Doctor Who wins the fictional battle but loses The Reality War.
So, in the end, Russell T Davies returned, not to save Doctor Who but to bury it beneath an avalanche of superficial fan service, rip-offs of homages to better franchises (Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Avengers: Endgame), sloppy plotting and wasted Disney Dollars. Wielding canon like Trump wields tariffs, he flipped and flopped, teased and turned, promised big things and chickened out, delivering little but a eulogy for ambition that overreached the plotting. Moments were sublime, performances terrific but the era was a constant conspiracy to ensure the whole was always less than the sum of its parts. Curating a series like Doctor Who to deliver meme-able moments and social media buzz at the expense of coherent and cohesive plotting will forever mark this as one of the series’ nadirs. That it comes so soon after Chibnall’s era is what makes everything in The Reality War feel so bleakly existential for a series whose big “glimpse at what’s next” amounts to a damp Torchwood tribute act.
After last week’s ersatz WandaVision knock-off (Wonder-Vision?), this week we get RTD’s Endgame only this time, the moment doesn’t appear to have been prepared for at all. When we last saw The Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa), he was plummeting towards the Underverse as reality itself crumbled around him. And, indeed, that’s where we pick up with him in The Reality War but fear not, for his descent into oblivion is cut short thanks to a deus exit machina in the form of Anita (Steph de Whalley) former manager of the Sandringham Hotel, London and – crucially – current manager of The Time Hotel, 4204, a trans-temporal establishment that, understandably, has been finding Earth’s destruction on May 24th 2025 somewhat disruptive to its business operations. Safe in The Time Hotel’s omni-dimensional corridors, The Doctor learns the Ranis (Archie Punjabi, Anita Dobson) have put Earth, under Conrad Clark’s wish, into a time loop, resetting it each time reality collapses – something that went entirely unmentioned during last week’s breathless “final” countdown to midnight. Use the Time Hotel’s conveniently concentrated doors, The Doctor and Anita restore the flow of normal time and memories to Belinda (Varada Sethu) and everyone at UNIT HQ, allowing Kate Lethbridge-Stewart (Jemma Redgrave) to restore Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson) and other UNIT operatives – including Mel Bush (Bonnie Langford) and Shirley Bingham (Shirley Bingham) – to orthodox reality via implanted chips. Confronting the Ranis in the Bone Palace, the Doctor uncovers their plan to bring Omega back into the universe and use him as a gene bank to create a new race of Time Lords under their rule.
The Reality War is one of those specially extended episodes that Doctor Who indulges in from time to time but it really doesn’t spend its extra minutes well. In fact, by the time it’s over, it starts to look very much like the extra minutes were needed to tack on a clumsy and contrived coda to accommodate the sudden change in production plans. But, like one of Davies’ gyroscopically meandering plots, I’m getting ahead of myself.
The immediate unwinding of the cliffhanger’s peril is a Doctor Who tradition as old as time itself, but here there’s a fundamental retconning of what’s going on that immediately sticks in the throat. As Wish World ends, it’s made pretty bloody clear that this is it, this is the moment that reality will shatter and Omega will rise. Only apparently, it’s not. No, apparently every time-looped May 24th is just another chance for The Two Ranis to get a bit closer to figuring out where Omega actually is, although why they need to know precisely where he is when they’ve already built a ready to use Omega door is anyone’s guess.
This screeching handbrake turn plotting does at least buy time for the Doctor to run around a bunch of locations, visiting with all of the returning and recurring characters that are kept hanging around for very little reason apart from the fact their presence gives the impression that something more momentous and significant is happening than it actually is. It also gives a larger on-screen audience to react incredulously to the out-of-nowhere idea that Poppy (Sienna-Robyn Mavanga-Phipps) is genuinely the biological daughter of The Doctor (a Time Lord) and Belinda Chandra (a human), and not just one of Conrad’s Reformist wish fulfilments. Their having such doubts in the face of the Doctor’s insistence is a strange narrative choice given that the episode is really, really insistent that you buy into the idea that Poppy is legitimately The Doctor’s daughter – despite nothing in the preceding episode or, indeed, this episode so far to corroborate or validate that. It also leads directly to one of the most jaw-droppingly inexplicable moments in Doctor Who’s 60+ year history when the current companion is literally placed in a box to sit out the whole of the final battle, worse even that Nyssa snoozing her way through the duration of Kinda. And it’s still not the worst thing that happens to Belinda before The Reality War is over.
The out-of-the-blue assertion that Poppy is real did raise the possibility that RTD was channelling his inner Chibnall and setting out to finally explain “the granddaughter”, linking perhaps to the reappearance of Susan (Carole Ann Ford) in The Intergalactic Song Contest but no, you can forget anything even remotely that coherent – although I am almost certain there was at one stage an alternative end to this episode and series that would have seen Susan return as a tease into the following season – an ending that wouldn’t have featured the stunt that the broadcast version did. As it is, Susan’s appearance amounts to precisely nothing. She’s not even mentioned in relation to the Doctor having children – real or otherwise.
Anyway, back to RTD’s Endgame and, if you’ve been keeping up, you’ll have figured out by now that Poppy is Morgan Stark – like Iron Man, The Doctor is unwilling to restore reality to what it should always have been if it means losing his “daughter” – and the little baby god Desiderium is the Infinity Gauntlet – whoever’s left holding the baby, shapes reality.
With The Doctor occupied in a game of wits with The Ranis, and UNIT HQ engaged in a pointlessly bombastic SFX battle with the arbitrary giant skeleton monsters that’s neither big, clever nor particularly Doctor Who (it’s a bit Stargate Atlantis, if anything) it’s left to Ruby Sunday, and her 73 Yards-fuelled ability to remember multiple timelines to confront her gaslighting ex, Conrad. That Conrad’s character ends up being rooted in daddy issues makes sense. After all that’s how the real world’s worst people became who they are. You know who I mean. Ones orange, one’s South African. They’re both awful.
I did think at the time that Conrad’s confrontation with the Doctor felt curiously underplayed, to set up his animus against the Doctor in Wish World/ The Reality War as it turns out – and his confrontation with Ruby likewise fails to properly come to a boil. At least Ruby’s decision to defeat him by giving him happiness is peak Doctor Who – a welcome island of genuine Whovian philosophy in an otherwise barren ocean of shallow storytelling, and perhaps more Doctor-ish than anything Ncuti Gatwa gets to do in this hastily re-engineered swansong.
But what of Omega, you ask? What indeed! Omega, as we’ve established, only really comes out for the early big decade anniversaries. He was there for the 10th; he was back for the 20th (even if he did end up getting upstaged by Rassilon in the end). He hard-passed on the 25th anniversary but did at least send his Hand as a token gesture. Of course he was going to come back now, on the 20th anniversary, give or take a few months, of the revival of Doctor Who. And what a comeback it is, as in “What was the point of that”? For all the build-up, all the pre-match hype and near constant hagiography from The Ranis, Omega is the big bad that does very little. Essentially, he pops out looking like a dusty grey version of Alien Resurrection’s Child, digitally gross and weightlessly CGI, gobbles up one of the Ranis and then gets proton-packed back into his hellmouth by the Doctor with almost the same sense of anticlimax that saw The Mayor from Season 3 of Buffy The Vampire Slayer vanquished by a school-destroying IED (not the first time RTD has cribbed from Buffy for a season finale – see Last Of The Time Lords’ direct lift from Buffy Season 4’s Primeval).
With Omega so easily vanquished (or should I say vindicated?) and the remaining Rani disappearing with a “goodnight from me”, there’s not much else for The Reality War to do, except there’s still about twenty minutes to go. You might think that’s not a good sign. And you’d be right.
Firstly, the Doctor uses Desiderium to wish for no more wishes (using the stones to destroy the stones), rendering the tiny tot a mere motherless mortal. Good job, then, that Ruby’s mum is a serial fosterer, providing a convenient place to dump a child that was trafficked from Bavaria 1865. At least the Avengers had the decency to put their infinity stones back where they were meant to be. But we’re still not done, because Belinda and Poppy emerge from the box and have survived the dismantling of Conrad’s Faragian fantasyland. Hooray! Except not, because – in the finale’s only genuinely emotionally potent scene – as The Doctor and Belinda discuss life in the TARDIS with a toddler, folding baby clothes that get smaller and smaller with each handover, Poppy fades from reality and the Doctor and Belinda are back to their old selves.
Never fear, though, because arch-timeline rememberer Ruby is here and by sheer force of nagging she manages to convince the Doctor and Belinda that they had a baby. Then again, Ruby’s vaunted recollection of the different universe doesn’t apparently extend to her recognising that the wig she’s wearing for the reshoots doesn’t remotely match the hair she had during principal photography, or that she – and several other cast members – look markedly different than they did moments ago. But, inspired by Ruby’s nagging, the Doctor resolves to adjust reality one more time and leaps into the TARDIS without even bidding her – or any of his other friends – farewell.
In the TARDIS, his scheme becomes clear. He intends to force a regeneration and channel the energy into the time vortex via the TARDIS console to will a universe with Poppy into existence, a scheme so dangerous that even a former incarnation (Jodie Whittaker, picking up her Doctor like she never left) can’t talk him out of it. It works, of course, in a manner of speaking. And that manner of speaking is that it delivers the darkest, most horrific act of the Doctor’s life – and he fought, lest we forget, in the Time War.
The Doctor’s forced regeneration succeeds in altering reality, alright. It alters it so that Belinda gets a baby and a baby daddy she never had forced upon her, pretty much without consent. There’s just no getting away from the fact the Doctor sacrifices his life to make sure Belinda gets trapped for the rest of her life into the exact kind of existence that Conrad was wishing upon everyone else and they’d spent the past two episodes fighting to escape from. It’s a grotesque betrayal beyond anything The Rani, The Master or any of the Doctor’s foes have committed.
It’s a sour note to end an experimental era which must surely be acknowledged to have failed. The eight episode runs ill-suited a storytelling pace and approach that remained rooted in 10+ stories a season and swapping out subtlety and storytelling skill for in-your-face activism has harmed as much as it’s helped. I feel sorry that Gatwa was forced onto the front lines of a culture war counter-attack that Russell felt he needed to launch after the reception that greeted Whittaker’s (whose appearance here is more a statement of solidarity than continuity – although the gag about it usually being the other bloke is fun) poorly realised era. Davies would do well to harken to the newly-hatched 10th Doctor’s words that brought down Harriet Jones, Prime Minister. When it comes to showrunning Doctor Who, don’t you think he looks tired?
So farewell, then, Ncuti Gatwa. Fifteenth Doctor, we hardly knew ye. Never faced the Daleks, never faced the Cybermen, never faced any of the iconic villains, except for the ones RTD raided the back catalogue for, retconned almost to the point of being unrecognisable and wheeled out for five minutes before chucking them aside with ridiculous ease. I don’t think I’ve ever felt this betrayed by an actor’s decision to relinquish the role. The fifteenth Doctor has undeniably gone long before his time was up, becoming, if you like, the anti-David Tennant. It’s a shame. It’s a waste. It’s maybe even an outrage.
Of course, Doctor Who will return eventually (whether or not in the form of Billie Piper remains to be seen but I’m sure we’re all excited to see yet another run at the “why this face?” plot after having had it twice already in the past four incarnations. Makes you long for the Sixth Doctor giving absolutely no shits that he looks quite a lot like Commander Maxil). It’s a series that managed to get rebooted when reboots weren’t even a thing. Everything gets rebooted nowadays, sometimes before the previous version has even finished, so a show as versatile and popular as Doctor Who won’t stay dormant for long (in the timey-wimey sense of the word) but still. All the promise. All the potential. All the excitement and good will. All the resources. Spaffed up the TARDIS wall with all the care and dexterity of a Slitheen exhaust fart, leaving the series broken and bereft of direction. If you need me, I’ll be sulking in the Zero Room for the foreseeable future.
