Doctor Who (2023) 2-06: The Interstellar Song Contest

Episode:

890

|

Serial:

318

|

Writer:

Juno Dawson

|

Director:

Ben A. Williams

|

Air Date:

17-May-2025

---

This week on Grumpy Miserable Cynical Reviews, I'm hating on the latest episode of Doctor Who season 2! Okay to be honest I'm writing this bit before watching the episode, so I have no idea whether I'll like it or not. But the season really hasn't been working for me so far and The Interstellar Song Contest is the story I've been dreading the most this year.

I haven't seen any trailers, I don't know what happens in it, but I have zero interest in Eurovision so the premise has no appeal to me and all the references are going to fly over my head. And if The Devil's Chord is a harbinger of what's to come, then the soundtrack is going to be an assault on my ears. I'm going to have to leave the room and listen to the rain again.

Okay, there are going to be SPOILERS below for the episode and stories that came before it. I couldn't spoil anything that comes later if I wanted to though, as I haven't got a clue.

---

The episode begins by showing off the massive Harmony Arena space station, looking way more spectacular than Platform One or Satellite 5 (I've been going through the 2005 series recently so those are the only space stations I can remember).

The camera does one of those 'fly through the window with a bit of distortion' moves that I'm very used to after watching series like Discovery, and inside the arena is absolute packed with extras wearing masks and prosthetics, with digital crowds stretching off into the distance behind them. I thought that The Story & the Engine felt like a cheap episode to save a bit of cash. Now I know what they were saving it for.

The French space cat presenter introduces the host, who comes striding right out of cryogenic suspension fully dressed, only wanting to know what year it is. It's something right out of a Douglas Adams novel or I guess that Christmas Carol Christmas episode where it turns out they're dying of a terminal disease.

The year's 2925 by the way, which means we're in the 30th century, exactly 900 years in the future. So roughly the same time as The Mutants and Terror of the Vervoids, give or take a few decades. The last time we saw a Catkind was way back in New Earth and Gridlock, 5 billion years in the future, though Sabine doesn't seem to have the fur so she might be a different kind of alien.

Oh, I should probably mention that this guy is Rylan Clark, an actual real life person. At least that's what Wikipedia tells me, I hadn't heard of him myself.

The TARDIS materialises in a booth so the Doctor can do a bit of vindicating and once again it's completed without incident. But when Belinda realises where they are she decides she wants to stay for the show. It's funny how she thinks this won't turn into a disaster within five minutes.

OPENING CREDITS

Act one begins in the production control room gallery, which works for me. I love all this behind the scenes stuff and they've got a nice little set built here.

There only one ad, for the sponsor Poppy Honey, and there's enough attention drawn to it that it seems pretty certain that it'll be important later. There's absolutely no attention drawn to the stats on the video feed, but that's why I'm here!

You can tell this is a British TV series, they called it 'colour' space. These days the number goes up to 4:4:4, which indicates lossless quality with no chroma subsampling, so I guess 8:8:8 is just the same thing except more futuristic. And 78.5 must be the optimal FPS for alien eyes.

The show is being broadcast in 11920x6705 resolution which means this is 12K. You might expect the picture to have gotten a bit sharper than that in 900 years, but I suppose after a point there's really zero benefit. That's an aspect ratio of 16:9, by the way, so it's actually less widescreen than the episode's 2:1 ratio.

This really takes me out of the story, as if you look at how resolutions have evolved over time and do the maths we should be up to an ultra-cinematic 23:1 by this point in the future.

Look at how much extra content 23:1 would give you at the sides!

Speaking of extra content, there are some interesting names on screen.

I'm not going to check TARDIS Wiki for all of these planets, but I do recognise Alpha Centuari. That's where the character Alpha Centauri is from (last seen on screen in Capaldi-era episode Empress of Mars). The Zygons have gotten themselves a new colony at this point, called New Colony, so that's cool.

Trion is also an interesting planet as that's where Fifth Doctor companion Turlough is from. This is the first time we've had Trion characters in the series in about 40 years.

Hey, Alpha Centauri flags! That's what I'm assuming they are at least, as they've got a picture of his eye on them.

Mrs Flood is here too, as usual, and she's spying on the Doctor with her hi-tech opera glasses I wonder how the hell she keeps getting to places before him. It's really not easy to keep track of a TARDIS jumping around randomly. Flood does something with her own gadget after seeing the Doctor finish vindicating, but after she's done she decides to stay and watch the show. It's funny how she also thinks this won't turn into a disaster within five minutes.

Meanwhile Gary and Mike try to get into their VIP pod, only to find that their ticket's not accepted because the Doctor and Belinda have accidentally stolen their seats. The security drone isn't much use as it walks off to carry out 'phase one'.

There's zapping outside the galley and a Hellion called Kid comes in. I keep wanting to call them Tieflings though, as they look like they're out of D&D. The horns are a cool look.

The director, Nina, wants the drones to get him out, apparently missing the fact that there were zaps outside and she's in danger right now. Turns out that he's one of those hacker terrorists like out of a Speed movie and the drones are following his instructions now.

Oh damn, that's so flashy. I love the visuals in this episode.

Kid has everyone removed from the gallery except for the director... and his lover Wynn! She betrayed Nina, even though she was one of the few people willing to take a chance and hire a Hellion despite their reputation.

Wynn switches the broadcast to the prerecorded dress rehearsal so that no one at home is any the wiser (though the Doctor notices) and they're going to use publicity comms to explain that Rylan's missing due to food poisoning. That's good news, as it means they're at least giving the poor guy a chance to eat before sticking him back in cryo freeze. They may even let him sleep every few years.

Down on the stage Rylan is winging it like a pro, introducing Liz Lizardine from the planet Lizoko. Who doesn't seem to be a lizard. She's played by the singer who did the Goblin Song back in The Church on Ruby Road, so it's nice that people almost get to see her face this time.

Honestly, I was liking this episode until the singing. And I'm liking it during the singing as well; she's a bloody good singer. It helps that the episode doesn't crash to a halt when the music happens.

Kid pulls the big obvious lever that switches off the forcefield above their heads and there's a loud warning sound that gives everyone plenty of time to get back into the hallway where it's safe. Unfortunately no one was told what it means!

And we get to watch as the whole crowd gets lifted off the ground by the rushing air and blown into space.

This is what fans of Star Trek: Discovery and The Orville were afraid of happening every time they saw the ship flying around with its hangar door open. It's never a good idea for a forcefield to be the only thing between you and the vacuum of space.

Belinda gets blown up into the roof of her VIP pod somehow, so she's safe, but the Doctor and the TARDIS go flying out into space.
 

Bloody hell, I didn't think I'd be seeing a visual like this in a Doctor Who episode. Especially not one about Eurovision.

They really just flushed the crowd into space, we even see them freezing in the cold. We know that the Doctor can survive for a while out there, but it's bad news for everyone else.

Though Nina points out that they're not actually dead and they can be saved! So the episode walked that back quickly. Unfortunately Kid doesn't want to save them. People have been telling him he's a monster his whole life, so he's doing what's expected of him.

The drones bring in a cube and he explains that it's called... a delta wave! Oh damn, there's a callback I didn't expect. I'll be publishing my Parting of the Ways review soon, so I was thinking about how this dangerous weapon that even Jack's heard of about never gets mentioned again. Well, it just did.

Belinda leaves the pod and runs into Trion singer Cora Saint Bavier and her guest Len Kazah. The guy just happens to have tech skills that can open the doors and let them out, so that's convenient. Though the station can't broadcast a distress call due to gambling rules, so that's less helpful.

Cora's a famous celebrity so they could've made her rude to Belinda or she could've been panicking about what just happened, but she's actually the one trying to calm Belinda down.

Belinda gives us the mention of her mum and dad for this episode and then realises that she's completely lost without the Doctor. It's like that scene in The End of the World where Rose was hit by the reality of where she was and how little she knows about this world.
 

Except here they can stop and watch this weird-ass CGI duck thing for a bit. I love the production design in this episode by the way.

It's apparently Dugga Doo rehearsing the song Dugga Doo, though you wouldn't know it from all the effects. It doesn't really look like a live on-stage performance. Though I respect how they have it playing in the background during Belinda's big emotional moment as it only adds to the feeling like she's stranded a long way away from normal.

Meanwhile the Doctor is unconscious in space, his arms freezing from the hands up. I'm no space scientist, but that doesn't seem very realistic. But something jolts him awake again...
 

...it's a vision of Susan Foreman, his granddaughter! They actually brought Carole Ann Ford back after all. Took them long enough.

William Russell still has the record for the longest time between appearances as he left in 1965 and didn't return until 57 years later in 2022. But Susan was in the very first episode, she is the Unearthly Child, so this means she's played the same character over the entire span of the series! 62 years.

She says "Go back. Grandfather, go back. Find me." Which is interesting if she's actually getting a message through to him. That's not a power that Time Lords usually have. I mean they're a bit psychic sure, Susan maybe more than most, but she was dropped off in 2167 and this is 2925 in deep space, so that's a bit of a gap to get a signal across.

The Doctor shakes off the ice and swims over to a confetti cannon to launch himself through space to the airlock. It's part of RTD's ongoing efforts to try to rehabilitate Star Wars: The Last Jedi by taking things that people hated about it and doing them worse.

Okay, the second part of the plan makes sense. I don't know how fast a confetti cannon will propel you, but it will get you moving and that's the important thing. You know what won't get you moving? Waving your arms around in a vacuum. He should've tried throwing his shoes, or his shirt if they really wanted to give viewers a bit of fan service. It still wouldn't have been as good as the scene in Four to Doomsday where he throws a cricket ball at a wall and catches it on the rebound, but it would've made more sense.

Though to be fair he does yell "woo-hoo!" which implies the presence of air. Waving your arms around in air might do something!

The Doctor gets into the station through the airlock and immediately collapses. Fortunately he just happened to collapse next to a nurse! Not Belinda, Mike.

I like that Mike actually has the medical knowledge to deal with his alien anatomy, as that doesn't happen often. He's intrigued by the two hearts and repository bypass system but he's quickly able to figure out how to treat him. Hang on, this is something like the third time this season that an episode has made a point of showing the Doctor's two hearts. Is this going to be relevant for the finale?

Incidentally, I'm not all that keen on Mike and Gary so far. Partly because of the completely unnecessary "He's not seriously gonna use a confetti cannon to fly through space?" line, partly because... I dunno, they're not really matching the energy of the episode.

The good news is that the Doctor escaped exposure to the vacuum of space without being permanently blinded this time! The other good news is that he triplicated the mavity field to hold everyone in suspension and the cold is preserving them, like falling into a frozen river. Hang on, Nina used the word 'mavity' earlier as well. But (spoilers) the Earth got destroyed and these are all aliens, so nobody here should be affected the change they made to the English language. Well okay that gets complicated with all the things recovered from Earth (like Rylan somehow), but it's still weird.

It's around that this point that the Doctor opens up a panel and gets hit by the delta wave, I guess as a security measure put in by Kid. The poor guy's really going through it in this episode and it's barely halfway. So it turns out that a delta wave can go through an audio codec and come out of regular speakers in a form that can kill a person in seconds. Honestly after hearing 'Twist at the End' in The Devil's Chord that sounds plausible to me. Fortunately the Doctor's able to grab his sonic and blast the panel.

Meanwhile Cora's friend Len manages to catch up with what the Doctor's just learned, discovering the Hellion script in the system (without getting delta waved). He tells Belinda what Hellions are, that they practice cannibalism and witchcraft and have psychic powers! And Cora's obviously not happy hearing him say that. We already been given hints that Cora is actually a Hellion herself but after this it would've been surprising if we didn't get to see her horns.

The Doctor's group ends up in the Eurovision museum and Gary gets a tech desk activated, as that's his overly convenient skill set. He worked on the tech design and he's in charge of the hologram archive. He demonstrates by activating a hologram of Graham Norton, Doctor Who's greatest nemesis!

Twice this guy has inadvertently messed with Doctor Who. The first time was when audio from one of his series was accidentally played during a scene in Rose, near the start when Rose is walking in the shop basement looking for Wilson.

Then five years later, a banner ad with a little cartoon Graham Norton appeared during the dramatic cliffhanger at the end of The Time of Angels! If you want to completely wreck the tension in a scene, this is a good way of doing it.

Doctor Who did get revenge however, during The Graham Norton Show.

A little cartoon Dalek came out and murdered banner ad Graham Norton, finally putting an end to his mayhem. Or so we thought.

Poor Doctor is sad about Belinda not being here to see Graham Norton. But he's distracted by visions of Susan and clearly doesn't want to be. He gets into the system and ends up on a video chat with Kid.

Belinda can see both sides of the conversation on her screen so now she knows that the Doctor is alive Though he's in 'Angry Doctor' mode right now, talking about how Kid put ice in his heart (singular) and how he will find him, cast his body into the void and watch him freeze to death. Belinda is understandably confused by his out of character behaviour.

Cora Saint Bavier reveals that she knows Wynn and Kid, and she knows that Kid's mother was shot before he got a name. So he's never been anything but 'kid', a baby goat. Len is suspicious about Cora knowing so much, so she finally reveals her horns... to the camera.

Cora stands like this for a good five seconds, giving us all a good look at her sawn-off horns before finally turning around to show Belinda and Len. It's not that hard to guess that the Saint is a Hellion using all that hair to conceal her horns, but you might not have predicted that her horns are gone. Unless you're a Hellboy fan.

She explains the history of Hellion, that the Corporation bought the planet and its people just to get the Hell poppies to make the poppy honey that's being advertised by the song contest. I don't know why they had to burn the planet for this, that seems a bit counter productive. It's not even clear if the Corporation were the ones that spread propaganda to demonise the Hellions, but I wouldn't be surprised! Hellions aren't allowed to sing so she had to hide her true identity to even be here, though it turns out that her horns were removed by force.

Belinda suggests that she could talk some sense into Kid and Wynn and she's all for the idea. Len's suddenly being a lot less helpful however. At least until Belinda points out out that by getting them into the gallery he'll be helping himself as well.

Meanwhile the Doctor's at a console, focused on doing his thing while Gary and Mike plead with him to acknowledge the drones coming to kill them. He just explodes their heads with the sonic without looking, which would've been a very handy trick to use during The Robot Revolution.

Poor Gary and Mike are clearly terrified of the Doctor at this point, in a very comedic way. But the Doctor still has use for them, because they are incredibly useful people. This time it's Gary's triangulation skills he needs, because he's going to do a thing.

At this point Cora's dress rehearsal is playing on the broadcast and it's turns out that her song is about her big feet being too big for the shoes she wants, or something. It's not a heartfelt cry for the acknowledgement of the crime that's been inflicted upon her people, is the important thing.

Also the Doctor appears in the gallery, right next to Kid! He's not in his most diplomatic mood, saying that Kid's cold filthy heart just likes to kill. So Kid just shoots him!

It's okay though as it was just a holographic diversion to let him sneak onto his chair. The Doctor zaps the delta wave, then he zap's Kid's gun, and that's pretty much all he needs to do to take control of the room. Wynn certainly makes no effort to attack him physically.

This means that the Doctor is able to use his hard light hologram to electrocute Kid over and over and over again. The guy's on the floor in agony, but he keeps the electricity going. Even Darth Vader would be showing some sympathy at this point. But hurt people hurt people and the Doctor is out to get revenge right now. The man who never would is torturing a guy just for his own satisfaction, out of cruelty, and even Susan pleading with him to stop isn't enough to change his mind. So that's a bit dark!

But Belinda comes in and the look on her face is enough to snap him to his senses instantly. It's like The Runaway Bride again... or any of the other situations where something like this has happened before. He needs a companion to remind him to be his best. Though he does warn Kid that the ice is still in his heart, which I didn't need. You can't just tell the audience that you're 15% more ruthless now, at least not like this.

Cora was too late to talk anyone out of using the delta wave, but now that she's here she does take the opportunity talk to her gentle kin-sister Wynn. It turns out that Wynn felt abandoned and that she had to do something, while Cora just hid in plain sight. And that's the end of Cora's story for this episode, she's totally not going to reveal her true species and sing a proper song about her people at the end.

Now that he's done being dark, the Doctor leaps back into insane genius hero mode and figures out a way to grab the people outside with a very Star Trek looking tractor beam (with Gary's help) and then turn Rylan's cryogenic booth into a revival booth (with Mike's help).

Incidentally when you're talking about freezing people to be resuscitated later, the correct term is 'cryonic', not that anyone actually cares. Well, except for people working in the fields of cryogenics and cryonics I suppose.

And Rylan is successfully revived with no ill effects! I'm glad they're having to use a device to bring people back as it's already breaking my suspension of disbelief enough that people can just float in the vacuum of space for a whole episode and survive without their cells being damaged by the freezing process or lack of oxygen, or whatever.

So now they need to repeat this 100,000 times. If they're really quick then they can save 30 people per hour. If they have people working on this around the clock, then that's 700 per day. So they should have this finished in around 140 days (5 months)!

Fortunately they have the idea to use the VIP pods to save them in batches of 12 and they're doing it in a montage with Bucks Fizz playing so it takes no time at all. Soon everyone's back in the crowd, waving their flags. The only person who seems injured is presenter Sabine, who's wearing a bandage over her eye.

Fortunately the episode has the sense to realise that when a terrorist attack flushes the entire audience of Eurovision into space you don't resume the show the moment that they're all saved. Because that would be crazy! Well okay the show does resume, but it's just Cora doing a final song for them. The public haven't done too badly here as they've already had 14 songs, and Cora's doing great as she's technically gotten to perform twice.

Though she tells the audience that this time her song is about her home planet Hellia, which the Corporation destroyed. Someone yells 'go back to where you came from' which is a bit of a hilarious thing to shout on a space station in the middle of nowhere. Every single person here is far from home. Except for Gary I mean.

The lyrics are presumably in Hellian, which I do not speak and the TARDIS is not translating, but the visuals of poppy fields and a planet on fire gets the point across. This one's not about big feet.

When she's done she's in tears and everyone's silent. It even beings Len to tears. But Gary and Mike start clapping and get everyone else going. The episode's missing any kind of discussion about other ways to fight the company aside from 'kill 3 trillion innocent people' and 'sing a song', but I don't think it's putting forward the message that those are the only options.

What's important here is that Kid went with option A, and the message this would've left people with is that Hellions are pure evil. The Galactic Empire in Star Wars would have to be 1,000 times more evil just to catch up with his death toll. But Cora made the biggest emotional impact and got people crying over the horrors inflicted on Hellia instead. Len is our representative of the people prejudiced against Hellians, so if she could get him clapping, then there are other Lens out there who are rethinking what they've been told. Option B doesn't defeat the corporation, it's not a solution, but it changes the narrative.

Anyway, the Doctor and Belinda go to pick up their TARDIS in the museum and Graham Norton appears again. The Earth disintegrated in a second on May 24th, cause unknown! They rush back home using the vindicator to get them to the right point in space and time, and find...

...an explosion strong enough to blow the TARDIS's doors off.

So I guess the Doctor and Belinda are both dead now. That's a bit of a depressing ending to the series. At least we have a spare Doctor who can take over, assuming that David Tennant's not busy filming something. Or maybe Jo Martin.

Though this isn't the only multi-part story in Doctor Who history to end its first part on a cliffhanger with the TARDIS exploding.

Doctor Who (1963) 6-06 - The Mind Robber, Part 1

Something similar happened in the story The Mind Robber, when the heroes got stuck in the Land of Fiction. I'm not saying that the series is doing a Land of Fiction thing here, but they've been certainly doing a 'break the fourth wall, meet your real life fans, what even is reality?' kind of thing for a couple of seasons now. Ever since Mrs Flood showed up. Ever since the salt at the edge of the universe, in fact.

Anyway, the end credits have started and the episode is now done.

Though a little while after watching it occurred to me that I should check if this has a trailer at end. I don't want to watch a trailer, I just wanted to know how secretive they're being about the finale. And it was a bloody good thing that I did check because it turns out that there's a really important mid-credits scene!

Doctor Who (2023) 2-03 - The Well

The thing about Doctor Who's end credits is if you don't stop them quick enough it'll usually start playing a trailer for the next story, which isn't good if want to go in blind. It's especially not good if the very first frame shows off a returning character, like the trailer at the end of The Well did. Doctor Who has been doing this for long enough that it's trained viewers like me to turn the episode off the moment it's over. 

Also no one even wants mid-credit sequences anymore! Marvel and DC have burned us out with all their teases for characters that never got even a movie in the end.

Anyway, the big surprise scene in this episode is Mrs Flood stepping out of the revival booth and revealing that they left her frozen until after Cora's song was finished! They could've told Nina and Rylan to hold on a little a little longer. Also it turns out that she's a Time Lord! It seems like out of 100,000 people she was the only one to be fatally injured by being frozen in space, which is funny considering that it's usually the Time Lord that survives this kind of thing due to their resilient physiology.

But Mrs Flood doesn't regenerate, instead we get another bi-generation! This is supposed to be so rare that it's mythical, but she's not even surprised.

That's not her name though, as the only rain in the forest is the flood... no, sorry, that was a different surprise name reveal. Some call her boss, others the governor, in India they'd call her queen, as she is the Rani! We've been waiting 40 years for her return, and it turns out that it never Ranis but it pours as we've got two of them at once!

I hope they don't feel forced to cast an actress of Indian descent for future regenerations, as it's just a name and the woman's Gallifreyan, but I'm immediately sold on Archie Panjabi being the right actress for this incarnation.

I wasn't spoiled on any of this by the way. I've avoided all the leaks (aside from that one about Midnight a few episodes ago) and I genuinely had no idea that this was coming.

Though I may have had my suspicions.

I think they could've done a better job of setting this up to be honest, because this is only season 2. The audience that Ncuti Gatwa pulled in would started with stories like The Church on Ruby Road or Space Babies, so they have no idea what bi-generation is, or who the Rani is. Even people who started with Rose in 2005 have no bloody clue who the Rani is! I can imagine half the people who watched this staring at it with a blank face, with no emotional response to a mystery that's been building for two seasons. That means the showrunner messed up.

When RTD introduced the Master in series 3 he made sure that the reveal had meaning to new viewers. It was the pay off to the Face of Boe's final message, the Doctor being the last of the Time Lords, Mr Saxon and the chameleon arc. This is just "The mysterious woman is another mysterious woman".

And it hasn't even been set up in a way where you can go back and look at the earlier episodes for clues, because RTD made sure that Mrs Flood talked and acted nothing like the Rani. New Rani does though, so there's that at least.

Doctor Who (1963) 24-01 - Time and the Rani, Part 1

I suppose dressing up as companions was supposed to be the hint, as the Rani dressed up like Mel once. Also bringing Mel back into the series should've been a clue as well! Her arch-nemesis returns.

The funny thing about bringing the Rani back, is that she's from one of the show's creative nadirs and her episodes have been kind of terrible. Time and the Rani is a contender for the worst story of the entire run. Kate O'Mara made her iconic, but there's no risk of this finale spoiling the character's legacy.

The episode left me with a few questions. Like why is Mrs Flood holding up her own trousers like they're too big for her now? And why is she instantly subservient to the Rani when they're both the same person? I'm hoping that the finale's going to explain bi-generation a little bit because they've been kind of vague about how the situation with the two Doctors works.

Speaking of the Doctor, this is at least the second time he's saved the Rani's life, so I don't know why she's so eager to end his story with absolute terror.


CONCLUSION

---

The chances of this impressing me were never good. I don't like the direction this series has been going, I don't like the episodes with musical numbers, and I've no interest in Eurovision. Then again I never had much interest in Big Brother, What Not to Wear and The Weakest Link either, and I still enjoyed the series 1 episode Bad Wolf. And I do like Die Hard!

With all the secret musicals coming out lately I'm glad The Interstellar Song Contest turned out to be a secret non-musical. It was an genuine relief for me that I didn't have to sit through multiple performances. I mean there were multiple songs, but I didn't have to sit through them as we only got small clips. Even Cora's big performance at the end was over in less than two minutes, which I think is the right amount of time for it to make its point.

The episode is a little vague about why the Corporation would burn its own poppy fields and whether the prejudice against the Hellians was a deliberate propaganda campaign against them. But that's fine, as I just watched Andor, so I'm using that to fill in the details. That series did all the work to set up the horrible situation that this barely explains. I'm sure you wouldn't have to dig too far to find some real world parallels as well, especially considering how newsworthy some of the Eurovision countries are right now.

It's interesting that they gave the Hellians traits associated with demons. I can't tell if the other aliens were supposed to share humanity's wariness around folks with goat horns and Hell poppies (not impossible, considering the bloke in the pit in The Impossible Planet), or if that was just for our benefit. It set them apart at least and set up the twist where Cora's horns had been cut off, allowing her to pass as Trion. Not that it was much of a twist. No expectations were subverted there.

I definitely didn't expect Susan to make an appearance though! I'm still not sure season one's bait-and-switch was a good idea but it certainly made new fans aware of the Doctor's granddaughter, and that's the kind of set up a moment like this needs to have an impact. If a showrunner doesn't put in the work to build a character's significance you end up with moments like the mid-credits Rani reveal. Man, I can't believe that RTD did the exact same thing twice. A mysterious old woman keeps appearing everywhere the heroes go, leading to the big return of a classic series character that no one has any reason to know or care about. How do you mess this up in the same way two seasons in a row?

Speaking of villains, Kid and Wynn weren't the greatest in the show's history (or even on Conrad Clark's tier), but they served their purpose. Gary, Mike and Len also served their purpose, having the exact skillset needed to trivialise every obstacle in their path, without really developing into proper characters along the way. The episode was like 'Die Hard on a Eurovision' but there was no progression of events leading to the Doctor taking on the bad guy. Step 1: get back inside. Step 2: become aware of the bad guy. Step 3: go to the control room and win. Okay maybe I'm being unfair to Gary and Mike, but they were too low key to work well as comedy characters and they were too blatantly comedic to be taken seriously. Nina and Cora were good though, and Rylan as well actually. And Belinda was the companion.

I mentioned how the episode echoes Bad Wolf/Parting of the Ways with its use of celebrity cameos, pop culture, space stations, and delta waves, but I also think Belinda's journey mirrors Rose's in The End of the World. At first she's excited, then it all gets too much for her and she freaks out about how far she is from home, and then when they she meets up with the Doctor again she's a bit disturbed by how cold he is to the villain. The difference is that this is could be her penultimate story! We should be at opposite ends of their arcs.

Anyway, to me this felt like a big dumb campy cartoony Christmas special come early, with all the absurdity and tragedy those stories tend to have. Specifically, it reminded me of Space Titanic disaster story Voyage of the Damned, though that one was dark enough to have all of its deaths stick. For all of its fantastically dark imagery, scenes of the Doctor literally torturing someone, and literally Earth-shattering reveals, this ultimately turned out to be light-hearted and fun. Which is just what an episode written to lead into the Eurovision grand final should be really.


RATING

---

This is a six out of ten episode for me, I feel that in my heart, but I really want to give it a seven. I love the irony that the episode I was dreading most has turned out to be my favourite and I'm just looking for an excuse to give it that extra point.

It was a huge relief that it wasn't torture to sit through, so it deserves half a point for that. Also it looks incredible, with some stunning shots of the arena. Sometimes they're stunning because of all the dead people floating out of it, but that's not a negative. So I'm going to say this has earned...

7/10

---

NEXT EPISODE

Next on Sci-Fi Adventures, it's... oh damn, I've made it to The Empty Child! Will it still impress me or has two decades of exposure to Steven Moffat stories left me hyper aware of its flaws?

Actually, here's a better question: what did you think about The Interstellar Song Contest? The episode I mean, though also the contest itself I guess.