15 – New Series Two: Ncuti Gatwa

Joy To The World – 2024 Christmas Special

This has an interesting premise. There is a Time Hotel a few thousand years into the future (4202) where each door leads into a different point in Earth history. One of those points in history is a hotel room in London in 2024, at Christmas, and a lady named Joy checks in to the hotel and gets this room. Meanwhile, The Doctor lands his TARDIS in the lobby of the Time Hotel, and notices a Man checking in who is dressed in a suit and has a briefcase chained to his wrist. This seems suspicious, so The Doctor decides to investigate. He goes from room to room looking for clues, I suppose, though it isn’t clear that he is doing anything at all useful, but the rooms he visits prove useful later in the plot.

Meanwhile, the briefcase seems to have a mind of its own, and arranges to be transferred from one person to another, and each time says it “upgrading access”. But the problem is that the previous custodian of the briefcase always dies after this transfer. And as soon as a new custodian takes over they say “The star seed shall bloom, and the flesh will rise.” Eventually the Briefcase, The Doctor, and Joy all meet in the hotel room that Joy rented, and Joy ends up attached to the suitcase. The Doctor attempts to separate her from the suitcase, when a countdown starts, and a future version of The Doctor burst into the room to give them code to stop the countdown. It urns out that all of this was set in motion by Villengard, the evil arms merchant that has appeared in several prior stories, and they plan to use the contents of the briefcase, a Star Seed, to start a star. The problem is if it starts on Earth everyone burns up in the star. But this is a Christmas Story, after all, so what happens is that the star they create becomes the Star of Bethlehem.

This is not Moffat’s best story, but it has its elements of charm, even if the ending is a bit over the top. But it is really the germ of two stories, either of which could be developed in interesting ways. Ask yourself if it revolves around Joy, or Anita. I’d have liked more Anita, in fact.

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The Robot Revolution

The whole purpose of this episode is to introduce a new companion played by Varada Sethu. She is Belinda Chandra, a nurse, but we’ve seen her before in the Series 1 episode Boom where she played the Episcopalian soldier Mundy Flynn. And this is explicitly brought out in this story as Flynn is a 51st century descendant of Chandra, and that is a mystery that the Doctor has to uncover. In this story, we see a setup where a teenage Chandra receives a gift from her nerdy, but controlling boyfriend Alan. It is a star named for her, called Missbelindachandra. He proposes to her, but she rebuffs him. 17 years later a spaceship lands, and robots kidnap her with the purpose of making her their queen on a planet in the same star system as Missbelindachandra. The Doctor is just a minute too late, and we again see Mrs. Flood, who is of course Belinda’s neighbor, and Mrs. Flood again breaks the fourth wall by talking to us directly.

On the planet, She is told that not only is she their queen, but she is to marry the AI that controls the robots, and she has no say in this. The Doctor pops up again as the Historian on this planet, and part of a rebel gang. There is another mystery here, which is that the robots and the humans collaborated peacefully until 10 years ago when this AI showed up. Now the human rebels are being hunted by the robots. And Belinda Chandra realizes that she is the key and surrenders to the robots if they will stop hunting the humans, and she will go peacefully to be “married’/joined to the AI. But in so doing, she defeats it. And we learn that it isn’t AI at, it is “Al”, i.e., her teenage boyfriend Alan, getting his revenge for her spurning his proposal years ago.

The cliffhanger end comes when something is preventing the TARDIS from returning to the time that Belinda originally left, and that leaves something to be worked out later. But we see something in space tht6a looks like the things of Earth floating in space. Just what happened here?

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Lux

At the end of the previous episode, The Robot Revolution, the TARDIS was unable to land on Earth on May 24, 2025. Within the story, this is is when Belinda Chandra was abducted, and she just wants to get back to her life like nothing happened. But the date is also significant because it is the date that the final two-part story of the season (Wish World) is set to debut. Just what this means I don’t know yet, but I’m pointing it out. In any case, they are finally able to land on Earth, but it is in Miami in 1952. And this poses problems since Florida in 1952 is a segregated state, and both the Doctor and Belinda would qualify as black. I’m glad the show is straightforward about this. And they find a locked cinema, and 15 people disappeared some months ago from this cinema. Police could never figure it out.

It turns out that another one of the Gods is involved, and we get two early clues. First, the cinema sign drops some letters to reveal “The Harbinger”. Then, when they meet Mr. Ring-a-Ding, a cartoon character, his laugh is the same as The Giggle. Along the way, the Doctor and Belinda are turned into cartoon characters themselves, then they burst through a TV screen from the inside and find themselves with a group of very nerdy Doctor Who fans, thus breaking the fourth (?) wall, or at least some wall. And at the end Mrs. Flood comes by just to point out to people that the TARDIS is disappearing.

This is a fun story. It isn’t Blink (see inside for more), but it is definitely worth your time to sit down and watch.

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The Well

The Doctor and Belinda land on a spaceship 400,000 years in the future, and are dropped with military squad that is investigating why a mining outpost suddenly stopped communicating. And when they get there, they find everybody dead, half from being shot, and half with all their bones broken. Everybody, that is, except for a deaf woman who is a cook. The Doctor eventually figures out that this planet is the one that used to be called Midnight, visited by David Tennant’s Doctor in the episode of the same name. And about half of this squad gets killed before the Doctor figures out possible solution. He noted that all the mirrors were smashed, and concludes that the creature hates mirrors, so has two shots placed in a pipe containing mercury, which pours out and creates a mirror, freeing the deaf woman. Everyone runs for it, but the creature somehow gets in the airlock with them, causing the leader of the squad to sacrifice herself to kill the creature so the others can escape. But did it work? In the end, we are not sure.

Mrs. Flood appears again, this time as the leader of the military forces, and she is very happy to learn that the Doctor was using a Vindicator. So Mrs. Flood can travel in time both backwards and forwards, and we don’t know how or why. And no one they meet has ever heard of Earth or of the human race. That ending to The Robot Revolution added to this makes us think that the Earth has been destroyed, and the reason they cannot get back to May 24, 2025 is that the Earth doesn’t exist at that time.

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Lucky Day

Ruby gets a boyfriend, but not really. He is just a scumbag using her to set up to set up a “gotcha” video attacking UNIT. It seems he is one of those social media “influencers” that brings in big bucks by promoting conspiracy theories, one of which is that UNIT is a complete fraud that is taking lots of taxpayer money and pretending to protect us from fake threats that they “create” using special effects. He then invades UNIT headquarters with the inside help of a UNIT employee who has fallen for right-wing conspiracy theories himself. Kate Stewart finally decides to let a dangerous alien loose to get the idiot, though he does survive in the end. But the experience has not changed him. The Doctor, who has been absent aside from a brief appearance in the setup to the story (this is another Doctor-light story) brings this guy into the TARDIS at the very end, but he is still defiant. He does ask the Doctor if he has met Belinda Chandra yet, though, so this explains the reference in The Robot Revolution where the Doctor says that some man had given him Belinda’s name to look up. And Conrad, the asshole, knows this because he met the Doctor and Belinda in 2007 as a boy. When you have time travel causality can get really messed up. In the final scene Conrad is sitting in his cell when Mrs. Flood arrives, claiming to be the Warden, and she jangles the keys and tells him it is his lucky day.

This whole story is an emotional roller-coaster for Ruby. It is clear that she has had trouble getting on with her life after the TARDIS, and suffers from some PTSD. She thinks she has finally found love with Conrad, but he was only using her and lying to her. Now she thinks she needs to away to some other place where no one knows her. Of course, that would mean leaving the family who love her. We will see where this might lead.

Finally, this whole episode is about social media “influencers” who grift off of conspiracy theories, as RTD has said explicitly. Fair enough, it is a topic worth exploring. But the idea that suddenly the followers of Conrad would change their minds, which is at least hinted at, flies in the face of everything we know about human behavior. People who believe nonsense like conspiracy theories do not change their minds when given the truth; they just dig in and resist the change and become even more firmly devoted to their cult, as the followers of Donald Trump have proven over and over.

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The Story & the Engine

The Doctor decides to get a haircut, and goes to a barbershop in Lagos, Nigeria to get it. He has been there before and is friends with the owner. And it feels like home to him because everyone there is also black. This is an interesting point, because this is the first incarnation of the Doctor to be black, or is it? Technically it is the first incarnation to be a black man, but in a scene with Abby, the Doctor switches from Ncuti Gatwa to Jo Martin, the Fugitive Doctor. This is the second show this season to address the Doctor’s skin color, but in Lux it just seemed like a fact that the Doctor has to take into account in the racist South, whereas in this story he is emotionally affected by it.

The other theme of this story is the power of stories, and in this case power is very literal. The stories people in the barbershop tell give actual power to the Nexus, a machine that runs on story power. The people in the barbershop are are being kept there to harvest the power from their stories, but the person doing it, who is simply called The Barber, claims at first to be a number Gods, such as Anansi, Loki, and Bastet, but the Doctor tells him he is a liar because of course the Doctor has met all of those gods. He has gotten drunk with Dionysus, for instance. It finally comes out that the Gods have rejected The Barber, and his plan of revenge is to kill them by killing their stories. But this would kill all of humanity for humans cannot live without stories.

Mrs. Flood has a brief cameo appearance that does nothing to advance the plot, so it is looking like RTD is repeating himself by putting Mrs. Flood in every story this season, just as he did with Susan Twist in the previous season. This makes me wonder if by the end she will just be a rug pull character that has been built up all season (and much of last season) only to be a damp squib at the end.

Overall, I liked this. I thought it was refreshing to have a story set in Africa, and written by an African writer.

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The Interstellar Song Contest

This take off on The Eurovision Song Contest has the TARDIS land in Harmony Hall, where the Interstellar Song Contest is being held. And for some reason Mrs. Flood is there, though how she knew ahead of time where the TARDIS would go is never explained. And I think Harmony Hall is named for the Harmony Shoal Corporation, which was featured as the villains in The Return of Doctor Mysterio. And the unnamed Corporation (which I think is Harmony) is the sponsor of the show, and is also the villains behind the rape and plunder of the planet Hellia, in a metaphor for colonialism. So a couple of Hellians manage a Terrorist takeover of Harmony Hall, and then plan to use a Delta Ray (See The Parting of Ways from Season One in 2005 for a previous appearance) to kill 3 trillion people tuning in to the show. This pushes the Doctor over the edge in a Time Lord Victorious kind of way, but he is stopped from torturing one of the terrorists by first, a vision of his granddaughter Susan, appearing the in a pure white TARDIS, like a nod back to the First Doctor. She is played by Carole Ann Ford, now 62 years older. And then Belinda comes in a finally stops the Doctor for good. This is a disturbing element, since to my mind it is the first time that the Doctor has ever been deliberately cruel. Mrs. Flood is the last person rescued, and she bi-generates, revealing that she is not only a Time Lady, but in fact The Rani. And now two of them, though Mrs. Flood is very subservient to the new Rani

A hologram of Graham Norton, preserved from the wreckage of Earth, explains that the planet suddenly disintegrated on May 24, 2025, which is the date that the next episode will air. And the Rani has collected readings from the Doctor’s Vindicator device, though we don’t know why. But she is threatening to make his life hell, so stay tuned for Wish World.

So as you can see there is a bit of fan service in this episode. I’m not sure that serves any good purpose, really. The Story & The Engine was a fantastic episode of all original material and no fan service at all. This story advanced the plot of the season arc, but take away the fan service and you have an average episode, in my view, except for that cruelty. With that taken into account, this is a bad episode. And that is really too bad because the rest of this season has been pretty good to great.

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Wish World

The Doctor and Belinda wake up in bed as a married couple, and they have daughter Poppy, who is the same Captain Poppy from Space Babies, and who also made a brief appearance in The Story & The Engine. The Doctor is under the impression that he is John Smith (the Doctor always goes by John Smith when he needs a normal name, something that began in The Wheel In Space), and that he works at UNIT, which is an insurance conglomerate. So this world is just a mixed up version of reality. Ruby shows up and tries to convince John Smith that he is the Doctor, and that he doesn’t have a daughter. But gradually doubts start to creep in. We discover that the Rani is behind this, and has taken Conrad as an accomplice. And this is all possible because of a baby the Rani kidnapped, who is part of the Pantheon and is the God of Wishes. And Conrad has been wishing this world into existence. Brief cameos of Susan, Mel and Rogue occur in here. Then in the end we see that the reason the Rani is doing all of this is to rip apart the fabric of reality so that Omega can live again.

Obviously there are cross-ties to various stories, but I have to wonder what the point is. The Rani was the focus of two eminently forgettable stories in the 1980s (The Mark of the Rani and Time and the Rani), and Omega appears twice in the original Doctor Who (The Three Doctors and Arc of Infinity). But bringing them back along with Susan, the Doctor’s granddaughter, is an odd choice if you are trying to bring in new viewers, since they wouldn’t have any of the backstory for these characters. It just might be time for RTD to step away from the show.

In any case, this episode does not resolve anything because it is a setup for the finale next week. So you can’t decide on its own if it is any good. But if this story seems like they took Lie of the Land, filed off the serial number, and presented it as a new story, I couldn’t argue against you.

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The Reality War

As the Doctor is hurtling to his death, he is rescued by Anita (from Joy To The World), who opens a door into the Time Hotel and pulls him in. She explains that the time hotel has doors into any place, and that she has the key to do it, so the Doctor first goes back to his home in Wish World to change out of his suit and into the kilt, then to UNIT. Anita keeps the door open in UNIT, and that allows reality to start returning, and soon UNIT is back to being UNIT, and not the Insurance company. And the reason that Poppy being his daughter is significant is that all of the Time Lords were sterile as a result of the Time War (?). And the Rani’s plan is to bring back Omega as a gene bank for rebuilding the Time Lords. But when she does bring him back he is a monster and proceeds to literally eat her. Mrs. Flood then takes the Time Ring and skedaddles, leaving the Doctor to push Omega back to his hell, which he does using the Vindicator.

Ruby goes in to confront Conrad, and manages to steal the baby Desiderium, and uses it to make a wish that Conrad would be happy, which causes him to disappear. She returns with the infant, and the Doctor makes wish that all of the wishes would be ended, but only after first putting Belinda and Poppy in a Zero Room outside of Space and Time, since Poppy was the result of one of Conrad’s wishes. But then Poppy disappears, and no one remembers her except Ruby. But she finally convinces the Doctor that someone got left out when he reset the world. He decides to use regeneration energy to reset the world one more time, which does bring back Poppy, but also starts the Doctor on his regeneration, in which he appears to become Billie Piper, who was last seen in The Day of the Doctor, after many appearances as Rose Tyler. I assume that means Billie Piper will be Doctor #16, but with RTD who knows.

First, there are lots of call backs in this. We mentioned Anita, but during his regeneration the Doctor visits Joy, who is now a star. The history between Mel and the Rani is brought up, and all of that is from the original series. Omega is all from the original series as well. And of course Billie Piper is brought back, and Jodie Whittaker appears as the 13th Doctor just before the Doctor attempts the Time Shift. She warns him that he is causing a rift in time, which can’t be good. And it is interesting that in the two-part finale Ruby Sunday is much more prominent than Belinda Chandra. I think RTD is spending too much time looking backwards.

Finally, as Anita is leaving she gives the Doctor as message from “The Boss”, so that is one mystery still hanging out there. The Boss was definitely not Omega or the Rani, or any of the Gods we have seen in the Pantheon.

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Season 2 Overall

First, it really sucks that Ncuti only got 2 seasons, but it seems clear that with his career taking off he couldn’t afford to just sit and wait for Disney and the BBC to figure out when and how another season would be done. And he has been great. And it is possible that the final episode, The Reality War, may have gotten some awkward rewrites that made it more confusing just because Ncuti decided to leave. It seems pretty clear that the original episode they shot was different, and that they hastily did some “additional filming” in 2025. Even so, The Reality War, while it had problems, was much better than The Empire of Death from Ncuti’s first season. And I think Season 2 was overall better than Season 1. Both had some outstanding episodes, but I think Lux and The Story & the Engine, in particular, are the best Ncuti episodes of all, and once again Millie really shone in her story Lucky Day.

There were some big problems as well. The cruelty Ncuti displays in The Interstellar Song Contest is never addressed. Perhaps it would have been addressed in a third season, but so far there is no evidence that anyone on the Doctor Who team thinks there was anything wrong about it. And Belinda started off strong in the first few episodes, but it seems like by the end they just lost interest in her. In hindsight, they might have done better to just keep Millie for both seasons, but in any case it was a terrible waste of someone who appeared to be a good actress, and I am left wondering just what they though they were doing.

The biggest problem, though, is RTD’s obsessive focus on the past. The Well would have been a better story if it was not tied to Midnight. They brought back Susan for a very brief cameo, and then dropped her. Why? We may never know. Omega was dragged in for apparently being a figure from the past no one had seen lately, and then was presented in a way that made it seem that RTD had never actually watched The Three Doctors. Then there is the Rani, who apparently was brought in because a lot of fans kept looking for her, but in this appearance seems completely different from her previous appearances. And what is even stranger is that we kept hearing that RTD’s brief was to bring in a new audience to Doctor Who, and how do you do that when you keep bringing in characters and situations that only long-time fans have any knowledge of?

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Ncuti Gatwa

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