you're listening to fusion patrol a listener supported podcast
each week we take a single episode of a science fiction tv series movie or
audio and overanalyze it to within an inch of its life welcome to the discussion
hello and welcome to another episode of fusion patrol i'm eugene and i'm simon and tonight we
are going to be looking at wish world and the reality war episodes of the 2025 season of doctor
who aka the final season the final the last last episodes of doctor who this is going to be a little
bit of a weird episode because trying to learn from what happened last year when basically the
legend of ruby rose got just overshadowed by the empire of death so simon and i both recorded some
thoughts about Wishworld after we watch Wishworld, but before the reality war came out.
So I'm going to play those in now.
Simon's never heard my comments.
I've only heard a little bit of his comments.
Going to have about 12 minutes here total.
And we are playing them in live and hearing them along with you as this goes.
So I'm going to start, though, with a synopsis of Wishworld.
And that goes a little like this.
The Rani arrives in 1865 Earth pretending to be a midwife.
She has arrived somewhat later than a midwife normally would
after the seventh son of a seventh son of a seventh son has just been born.
And because that's just downright magical,
she steals the baby and then wishes the parents and siblings to turn into plants and animals.
The doctor and Belinda wake up in bed together living in their 1950s style life with their child.
Poppy!
The doctor thinks he's John Smith.
Belinda thinks she's Mrs. John Smith.
Poppy presumably thinks she's Miss Poppy Smith.
Melanie Bush is their neighbor.
The bones of giant dinosaur-like beasts roam the streets.
John Smith works for Kate Stewart at an insurance company,
and there is much crockery being broken.
Ruby shows up at the door asking for the doctor,
but Belinda calls the police on her.
The Ronnie runs this world from a big tower called the Bone Palace.
Conrad is using the baby to create a world of his wishes.
to the Ronnie's specifications.
Anyway, this is all just make-believe worlds
so that the Doctor will have doubts
and then shatter the world with his doubt,
revealing the one who is lost,
which turns out to be just the proto-time Lord Omega.
And now that the Doctor has doubts,
the world is falling apart,
and the Ronnie dumps him off the building to kill him.
The end.
All right.
And here are the thoughts of that episode.
In the 2024 series of Doctor Who,
there were eight episodes,
and I imagine that I could name a couple
and you'd immediately get an idea of what that episode was.
Perhaps not just an idea, you might even have some sort of a traumatic episode.
For example, if I said Space Babies, 73 Yards, Dot and Bubble,
or most notably Empire of Death.
But in the list of episodes from 2024,
one always has the same thought from me.
What the hell happened in The Legend of Ruby Sunday?
It's a nothing episode, serving no purpose other than to kill time before the reveal of Sutek and the destruction of the entire universe.
It is also inextricably linked to and overshadowed by the incredible cloud of crap that is Empire of Death.
I'm writing this not-at-all-detailed review of Wishworld, the penultimate episode of the 2025 series of Doctor Who, prior to the airing of the second part, The Reality War.
I'm doing this because I want to give it a fair shake.
And after the reality war airs, I strongly suspect that Wishworld will go the way of Legend of Ruby Sunday.
A wasted 45 minutes that did nothing except kill time and cram as many returning characters on screen as possible.
I said I wanted to give it a fair shake.
In this case, that means I want the opportunity to excoriate this piece of crap before I completely forget it exists next week.
I'll also add that before I get into that, I am sick of the word vibes.
There seems to be a huge apologist camp in fandom lately that has decided that if they can't have a story that makes cohesive sense or has any internal logic, they're going to fall back on the vibes.
No, it didn't make any sense, but the vibes worked for me.
I can only assume that this is either a desperate need to like something so deeply ingrained with one's sense of self-identity, or perhaps a result of the movements to decriminalize cannabis.
Vibes don't cut s*** with me.
Again, this is not a detailed review, just a few of the lowlights.
One, the doctor and Belinda did nothing.
They were not themselves, but instead a 1950s sitcom couple, a trope which has been done so much better on other TV shows.
Two, it's made abundantly clear that this wish world is supposed to be some stylized heteronormative world akin to the stereotypes of 1950s created by Conrad's worldview.
Fine, although we'll come back to that in a later point.
It's also pointed out that in Conrad's world, alternately abled individuals like Shirley are basically invisible because they have no place in his worldview.
There's a third leg to the trifecta that this sort of worldview embraces, but they ignore that completely.
The doctor and Belinda are people of color.
It seems unlikely they would fit in his worldview either.
3. Conrad is a scummy piece of work.
In my opinion, one of the most loathsome enemies the Doctor has ever encountered.
But there wasn't actually anything explicit in Lucky Day indicating that he held the worldview presented in Witch World.
He's a conspiracy theorist.
He's got mommy issues.
He wants to be seen and validated.
He has no scruples.
But where was the setup for this world he created?
Surely Alan in The Robot Revolution was a much better choice to be the architect of this world.
Four.
Poppy.
Susan.
Rogue.
Ruby.
Conrad.
Kate.
Ibrahim.
Shirley.
Mel.
Susan Triad.
Carla Sunday.
Cherry Sunday.
There were probably more I didn't even notice.
But it's just too much.
It doesn't fill me with jolly vibes just to see some faces on the screen with no purpose.
It's indulgent twaddle.
Five, the Ronnie.
Some people aren't going to like this.
The Ronnie is a third tier Doctor Who villain who featured in one mediocre and one abysmally bad story in the 1980s.
She had two basic defining traits.
She's the epitome of the amoral scientist, and she has an expressed contempt for all the Time Lords.
The role, as written here, is Missy, without Michelle Gomez's charm.
And her desire to bring back Omega? That doesn't feel in character at all.
Six, Omega.
Also a third-tier Doctor Who villain,
who was in two relatively fondly, but actually quite pedestrian stories, going back to the 1970s.
Time Lord history has been a bigger problem than the unit dating controversy.
Omega was the first, as outlined in The Three Doctors.
But just a few years later, that seemed to be retconned in The Deadly Assassin,
putting Rassilon as the creator of the Time Lord's power, including the power to regenerate.
Jump forward a few years, and the Cartmel master plan manifesting itself in places like
Remembrance of the Daleks seemed to imply that the Doctor was also part of this
Omega Rassilon Doctor Triumvirate.
That never really went anywhere, but it was there.
Then Chibnall came along and made the Doctor not even a Gallifreyan,
but also undid the notion that Rassilon and or Omega and or the Doctor was involved in
harnessing the Eye of Harmy and creating the power to time travel and regenerate because
that's now something that was stolen from the Doctor's unique biology. It's a freaking mess.
And unless yet another massive, massive reset is coming, fingers crossed, bringing Omega back
now can only complicate things further. Seven. As each cameo or callback occurred in this episode,
I found myself increasingly angry, which boiled over when that damn baby chuckled the giggle.
Aloud, quite vehemently, I shouted,
F*** you, RTD. F*** you all to hell.
And once that genie was let out of the bottle,
it could neither be put back nor denied for each subsequent moment that angered me.
Were there any positives?
I don't know. Maybe?
With all the cameos and the comment about the ice in the doctor's hearts last week,
it still feels like we're on a countdown to regeneration.
I guess that's a positive.
Like Whitaker before Gatwa, it's not about the casting,
but about the terrible, terrible stories and plots given to them.
The real need for regeneration, or the real place that needs a regeneration,
is the production team.
But if a new teen comes in, could Gatwa's doctor be salvaged?
I've reached the throw both the bathwater and the giggle chuckling baby out all at once phase.
Thoughts about next time?
Well, by the time you're hearing this, next time will already be on upon us.
But I think, sadly, that we will not see David Tennant's doctor.
because in this world of getting eyeballs on TV sets, Tenet appearing at the end of this episode
would have been a lot more effective than the ineffectual cliffhanger presented. I also very
much fear the possibility that Susan will appear in the episode and utter the word
grandmother when she sees the Ronnie. So I have no reason to like or ever even revisit this episode
and have, if possible, even less expectations for the reality war.
Okay. I heard that chuckle. I heard that chuckle.
It came close, I thought.
I think so too, because I think there's still something in this whole infertility thing,
but okay. All right. Let's listen to Simon's comments again, without benefit of having seen
the reality war.
So here are my very brief thoughts on Wishworld before watching the reality war.
I did enjoy this one. I usually enjoy the build-up of these two parters in particular.
My regular recent criticism that RTD is retreading previous episodes certainly applies.
I thought there were strong episodes in this of Last of the Time Lords and Sound of Drums.
But also Doctor Who and the Dinosaurs and Inferno, which is no bad thing.
And the thing that really appealed to me in this was the way in which Conrad's Wishworld presented a version of the ideal of current right-wing populists, but demonstrating how kind of fragile a fantasy these ideas actually are.
And the echoes of the Truman show as well seem particularly apposite given the way in which the current US government is combining its fascist tendencies with the trappings of a reality TV show.
I was less keen, unsurprisingly, on the Rani aspect, although I do think the casting is pretty perfect.
I think we've definitely got the air to Kate O'Mara here.
In fact, you can see RTD thinking he was using his bi-generation to put right something he got
wrong before when he only had Derek Jacoby in for the one episode followed by John Simm when he
could have kept him around and had two great actors in the role. Never mind the fact that
John Simm wasn't actually really great in the role until World Enough and Time, which also
managed to have two great actors in the role without the need for any bi-generation nonsense.
But anyway, there's also Omega and yet another big chunk of continuity, another Time Lord
coming back. I can't think this is going to be good either. In fact, I suspect that we're getting
a much bigger retcon than Eugene is expecting, possibly on a Timeless Child Chibnall level.
but I guess by the time you hear this, we will know.
Well, I certainly was hoping for a massive, massive change.
I'm going to say no.
We did not get anything on the scale I was envisaging
when I recorded that little retrospective on Wishworld.
I have no actual comments on Wishworld,
So I guess we'll just, for the moment, plow into the reality war.
I had one thing, but I think it got rolled in.
So even my prediction is true.
So let's take a look at the synopsis.
Now, okay, hold on.
Actually, there's one more announcement.
If you haven't heard this already, it's been posted on our social media,
but there are only five people on Mastodon.
So when I watched the reality war, I was as mad as I have ever been watching an episode of Doctor Who.
It wasn't even a slow burn.
It was a fast burn from the beginning to the end.
And I didn't hate this episode as much as the Empire of Death.
But at the same time, it did make me even angrier.
I was absolutely livid.
And I guess I watched it about two or three hours before Ben did.
And I got a text message from him when he was done.
And I realized from the language used that he had, A, reached the end of the episode,
and B, I felt much the same way I did.
And on a whim, we got on a call and we recorded our anger.
I mean, that's what it is.
It's us just absolutely ragging, sweary, hateful.
Nonetheless, if you want it, it's out there on Patreon for our subscribers.
You can go to our Patreon, patreon.com slash Fusion Patrol.
If you're not a Patreon member, that's fine too.
It's actually available for you to purchase at the absolute minimum that Patreon will
allow me to charge, which is $3 or $4.50 if you're on an iOS device. Anyhow, that's there.
If you want to hear Ben and I working our way through our therapy session, have at it. Just
don't play it in the car with the kids. It's not suitable for going out in the public. It's very,
very angry. But this, since I've through this, I thought I was through it. I thought I'd get it
out of my system. There may still be some passive aggressive in my synopsis of Reality War,
which goes like this. No. The doctor is about to die, falling off the Ronnie's Bone Palace,
when he does something very clever to save himself. Nope, strike that. Anita from the
Time Hotel opens a magic door and saves him. In the future that cannot exist because the earth
was destroyed on May 21st, things are bad and they need the doctor to save the day. Having Anita
return him to John Smith's home, he puts on a dress, mans up, and takes his family of Belinda
and Poppy back to the Time Hotel, where most of the effects of Wishworld wear off on them.
They open a door to unit and let some reality in, restoring some semblance of competency to the unit personnel.
The Rani comes a-callin' and we learn that the Time Lords were wiped out by a, quote,
genetic explosion, end quote, that didn't just kill the Time Lords, it also rendered them sterile.
Which seems a bit redundant, since they're dead.
The Ronnie did something clever to sidestep that, but not enough that she isn't sterile too.
So she and the Doctor can't get funky and breed a whole new race of purebred Time Lords,
despite the fact that the Doctor isn't even of the same species as the Ronnie,
but who cares about continuity even in the same scene?
Poppy is somewhat supposedly real and special because she's the Doctor and Belinda's baby,
But since she's tainted by human blood, this thread goes nowhere.
Unit planned to restore reality, but that's over Belinda's dead body because Poppy would
cease to exist because she's clearly not real.
So the doctor has Sue Tech, not Sue Tech, sorry, that's Sue Tech, construct a zero
room to protect them from the oncoming return of reality.
The doctor goes to the Bone Palace to lower the barriers so that Ruby can beam in and distract Conrad, restoring reality.
The Rani sends the Bone Dinosaur Monsters to attack Unit, so Unit Tower goes into battle.
And I was genuinely surprised that it didn't turn into a giant battle mecha with a big sword.
The Rani releases Omega, but he's become a giant zombie and eats the Rani.
The other Ronnie escapes with a time ring.
The Doctor stumbles upon the Vindicator, which is apparently also a blaster, and zaps Omega
back into the nethers.
Ruby gets to Conrad and steals the wish baby and sets things right with a wish.
The Doctor shows up and wishes away all of the wishes.
And hopefully the so-called gods.
Oh, and hopefully Mavity too.
And then the episode is over.
The end.
Oh, wait, no.
Belinda and Poppy survived in the Zero Room, and now the three of them, that's Belinda, Poppy, and the Doctor,
are going to travel the universe in the TARDIS, and everyone is happy, except for Ruby, who's got a case of the Ruby Blues,
because they're happy together, and she's a fourth wheel.
But then Poppy disappears, and no one remembers, except for Ruby.
And we know nobody except Ruby remembers Poppy because she asks everyone, one at a time,
individually, almost as if the episode was running a little short of its 45-minute runtime.
Sorry, what's that?
Oh, I'm being told that the episode had a 66-minute runtime.
Well, never mind.
It must not be padding.
Unit has noticed that Teal is wrong, Norway has moved, and Ernest Borgnine is alive again.
That is the new reality, and Poppy isn't part of it.
The end.
Oh, no, wait, no.
No.
Ruby pleads with the Doctor, and so the Doctor goes off to kill himself.
But first, the 13th Doctor shows up to have a cameo, and then it's back to the Doctor
offing himself.
The plan, if we can deign to call this, give it a moniker, a plan, is to burn a regeneration
into the time vortex, nudging the universe slightly and restoring Poppy. Presumably,
this will also kill Ernest Borgnine in the process. There is now a mandatory post-regeneration
sequence where the Doctor hasn't changed yet, and he goes to visit Belinda, who now has a child
named Poppy, which is not the Doctor's child, just a spooky human child. By the way, Belinda
is the one who called her spooky, not me. The universe is back to normal? No, it isn't,
Because now all the previous adventures with Belinda, when she was whining to get back
to May 24th, are all now punctuated with, because Poppy hasn't got a reliable babysitter.
So still not the original reality.
Too late, though.
The doctor leaves and finally regenerates his face.
Her first words, oh, hello, I'm a chav.
The end.
I may have added three words in there, but I think the sentiment is right.
All right. Because of our disparate views on the previous episode, I'm just going to go.
Did you love this episode, Simon? Because I'm so tempted to say yes. I'm so tempted to say yes.
I tell you what, I clearly had far lower expectations of this. I was listening to
the synopsis and thinking, my word, the level of attention you have played to the details and the
things that you were caring about in the last kind of endless 20 minutes of it, I checked out
mentally by then. It was... Details matter. That should be the subheading for this podcast.
details matter. I can't help myself there. It didn't make me angry in the way that it made
you angry. And I'm curious about that because I think, I mean, one of the things I'm going to come
on to is the kind of emotional impact that Doctor Who in particular does seem to be able to have on
me and the way in which I kind of fix some of that on the production team of the time.
But for whatever reason, this one didn't make me as upset, let's say, as, I don't know,
the timeless child thing at the time.
Even in the name of the Doctor, at the time, the introduction of the War Doctor just seemed dreadful to me.
Certainly, I'm still fairly upset about the cyber brigadier.
Those things stuck for a lot longer with me than this, where I was watching it and I had a sinking feeling.
This episode didn't land well with me, I'll say that much. And it's been going over in my mind for a couple of days, but then, you know, it's Doctor Who. But I guess I kind of already resigned myself to some degree.
I think the kind of summary, I've got a certain amount of detailed notes down here, but I think probably the summary of the broad thrust is when they said that RTD was coming back, I was worried because I think the essence of this show is that it always makes mistakes, it always gets things wrong.
it's always been a cure-its-egg and that doesn't matter because it's always also doing different
things and doing new things and and i just i don't know but i didn't i didn't kind of feel
that it was the right move to bring back a previous production team and there's quite a
lot of the old production team have been behind this and that's not just because there were things
about the original RTD era that I didn't love as much as some of the things that have happened
since. It's just also because it's so much easier to forgive and get over the things that
are mistakes being made in the cause of going somewhere different and trying something new
than in the cause of trying to recapture an old form of magic that you just can't,
you know, lightning doesn't strike twice and you can't ever step in the same river.
That is your best justification for that yet. I understand because we have had this
conversation multiple times about, you know, you, you can't, you know, you want change,
you want it to move and grow and paraphrasing, right. And our previous conversation. And I have
always been a little wary of that idea because 1950s american automobiles change every year
fins up fins down taillights this headlights there it's like that's just capitalism to
to catch the bright shiny right that's just to to drive the market and change for change sake i don't
like and that's but that's not change when it's not real is yeah i know who's always been willing
to be much more kind of radical than that but that would be my thing when it needs to change not
for the purpose of change i mean you have to do this because an actor leaves or you have to
yes but your explanation of this and of it's not just rtd coming back it's rtd trying to
what RTD did before.
I think that's the best explanation
of why this is wrong
because RTD is not the same person,
certainly.
And not only does he want to recapture
what he did before,
but he wants to push his own boundaries,
what he couldn't get away with last time,
which is bigger and grander
and more flamboyant
and whatever it is.
But I don't know if it is bigger and grander.
It spends more money.
well yeah yeah yeah no it spends more money impression of being bigger and grander
it's like his idea in his head that he's doing bigger and and grander and and yeah i mean he's
got to go and and as of our recording of this we have not heard what i can say did here between the
time that i recorded my bit because you'll note in that earlier bit i said i don't know if we get
rid of the production team. Can they keep
Shooty Gatwin? Can they reform his
character so that he's a doctor
that's worth watching?
And I did not
know that he had been quoted
repeatedly that he
is only here for as long as Russell T. Davies
is here. Oh, I didn't know that.
I only found out about this
week, but yes, he's
here for RTD
and no more. So RTD leaves,
he leaves. And
apparently some of those reshoots that they
towards the end was them having two endings of this. So no announcement from Disney as to what's
happening yet. And I suspect they'll wait at least a week. I know they said, we'll wait till after it
airs. But what they really mean is they'll wait till had a week of ratings. They've still got
five episodes of the BBC Disney deal. So they'll wait till they've had. Oh yeah, that does look
really bad too. I finally saw a trailer. I think it looks really good. I've got to say,
Despite everything you're going to hear me say about this episode, this is the thing that looks really good to me.
It looks really interesting.
It looks like the kind of thing that RTD actually can write.
Yeah, sex with a sea devil.
Yep, that's what he's going to do.
That's going to be totally in a sea devil.
But what I will say about RTD, because I still have a huge amount of respect for him, is that, okay, I didn't watch Queer as Folk,
So I'd have to check how many seasons that ran for.
But the stuff that kind of stands out, the second coming and everything slipped out of my mind.
It's a sin I didn't see, but I know it got excellent reviews and it supports my case,
which is that he's extremely good at writing one-offs.
And what I'm guessing about Queer as Folk is that it maybe didn't run for more than two or three series, because I don't know that he could sustain it for that. I've just checked and it's run for five. So that's sort of undermined by case.
But it seems to me that one of the things that Stephen Moffat did incredibly well, and I'm sure I've said this before, was to actually regenerate what he was doing with the show. He changed the format, he changed the style, he pushed around what he was doing quite a lot.
I think there are things about the way that RTD wrote the original four seasons that he did.
Well, I mean, we discussed these early on, the kind of template format of the show and the way
that it is quite sort of similar, that you can see echoes of that in this version of the show.
And the fact that it's very easy to kind of pick on things that appear to be him doing the same
thing again, suggests to me that that isn't really the way he works, that he needs a whole new canvas
to explore his new ideas, that he doesn't particularly want actually to come back to
old stuff. And it makes me wonder why he came back to Doctor Who. I mean, I know a little bit about
it, but at the time he left, he was absolutely adamant that he was not going to come back.
And I think that was because he knows that for him, he also needs to move on.
Yeah.
Well, he needs to move on.
And I think there's a sign there that maybe he has, but it'll be a little while before
we find out from Disney.
Since we're on that, and since...
So Shudy Gathwa has done 18 episodes?
Something like that.
And Christopher Eccleston, 13. So he's not quite the short, but he feels like it.
It is the case that it was quite a short, well, apart from anything else, he wasn't in
a couple of the episodes except for kind of fairly minimal appearances. But we know with
the benefit of hindsight that Christopher Eccleston's run was not a happy time for the
relationship between the lead actor and the show's producers that whatever relationship he'd had
with rdd previously and obviously he'd done the second coming had completely soured and
shooty gatsworth filmed basically as i understand it pretty much all of his episodes back to back
although we've got two seasons out of it it was a bit like christopher eccleston going in and doing
one production run just you know five episodes longer so my assumption was that I mean there
are there are warm words about from RTD about how brilliant Shooty was and from Shooty about
what a privilege it was to to to be the doctor and work on the show but my assumption was that
Give it a couple of years and we will start hearing how miserable he was and how different the kind of views of what the role should be or what the show should be or just what the working conditions were like on set.
Because I can't really understand why he took the role and left so soon.
I mean, if you didn't think you were going to stick with it, why take it in the first place?
yeah I don't know and it has to be because it didn't live up to your expectations or because
there was unhappiness unhappiness on one side or the other because it could equally be the
production team looking at this and going you know what his performance isn't giving us what we need
from the doctor I don't know if that's what they were looking at and this is the thing that I think
you know we will have to wait until the revised edition of the writer's tale comes out or whatever
it is. But I look at Shooty Gatwa's performance, and obviously, this is very subjective, and every
Doctor Who fan has their own opinion on this. But I look at it, and I think, this is not what we need
from the Doctor. I do not feel that his performance suited the role. And I say that as someone who
absolutely welcomes there being incredibly different takes on it. You know, the differences
that you get between Peter Capaldi and David Tennant that you get between Peter Davison
and between Sylvester McCoy. I love those differences. There are very few doctors where,
ironically enough, with the exception, I guess, of William Hartnell, where I kind of feel like
the performance is a drag on the show. And I feel like Shooty Gat was one of them.
And I like him as an actor, just as I like Hartnell as an actor. I think his performance in Brighton Rock is terrific. I just don't like him as the doctor.
Well, I'm going to say that he does a remarkable job as a shallow, glib, insincere stereotype of a gay man.
And an insincere one.
It's not just that he's a gay man.
I thought you were going to be a gay man for a second, Beth.
It's that babes nonsense.
It's that laughing all the time.
Like, it's impossible to take him serious.
And he's doing a really good job of playing that character.
But that character isn't, shouldn't be the doctor.
And combine that with the fact that he does not, we've commented on this over and over again,
he does not save the day, Mutt, in these episodes.
He's always kind of maybe...
You've commented on that over and over again.
Yes.
He's facilitated it.
I, that to me, okay, did he save himself today? No, a door opens up by Anita and saves him.
It's just another example. I'm not, I'm not disagreeing with the facts here. I'm disagreeing
with the validity of it. Like to me, I am quite happy with doctors who don't save the day. I love
Peter Davison. I actually, I know she's never kind of been my favorite doctor, but I actually
do appreciate Jodie Whittaker far more than I appreciate Shuti Gatwa. It's not that. It is
the sense of, does he or does he not embody that intangible essence of this remarkable,
ancient Time Lord alien in that way that, you know, I think-
The depth isn't there.
When we were looking back at the 11th hour, and I was just so struck by how within one
episode, Matt Smith kind of made me feel that. And how in David Tennant's performance, you can
kind of sense a little bit of everyone who came before him. And how with Shuti Gatwa, even if
I liked the character that he is playing more, I don't think I still would feel that it was a
continuation of who the Doctor is for some reason. Okay, so let's pretend like this is deliberate.
and I think maybe it is, but it's so badly bungled, it is.
So Matt Smith, you're talking 11th hour
and we are talking Matt Smith of all the doctors
was, just because he's not my favorite doctor,
he was able to portray that old man in a young man's body
and still be goofy.
But when he needed it, that age and gravitas
and whatever was there.
and arguably that is the centuries of experience,
or if you go with the whole timeless child thing,
millennia of most of it forgotten experience,
then you could say that that is what's building him up
to being this sort of sad sack doctor, right?
The Time Lord Victorious, all of that is partially
because of all that that has come before.
This bi-generation fixed that.
They said that.
He was his own form of therapy.
He basically got rid of all that baggage.
No baggage, no gravitas.
Except they do.
They are bringing, they're repeatedly bringing back the baggage.
So it needs to be, it needs to be there under the surface.
They botched it.
I'm just, I think the idea was to get rid of all that baggage.
And yet somehow they managed to keep dragging it up again because of all these ridiculous callbacks to all the doctors.
I like it to be there.
And I don't think they were wanting to get rid of it in the sense of that this isn't part of who he is.
It's just not necessarily, you know, you can, we've had, we've had the, you know, the latter David Tennant stories where it is, it goes into the kind of darker Time Lord Victorious stuff.
and we've had the need to reset so that we could tell lighter, more whimsical tales,
which I think in a way, arguably, the kind of initial Matt Smith stuff was about.
And then it kind of gets more into the darker stuff with Peter Capaldi,
and whether that's because they go, we've got Peter Capaldi, let's do that,
or whether that's because they thought we need to go in this direction, let's get Peter Capaldi.
it's part of the show reinventing itself and reinventing itself which is my kind of fundamental
thesis about what the show should do and I don't mind the fact that they might take someone like
Shuti Gatwa who is going to do something that is lively and exciting and his performances
clearly have a kind of energy which has that electric charisma that I think works for the
Doctor. You know, I'd argue that someone like David Tennant had that. I certainly argue that
someone like Tom Baker had that. But what I don't think is that Shooty Gats were, I don't,
my sense is he never got it. I mean, this is pure speculation. But we know that there are those
actors like David Tennant or like Peter Capaldi, who were absolute, died in the world, Doctor Who
fans who were the biggest nerds out there. And there were those people like Matt Smith or Shuti
Gatua who basically got cast in the role without ever having seen an episode. And somehow,
someone must have sat down and told Matt Smith, this is what the character is, this is what the
show's all about. Maybe showed him a few clips because I'm sure RTD stuck a choice selection
of dvds in the post to him uh or martha in that case but i don't think gas were ever got that i
don't think i don't think he cared i think the whole that whole thing wasn't of interest to him
for whatever reason and so he never looked to to connect with that in his performance that's i don't
know but that's the feeling i got and that's it since you know this was his last episode for sure
whether or not it's the last episode of the show we're looking back on the shooting era and that
and that is my problem yeah well yes he might come back we'll come back to that but yes yeah
okay so i suppose we're we're at 45 in maybe we should talk about the actual episode
we must i'm just going to start with an absolute nitpicky point but it's omega it's not omega
Yeah, the doctor says it wrong.
Most people got it right, but the doctor kept getting wrong.
This is metabolous three all over again.
Yep, yep, yep.
But you know, if his mouth can regenerate to like fish custard,
I guess it can regenerate to mispronounce certain
very pronounceable Gallifreyan words like-
Here's the thing.
I guess metabolous isn't Gallifreyan.
You've got to show, I know we can go talk about Atlantis
and whatnot, but you've got to show like Doctor Who, you're intentionally doing all sorts of
callbacks to old, do and whatnot. Do you not have anybody on staff that can do continuity?
Was there nobody? Was there nobody on the set when he said Omega that said, no, you sound like an
American? Say it. Omega. It's like a Gallifreyan would. I know you're not a Gallifreyan. Oh,
wait, you probably didn't pay any attention to that when you're reading the dossier,
But it's Omega.
His name is Omega.
That's what he calls himself.
And you should respect that.
So it's like we don't, you know, I can't pronounce Dalek like Sylvester McCoy pronounces Dalek.
So I was expecting a continuity announcement that said next week, the Daleks and Omega team up to lure the doctor to Metabellus three.
It's like that would be a good one.
All right.
Take this as the first half of the story.
I guess the Ronnie's plan is to use Omega's DNA to make a new Gallifrey and new Time Lords.
This does not fit with the Ronnie at all. I mean, I know that they get the whole bit where she says,
well, you know, you never liked Gallifrey. Well, you know, I have this one with me at the top,
but she never had that desire to do. She just wanted to do her experiments and things. And
can't she reverse the sterility damage i mean come on if the master managed to come up with it
surely she could outdo it she's smarter than he is assuming it was the master that did it who knows
and okay we have to rtd has leaned into the timeless child the doctor is a foundling
right he's he's not ignored it he's just like oh yeah it's like he's brought joe martin's doctor
back, even though he doesn't seem to understand what Joe Martin's doctor has to represent,
which is a piece of the doctor he can't remember.
But along with millions of others, who knows how many hundreds, thousands, you know, over
the years, because that.
And so he's not a Gallifreyan.
He doesn't even have the right DNA.
Well, he does.
Does he?
Well, yes, the Time Lords have his DNA.
But the Time Lords have his DNA to do regeneration.
Do they just wholesale wipe out all their DNA and put in this alien's DNA?
Or did they make themselves some sort of a hybrid?
Which is what I always took from the timeless child nonsense
when they finally got around to trying to make sense out of it.
Was that they experimented on the Doctor until they isolated the genetic piece
and then instill that in the Time Lords, which, you know, going back to the three doctors and
going back to the deadly assassin, you know, first it was Omega. They were Gallifreans.
They needed power to do their time travel experiments. He blew up a star, created a
black hole, fell in it. Everybody thought he was dead. Okay. Not a Time Lord. Can't be a Time Lord.
no Time Lords yet. No Time Lords yet. Just stellar engineer who died. And then the doctor
finds out that he didn't die. Oh, that's a good point. The doctor finds out he didn't die,
reports that back to Gallifrey, and everybody's like, oh, my God. So that nudge is heading into
going, no, we should be able to, you know, we shouldn't have abandoned him. We need to save
him. And that's what brings about the Ark of Infinity bit of the story. But in the deadly
assassin, they almost tell a different story about Rassilon being, harnessing the Eye of Harmony.
And you kind of cut forward and they start kind of retconning it to be like, no, those two were
working together. Omega did the first experiment, which got him killed. And then Rassilon carried
on. They were working together. And he is the one that established Time Lord. And he used the power
of the Eye of Harmony was what gave them the power to regenerate. It's almost like Philip
the doctor about continuity he's got to go yeah so and then of course cartmel was trying to
kind of throw the doctor into that mix as well as well as the other two of them being
but the point being is that omega was not a time lord and as they say in a literal quote from this
episode the time lords of omega were tyrants and murderers no they weren't that was rassilon
Yes. Yes. I mean, nobody on his staff ever watched Doctor Who?
Well, no, I take your point about all of that. And I agree it would have been better if they
had got some of it right. But clearly in The Deadly Assassin, they just did the same thing
that RTD is doing here. They ignored some of the stuff that had previously been established on the
basis that the vast majority of viewers would not be picking nits in the way that we are picking
nits. And the difference for me is that The Deadly Assassin is a great story. And so I think
my criticism here would be bringing Omega back is not a great story. And not only that, but actually
bringing Omega back isn't necessary. It's something that is the kind of thing that an ardent Doctor
who fan would do rather than someone who is trying to tell a compelling interesting story
about whatever this is supposed to be about the power of whatever fantasy and the depths of depths
of desire in the connection with children and their parents or something or other the the
The emergence of Omega doesn't have to be Omega, right?
The Rani has to have generated this wish world for some reason.
And like you say, she's an amoral geneticist who could be harnessing this power for...
I mean, even if you took essentially the same, pretty much the same production that she brings
some kind of monster through from some kind of underworld who subsequently eats her,
why does that monster from that underworld have to be connected with Omega or the Time Lords?
That makes no sense.
That's the kind of absolute fannish nonsense bit of it. If you'd done that,
you'd have ended up with exactly the same story with fewer of the problems.
I want to bring back Omega, and I want to bring him back in entirely nothing at all like Omega ever was.
He's now a giant skull zombie corpse.
And let's face it, he was a big nothing.
Eat Ronnie, other Ronnie disappears, Doctor backs up into a convenient thing behind him and shoots him.
Game over.
At least Rassilon was James Bond.
Yeah.
I mean, just, just.
Yeah, and that's how they banished Rassilon, too.
It was the master doing it.
But yeah, come to think of it, it is, it really, I hadn't even spotted that parallel to yet another RTD story.
That's very good.
Yeah.
And then just, you know, picking up a couple other things.
So for listeners who haven't been paying attention, it goes like this.
The doctor wiped out all the Time Lords on Gallifrey, except it turns out he didn't.
He actually popped them in a cup of noodles.
And then...
Right?
So the doctor never actually killed all the Time Lords.
The Time Lords never actually all died until the Master went there and had a hissy fit,
and he killed them all, of which happens off screen.
We just go, yeah, I wiped them out.
And we don't know how he wiped them out.
And then he took their corpses and made them into Cybermen.
Okay, that seems like something he didn't do overnight, or it seems like something happened.
And then at the end of that story, they use Death Blossom crystal-y thing or whatever,
And wipe out all organic matter on Gallifrey, eliminating the organic parts of the Cybermen,
or the Cybermasters, or whatever they were called, Cyberlords.
And that was the end of it.
None of that is a genetic explosion.
So we have to assume that the Master killed them with a genetic explosion,
because that's what we get talked about in this episode.
But I have a couple quotes here.
The Doctor to the Ronnie.
Ronnie, the Time Lords were slaughtered.
Okay.
I don't know about you, but the definitionary word of slaughtered is killed.
How did you survive, Ronnie?
I saw it coming.
The genetic explosion.
I had a split second, flipped my DNA, made a biological sidestep, survived the carnage.
Also carnage, you know, death, destruction, dismemberment, you know, all the good stuff.
And then later on, we get this, and I don't have who's saying what here because I'm pulling
it from the subtitles and I didn't want to go back and watch it.
Some of this, maybe the doctor, some of this is the Ronnie, some of this is probably other
people, but the doctor, I'm sure it's the doctor, because she's impossible, the child
of a time lord.
And somebody goes, and there's no such thing.
We're sterile.
We are infertile.
The species is barren.
We are a biological dead end.
There can never be another Gallifreyan child.
This, I'm sure, is the Ronnie.
Sometimes I think that's what bi-generation is, a life force trying anything it can to
survive.
And then somebody says, what happened?
And we get the genetic explosion.
It didn't kill us, but it roasted us and sterilized us.
Okay, was it carnage?
Was it slaughter?
Or was it, oh, we accidentally forgot to put the lead shield over you when we ran the
microwave or did your dental x-rays you know what what was it because she escaped it and she
escaped it so why is she sterile so i don't i don't know if that was kind of careless as in
she escaped it but didn't escape its effects but then how did it's like in the same scene
you know well it well it is and it is and it is it's it it is kind of very unclear and it certainly
seemed to me that the destruction of the Time Lords, the second destruction of the Time Lords
by the master... No, no, that's the first actual one. The other was a faux destruction.
Yeah, well, yes, okay. But then... That was cross-communication wires.
It seemed to me that in the description that we got of that, that the master had killed all
the Time Lords on Gallifrey, that he hadn't yet killed the Doctor. And so some kind of universal
bioweapon that targeted Time Lord, I suppose it would have to be some temporal bioweapon,
that targeted Time Lord DNA through time or something, in order to completely wipe them
all out, would have killed the Doctor. And it's just...
Except he's not a Gallifreyan.
And it can't have targeted the...
Well, except she has the DNA that he could have targeted
because they all share her DNA.
Even if you take your...
So does he.
...reputation of that, so does the master.
Yeah.
Yeah, which is an excellent point.
And which also doesn't quite fit with...
If you target the DNA, if it is a genetic explosion,
then how is it that you can use the DNA of the dead bodies in order to create your cybermasters?
So that all seemed very strange.
It felt to me like the destruction of the Time Lords was actually localized to Gallifrey.
And it looked to me like it was violent.
Yeah, to be blunt about it.
The domes were all crushed.
Well, he did say he destroyed Gallifrey as well.
So I guess it could have been Time Lords first, then going around doing a bit of kind of wanton vandalism. But it did feel like it was a bit more violent, and it did feel like it was a bit more manual or localized. And the death particle was explicitly localized because it had been shrunk by the tissue compression eliminator. It was only going to affect Gallifrey.
why would Durrani have been on Gallifrey? I mean, that in itself didn't particularly make any sense
either. So, hmm. Yeah, it doesn't. It like, don't, don't, don't dig. If you're going to dig deep in
2025, okay, in 1974 or five, or whenever the Deadly Assassin came out, when we didn't have
the internet, the thousands of books and videos to rewatch them and everything in a world where
they deleted episodes of Doctor Who after a few years anyway, just to reuse the tapes.
I can understand how the writers are going to go like, eh, whatever. And I'm just, I want to
tell this story. But in 2025, you cannot do this anymore. It's, you know, it's, yeah. I mean,
Equally, I'm not sure that you can expect anyone to write a story that's consistent
with 61 years of completely internally inconsistent continuity.
Sure, but decisions were made here, like deciding to use Omega, that just made problems and
didn't make anything make sense.
But that's, I guess, where I would level my criticisms at that sort of higher level of
Do these things, never mind the continuity, do these things work for the story itself?
And so if we take this question of the apparent sterility of the remaining Time Lords, I didn't
feel that that necessarily made any sense in story terms. Like, why did it matter that Time Lords
can't have children? Wasn't that part of the Chibnall master plan? That Time Lords were
sterile and were grown in vats or something i thought that was the cartinal cart not cartinal
what did i say i didn't say chibnall you said chibnall master plan i thought there was
did not have a master plan possibly a connection with the cartnet cartmel master plan i think
chibnall did i think i mean in some ways i'm coming to he had a plan but it's not a master
i've definitely started reevaluating cartmel much much more favorably and i think there are a lot of
parallels between what he did and what Chibnall did in the sense of they were trying to reintroduce
a backstory to the Doctor that had more open questions than because the show had kind of
filled in so much and closed it all down. I'm not sure that what they did was well advised,
but I think that's what they were doing. And the novel Lung Barrow goes into all of the stuff
about the looms, which actually, they have been based on the Cartmel master plan, but
kind of closes down all of those kind of mysterious questions anyway, so I'm not sure
what the point of that was. Whether or not we take the novels into continuity, the question here is,
what role does the sterility of the surviving Time Lords, of whom we are told in this episode,
despite Susan's apparent appearance and then non-appearance, is just the Doctor and the two
Rani's, we are
told that they are
sterile and therefore
even if there is more
than one Time Lord, there are
not going to be any more
Time Lords in the future.
What is the point of
that plot?
I don't know.
I think it is
connected with this whole
theme which he keeps coming around
to in this story
around this
the importance of Poppy as the doctor and Belinda's child because of the connection that they have
felt with her in this family unit that has been part of Wishworld and the sense in which those
kind of connections, and I kind of get where he was trying to go with this, but in the sense in
which those kind of connections don't have to be based on any kind of biological reality or
anything like this that the important thing is the strength of feeling and you know love at the end
of the day it's a bit like what was the name of the christmas special the doctor the wardrobe and
the something or other where moffat goes off on on you know and this is me like you know how much
I venerate Morfitt but this is in retrospect and at the time I was I was very annoyed by that
episode and I still think you know it wasn't strong what he was doing was he was going off
on one about kind of the sanctity of motherhood which just felt like nonsense to me the kind of
the diversity of the relationships between mothers and their children and and the the notion that
mothers should feel a certain way and that we should all feel the same way about our mothers
was frankly offensive. And this doesn't make a lot more sense. But more importantly, in story terms,
it doesn't come from anywhere. It doesn't feel like it's been built up to. It doesn't feel like
the doctor has enough emotional investment in this to essentially sacrifice his current
regeneration for it. More like this is an excuse for, you know, we need a reason for the Doctor
to regenerate. And we didn't feel any jeopardy in this episode.
Well, I don't know because it often feels to me like the Doctor regenerates for the wrong things.
But particularly here, if you go back to the question of why were Poppy and Belinda and the
doctor living as this family unit is supposed to come from this wish but where did that wish come
from is this is this supposed to be some deep expression of the doctor's internal desire was it
belinda's wish to have a child what we're told is it comes down to conrad's kindness but none of this
really motivates for me the sense that the doctor or even Belinda should have this deep attachment
to the reality well deep attachment to the fantasy I guess once the reality emerges and even even if
I bought in more to the kind of underlying idea of this story I don't I don't feel that was sold
sufficiently well.
And without that,
the sterility thing
makes no sense.
No.
So,
Errata,
the doctor,
the widow,
and the wardrobe.
Thank you.
What's the name?
In my bit
on the first episode
of The Wish World,
I did comment
that Conrad
doesn't make any sense
because this is not
what Conrad
was presented to be.
He said,
Alan,
from Robot Revolution,
was,
I went back
and looked through
every line of dialogue
in the lucky
lucky day and the closest he got to anything was he accused shirley of being i don't know a
diversity hire or something he was all about unit lying to the public to scare people to keep us in
line it was not about and then i need to make the world safe to get rid of all the gay people and i
need to get rid of all the handicapped people it wasn't about that it was it was that particular
thing there was nothing in that well i don't think you say that but i mean first of all the
Yes, it is.
Because it didn't have it there.
But secondly, these conspiracy theorists are absolutely wrapped up in this whole.
Not all conspiracy theorists are that way.
That's the problem.
There are left-wing conspiracy theorists too.
And the point is, if they were setting him up for this, they should have set him up for this.
They set Alan up for this.
They didn't set Conrad up for this.
Yeah, I disagree with that.
But then they kind of halfway undermine it because at the end of it, he's all like,
Yeah, I was doing what the doctor told me.
I was trying to give him a home and keep everybody fed and be all nice.
And Ruby brings up the point about, yeah, you never mentioned your father.
And it's like, so in that respect, he's actually, what he was trying to do is to give everyone
the home he wanted.
Now that home was mom, dad, child.
He didn't want anybody to be outside of that nuclear family ideal.
That was the thing that was driving this world.
It wasn't exactly anti-homosexual.
It wasn't anti-handicap people.
It was, I want a solid family unit for everybody.
And he was more sympathetic in this, which makes no sense either,
because he's still just a big scum bucket.
from the previous episode.
But it's like, okay, I'll
grant them that one.
You know, it's not the
exclusion of everybody that he's trying to
pull. It's the, this is
how I want everyone, how
I think everyone will be
happy. And
it's still wrong, but it's
at least that part
with his character.
That's the kind of part that does fit.
It's like, now I see it.
He had a terrible mom.
and no dad and we don't know why.
Yeah, and that felt to me like
what was the strength
of Wishworld in
my little recap
of it. But that wasn't
Wishworld. That was in this one.
Yes. None of that surfaced
until. But it was
what was underlying
the
it was that sense
of this kind of
fragile fantasy that is based on
a
a kind of psychological issue, for want of a better word, rather than any actual coherent
fundamental worldview. And that's why cups were falling through the table, because he didn't
He didn't manage to kind of create a fantasy that was based on any intellectually coherent concept.
Instead, it was a kind of an idea that he desired.
It's what he had hoped for himself and he thinks everyone else.
Yeah.
That he wanted to impose on everyone else and that he didn't want to think too hard about.
I mean, I think that, you know, again, that's kind of fundamentally it.
Again, you use the word impose.
yeah i think it's presented in this is that he's wanted to provide it there is a there's a in his
own mind right yes he is imposing it there's there's i'm not lying that but in his mind
he is providing it he is making wishes come true people he is he's he's doing the lord's work
or in this case the ronnie's work but he is anyway the problem the problem so is just i mean
to return to the Poppy question very, very briefly. The problem is that doesn't translate
into the wish on either the doctor or Belinda's part that the fantasy they've been living in with
Poppy is real. Nothing about Poppy makes sense. That has to come from somewhere else. And the
sterility thing, it feels like it's supposed to be motivating a sense that because the doctor
can't have children, that that is a loss for him because he wants to have children. And that's a
problem for the show, obviously, because there has been no indication at any point in the past
that he wants to have children. But...
Well, he never wanted to have children until after he couldn't, after the genetic explosion.
We haven't been told about now, so then we're having to process that change without it having been actually built up for ourselves.
I mean, I think for me, the other problem with that is that I can't remember exactly where, but I'm sure that in the Shuti Gatwa era, we have had some suggestion, well, maybe it was in the Maestro episode, some suggestion that although...
susan is his granddaughter susan's mother might not be born yet the doctor's offspring has not
been born yet and so the feeling that this was leading up to poppy being susan's mother especially
given that susan was expected by me to appear in this episode yeah that that that kind of felt like
well that would have been that would have been the reason for having all of these kind of
contorted plot points about why the doctor now wants to have a child or whatever i i i think
that line in the devil's the devil's court or whatever yeah i think that line was a smart ass
line right i think that's the doctor being playful he's not he's not really saying susan's mother or
father wasn't born.
It's like he's
just saying, hey, I'm a time traveler. These things
might happen. Literally
it might have happened on Gallifrey
in what is the future
from 1960 whatever
Earth. It's just
it's the future. Yeah. It's just
63. It was not
I really didn't feel I know I saw a lot of
people online that were like given the whole thing. Maybe
this is leading. I was like, no, I just think he was
being he was snarking.
But, you know,
And okay, we might as well, we're not done with Poppy. We're not done with Poppy. Why? Why Poppy? If she was not created into existence by a wish, which at the end of this, it seems like she wasn't. Why is it Poppy from Space Babies right down to the same name?
Why is it that Poppy shows up in the devil in the engine blaster or whatever it was?
And Belinda A doesn't recognize her and B calls her a spooky child.
Did you see the spooky child?
Like, it feels like suddenly the actress that that played actor who played Poppy became available, like when they were filming the last three episodes.
And RTD just goes, oh, pop her in.
Just like we're going to do Susan, pop her in.
It's like, and I don't, it just doesn't, it doesn't make any sense.
And then the only thing that I can argue in my mind that kind of, and I've mentioned it,
I know I've mentioned it, is that in all those episodes at the beginning of the season,
where every time they step into the TARDIS or they step out of the TARDIS,
it's like, I got to get back home.
I got to get back home.
I got to get back home right now.
I've got to be there by the 25th.
It's very important.
going to, you know, like she's got to do her shift tomorrow. Not anything to do with my child will
starve because her grandmother will toss her out into the garbage tip if I'm not home by 730,
as opposed to, I don't know, go to the neighbor's house and say, could you look after the baby? I
mean, that baby's not in any day. But then, of course, they retcon all those scenes and replay
them with her going, I got to get back to 730 to Poppy. It's like, okay, so this raises yet
another problem for me. One, the wish world breaks down and the universe is no longer right.
Teal is wrong. Norway and Sweden have moved. And Ernest Borgnine is still alive. And Poppy
doesn't exist anymore. And of course, who knows how many other people don't exist anymore
that the doctor is not going to care about.
And so he goes off and for no logical reason,
I mean, oh, you tried to save me
and you tried to save me
and he did all these things.
Yeah, fine, whatever.
Also, the doctor went through
all of Belinda's timeline
in that one episode to save her
from the temporal explosion.
And he should have noticed Poppy,
but guess not because she wasn't there.
She wasn't there.
She did not exist.
So he goes through and creates
a new reality that has Poppy in it.
I can only assume he killed Ernest Borgnine in the process.
And what kind of...
Maybe.
Do you know who Ernest...
How many other people did he wipe out of existence
because he created this new reality
that has Belinda and Poppy in it?
Who's to say which reality is the correct reality?
Who has that authority to...
to share. I mean, that's what villains do. I'm changing the world to fit the way I want it to
be. The doctor changed the world to be the way he wanted. And we don't know what else he did.
And by the way, I have a question for you. Do you even know who Ernest Borgnine is in the UK?
I have a question for you. Have you seen Bandea Blackrock?
Yes. It's a great film.
Is that a popular, or the Dirty Dozen, or Airwolf, or...
Oh, was he in the Dirty Dozen?
He was in The Dirty Dozen.
I haven't seen that.
He was in The Airwolf.
And he was in, oh gosh, he was in quite a lot of films that you would, he was in Escape
from New York, McHale, like I said, McHale's Navy.
I mean, that was a classic and, you know, an Airwolf.
But, and he was an Oscar, he was an Academy Award winner.
Best actor.
Yeah, he's certainly, he's certainly a name who.
For Marty.
I think people will recognize.
Okay, I didn't know. I heard that and I'm like, really?
I particularly love Bad Day at Black Rock. I think also, and I don't know without conducting his sound.
He'd be 108, by the way, if they brought him back to life.
Well, yeah, what was he? 95 when he died.
Died, yeah.
And I think that he's maybe a name where, I guess RTD may have tried this out on people in the office or something,
where I don't know how many people would remember whether he's alive or dead.
It's like people might know him but not know his age.
And I had no idea.
I had no idea.
So I spent a bit of time before I actually checked that he died 13 years ago,
thinking, is this actually more offensive if he's still alive or if he's dead?
And would it be more offensive if they had flipped the joke in the episode?
And I can't think of any way in which this is not in just awful, awful taste.
It is.
It is an awful taste.
I'm not.
I was a little.
I mean, they brought him when they said an Ernest Borgnitz back a line.
And I'm like, that's really random.
But also, I guess, yay.
But I mean, I knew he was ancient.
when he died and it's been a quite a few years.
And,
uh,
cause I definitely remember thinking,
you know,
he would have,
he could have done a,
a remake on airwolf or something,
but yeah.
And then they,
they,
I'm sure they must,
he's going to die again.
He's 108.
I,
yeah,
it's,
it's tasteless,
but if,
you know,
if he,
it honestly,
if he asked questions around the office as to whether or not people
recognized Ernest Borgnine,
then why wouldn't he ask around the office
whether anybody remembers what Omega was all about?
I just feel like maybe if you were doing
a little impromptu research
at the Doctor Who production office
that maybe somebody would know
what they were talking about there.
Apparently not.
Why?
I think it's supposed to be funny.
It's a series of random things.
Like the color teal is a slightly...
Different shade, yeah.
Yeah, well, it's a...
It's an esoteric color, isn't it?
You know, if you ask people to name colors,
how many colors would they go through before they reach teal?
I would get to teal before I'd get to cerulean blue,
and I'd get to cerulean blue pretty quick.
Okay, and the Australians would probably get to teal faster, but yeah.
Because of their water color around the barrier?
Well, I was going to say a political party,
but they have independent candidates who stand under the teal flag.
the environmentalist right-wingers the environmentalist right wing okay they're
strange bedfellows okay why is it that ruby is the one who remembers because a ruby is special
in the way that she's an rtd companion and b because she had this whole 76 yard thing
of experiencing an alternative reality.
I have no idea.
They did sort of say something about that in the first one.
So yeah, I guess that might have been.
But I think the fact that the doctor just basically says,
yeah, whatever, but evs, fucking ignores it.
Mystery we'll never figure out.
Yeah, whatever.
Yeah.
I am down to the terrible Whitaker cameo.
Ah, okay.
Yeah.
So I'm interested in why you think this was a terrible cameo, because I thought there
were two reasons why it was a terrible thing.
But I, yeah.
I mean, I'm starting with what was the point of having the Whitaker doctor show up?
It's not like the two of them needed to work together to get the job done.
I mean, yes, she said one thing that he goes, oh, yeah, but this is nowhere near as clever
as time crash with the two of them working it out.
In fact, it's kind of a very...
So that was just like...
No, I think...
I do think that this was actually to get the opportunity for Whitaker's doctor to basically say she loves Yaz.
Right.
That was the sole purpose of this was for RTD to correct the ambiguity that was left behind in the Chibnall era.
I think it could be.
I can't think of any other reason.
And maybe she works cheap.
You know, Tennant was busy or just was mowing the lawn that week or something.
He said, well, we can get the low rent version of David Tennant, the female version.
I don't think it was that.
And, you know, Time Crash, RTD has said he doesn't do multi-doctor stories.
And he didn't write Time Crash.
And he explicitly arranged things for the 60th anniversary so that you would get David
tenant in it without it being a multi-doctor story and said as much as time. And yet he lied
when he bi-generated them. He's, well, yeah, slightly, but for five minutes. This is a
multi-doctor thing without question, really. I think this makes it a multi-doctor story because
you've got two doctors interacting with each other in the way, in that kind of style that
they always do in multi-doctor stories. So the two things that I dislike about it,
bearing in mind that I'm much more partial to Whistaker and her doctor than you are,
so I was quite happy to see her, is that I think that RTD rewriting that conclusion for Yaz
isn't fair. That was Chibnall's story to write. Chibnall decided to end it the way he ended it.
We criticized it at the time, but that is the way it was. And even if RTD had felt that there
was something there that needed fixing, for God's sake, he picked up the doctor straight after that.
where was he? Where was he? Why didn't the doctor remember to do that much sooner?
So I think I said at the time, it just felt very strange that as soon as the doctor regenerates
after this kind of emotional parting scene with Yaz, there are no lingering consequences,
no further thoughts, not even a mention. And so the fact that RTD ignored it so completely at the
time and then decided to come back to it now irritated me immensely. The other thing that I
don't like about this is that this is, however much I haven't really enjoyed him as the Doctor,
this is Shooty Gatwa's final episode. This is the story in which he regenerates. He gets this
big extended regeneration, which seems to be, you know, par for the course now. And I can't blame
RTD for that because both of his successors did the same thing. But it's Shutey's show. It's the
episode in which he bows out. Why should he be sharing it with another doctor other than the
one he regenerates in being credited? That to me just seems odd and again, not really treating
people right. Okay, so I can understand why he might be there with David Tennant's doctor.
They are, they are, they're twins, they're twinsies. So I can sort of see it. But like I
alluded to in my thing about Wishworld, if you were going to have, if you were going to have
another doctor in the story, you put the other doctor in the story just before the cliffhanger
so that you get buzz going into the next episode.
Oh, David Tennant's back.
My kids might have watched.
There's no way in hell they were going to watch with Shooty Atwell.
But if David Tennant had been back, I bet that at least James would have watched the episode.
All right.
Let me put a third thing in there then, because there's a minor aspect that has been bothering me about it,
which is that multi-doctor stories will not create buzz if you keep doing them.
I've never particularly been a fan of multi-doctor stories, but James would have watched it this time,
okay. But then in a couple of years' time, when the ratings fall still further and they go,
oh, we better do another multi-doctor story, would he still have watched it then?
It felt like the day of the Doctor was special because, you know, it was this anniversary story
and they hadn't done that, well, forever in the 21st century, but they certainly hadn't done it
for a while. And it still felt actually like it was special in the power of the Doctor.
It had been almost 10 years. It was a sort of anniversary. And although it wasn't the day of
the doctor, it was actually pretty well done. But I just don't think you can keep doing it.
It's the law of diminishing returns. No, I don't. I don't think it had a it didn't have a purpose
here showing up just to say, hey, look, there's another doctor and to, you know, perv on themselves.
You're a good looking guy. It's like, OK, that's a little weird. All right. Yeah. I know. OK.
We briefly mentioned it, but we should at least see if there's anything anybody else wants to say about the fact that there was no Susan in this episode.
It's a bit like the shooty thing.
Me feeling that, well, on the one hand, it's an awfully short tenure.
How dare he take the role and then abandon it?
And then on the other hand, thinking, well, at least he's gone.
The Susan thing was like, this has been built up to.
Surely it should be delivered on.
Surely we are owed an appearance by Susan.
And on the other hand, thinking, yes, but it would have been a terrible disappointment in anticlimax.
So at least we were spared that.
Yeah.
Put it this way, it wasn't the William Russell appearance, which, you know, was just absolutely terrific.
And it was perfectly done.
Whereas this, well, there wasn't anything really.
I mean, I don't even understand what its purpose was, but yeah.
And I'm still not sure whether or not the appearance of Susan in Interstellar Song Contest,
that that was Susan, as opposed to just the Doctor's mind.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
But I mean, she's just having flashbacks.
And if this Doctor is the one that wants children, which, you know, of all the Doctors wanting
children, that's kind of funny.
This one didn't strike me as a breeder.
And it's just, yeah, I don't know.
It's pointless.
I'm going to throw, let's see, I've got two last things here.
I'm going to start with, wow, if we thought they were all going to clean up all the stuff
that going all the way back to the Star Beast, nope.
The boss is apparently in charge of the Time Hotel.
It's the master.
Thinking they were going to clear things up was one of the things that when Jodie Whittaker
appeared, I thought, wow, they really are going to wipe out everything that's happened
subsequent to Power of the Doctor. But yeah.
Oh yeah, they could have gone back to her regeneration.
I wondered whether she was going to come back as the Doctor. I thought, you know,
they're going to undo that regeneration and just have her back, although I thought that
was pretty unlikely.
Well, he could have had to save it. Instead, he would have had to burn his own
regeneration back to back to jody and so she could have regenerated into somebody different
undoing the whole timeline yeah no that's what that's what i thought that's where i thought it
was gonna go for a second but uh it still could because i'm not convinced anyway i'm just gonna
say let's raise on to that the boss has two hearts we think how do we know that the meep sort of says
because the meep said well yeah the meep says a line something like uh and dina not not
many double-hearted creatures out in the universe.
The boss will be interested to hear that.
Could mean many number of things,
but it also could mean the boss is one of them.
And then there's the line from Anita that says,
the boss says, say hello.
I suppose it might have been the Ronnie too,
but it's the master.
It's the master.
It's our out.
Now both the master and the Ronnie are running around the universe
because the master's tooth,
Or the gold tooth was rescued in the giggle by somebody.
So the toy maker didn't call the master the boss, though.
No, no, he did not.
But I really, I hated the way they dealt with that, where she says, oh, the boss.
And the doctor says something to the effect of, oh, let's set that aside for later.
It's like that was that did get another F-U-R-T-D out of me.
It really did.
I mean, and I was doing so well and I was much madder watching reality war, but these are things, there are definitely things in, in here. And I have no idea what he was thinking about when he wrote the original reference in the star beast, but bringing it back here is one of the things in this episode that is clearly a, I'm, I'm laying the seeds for give us a recommission.
BBC. I don't think that the way to lay the seeds for giving us a recommissioned BBC is Billy Piper.
Just before we get to Billy Piper, because you've mentioned Anita and I want to just touch on the
Time Hotel, I've still got quite a few other things to get through. I just wanted to say
bringing her back really annoyed me as well. It's like, I love Joy to the World. It was the best
episode since well certainly in the shooty run pretty much since rtd came back i think
and this feels like it's tainted it don't spoil the good stuff
yeah the other thing it kind of got me on that one was you know they have that whole backstory
about how she was searching through time and looking at all the past doctors to try to find
shoot his doctor and when she finds him he's he's doing his dance with rogue and suddenly she goes
wait he's gay it's like you spent a year with him you didn't notice how there was something there
was something about the way in which i don't i mean i don't i'm in danger of getting back into
re-reviewing the joy to the world but just moffat's lightness of touch in the way that he used that
montage in order to just present a relationship there through little vignettes and leave you to
join the dots and not explicitly say what she did or didn't know or how that made her feel
was part of the appeal of the episode. And there's no subtlety to the way in which the story is told
here and the way no none he he kind of decides that that nice open-ended finish to to joy to
the world had to somehow be spoiled yeah it's fixed but spoiled in my book yeah and literally
fixed like we're going to take something that is open and we're going to pin it down yeah i don't
disagree i don't disagree so on to billy piper i just want to say billy piper i just want to say
in in my discussion with ben i will say that we both very much honed in on the fact that the
wording was odd on the end credits odd it's suggestive i think it's explicit she is not the
doctor she's not the doctor i i mean okay let me first of all get let me first of all get my
like Billy Piper as the doctor thing out of the way which is this okay I think Billy Piper
would do a good job as the doctor I think I would have difficulty accepting Billy Piper as the
doctor because of how memorable she was as Rose because that character is so stuck in my mind
but even then I kind of think yeah she's a phenomenal actor she could do a really interesting
job in the role. That's number one. Number two is RTD going back to rely on the things that he
did. It's a bit like, I mean, I know he worked with Christopher Eccleston before he cast him
in Doctor Who, but he'd also worked with David Tennant before. And so he was going back to
an actor he'd worked with before. If, as I suspect, there have been problems with Shooty Gatwa,
that he's going back to an actor who he's used before.
I'm not sure I see that as a good thing.
And I see that as indicative of why the show needs someone else guiding it along,
who has new ideas and who has, frankly, a different Rolodex.
This was the thing that Chibnall was doing well,
because he was bringing in different writers as well as different actors.
And to give the show a different kind of sense and feel,
You need fresh blood.
So coming back is not great.
It did feel creatively bankrupt.
It's like, wow, you couldn't think of anybody else.
However, there is just this one possibility that I'm going to throw out there.
Because of the bi-generation nonsense, David Tennant's doctor is still out there.
So if Billy Piper were also the doctor, you could have a two doctors episode where they do what RTD says all stories are about sex.
Now it's now it's equals.
This is get the two of them together.
And there you go.
This could be shooty shooty's doctor transforming into Rose, just like Capaldi's put the pick the face to remind him.
It's transformed into Rose because he knows he's got some unfinished business with the 14th Doctor.
The Doctor can regenerate into Rose's face.
No problem.
This is established in, I can't remember the episode, but Romana decided that she was going to have Princess Astra's face.
If she can do that, the Doctor can have Rose's face.
That's not a problem.
The show can do anything it likes.
The idea that you have just put into my head, I'm going to have even more difficulty forgetting than I am this whole two-parter.
I think that the obvious suggestion of what's going on here, or the interpretation most people seem to be taking on this, is that Billy Piper is not the doctor.
And I kind of think that, yes, that's correct.
But also, the show hasn't been recommissioned.
Does RTD know what he's doing?
Does he have an idea of what the story is going to be with the Doctor having regenerated into some sort of Rose or Bad Wolf or even the moment?
Probably not the moment, probably Bad Wolf.
And I think the answer to that is, I'm not sure he does.
I'm not sure he
I don't think he writes anything with an idea
well I'm not sure he
what he's aiming to do partly
is get people talking about it
and it's been in all the papers over here
and it has definitely worked on that score
but I also think
that he has ended up with a problem
that really
no one else has had since the show has come back
which is that he can't
cast a new doctor
and so
what do I do about that? Twice, because that's what he did with David Tennant, basically.
No, he'd already cast Judy Gatwa before. He could easily, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So he could
easily have put Gatwa into the Power of the Doctor scene. Most of us, I think, were expecting
50-50 on whether it would be Gatwa or Tennant. I think the difference here is, as far as I'm
aware, we haven't had an occasion since before 2005 when an episode of Doctor Who has aired
without the subsequent one having been made or at least commissioned. They can't cast a new Doctor.
They can't cast a new Doctor for a TV show that hasn't been commissioned. So he needs to do
something at the end that leaves it open. He's got to write Gatwa out because he can't guarantee
he's going to get him back. Otherwise, you get into a time in the Rani situation with someone
having to black up, which you can imagine would be even more controversial than putting Sylvester
McCoy in a blonde wig. So what he's done is he's gone, well, we'll stick Billy Piper in there.
That will get everyone talking. Whoever writes it, there's no real danger that she won't come
back and do whatever episode is next. But they can do, whoever writes this, whether it's him
or someone else can do something
that then transitions you
into the new Doctor who by then
they will have cast.
I mean, as
I haven't seen the British
press per se,
but in the end credits
if anybody had
slipped their throats and hadn't finished watching
didn't get through to the end credits or whatever
you had to do, you know, it says
Shooty Gat was the Doctor,
Jodie Whittaker is the Doctor, and introducing
Billy Piper, whereas in
Other instances, it said, and introducing so-and-so as the doctor.
Introducing David Tennant as the doctor.
As the doctor, yeah.
At Power of the Doctor.
I think maybe in the Matt Smith as well.
But the BBC did issue a press release.
Yeah, but I think the issue of Power of the Doctor, because David Tennant wasn't being introduced.
He'd been in the show before, very much as Billy Piper isn't being introduced.
He's been in the show before.
Right.
The BBC issued a press release saying, you know, should he get what we're regenerated into Billy Piper?
And interviewing Billy Piper and, oh, it's so great.
I'm always, you know, happy to come back and do stuff and that thing.
And then not only do they avoid saying Billy Piper is the doctor,
but they go multiple times on the whole, yeah, what it means?
Can't say at this point.
What does it mean?
I don't know.
Like that, that feels like, you know, they're clearly trying to not only get you interested in Billy Piper coming in, but at the same time, they're also trying to telegraph Billy Piper isn't going to be the doctor.
I think, I think, yes.
I mean, I think that I can't find it at the moment, but there's the statement from Russell T. Davis that says something like, who is she or what is this about?
But you don't even need to wait for the release.
We don't even need to wait for the end credits because the regeneration doesn't finish before they roll.
So there is even the scope for the Doctor to kind of go through multiple phases.
You know, you could grab a few other ex-companions and go through multiple other phases and then regenerate to the next Doctor if you didn't have Piper back for the next story.
He's set it up as a placeholder.
that's fundamentally what it is because there is no way that they can cast a new doctor
and gatua has gone yeah so that's a sour a sour ending on a sour episode i really hated this
i really hated it all of it i can't think of anything i liked in the whole episode
bring the Ronnie back to have the Ronnie
eaten. Interesting.
I mean, yes, there's another Ronnie.
Half the Ronnie, yeah. So, I've got
a list of things that
didn't get fixed in this episode. We've
mentioned, Susan,
you've claimed that Mavity has been
fixed. The boss is... No, no, I'm just
hoping. I'm hoping Mavity's been
fixed. I wish someone had
said the word gravity when they
were talking about the
Ernest Borgnine and stuff.
And the Earth's gravity is at now 0.99974 or something.
It feels like that was intended to be the fix,
but it just seems strange after they said Mavity 90 million times
in the Interstellar Stone contest.
Yeah.
But they didn't actually finish that.
So I was expecting that, the boss, but also by generation.
And it feels weird to me.
Obviously, the Rani being eaten is one thing where you suspect
they're actually going to use by generation and that Anita Dobson will be back as the Rani.
Although, frankly, I thought Archie Panjabi was, I thought she was really good as the Rani. I
thought, I mean, I agree that the way the Rani was written didn't necessarily reflect the character,
but her performance felt like a natural successor to Kate O'Mara's performance. Incidentally,
the clip of Kate O'Mara that was used was taken from dimensions in time that I yeah I've heard
people I thought they couldn't use that I wish they couldn't use that maybe that's just a reason
why they can't put it on DVD because it was a charity thing so they can't use it commercially
but I wonder if that's going to cause any kind of problems when this gets released on DVD I guess
maybe it counts as a clip just as it would be if it was you know a dvd documentary where there was
a clip of the dimensions in time as a you know just as an illustration of a point of doctor who
history i don't know they'll give one p to charity for every dvd and blu-ray sold well yeah but then
if they could do that they could have released it on dvd before i think the problem is that there
is actually maybe it's not a problem because they're only using the clip of kate amara whereas
so they could settle that with her estate.
Whereas the problem with releasing it for charity
is probably they would have to renegotiate
the agreements of every actor who was in it
and they put every actor they could get from Doctor Who
as well as every actor they could get from EastEnders.
And that would be prohibitively expensive
just in legal fees.
Why? Why did they use it from that?
I have no idea.
That is one thing I have seen online.
I have seen a couple of things online,
particularly after Wishworth,
they're impossible to avoid.
And,
you know,
I've seen a lot of the F bomb and I've seen a couple of reality war,
nine out of 10,
nine out of 10.
What?
It's like,
what,
what?
It's like,
get E to a therapist quickly.
But one of the things I've seen is people going,
yes,
dimensions in time is now Canon.
And I did not spot that,
but why,
why would they,
That would be a good thing.
From Dimensions in Come.
Was it like better video?
Were they using HD when they made Dimensions in Time?
I don't think so.
You know, I could see why they might want better video quality, but otherwise.
Well, they shot it in 3D, so I don't know if that had anything to do with it.
It would be on film.
They didn't actually.
I mean, they shot it in 3D with ordinary cameras.
It's just about the way they moved them.
But Dimensions in Time is possibly, I'm not sure if we have time in this to go into that as well.
I think my point about Durani was that I wonder if they're going to bring Anita Dobson back
rather than bringing Archie Panjabi back.
And that therefore her bi-generation fork is actually a dead end.
And bi-generation is what will allow the character to continue.
I have no idea.
Could be.
Anyway.
The question is, can Anita Dobson now regenerate?
Or did she lose that at all?
The other question is, why did the Doctor not bi-generate?
Why did the Doctor regenerate into ostensibly Billy Piper?
Because we fixed the world.
Yeah, well, it could be.
It could be.
I don't know.
Yeah.
Or if he had bi-generated and channeled his bi-generational energy into Jodie Whittaker,
which is how Jodie Whittaker produced David Tennant, who could then bi-generate.
It could be like this snake eating its own head thing.
There's so much they could have done with this silly, terrible setup to make it even
sillier and more terrible, but anything else?
You know what?
I'm exhausted.
I've got some nitpicks, but to be honest, I'm not sure this episode deserves any further
analysis.
I think I'm done.
This episode has gotten an awful lot of analysis from this.
For me, this is three hours worth of podcasting.
Two here, one with Ben.
for something I hated that much.
I just don't get it.
Yeah, I think we're done.
And I think, you know,
I don't think we're going to have to worry
about 2026 as a year
where we're going to have to do Doctor Who.
So we'll be going back.
Simon and I will be going back
to our regular stuff
where we're going to be picking up with bugs
if we haven't already put out one.
I don't think we did.
So I don't think we did, but I would sweat.
Season four of Bugs, here it comes.
So something to be a lot more cheerful and better than what we've just lived through.
Simon, thank you for joining me.
It's a pleasure as always.
And listeners, I do hope you'll join us all again next time on Fusion Patrol.
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