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When Russell T Davies looks in the mirror, do you know what he sees? It’s him telling himself, “I’m your favorite reference, baby.” This season concludes with a shocking (re)introduction of yet another face from his tenure as showrunner. First, though, we have to get through a plot that quickly disposes of much-hyped villains and focuses on the Doctor and Belinda having a daughter — but no, Susan doesn’t show up at all. Fifteen’s exit feels upsettingly premature, and our alleged main companion is underutilized. There are great moments in this episode, but there’s also a lot of wasted potential. If I had access to Desiderium, I would’ve wished for several changes.
The solution to last week’s cliffhanger is a now-pregnant Anita from the Christmas special, who opens a door and pulls the Doctor into the Time Hotel. Time on Earth keeps resetting to let the Rani stretch reality thinner, so the Doctor returns to May 23 to start snapping his allies out of Conrad’s straight, suburban wish. He gives Belinda a reality check by simply changing into a kilt, but the full return of everyone’s memories hinges upon Anita’s open doors. Once Kate is back, she activates biochips implanted in UNIT employees, including Ruby, Mel, and Shirley (who zooms back fast enough to leave Back to the Future-style flame trails). Rose Noble also reappears. I get that she became invisible as commentary on Conrad’s worldview, but I wish she’d stuck around as a message that trans people exist regardless of whether people like Conrad believe it. The Doctor and Belinda introduce UNIT to Poppy, and explain her resemblance to Poppy from “Space Babies” by saying that she was born from a combination of his and Belinda’s memories and wishes.
The Rani teleports over to share some exposition (and also to declare that Mel thinks of her every night. Happy Pride?). Apparently, she took a “biological sidestep” to survive the Time Lord genocide, then used a Time Ring to travel. “Find a stupid, blonde Earth girl, and there you are,” she tells the Doctor. Her plan is to use Omega, dead or alive, as a gene bank to resurrect the Time Lords and construct a new Gallifrey. We already know that she views Omega — who discovered time travel and has been nicknamed the “original sin” of Time Lords — as a means to an end. No one will be her lord and master.
Now, it’s time for a major update to Time Lord lore that is delivered so matter-of-factly that it feels like we were supposed to already know this. The Rani and the Doctor say that the genetic explosion caused by the Spy Master sterilized all surviving Time Lords, rendering them incapable of having children. The Rani prompts groans from the room by arguing that Poppy doesn’t count because she’s “contaminated” with inferior human DNA. She’s never felt more like the Rani than in the moment where she starts calling humans cattle. It’s unclear what will happen to Poppy if the wish world ends, but the Doctor maintains that his and Belinda’s daughter is real. So what if she was born out of hopes and dreams? All children are.
After the Doctor refuses to join the Rani, they aim their sonics at each other, and she returns to the Bone Palace to set the Underverse’s Bone Beasts on UNIT. I may have underestimated how much of a tech genius Susan Triad is because, at the Doctor’s request, she’s managed to build a Zero Room that exists outside of reality in … what, 20 minutes? (Mind you, she’s technically less than a year old.) The plan is for Poppy to wait out the battle and hopefully continue to exist afterward. Belinda decides to accompany her daughter, accepting the possibility that if things go wrong, the two of them will be suspended inside forever. I do think it would be wrong to send a child inside alone, and I understand that becoming a parent is a priority-shifting life event. But it’s still sad that Belinda is now sidelined from the action, when I already wish she was given more to do this season.
The goal of the Unholy Trinity — the god of wishes, the Rani(s), and Conrad — was to bring back an even bigger villain: Omega. But all these threats are handled with remarkable ease. The Doctor has copied the Rani’s sonic coding, so he’s able to get to the Bone Palace and help Ruby teleport in. Omega ends up being a giant CGI beast who has become the mad god from the legends about him, and he immediately eats the Rani. Mrs. Flood vanishes with the Time Ring, and the Doctor uses the vindicator to force Omega back into “hell.” Meanwhile, Ruby’s empathy helps her disarm an armed Conrad to get to the baby god, which she uses to wish for Conrad’s happiness. I would’ve wished that he felt true remorse, such that he would dedicate the rest of his life to making it up to the communities his world tried to erase and control; he hasn’t grown enough for his happy ending as a cook to feel satisfying or earned.
Ruby also wishes for the end of the wish world, and the Doctor wishes, “No more wishes,” allowing Desiderium to turn himself back into a crying human baby. To the Doctor’s delight, Belinda and Poppy still step out of the Zero Room unharmed. As the Doctor and Belinda start making plans to child-proof the TARDIS and travel the world as a family, Ruby (who also remembered parts of the world when no one else did) watches them pass Poppy’s vest back and forth. In a gorgeous gut punch of a sequence, Ruby realizes the vest is slowly shrinking. Eventually, it disappears, and Poppy is gone — as are her parents’ memories of her.
The Doctor moves on to throwing Belinda’s star certificate into space for the robots from the season premiere to find. He and Belinda literally laugh in Ruby’s face when she tells them they had a child. Maybe it’s because the idea stings since he thinks it’s impossible, but at UNIT, he’s almost condescending when Ruby brings up Poppy again. While UNIT staff can remember other changes, like that teal wasn’t so blue before, no one remembers Poppy. But Ruby reminds the Doctor that he once brought her back after she ceased to exist, and suddenly everyone is thinking about how the Doctor has saved them. “Sometimes I think we’re all your children,” Kate says, abandoning all subtlety.
Now convinced, the Doctor swears to Belinda that he’ll find Poppy. But only a Time Lord’s regeneration energy can shift reality by one degree, so he’s going to give up his life (or at least, this face) for her. “Let’s be honest, I was the best,” he tells a slideshow of his past selves before he’s interrupted by … Jodie Whitaker’s Doctor! It’s a lovely send-off. Thirteen muses that they never really change, but Fifteen proves that’s not true by saying that he loves her. She realizes she should say that to Yaz, but Fifteen tells her she never does. The acting here … whew, the show could’ve done more with both of them.
The Doctor voluntarily regenerates, and the “screen” of the world shatters into pieces before fading to white. He wakes up in a beautiful garden to see Belinda. While Poppy is still her daughter, she’s no longer his. Retroactively, the story changes — in every episode, Belinda tells the Doctor she needs to come back for Poppy. In a touching moment alone with Poppy, the Doctor whispers, “I can’t have children. But if I could, I wish that she was exactly like you.” Belinda says it’s too dangerous to travel with Poppy, but asks if he’ll take her to Neptune once Poppy grows up. She tears up and says she feels like she’s forgotten something, and he says that beautiful things can be forgotten, but still happened somewhere. “One thing remains. I love you,” he tells her. “And I love you, Pops. That will never change.”
I don’t like this resolution for Belinda. To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with being a single mom, and on some level, it makes sense that two seasons of references to babies and family ended with the Doctor helping bring a lost child back to a mother. But because of the order of events that we experienced as viewers, it feels like Belinda was rewritten as a character and never got to fully choose motherhood for herself. (Yes, she asked the Doctor to save Poppy, but that was a child she was told was already hers but that she had forgotten, which feels different to me.) Consider Carla, who chose to add Joe Sunday to the family — we already know she loves kids, and she had no obligation or connection to Desiderium; he could’ve easily been adopted by someone else. Belinda’s retcon feels jarring in contrast.
The version of Belinda who was excited to continue to travel the universe with the Doctor, even when she had Poppy, no longer exists. She has a completely different backstory and a completely human child now. And while that’s supposedly been the “real” her all along, the order of events we experienced as viewers makes her arc feel off. This Belinda doesn’t protest when the Doctor calls her “Miss,” even though a key point of her first adventure was that she didn’t want to be defined by whether she was married or not. This Belinda doesn’t ask follow-ups when the Doctor scans Poppy without asking for permission, even though she once called him out for doing that to her. It doesn’t feel like Belinda even really got to be the main character in her own storyline about motherhood; Ruby was the one who initially remembered Poppy.
As for Fifteen, it’s always hard when a Doctor leaves, but this one particularly stings. On top of the Doctor-lite episodes, Ncuti Gatwa didn’t get the chance to take on the iconic villains he himself wanted to. He goes so quickly that there’s apparently no time to say goodbye to Ruby. He regenerates near Joy the star with the parting words, “This has been an absolute joy.”
Then, he’s replaced by … Billie Piper?! As someone who loves Rose Tyler and the Tenth Doctor, even I feel like I’ve already been pandered to enough. Plus, turning into someone who looks exactly like your ex is bonkers. The credits don’t name her as The Doctor, though, and a press release coyly hints that we don’t know who she is and why she’s back. Maybe this has something to do with her being Bad Wolf, since he aimed his regeneration energy at the TARDIS console? Billie is too talented for me not to enjoy seeing her on screen, and I suspect her return will not last an entire season. But it feels like nostalgia is being used as a crutch, and continuing to look back may limit this show’s ability to move forward.
Cut for Time (Lord)
• So much is left unanswered. Obviously, there’s Billie’s return. But also, why did the Doctor see Susan? Who is the boss that Anita tells the Doctor says hello, and what do they want? Is Rogue, incidentally another person who has mentioned a boss, just … in hell forever now? Where did Mrs. Flood go? Why was she able to break the fourth wall and look at the camera? Who picked up the tooth with the Master in it? If the next season has new mysteries to ponder on top of all of that, I’ll be overwhelmed.
• If we must only cast from the past, what the hell, give me Christopher Eccleston as Billie’s companion. (Just kidding, there’s no way he’d do that.)
• For all his ideas about gender roles, Conrad was happy to be very submissive around his “mistress.” I’d believe you if you told me Steven Moffat ghostwrote that scene.
• Hilarious that someone deemed it more effective for UNIT’s building to rotate than to just have guns on all sides of the building.
• Mrs. Flood’s farewell (“So much for the two Ranis. It’s a good-night from me”) was a reference to The Two Ronnies, a British sketch show. Don’t tell me the bi-generation happened just to set that line up?
• In other Who-niverse news, the trailer for The War Between the Land and the Sea has dropped to tide us over until our next update on the main show.
