Doctor Who just smashed Eurovision sparkle into a Die Hard in space hostage crisis, and I’ve got to decide whether this cosmic sing-off hits a perfect 12 points or crashes harder than a confetti cannon in zero G. That reference will make more sense later.

I’m not going to bury the lede. This has been an absolute banger of a season, and this is actually a pretty good episode as well. Very RTD1, like a lot of what we’ve been getting. It was sold as Doctor Who meets Die Hard with Eurovision as the theme, and the Eurovision half is something I’m not super familiar with, so some of the reference was lost on me. I appreciated it nonetheless. I think I liked the Graham Norton cameo a little better, because at least I know who that is.

Big spoilers from here. I spoiler talk things.

The TARDIS lands on Harmony Arena during the 803rd Interstellar Song Contest, which I think is pretty cool, hosted by the permanently cryo-frozen Rylan Clark. Graham Norton shows up playing a hologram of himself. Then two Hellion activists named Kid and Wynn (it’s funny, they’re called Hellions, and they have these little horn things on their heads) hijack the broadcast and vent 100,000 fans into space. Yes, that happens. And then they rig a delta wave, tell me if you remember that name, to kill roughly three trillion viewers watching across the known universe.

The Doctor and Belinda get separated and each team up with different stranded crew members while they try to reverse the mavity shield and revive the audience. I love that running gag, and I got a real kick out of it here too.

I Wrote This With the Episode Still Warm

I need to preface this up front. I liked the episode a lot. It was a lot of fun, it reminded me of a whole bunch of different Russell T Davies Doctor Who, and it fits perfectly well in the mix of everything this season. I probably should’ve waited to record this, but I’d just finished watching it and my thoughts were all very fresh.

The writer, Juno Dawson, is one of us. A younger fan who’s been watching since the reboot started and has really been into all of it. She marries that campy Eurovision glitz to disaster movie stakes, and the BBC press notes say Russell pitched it as Eurovision meets Die Hard. Okay. Sure. I guess I can kind of see that comparison.

What I know about Eurovision comes from the movie and from whatever hits my feed that time of year, so I know the idea of it. I didn’t know who Rylan was. Going in he was some guy with a beard and a crushed velvet suit. I looked him up while I was prepping, because I wanted to understand why that casting mattered.

The Driver Who Can’t Shift Gears

My big criticism right out of the gate is the tonal whiplash. One minute you’ve got a confetti rocket gag, the Doctor seriously using a confetti cannon to fly through space, and it saves his life. The next minute you’ve got on-screen genocide. It created what I think we as critics call a land of contrasts.

I was fine being in the car for the ride. No issue. But you know when you’re riding with somebody and all of a sudden they don’t quite know how to shift gears? You get that constant lurch, and you’re thrown back and forth. That’s what I was feeling. Tossed to and fro, and I’ve been on the fun version of that ride with roller coaster Doctor Who before. This was the other kind.

A lot of callbacks is what bogs it down for me too. I love that Rylan and Norton embraced their meta casting, and Graham Norton got the really cool plot twist reveal about what happened to Earth. I’m sitting there wondering, is the universe cracked again? What’s the deal? It felt very much like that moment where they realize the Earth has been destroyed, and I’m going, where’s River? Where’s River? This season has felt, wonderfully so, like let’s play the hits. I said that last week. I’m okay with it, I really am, because it’s fan service I like and I’m down for it.

There’s the Range

Mid-episode you get this vision of an aged woman telling him to go back. Go back, grandfather. That’s Susan Foreman, the Doctor’s granddaughter, the one who was left behind. They’ve been alluding to her returning for some time now, and I’ll come back to her.

Because right after that is where the Doctor turns, and we get to see Angry Doctor.

We’d never seen Ncuti Gatwa’s version of that. David Tennant was Angry Doctor all the time. Matt Smith pulled it off a few times. Peter Capaldi was perpetually an angry Doctor. Gatwa flips from joyous to fangirling to wrathful Time Lord and it all happens very fast, and the ice in my heart monologue landed so hard. I don’t necessarily know that it rivals the scale model of war speech, or Matt Smith’s take it all, baby, or any of several that David Tennant did. But it’s good, and mainly it’s good because it’s us seeing the Doctor be angry, and we hadn’t seen that from Fifteen. I liked it because I went, oh god, there it is. There’s that range.

I’ve jokingly said in the past that the selling moment for Matt Smith, for me, was when he faces off with the Atraxi in “The Eleventh Hour.” The moment I bought Peter Capaldi’s Doctor was “Listen,” mainly because I feel like that episode was written for him. Same thing here.

And I’ll be honest about where I was before this. To this point I’ve kind of thought Gatwa’s Doctor was a little bit vapid. A little surface. He’d cry at the drop of a hat for almost anything. This was also the first episode that didn’t have some sort of vengeful god angle, and I was like, hey, we’re back to sci-fi Doctor Who. Okay, cool. What’s going on?

I know I’m being harsh as a critic. I did truly enjoy the episode. I really did.

Belinda is the source of empathy. She’s the emotional anchor of this episode without a doubt.

At the very end she comes in while he’s essentially torturing the bad guy with what looks like a Nintendo Power Glove. I say villain, and I’m ambiguous on him. Obviously tossing everyone into space was a bad sign, and planning to kill three trillion people, bad thing also. But they give him the backstory and I’m supposed to be sympathetic.

She confronts him, and it’s funny. He behaves as if he got caught. He looks like he’s got his hand caught in the cookie jar. I think I understand why it went that way, because the Doctor has always been one of those people who gets real vengeful and angry and then somebody reels him back. He tells Belinda later that he lost all his people, and seeing that many people thrown into space was like watching his people die.

Is Everything a Message?

Believe it or not, I’ve been rewatching this season. I haven’t rewatched anything from season one, but I went back to episode one of this season and I’ve watched each of them several times. I’ve enjoyed the heck out of it. And it’s becoming more evident to me that there’s messaging in here. It hasn’t bothered me, because it’s been really messy, and this episode’s no different.

Kid’s revenge plot springs from the corporation, which is Doctor Who parlance for the government, I guess, and the corporation’s exploitation of his home world’s poppy crops. I guess that’s supposed to be an allegory for colonial resource theft. Maybe. The episode interrogates xenophobia, media spectacle, and whether extremist violence can ever truly raise awareness. At least those are the ideas I was able to glean from it.

Once you realize there’s messaging going on, you stop and you go, well, is it everywhere? Is everything a message? I don’t know. I could be 100% wrong, none of those things could be real, and the actual message may be lost on me.

Susan, and a Main Plot That Went Blurry

Susan Foreman in the vision is a tease, and my reaction was kind of okay, fine, whatever.

I needed to gauge my pulse on this one, so I went looking at what other people were saying. Printed reviews, actual reviews reviews, and then the social threads. The thing I noticed is that there are people who believe the whole Susan Foreman idea hijacked the focus from the main plot.

I think the main plot was blurry enough that it let that happen. Susan didn’t take anything away from it. The main plot wasn’t strong enough to hold our attention in the first place.

Stop Writing a Better Episode

There’s a review channel I love. They’re really good. I feel like they’ve been a little overcritical this season, and that’s okay. Just in case this somehow gets back to you guys, I love you.

I was setting things up to record this when I heard them say the episode should’ve leaned heavier into the Die Hard of it all. I stopped, rushed over, paused the video and rewound a bit, like, did I hear that right? And what I said to myself was: stop writing a better episode, guys. Legit, knock it off. Because they totally were. Their version was the Doctor relaxing, laying back, putting his feet up, taking his shoes off, and then everything goes wrong.

Dude. Gatwa running around barefoot. Brilliant.

As much as people might think that tainted my opinion, no. I enjoyed the episode and I had fun with it. But they’re right, and the more I think about it, if you really wanted to sell me on the Die Hard aspect, do that. Because let’s be real, there wasn’t much Die Harding going on. Nobody was in ventilation shafts. Nobody had to sneak around anywhere. Everybody was pretty much where they were supposed to be. You had Belinda and the Doctor in what I honestly think was the same hallway, just different sides of it, redressed. I could be right, I could be wrong, especially the way production schedules work.

The Rani, and Why I’ve Got Nothing

Then there’s the post-credits stinger. Mrs. Flood bigenerates into the Rani, finally unmasking her season-long mystery.

Really, I’ve got nothing. Sure. It’s a thing. It’s a thing that happened.

It’s a classic villain return and it thrilled a lot of longtime fans. I didn’t mind it. The problem is where I came in. I was into Doctor Who at several points when the Master was a thing, so when you got the Master reveal in the reboot, that meant something to me. I saw the Daleks, so the first time you hear “exterminate,” I’m like, oh my god, it’s wonderful. Same with the Cybermen. I saw classic Who in those moments, so from 2005 on I was excited when certain things happened.

I wasn’t that big a fan, though. I never saw Sutekh. I never saw the Toymaker. So when those reveals happened, I thought, cool, great new character. Same thing here. I knew the Rani was a thing, but she means nothing to me. You’d think even in context I could find something to grab onto, because I love this era and I love Russell’s work. The way they handled Mrs. Flood just didn’t do anything for me.

And now you’ve reintroduced bigeneration. So is everyone going to bigenerate moving forward? Is this a product of something that’s happened? Is it left over from the Flux? Why is this happening? They don’t make it clear in any way, shape or form.

I had a theory for the Doctor. I figured Fourteen bigenerated into Fifteen because Fourteen was going through something of an existential crisis. Thirteen had just dealt with the Master forcing a regeneration on her and putting his face on the whole thing, then she’s suddenly thrust back into her own body, and now you’re going to regenerate, and poof. Okay. I can follow that logic somewhat. I don’t understand why the Rani bigenerated. No clue. I also don’t know the actress playing the new Rani. Rani Prime, I guess we’ll call her. I didn’t care enough, and the whole thing felt really rushed and visually flat.

The Crowd Goes Up

Direction and production are great. I looked him up: Ben A. Williams, who stages the zero G crowd ejection, and it was chillingly beautiful. It starts in the Doctor’s periphery, off to the side, and you see them begin to rise up. Then they cut back to that real spectacular wide that shows the giant arms of the station, the Deep Space Nine wings of the thing, and you see everything. I looked over, and I wasn’t the only one in the room with my mouth hanging open.

Murray Gold’s score was okay. It smartly weaves what I assume is Eurovision bop music in with the tenseness, and I thought it worked, especially during the hostage beats. There’s been no official release yet, but the BBC press kit I checked says these are original songs. Even Murray (because we’re on a first name basis) has said they’ve got a backlog and they’re working on more releases. He just doesn’t know what or when.

Reviews range from campy romp to a rare misfire weighed down by theme overload. I’d lean a little toward the second, but it was still fun. I’m not as cautious as a lot of other critics. I do feel like there were big ideas, and everything feels overstuffed. As my rewatch of this season continues, this will probably be the one I skip. Or maybe I don’t skip it. We’ll see, because there are things I liked about it and I’ll probably end up not holding too much against it.

Digital Spy hyped the crossover as the wildest episode of all, and I’m just like, really, guys? Wildest? Come on. I didn’t mind any of those elements. I feel like they missold it a little bit, and it was really fast on the gears.

The Verdict

Doctor Who Season 2 Episode 6, “The Interstellar Song Contest,” lands at about an 8 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index, and that’s an averaged score.

For the craftsmanship, the high octane spectacle and the bold themes, it gets a 9 out of 10. I didn’t think it was bad acting, either. Some people have pointed out that everybody sounded like they were speaking stiff dialogue, and I always chalk a lot of that up to the TARDIS translation matrix. I swear it sounds stupid and it sounds like an excuse, but I never really sit there and go, oh, that sucks. I wasn’t a Chibnall fan, and most of the Thirteenth Doctor’s dialogue always felt clunky to me, like they had to overexplain everything. This didn’t hit me that way.

Then the Mrs. Flood reveal happens. Conceptually, fine. I’m willing to concede that conceptually it’s cool, and Russell’s reveals have always been some variation of that. But it was a really clunky delivery, there was zero buildup, and I just didn’t care. 6 out of 10 for that.

Averaged, but weighted to story impact, that’s about an 8, with a footnote. That reveal needs to sing louder next time.

Which one hit you harder, the Doctor’s vengeful rage or the Rani? And if it was the Rani, genuinely sell me on why she matters, because I didn’t know much about her before this other than that she existed. Were you singing along, or was it a sour note? The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.