperature I’d feel in safe hands. Not so Belinda. She looks as if she’s never seen a stethoscope before. There’s also no chemistry between Varada Sethu whatsoever – I’ve seen Doctors and Nurses in hospital with better rapport than this. Normally I’d give her the benefit of the doubt and say she’s still in shock – except that never once the whole episode has she done anything any ‘normal’ person suffering from shock would feel. Full marks for the ‘x-ray blankets’ though, a very clever and creditable invention for the future, as well as a clever means of reminding the audience that The Doctor is indeed alien (just not this sort of alien).

Belinda’s story ‘arc’ is a confusing one too, in that we already know the answers. It’s not like the Moffat days that left us on the edge of our seat trying to work out what happens next – it looks as if the future episodes of this run will be looking at the repercussions of all this (and presumably what happened to make the spaceship Belinda was travelling on go ‘schwup’. Which is odd as the Doctor wasn’t onboard and he seems to be in her timeline but hey ho, that’s timey wimey spacey wacey stuff for you). It’s an interesting dynamic having a ‘reluctant’ companion who doesn’t want to be there and just wants to get home, with a Doctor who thinks he can but can’t. We’re right back in the show’s early days with Ian and Barbara in fact. Only…I cared for Ian and Barbara and half the reason for watching Dr Who in its first two years was to see if they got home safely. I couldn’t care less about Belinda, who seems to have lost a lot of her teenage interest for the stars (maybe because her boyfriend stole her hope and sense of wonder from her? It would be nice if the Doctor can bring that back!) We don’t know Belinda properly yet – even compared to Ruby she’s sketchy, without anything to set her apart from previous companions (the ability to befriend anyone like Rose, the responsibility of Martha or the bolshieness hiding tenderness of Donna).Well, I got to like Ruby more as last year’s series went on so hopefully that is one issue that can be saved. But if even I’m not bursting at the seams to see what happens next and got a bit bored before the finale then Dr Who does have a bit of a problem. Mrs Flood, too, is becoming a bit irritating in her 10^th (?) cameo, without any new hints as to who or what she is. No Susan Twist this time though: have we finally finished with that arc now? (Seriously, was she really only there as a weak pun on ‘Sue Tech’? I mean, if Russell wants some new puns he only needs to have a read of my ‘Kindred Spirits’ books out now, with lots more awe at the stars, coldblooded reptile controlling ex-boyfriends and wonky robots).

For the most part ‘The Robot Revolution’ is a 50:50 story that could go either way, but it’s the finale that tips it over into the disappointment pile. For every fan that says the conclusion of ‘The Legend Of Ruby Sunday’ was a letdown I raise you this one: Belinda takes her star certificate and thrusts it into the baddy’s hands. That’s it: that’s the entire denouement. The Doctor has set up his escape route for six months and that consists of…sending his new companion a certificate in a vacuum cleaner and expecting her to know what to do. That’s an awful lot of trust for someone who has only had two conversations with him so far (and one of them only using every ninth word). What’s more it’s incredibly trusting that the Alan-villain is gormless enough to just sit there letting it happen. He doesn’t even react by going ‘noooooooooooooooooooooooooo’ the way all good villains are supposed to, which is just rude. And why does it happen anyway? So it’s established that two things can’t be in the same proximity at different dates in their lifetime. Except I could point to a hundred examples in Who where this doesn’t happen (half of them 11^th Doctor stories). Why, if it’s such a risk, does the baddy keep his star certificate in such easy reach anyway? And it really is a colossal coincidence that the Doctor is able to shield Belinda from harm by simply throwing herself at him (he can usually only do that sort of thing when he’s just regenerated). I’m all for companions taking charge and taking their life into their own hands (not least when it’s against a controlling ex-lover) but the scene would be more powerfully charged if it was entirely Belinda’s idea, if she went into the situation expecting to die (rather than being clueless) and if she’d kept that certificate as a reminder to never give up her life and freedom to anyone ever again. Honestly the younger Russell T would have ‘known’ instinctively to do that too. The younger Russell was also better at making us care for characters we barely knew: while I’m quite happy to see the 15^th Doctor cry every few minutes (it’s so much better than having him dark and brooding the whole time) we don’t know Sasha 55 at all so we feel distant from him at that point. Unless we get to have a Big Finish/novel spin-off of their adventures during their six months together it’s another waste and so easy to solve (have her say more than one sentence so we get to know her properly).

Oh well. It’s not as if the script is hopeless. There are little gems scattered here and there. We were told before we met him that Ncuti’s Doctor was going to be streetwise and smart, ‘too cool for school’ and while he is all those things I’m really enjoying how accident prone and ‘human’ he is, for lack of a better word. The scenes of him swanning in, fully in command, only to mess up (accidentally turning all the hospital lights out and missing Belinda by seconds) is so hilariously opposite to what the 10^th Doctor does in the similar setup in ‘Smith and Jones that its hilarious (the 15^th in reverse: acts like a nerd but secretly cool underneath it all). Equally, before we learn who Belinda is and what Alan is really like the opening scenes of Belinda staring up at the skies and dreaming of other worlds is a lovely small bit of writing, like the 9^th Doctor’s introduction to Rose in miniature.  It’s about time someone in the Whoniverse made the joke that’s been around in most hospitals for a century too: ‘There’s always a Doctor standing back while the nurses do all the hard work’. (Putting this in the single most feminist episode since Ace beat up a Dalek with a baseball bat, it makes more sense here than most). I would also put up with everything for my favourite – albeit brief – shot of the story, as a totally confused Ncuti holds baby Belinda, not quite sure what’s happening.

Those are, though, sadly, little nuggets of greatness in a story that doesn’t quite gel. There’s a lot riding on ‘Robot Revolution’ too: ratings are in freefall, half the Whovians I know seem to have given up watching and from what I hear Disney are waiting for final audience figures to come through before making a final decision on the show’s future. Which is a shame: despite all the calls for ‘fresh blood’ and a ‘new look’ at the series there’s nothing here a bit longer in the creative oven couldn’t put right. Dr Who isn’t short on ideas and it’s never been short of the courage to say what needs saying. I for one really enjoyed last year’s series – Capaldi's last series aside the best of any since the 50^th anniversary year twelve long years ago. It just needs an extra bag of tricks to keep the episode unfolding all the way through, to break up a lot of the longer talky scenes (which are easier to film but harder to watch) and to use some of that Disney funding more fairly across the episode rather than in two robots, one rocket launch and a minor explosion.  None of these ideas are revolutionary,  but they would make all the difference to the show’s health and critical standing. As it is we’ve had another episode now with some great ideas but which is an uneasy mix of the grown-up and childish, that takes the big scary monsters that we should be putting on screen but turning them into brightly coloured robots and an easily defeatible cartoon so as not to scare the kiddies with all the mentions of misogyny. Talking of cartoons, look what we get next week…

POSITIVES + The sets are really good this week, believable both as an alien world and later (when we learn what’s going on) as an artificially created alien world. Russell says that he was inspired by the ‘blank slate’ of 1950s low budget B films like ‘Forbidden Planet’ and ‘This Island Earth’, sets that looked both dated and hiply contemporary at once.

NEGATIVES – Rather fittingly perhaps, the robots were created with digital printers in 34 parts that were then stapled together and painted. They look impressively sturdy given all that though and chunky. The problem is they’re like so many robots we’ve had on Who before – as if the designer was an a.i. generator in fact – with the base of the colourful Daleks of ‘Victory Of The Daleks’, the style of the robots from ‘Dinosaurs On A Spaceship’ and the faces of the emojibots of ‘Smile’. Given that all three are Steven Moffat creations it’s hard not to think that Russell feels in competition with his old friend and wants to put his own stamp on those ideas. Only the difference is these are not original  in any way.  

BEST QUOTE: Belinda ‘He has taken coercive control – and made it complete control of the whole planet!’

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: There are a few similarities with ‘Evening’s Empire’, a 7^th Doctor comic strip from a Dr Who Magazine Autumn special (1991). There, too, a world is created out of thin air by a misogynist (named Alex, not Alan) who is fed up of not being able to run his life the way he wants to. He has it in for all women rather than just one, but does create it after being spurned by a Belinda-type (and there’s a satisfying number of clashes between him and Ace, who isn’t about to be told what to do by anybody, never mind a boy her age). The story is far kinder to him too, seeing the villain as the inevitable result of a strict Christian upbringing that made Alex unable to see any ‘truth’ beyond the Bible’s 2000 year old idea of gender issues. Like many Who things from the ‘wilderness years’ it’s somehow more relevant to now than anything Dr Who is making at the moment.

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