"Wish World" - Doctor Who s15e07 Review

I’ve been trying to write this review all day, expounding words about all the things this episode is doing and trying to stay positive. As it’s gone on, though, that’s become harder and all roads keep coming back to the same core idea:

Russell T. Davies has to go.

There’s no joy in that, no elation or giddiness. Davies has done some great episodes since returning. The Tennant specials really were wonderful and his output since has been overall quite strong. It still stands, though, that this show isn’t working in its current incarnation, and the transition to this eight-episode-per-season model has kneecapped this show’s ability to actually function.

What’s crazy is that despite that, this wasn’t like some horrible episode. Hell, I had a good enough time watching it. But it’s ironic how the premise for this episode is of a world in which no one can question anything, where doubt is a crime of the highest order. Here the show is, though, building an episode where the second any doubts come in about it, it all falls apart.

Warped timelines

This has been a refrain all season, but here’s a few stats about the pitfalls of the way this current Disney+ era has decided to structure these seasons. Not counting Whittaker’s final season (Flux) because of the COVID compromises, here’s how previous seasons break down.

Episode 7’s of previous Doctor Who Seasons

1. “Father’s Day”

2. “The Idiot’s Lantern”

3. “42”

4. “The Unicorn and the Wasp”

5. “Amy’s Choice”

6. “A Good Man Goes To War”

7. “The Bells of St. John”1 OR “The Rings of Akhaten”2 OR “A Nightmare in Silver”3

8. “Kill the Moon”

9. “The Zygon Invasion”

10. “The Pyramid at the End of the World”

11. “Kerblam!”

12. “Can You Hear Me?”

All of these are fairly firmly mid-season episodes, just around the point where the show starts to get strange or interesting. There’s a sense of just living in the season, a nice soak in the bath of Doctor Who.

So that tells a story, but let’s play a different game. How long has Gatwa been The Doctor by this point? This is Gatwa’s 17th episode (or 16th story) in the role. So given that this episode focuses on giving him a quasi-human life and playing with his character by making him un-Doctory, how does he stack up?

• Eccleston - N/A, though Eccleston’s entire run covers Gatwa’s up to “The Well”, for what that’s worth
• Tennant - “The Shakespeare Code” (episode) or “The Lazarus Experiment” (story)
• Smith - “The Curse of the Black Spot” (episode) or “Let’s Kill Hitler” (story)
• Capaldi - “Before the Flood” (episode) or “The Zygon Invasion/Inversion” (story)
• Whittaker - “Praxeus” (episode) or “Can You Hear Me?” (story)

That’s insane. It’s even more insane that there’s a big (and at this point extremely probably corroborated based on how this season has gone) rumor that Gatwa is bigenerating next week. If this is true, to think about all the opportunities we’re missing to explore his character, to see how this era has kept him from spreading his wings, it feels like we’ve wasted precious time. The reason behind this suspected departure is because the next season is unscheduled and Gatwa’s been getting offers elsewhere. It’s hard to argue that the show has been capitalizing on his limited time in the role.

There’s no way Davies is pleased with this. There’s no way Davies looks at the output of the show and thinks that this is in any way a good method to run it. Compare how it’s going now to the Tennant specials of 2023, and that’s a way to show how just a nice tasting of stories can be satisfying if each one of them is a powerhouse of voice, tone, and imagination. Each of those three stories had big sexy posters and a reason to show up. I love this show and I can barely remember what’s coming up next.

Ideally, though, the show just needs more space. Twelve episodes has always been extremely hard to produce within the BBC’s production infrastructure, but it’s about the minimum the show needs to be able to sink its teeth into the infinite possibilities of a given year. The strength of Doctor Who is in its existence as the best representation of the medium, where television allows the efficient production of numerous stories in a compressed timetable. That’s not how the show currently operates. You’d think that Disney+ and the influx of money or whatever would make it possible to produce the show in a more manageable way. That seemed to be the promise, at least. But my assumption is that Disney+ finds itself hewing to the current streaming model of shorter seasons with fewer episodes broadcast a year apart. The deal that helped keep Doctor Who alive post-Chibnall has been a compromise that’s wounded the show.

Davies can obviously produce a big, fully proper season with a good amount of episodes. But this is the current television model actively suffocating and killing Doctor Who. Ten episodes was limiting when Chibnall implemented it, and the eight story season of Whittaker’s second constrained the series further. I hate to say it, but at least “Ascension of the Cybermen”/”The Timeless Child” received the room to explore its ideas, however wretched they were.

Home life Doctor

The decision to utilize the eponymous Wish World as a setting for The Doctor and Belinda is a good one, at least in theory. It’s a great opportunity to give the two something else to play… or at least it would be if this weren’t the sixth4 episode with them at the center of the action. At least by the time Tennant did “Human Nature” he still had a this-current-season worth of run time between his 17th episode and that demand.

Regardless, it’s intentionally disorienting and gets into this episode’s themes. It’s been a while since The Doctor has been within an unjust system and forced to tear it down from the inside. Watching him slowly put together the various plots has an air of inevitability to it, and seeing him get so utterly oppressed by the actual world of Conrad’s wish is certainly chilling and speaks to the power of this particular elder god. Yet, The Doctor puzzling his way through this problem is not nearly as satisfying as him doing the same thing last week. That felt like a much more active Doctor, probably because he was, well, The Doctor last week.

By sidelining him from the plot, the show is intimating that The Doctor can’t save the day this time. Or, at least, we know there’s a cliffhanger and The Doctor struggling to keep up with the actual plot is an ominous portent. It’s less “This isn’t an invasion, it’s a victory” from “Army of Ghosts” and more “The Doctor lost before he even showed up” from “The Sound of Drums.” It makes for something extremely compelling, but the various masters Davies has to serve don’t make this easy. In “Sound of Drums”, the focus stayed tight on either The Doctor/Martha/Jack or The Master. In “Wish World”, Davies has to do The Doctor/Belinda as a happily married couple… and The Rani/Mrs. Flood/Conrad waiting for midnight… and Ruby knowing something wrong and teaming up with Shirley to solve how things got so bad. He has to spend time explaining how we got here and also has to show The Doctor at UNIT HQ so we can see that this reality is everywhere and everyone.

It’s a lot to cram into an episode that’s marking time until the big cliffhanger. Maybe Davies thought it would be good busy work to distract the audience until the big reveals, but that means it’s a lot of explaining the plot with little strong character work. This episode treats it all as a mystery to solve rather than as some development that’s key. And no, the “Poppy is real!” reveal hardly counts because it’s just another question to tide us over until next week.

Maybe it’ll play differently on rewatch. As it stands, it’s nice to see The Doctor constantly questioning and doubting the world (because that’s how he works), but that feels relatively one-note and repetitive. There are plenty of nice moments. It’s nice to see him trying to hook up that one UNIT soldier with Kate or the way Kate looks back at him after he doubts the world. Honestly, the moment with Rogue was a delightful, wonderful surprise. I didn’t know Groff would be in this season even as a cameo, and I really hope he’s back in the finale in some capacity, especially if it’s just for Gatwa’s end.

Baddies in the driver’s seat

That makes it a good opportunity to let Archie Panjabi center herself in the narrative for this Rani-centric episode. Her teamup with Mrs. Flood is lovely, and it’s always surprising when something as simple as a Rani/Rani crossover rocks. Two episodes ago the Rani thing was unconfirmed, but now that it’s here, onscreen incarnations of the same Gallifreyan provide excellent thrills.

So, too, it’s nice to see Conrad back and driving the narrative as the one whose wish has shifted the world. He’s such an asshole, but I love that Davies layers direct commentary on these know-nothing know-it-alls. Conrad (and those like him) spend so much time asking people to question, to doubt, all in the name of disrupting or bringing down some system they all view as unjust. True to form, as soon as Conrad gets the power to change things, he creates a world where doubting and questioning are high crimes. It’s a great commentary on the bad faith arguments people in these positions use in the naked pursuit of their own power.

Yet the big reveal here is that The Rani is trying to bring back Omega. There are two things on this:

First, Omega himself is a big totemic Time Lord baddie having appeared twice in the Classic series. The first was in the 10th Anniversary special “The Three Doctors”, a threat powerful enough to drag the 2nd and 3rd Doctors (and the 1st, though Hartnell was so ill at the time all of his bits are pre-recorded with him alone) together for the first time. It’s a delightful story, and Troughton might steal the show, but eveyrone making it has a great time.

Omega’s second comes in the 5th Doctor story “Arc of Infinity”, the leadoff to a season built around returning villains. It’s a rather atrocious story, entirely about nothing and devoid of stakes and drama. The most exciting bit of it is when Omega manifests as a copy of the 5th Doctor. Even then, it’s difficult to find it even engaging at all. It’s one of the 5th Doctor’s worst.

To bring Omega back is different than Sutekh. Last season, that was an audacious move, Davies riffing on one of the seminal classics of a golden era. This season, Omega is a much blanker canvas, a character who’s been middling in his televison appearances. It continues the trend of using finales to bring back big villains from the past, but all of this is speculation based on an episode we haven’t seen yet.

The second is a slightly bigger issue. Like Omega, The Rani has only appeared twice before this. For her first appearance in “The Mark of the Rani”, she split villain duties with The Master. There are those who say that The Rani runs circles around The Doctor and The Master in this story, staying above the fray and refusing to get more involved than is absolutely necessary. This ignores that The Master seizes a key piece of The Rani’s equipment and refuses to give it back to her unless she help kill The Doctor. In her second appearance (“Time and the Rani”), The Rani hauls in a freshly regenerated Doctor and fools him into helping her because without him, she’s stumped. Yeah. She’s a real genius.

Here, there’s the threat of something similar. If The Rani’s plan really is to wake up Omega for some nefarious purpose, the best case scenario is that it’s a play to somehow harness Omega and turn him into the whiny little bitch he is at his best5. If this is a Sutekh situation, it’s likely that Omega comes back very early in next week’s finale and he’s the big bad that Davies takes the episode to explore. In this situation, it’s difficult to see a world where RTD doesn’t sideline The Rani in some way. It would be a sad waste of the character, and not ideal given all the buildup to making her awesome. Now, if it’s all a feint and The Rani turns it back on Omega in the third act, that’s perfect. As long as this isn’t some situation where she as the main villain suddenly plays second fiddle to the ostensibly bigger one.

Piercing the veil at the end of the universe

One of the undercurrents of the Disney+ era has been this threat of Harbinger gods as a result of The Doctor’s actions in “Wild Blue Yonder”, when he tricked the Not-Doctor and Not-Donna with the superstition about salt. The baby at the center of this, the one The Rani takes from the family, is a reincarnation of Desiderium, who grants the wishes of people to transform and reshape reality.

The moment Desiderium laughs is one Davies designs to be chilling and haunting, but this thread of the Giggle continuing has helped to define the era in great ways. It’s the closest thing the show has to an engine if it needs to find some villain for The Doctor to fight. To this point, Davies has been the only one to really pull from this, but if the show continues, it’d be interesting to see what sort of reality bending ingenuity comes from other writers mining this infinite well.

Cliffhanger

The big reveal at the end of this episode is that Poppy, the ostensible child of Belinda and The Doctor is not the manifestation of some wish, but rather a real person in some capacity. Poppy has appeared before, coming from “Space Babies” but also had a brief cameo in “The Story and the Engine”, leading Belinda to the barbershop in Lagos. In that episode, she feels like an apparition or a spirit as she serves the plot in some capacity. The Doctor’s revelation here is a curiosity, inspiring questions of how a Space Baby wound up in present day London. Given that Susan has to be returning as well, we’re in “The Doctor had kids at one point” territory, and this will possibly explore that. Not a bad thing.

Running back, Doctor Who’s cliffhangers do have a heirarchy of quality, where the best ones functionally change the way the story has worked to that point. “Army of Ghosts” stands out because of the big reveal that the Cybermen story we were expecting actually has Daleks in it. Others are great in retrospect, where “The Pandorica Opens” is amazing because it truly, utterly obliterates the universe in an operatic manner, but more impressive because it sets up a scenario where “The Big Bang” is a tiny intimate story that’s just The Doctor, Amy, Rory, and River Song bouncing around a museum. Davies did this with “The Sound of Drums”, though The Master’s win at the end of that episode is so total that the one-year-later time jump at the beginning of “Last of the Time Lords” practically screams that there will be a big reset button smash by episode’s end. Regardless of that, “Sound of Drums” still has a great cliffhanger.

We’ll see how it goes next week, but as it stands now this is solid enough. The Doctor careening towards oblivion, Belinda disappearing while in The Rani’s thrall, and… Ruby just kinda staring at the whole of London descending into that same oblivion. It’s a world-ender, leaving the story in a place that’s intriguing for next week, but we’ll see where Davies picks up.

So overall, more of a mixed bag that we’d hope. Coming off of last season “The Legend of Ruby Sunday” gave hope for a season finale that ultimately dropped the ball just a bit. Given that “Wish World” feels like a bit of a dropped ball, the wish is that next week’s is the main event Davies has been building towards. I’m excited for more Ruby and Belinda and Mel and others in the UNIT cast. The BBC readout says Yasmin Finney’s Rose is coming back, which is always insanely welcome.

Next week’s ending is going to have a major impact on this season’s legacy. If it is Gatwa’s bigeneration, word on the street is that was all done in reshoots and that means Davies did not construct this to function as a big epic end for his Doctor. That makes the stakes higher than the episode probably can take. My optimism is there, and I’me xcited for it, but I’m more guarded than I want it to be after a season I’ve quite liked to this point.

Season 15 Rankings

1. The Story and the Engine
2. Lucky Day
3. Lux
4. The Interstellar Song Contest
5. The Well
6. Wish World
7. The Robot Revolution