Doctor Who – The Interstellar Song Contest

NOTE: There are many speculating “leaks” ahead of the series launch floating around online – they will not be discussed in this review unless they have happened in the show already. If you want to talk about the leaks for future episodes, please use spoilers.

Classic Doctor Who follows up the best episode of its current era with the worst almost immediately. The concept is fun: the Interstellar Song Contest, space Eurovision, broadcast worldwide, digitised Graham Norton, Juno Dawson, author of Her Majesty’s Royal Coven and even the hint at the long-awaited return of Susan, the Doctor’s granddaughter! But it’s surface level, and stripped back it rapidly becomes apparent that there are greater issues at play.

First, let’s talk politics. It’s hard not to, when Eurovision, airing after the episode, featured Israel despite numerous objections and Israel not actually being in Europe. Israel almost won. The themes in this episode are many: capitalist exploitation of a planet to harvest a product, racist attitudes towards an entire species, and the wrath of The Doctor scorned, that none of these things in turn could justify the actions of someone with a heart designed to kill. We’ve seen Dark Doctor moments before, The Waters of Mars, Time Lord Victorious etc. Capaldi threatening to call the Daleks/Cybermen on Me and her hidden street of refugees. But they’ve always had consequences. Not so, with The Interstellar Song Contest.

The Doctor ruthlessly snaps and beats a terrorist kid believing Belinda is dead only to be stopped by her return, and whilst she’s called out The Doctor before, doesn’t this time. She misses him, she’s back with him – they’re together. There’s no reason for The Doctor to not find out about why the Kid did what he did – and given his planet Helios has been destroyed by the corporation, you’d think he’d be more forgiving. Yes, wiping out millions of people is evil and the other end of the extreme – but there feels like there should’ve been a mid point between beating the Kid almost to death and the lengthy revenge.

There’s also the whole allegory for the Hellions as Palestinians, Space Eurovision as their intended target. This is what makes it more insidious, more callous political statement especially when nothing is subverted. The solution to the Hellia/Corporation conflict is to resolve it in song, with Cora singing in her own language about Hellia, which is applauded. It’s a fantastic emotional set-piece of a song but feels very centrist, and it kind of fits in with the themes of “oh you can protest, but don’t get in the way of our singing,” that lets the show continue despite this. Despite a great performance by Miriam-Teak Lee; it feels ham-fisted, overtly centrist. This is a show that once gave us Oxygen, an anti-capitalist masterpiece. It feels like this era is unable to commit to anything – and instead lands firmly in the middle.

Which is a problem. It’s a problem when Doctor Who comes up with an allegory for the Palestinians that makes them from the “Evil Evil Land” but without a real twist that will be subverted. One of them is evil; one of them isn’t – but it’s the freedom fighter that’s presented as evil. It’s the freedom fighter that The Doctor scolds. Rather than relate, emphasise – it’s not The Doctor. Gatwa plays The Doctor brilliantly – he always does – but it feels so out of character it’s hard not to get mad.

Are there any narrative consequences for the evil powerful entity that oppressed these Hellions? No? It just cut to The Doctor and Belinda leaving. It feels insane.

There’s no repercussions for their genocide or their actions against anyone. I kept wondering if I had skipped a bit. It feels abrupt, awkward. Belinda forgives The Doctor too easily and betrays her moral compass. Coupled up with this mess of an episode, it doesn’t do great for her character who had started off so strong. Going straight from this into Andor’s finale, it almost feels unfair. The Interstellar Song Contest is anti-Andor in every sense of the word; and you can’t even use the fact that it’s owned by Disney+ as an excuse because they somehow got away with making Andor on Disney+.

And then we get to the actual Doctor Who-ness of it all. Susan is back! In cameo form. This series is riddled with it; and we have her telling her grandfather to find her as a motivation for The Doctor staying alive. It’s brilliant. It’s a great example of how to use a cameo. Bringing Susan back, finally, in person, after all this time – a highlight of the episode. But you can’t just go “oh it was a good episode because Susan came back.” You also can’t go “oh it was a good episode because the Rani came back”, either – because that was a thing that happened.

We have our answer to Mrs. Flood’s identity and it just felt so anticlimactic to reveal it to two people in the post-credits scene where The Doctor isn’t even there, doesn’t even know. Rani is back; and bi-generated in a scene so clumsily done it feels like it was straight out of Sarah Jane Adventures than what we’ve come to expect from Doctor Who regenerations. If this was modelled after Utopia, they didn’t do Utopia right – the Master’s reveal back then was so much more effective, and deploying two bigenerations in quick succession feels stilted; awkward and forced. Flood sticking around is a welcome one – and the Rani seems surprised by the fact that she bigenerated; but it feels cheap, like Davies doubling down on a concept that felt gimmicky when it first started and worse now when it’s used.

Finally, we have the mystery around Earth and its fate waiting for The Doctor and Belinda. An exploding TARDIS, trapped in a Wish World running into this weekend’s finale. Effective! It remains to be seen whether the fallout of this will be more in line with his other, largely underwhelming finales. It’s a stake-setter, and to see it deployed really has you on edge for next week. The bit with Graham Norton was fun – especially when he dropped that the Earth had been destroyed; a brilliant bit of acting from the talk-show host – but it all feels a bit too little too late.