“Wild Blue Yonder” is about as RTD as Doctor Who can possibly get, and it’s immensely better than last week’s special in terms of how the story’s written. This was actually good writing, and you can always tell the difference when it’s really good writing.
Mrs. Know-It-All joined me for this one, and her first reaction out of the gate was that she loved it and had nothing bad to say. I enjoyed the heck out of it too. We’re going through the whole episode, so everything’s spoiled from here on.
Mavity, and a TARDIS That Runs Away
You get a quirky little opening first. The very first place the TARDIS accidentally stumbles to, for whatever crazy reason, is Isaac Newton, and specifically the apple tree above his head. They mess up the word, so it comes out mavity instead of gravity, and they come back to it later too. It’s a piece of ridiculousness that felt very RTD in terms of how he’s done things in the past.
Then the episode itself starts. The TARDIS slams into a ship of some kind and has essentially torn itself apart, so the Doctor puts it into repair mode, and suddenly it disappears. He explains to Donna that there’s a system on board called the HADS, the Hostile Action Displacement System. If the TARDIS is in danger it goes away, and it comes back when the danger has passed.
That’s the classic moment you saw in the trailer, when Donna says there’s something on this ship that’s so bad the TARDIS ran away. I love Donna. She’s the best.
So they go out to figure out what the problem is. There’s a long hallway, and way down it there’s what looks like a little teeny robot. He’s actually pretty big, he just looks small from that far. The ship says a thing, everything starts reconfiguring, and the robot takes one step. The Doctor, because he knows everything about everywhere, finds a little trolley they can ride. Donna jumps in the driver’s seat and whizzes them down to what I assume is the bridge.
This is the first time I can remember this happening. The TARDIS is gone, so the Doctor can’t read anything, because apparently the translation has to do with the TARDIS being there. I was confused by that. I always thought he and the TARDIS were linked, and that as long as he’s around it just works. But he apparently speaks billions of languages, and as Mrs. Know-It-All pointed out, he was very precise about the number.
Donna Wants to Go Home
I like that Donna, in this early part, is very worried about home. It reminds me of Martha. The first time Donna ran into her, back in the Sontaran episodes, Martha gave her kind of a friendly warning. Not a bad warning. More like, hey, there are things, you have to be careful, and you always want to have people to come home to. Now Donna’s the one saying she’s got her daughter to get back to.
The Doctor finds another area with what look like control chips, tells Donna to sit there and move them, and goes to check something else. So Donna’s in one room and the Doctor’s in another. Then it gets cold, the way we’ve seen in horror movies with ghosts, the whole breath in front of your face thing.
The Doctor comes back into Donna’s room, and she starts telling him how she imagines it would go if they never make it back. People going on with their lives. How long it would be. She gets to her grandfather and says if she knows him, he’ll just sit there in a chair, waiting, saying they’re going to come back, I’m going to wait right here. It was really heartfelt.
And then the Doctor says, “My arms are too long.”
She thinks it’s some weird alien spaceman jargon, a figure of speech, another thing he came back with fifteen years later.
The Flux Is Still Canon
We cut to where the Doctor had actually gone, and he’s still there doing his thing. Donna walks in and starts asking him about everything that’s happened to him. Where have you been. She says she saw things. She saw the Flux.
It’s the very first time we get a reference to Jodie Whittaker’s era. For those of you at home who thought they’d just brush her era out of the way, they didn’t. She asks him, don’t you want to go home too, and he says it’s got complicated. She says, but you don’t know where your home is. Because the Doctor doesn’t know where home is now. We have the new origin for the Doctor, based in the Timeless Child.
Good, bad or indifferent, whatever your beliefs are, it doesn’t matter to me. At the end of the day Doctor Who’s a story. I exist and I enjoy my fandom here in the present, however that’s presented.
Then she says something similar to what the other one said. My arm is too long. And that’s where both of them start to realize this isn’t who they think it is.
The Ones With the Long Arms
The real Doctor and the real Donna both run out and end up facing each other, with the long-armed ones behind them. Clearly these entities, whatever they are, are latching on to them and reading their minds somehow. They know what the two of them know.
So they run. These things get bigger and start looking like monsters, running down the hall with massive sides to them, until they’ve finally grown too big for the space. The Doctor and Donna head up a little stairway, the ship shifts again, and we cut back to the robot taking another step. The walls move. The Doctor slides down one chute and Donna slides down a different one, into different hallways.
Both of them get the cold again, so they already know what that could mean. Both of them break through into a room and find another version of the other one waiting. We know who’s who as the audience because of where they are, but the new versions are really convincing. The fake Doctor takes his tie off and he’s talking really well.
Donna was already starting to be suspicious, and the tie is what does it. Once it’s away from him, it’s gone. That’s how she knows it isn’t him.
On the other side, the other Donna manages to convince the real Doctor that it’s her. Is that you? Yes, I missed you. They go to hug, and just as they do she can’t keep it up, and she half melts. Literally. Her shoes are partially sticking up out of the puddle.
Everybody runs, and this time all four of them end up in the same room from different corridors and doors. The Doctor does some mental math, deduces a few things, the two real ones work out who each other is, and they put a big glass door between themselves and the other two.
A Bottle Episode With Disney Money
This is when the real acting begins. The whole episode is basically a giant bottle episode. The only people in it are the Doctor and Donna, and the only other thing is that robot.
From what I can see, the only physical sets were the room they crashed in, the gangplank where they first walk out of that room, the bridge, the rooms off the bridge and the bits of the two hallways they got split into. The rest of that corridor I believe is the volume, or a volume of some kind. I don’t think it’s green screen, because it looks way better than green screen. That’s the Disney money. It still has a little of the uncanny valley to it. It looks a hair too far, a little bit wrong.
And imagine it as a fan. You know how you picture your favorite Tennant episode? Now he gets to act against himself. He gets to be the doppelganger Doctor and the real Doctor in the same scene, and it’s amazing.
Mrs. Know-It-All loved the episode, and said she doesn’t know if she’d have liked it as much if Donna hadn’t been a smart butt to herself the whole way through.
What Came From the Nothing
There’s a really wonderful moment where the Doctor says he wants to talk to it. The entity. He knows for a fact it’s a fake, so he wants to know why it’s doing this.
What he gets out of it is that it came from the nothing. They’re at the edge of creation, the edge of the universe. There’s nothing past that, no stars. It’s the classic I looked out into the darkness and the darkness looked back. These things come from that, and they could sense us. What reached them from our universe was war, negativity, bloodlust, all these horrible emotions of ours. Donna makes a joke at one point, and the other one comes back with: love letters don’t travel that far.
The trick is how the doppelgangers work. To speed up the process of assimilating Donna and the Doctor, so they can be better copies, they need them to think. So they make them panic, because panic raises your adrenaline and gets your brain moving fast. And the Doctor can’t help himself. He’s never found a puzzle in life he didn’t want to figure out.
Then there’s clanking and thunking, and outside the ship they see a horse-faced alien. Basically they stuck a horse skull inside a humanoid space suit.
When the Doctor was working out the language earlier, he saw on the computer that three years ago the airlock opened, closed, and never opened again. Donna latched on to that. She kept trying to work out what it meant, and figured maybe that was these creatures coming in.
It was the opposite. The captain left the ship. Once she worked out what was going on, rather than let these creatures assimilate her, learn how to fly the ship and leave, she did the best thing she could, which was to set an incredibly slow countdown. The alien words you keep hearing are numbers. That little robot has had three years to walk down a long corridor and push a button. It’s so slow, with such a simple mind, that the doppelgangers couldn’t work it out.
RTD and the Big Ideas
To me this has gleanings of “Utopia” and some of those other episodes from when he was doing the David Tennant Doctor. RTD is really good at these big ideas. What’s actually past the universe? In Torchwood they explore death. Is it darkness, is it nothing, do you cease to exist? This is the same kind of idea: beyond the edge of the universe there’s something, but what is it? I always love the big head games RTD plays, because they work so well in stories like this.
It had shades of earlier RTD in the way I like best, which is the creepy way. It had shades of “are you my mommy.” It had shades of “Blink.” I know those episodes were written by different writers, but it felt like that era, and it felt really good.
Nobody had a soapbox to stand on, either. I didn’t have a problem with last week, even the line at the end, which felt a little counterproductive to the story they’d been telling the rest of the way. But this one really touched home with all the things I love about a good creepy RTD episode.
Two Doctors, Two Donnas, One Bomb
They realize the whole place is a bomb. The entire time they’ve been talking, the doppelgangers have been working the computers and the doors, and the Doctor’s been doing the same thing, trying to counter them.
Now that everybody knows what it is, there’s nothing left to hide. The Doctor explains to Donna that they have to speed the countdown up, because these things can’t be allowed to leave and this ship can’t be allowed to exist anymore. Donna’s already at what about my family, and he’s telling her he’s really sorry and they’ll try.
The door opens and it’s literally two Doctors and two Donnas chasing each other. It’s so great, especially because Donna catches herself and has a knock-down, drag-out fight with herself. She smacks herself and says how good it feels. It’s therapeutic.
The other doppelganger goes down on all fours and starts running, very animal-like. Then the Doctor realizes that if the bomb is about to do its thing, the threat is technically over, and the TARDIS can show up. That’s what it does. That’s the connection Mrs. Know-It-All was talking about earlier. Translator or not, they really are one. He said it last episode: the TARDIS is his oldest friend.
He gets to the two Donnas, has to work it out quickly, and takes the wrong one. Mrs. Know-It-All thinks he did it on purpose. Once they’re inside, the TARDIS measures her arms and he knows immediately. He hits an ejector, the platform pops up and kicks her out, and the real Donna runs up and gets in just as the whole thing blows.
Fire, and Fifteen Years
They take a minute to take stock. The Doctor asks Donna whether she remembers anything from when she was the Doctor Donna. She says no. He tells her the other Donna knew some things, which means she must have something in there. Her answer is that maybe its big alien brain was just able to make more sense of it. Every time she thinks about that time, all she sees is fire.
Then she turns it on him. What happened during those fifteen years, which we know was way more than that for him? He says a lot. She asks if he’s okay, and he says well, yeah. She knows. You can tell, because there’s a shorthand between the two of them, both the actors and the characters.
Mrs. Know-It-All pointed out the mannerisms, and I noticed it too. He’s doing things that Matt Smith’s Doctor would’ve done, that Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor would’ve done, that Peter Capaldi’s Doctor would’ve done. You see little glimpses of them, because he’s lived those three lives already.
Tennant’s Doctor the first time around was never overly affectionate. He’d hug, of course. The Doctors have always hugged in bad situations. But the moment Donna starts panicking and you see David Tennant grab her hands, kiss them, and tell her it’s going to be okay, that felt very Matt Smith. Hence why I decided to wear my Matt Smith today. I like that he’s being informed by more of those lives.
I don’t know if this next part was on purpose, but it worked. The Flux destroyed a good segment of the universe, if not half of it, and that was never fixed. That means the Doctor lives in a universe where an enemy that was after him ravaged it. And who bears the weight of something better than David Tennant? When he played the Doctor carrying the Time War, you saw it. This just gives him a new weight to carry, and it fits on his shoulders.
If Ncuti Gatwa gets to be some variation of the Doctor recovering from that and becoming more like the Doctor we’ve known, I’m happy with that too.
He Was Right Where She Said He’d Be
They land right where they were, only it’s a couple of days later. And who’s outside the door? Her grandfather, sitting there waiting, right where she said he’d be. Well, where the other her said it, whatever.
She can’t believe he came to greet them. He says oh no, I knew you’d save us. Donna doesn’t realize they’re a couple of days behind. The Doctor does, and he doesn’t get a chance to tell her. There’s trouble, people are fighting in the streets, and I believe that rolls us right into the next episode.
Next Week: The Toymaker
I’ve already seen the trailer for next week. It was real short, more of a tease. I know for a fact we’re getting the Toymaker. Then you see the Doctor standing there starting to glow, so you know he’s going to regenerate, and they cut to Ncuti Gatwa standing in the current TARDIS.
It could go one of two ways. He could regenerate at the end of the episode, which is usually how it happens. The regeneration usually isn’t a cliffhanger in itself. And we know that right afterwards we’re getting an episode called Ruby Road, or something on Ruby Road, which is one of Gatwa’s first and where he meets his companion.
But I lean the other way. I think about two thirds of the way through they’re going to do something they don’t normally do, which is a regeneration mid-episode, and then we’ll see Gatwa finish it out. Mrs. Know-It-All doesn’t like that idea. We’d probably also get that moment we speculated about last week, where he invites Donna along and her husband’s not sure.
I want to see a little more of Rose before everything turns over completely. So does Mrs. Know-It-All. Bring her along, even just for a little bit. If they’re going up against the Toymaker, it wouldn’t surprise me if Rose is in it, because Rose has all those toy animals, and there’s the buyer in Dubai who wants to buy all the toys. It sort of sets itself up.
The Verdict
Doctor Who’s “Wild Blue Yonder” lands at an 8.5 out of 10 on the Know-It-All Index.
Mrs. Know-It-All’s first thought was an eight, and that’s a solid eight. I went one better. I thought it was an excellent episode when it comes to being an RTD episode, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was a closed episode on a bottle set, so we didn’t see a lot, and it didn’t need more than two actors and one very slow robot.
I’m excited to see what happens, because the Toymaker’s coming.
What did you think of the episode, and where do you think the regeneration lands next week? Speculate away. The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.
