Doctor Who (2023) 1-03: Boom (Quick Review)

Episode:

878

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Serial:

307

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Writer:

Steven Moffat

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Director:

Julie Anne Robinson

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Air Date:

18-May-2024

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm sharing my thoughts on Doctor Who episode Boom.

Boom is one of just two episodes this season that wasn't written by current showrunner Russell T Davies. In fact, this is the Steven Moffat story! That doesn't meant that it's going to be good, I've done plenty of bitching about the episodes produced during his time as showrunner, but the potential for greatness is high. Moffat's episodes dominate Doctor Who 'all time top 10' lists. According to IMDb voters, he wrote the highest rated episode in series 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10, and he came second for series 5. Second, third, fourth and fifth. And sixth.

Personally, I'm interested in seeing how much this episode has in common with the other Ncuti Gatwa episodes so far. Is it going to embrace the new fourth-wall breaking fantasy tone or is it going to be a throwback to the slightly more mature and realistic style of the 2005 run?

There will be SPOILERS below.

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RECAP

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3000 years in the future, on a distant alien battlefield, the Doctor steps on a landmine and his day gets worse from there. He got into this situation running towards the screams of a marine, Vater, executed by an ambulance robot for being temporarily blind and the man's daughter soon turns up looking for her dad. Then another marine, Mundy, arrives and strongly insists that the Doctor drops Vater's remains. He can't though, as he's using them to put the correct weight onto the landmine. The thing is very temperamental and will detonate if the Doctor so much as loses his cool. Fortunately, he's able to make Mundy understand that if he blows he's taking out half of this planet, so she stops shooting him in the arm.

The ambulance comes by and doesn't much like the Doctor's Time Lord physiology, so Mundy and Sunday try to distract it with a self-inflicted injury... leading to Ruby getting gunned down by Mundy's friend Canto! But then Canto's killed by the ambulance too, right after admitting he loves her.

Turns out that the whole war has been faked to sell weapons, with soldiers motivated by religious belief and the ambulances ensuring that they suffer acceptable losses. The Doctor appeals to Vater's AI simulation, telling him to help his daughter, so he hacks the system and saves the day.


REVIEW

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Boom must have been a bit of a shock for new fans who've only seen goblins, snot monsters and music demons so far. Personally though, the biggest WTF moment for me was when I noticed that the letters of Millie Gibson's name move out of the way to let the TARDIS through.

This has been part of the new title sequence since back when it was Catherine Tate's name in the credits and it's taken me this long to realise. That shows how observant I am.

Though you'd have to have a blindfold on to miss that this episode has a few messages it's trying to get across. Some stories try to use allegory to sneak a moral past its audience, this straight up says 'religion can be used as a tool to manipulate people with blind faith to fight in pointless wars for the benefit of the military-industrial complex'. It literally starts with a blind man stumbling around the battlefield before being killed by the algorithm for the sake of efficiency.

Then he got resurrected as an AI ghost, because it's a Steven Moffat story and that's what he does. He even repeats the same thing over and over, just like Steven Moffat!

Though it's the episode's monster, the AI ambulance, that has the creepiest recurring phrase:

"Thoughts and prayers".

Steven Moffat's not the first person to take issue with this hollow statement, but the 'prayers' part takes an extra cynical edge coming from the corporation using religion to manipulate people. Coming from medical bots programmed to murder the injured for the sake of acceptable losses.

The Villengard Corporation was mentioned in Moffat's first episode and we saw its ruins in his last, but this is the first time that it's shown up as an actual villain and it's a really nasty one. Okay, it's basically just the same as the corporation in Oxygen that tried to kill off its employees, but I guess that's the point. Unrestrained capitalism is the monster.

Changing the subject entirely, Doctor Who really spent some Disney money on this military base set. Okay, it's not really anything that special, except for the fact that it's barely in the episode. They could've skipped these scenes entirely and saved a bit of cash.

The majority of the episode takes place in a place that looks like a quarry, with the characters barely moving. In fact, this might be the most constrained episode of Doctor Who since... I dunno, Midnight.

Its gimmick is that the Doctor can't run around saving the day, because he's stuck on a bomb. It's a very stylish landmine, designed to look good in a showroom, so we get a progress bar on the side showing how close it is to detonating. There's something very unnerving about the fact that it only fills up, never goes down. And something pointless about it too, seeing as once it's started filling up it's going to detonate on a timer anyway.

The Doctor can't even use his sonic screwdriver... I think. I don't actually remember it being mentioned. Personally if I'd written the episode, he would've pulled out the screwdriver, hacked the landmine, and then the rest of the episode would've been about him and Ruby going off for ice cream. But Bad Wolf still haven't offered me the job, so we're all stuck with 40 minutes of extreme tension and drama I guess.

The episode's so tense that the Doctor's first challenge is to find a way to put his other foot down and Ruby is risking her life to help him do it. Some days you're fighting a god of music across time, and then there are days like this. Though he also sends her off to see if anyone else needs help and that's extremely in character for him.

Then Splice turns up and spoils the mood a bit.

I think the problem I had with her is that she seems way too old for how she behaves. She's written like a tiny kid who says "Daddy, daddy!", gets distracted by photographs, and can't tell that the glowing blue image of her dad is a hologram. But she's clearly not.

Mundy Flynn was a more successful character for me, even if half her scenes are about a dude wanting to see her tattoo.

I didn't appreciate her shooting the Doctor in the arm though, mostly because I didn't quite get what was happening. When you shoot someone in the arm with a ray gun they're typically wounded, vaporised or stunned, but here it made the Doctor's arm transparent for a moment.

The episode establishes that the guns can be fairly harmless, with Mundy even asking Ruby to shoot her, so it kind of took the sting out the moment when Canto came out of nowhere and gunned Ruby down!

I mean it was still pretty surprising. And everything leading up to it makes perfect logical sense. Everyone here is being very brave and pro-active and doing the smartest thing they can think of with the information they have, and they're making everything much worse in the process. The episode loves raising the stakes, and taking the other lead character out of the action like this definitely took the drama up another level.

I loved how he was trying to keep it together, doing his exposition to an unconscious Ruby like he's trying to keep her in the story through force of will. Honestly, the way the Doctor typically reacts when his companions are harmed, everyone is very very lucky he was able to keep his feelings contained as he could've wiped out half the planet in his rage.

He mentions that he's a Time Lord, a higher dimension life form, and detonating his DNA is going to cause a way bigger bang than they expect. Which is interesting, because he's not. I mean, he was adopted by the Time Lords and they re-engineered themselves to be more like him, but they're not the same race. I dunno, maybe he was just trying to keep things simple. Or maybe Moffat is less keen on the Timeless Child twist than RTD.

We also got the abrupt death of Canto, who is immediately replaced by a hologram. That might have even been a surprise if I hadn't already seen Silence in the Library.

In fact, this story echoes so many things from Moffat's previous stories and his time as showrunner that I have to think it was deliberate. Like he thought this might be his last ever Doctor Who story and wanted to give people the most Steven Moffat adventure possible.

I've already mentioned Villengard (The Empty Child), the AI echoes of the dead (Silence in the Library), and the evil corporation (Oxygen), but you've also got the Anglican Marines (A Good Man Goes to War), the deadly military ambulance (Empty Child again), the plan to surrender to deactivate the war tech (Mummy on the Orient Express), the companion getting near-fatally shot (World Enough and Time), mines in a smokey battlefield (The Magician's Apprentice), fish fingers and custard (The Eleventh Hour) and the snowflakes pausing in the air (Twice Upon a Time). Snowflakes falling in front of the camera was how The Snowmen started as well.

Incidentally, I liked that the Doctor doesn't have a clue what the snow is about, but he's decided that snowing is a sign of a healthy Ruby and he is very happy to see it. Co-opting a scary omen as a sign of hope.

Oh, plus the episode has the 'power of love beating the bomb' ending from Victory of the Daleks.

I wasn't keen on the ending to be honest. Okay, the view they got afterwards was fantastic. It's like the cover to an old sci-fi novel, in the best way. But I was very disappointed that the solution was 'appeal to an AI copy's love for his daughter', especially as a: we were told he'd been deleted and b: the AI came up with a new plan all on its own, while the Doctor stood there helpless, waiting to explode. That's two episodes in a row where the Doctor's been bailed out by other people. It's not satisfying.

It's doubly disappointing, because the episode's all about how he's going to get off this landmine. It only really has that one problem for him to solve and it's set up right from the start. In fact, it was set up a week ago if you saw the trailer. Really, the episode had just one thing that it absolutely had to nail, the ingenious solution to the bomb situation, and it messed it up.

Also, this was Ruby's first visit to an alien planet? She's been travelling with the Doctor for six months already! How is that even possible... oh wait, Rose didn't visit another world until series 2. Never mind then.

I was curious about whether this would feature some of the elements that have been showing up in Russell T Davies' episodes, like the music, the fourth wall breaking, and the weird fantasy elements, and it turns out that it does a bit. The characters sing to get the right timing, they look directly at the camera at the end (because they're looking at something behind it), and Ruby's magic snowflakes return.

There was no choreographed music number though, or reality warping gods, or talking babies. This could have fit right into any season really, with any Doctor and companion pairing, and I can appreciate that. I find it a lot easier to suspend my disbelief when things aren't entirely unbelievable.

Also, we got a fifth appearance by Susan Twist, this time with her role upgraded to 'main villain'. She's been on the show since Wild Blue Yonder, so she's basically the third member of the main cast at this point. If this is a meta way to get us expecting the Doctor's granddaughter to return at some point, then I'm giving Bad Wolf points for creativity. If she's the evil god of television and stories, then I guess that could work as well

Did I mention how much I hate these ambulance bots yet? I mean, they've got a nice design, like they're right out of that Judge Dredd movie or The Fifth Element, but they're monstrous avatars of a company that's at best indifferent to human life and that's not what you want from a healer. I just want to kick all of them off a cliff. I'm glad the Doctor blew up their factories. They even managed to make the fun, friendly Fifteenth Doctor angry, and man Ncuti Gatwa was up to the task. I think they've cast the right person as the Doctor, guys. And Millie Gibson does a pretty good Clara.


RATING

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Alright, what did I think about Oxygen II: This Time it's War? I usually only compare a story to one other episode when I'm deciding on what to rate it, but this time I've got three of them: Boom Town, The Big Bang and Kerblam! They're all from different showrunners and they're all from their first season, so that works out.

Boom Town was one of my least favourite episodes of Russell T Davies' first year as it's half about Rose and Mickey getting into a row and half about a Slitheen trying to escape the Earth on a surfboard. Though the Slitheen tormenting the Doctor over how he's bringing her to her execution led to some good moments. Boom doesn't really force the Doctor to confront his choices like that, but if you want good moments between two characters it's got you covered. There are some great performances here as the heroes are put through some serious stress. Plus Boom and Boom Town both have the same double-meaning in the title, so there's that. And nothing explodes at the end of either of them.

The Big Bang is the epic finale to Steven Moffat's first season, with the Doctor leaping through time with a fez and a mop, trying to reboot the universe and pull himself back into existence. It's a very different kind of Steven Moffat story, frantic and mad. Boom is static and grounded, but that can be good as a scene is only going to be tense if you're able to fully buy into what's happening. Matt Smith's manic enthusiasm is a big part of what makes Big Bang such an entertaining episode, but here Gatwa was frozen on the spot and stripped of all his props, and he was still acting rings around people.

It's dangerous comparing Boom to Kerblam! as it's like putting matter and antimatter together. Kerblam! seemed like it was going to be about the horrors of Amazon, before pulling a last moment swerve to say "At least it's better than not having a job!" On a storytelling level I thought Kerblam! was the strongest episode of Chris Chibnall's first season, but I can't 100% get behind its message. I mean, both stories have a character's love interest murdered by their company's own AI, but Boom recognises that as being a bad thing so I'm going to rank it higher.

Boom's hurt hard by its ending for me, and the kid was kind of bizarre, but there's still enough good here for me to give this a strong...

7/10

Basically, the best Doctor Who writer came back and proved he still has it. He still has the same narrative bag of tricks at least, and the same well-worn tropes and themes. But also the same intelligence and wit.

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NEXT TIME

Doctor Who will return with 73 Yards. But next on Sci-Fi Adventures, it's the return of The Last Jedi! It's not my fault that I'm still writing about this film, it just keeps going. It's like the Lord of the Rings of Star Wars movies.

Anyway, I'm curious to read what you thought about Boom. Do you reckon it's better or worse than the Russell T Davies episodes we've been getting lately?