The last two seasons of Doctor Who were intended to be an accessible introduction to the franchise for new fans. With a new Doctor, a higher production budget courtesy of Disney+, and the return of beloved showrunner Russell T. Davies, this current stint of the program had everything going for it to take the show to new heights after years of declining ratings. Longtime fans of the show had hoped this would be a return to form after Chris Chibnall’s disastrous tenure in charge, but whilst the previous season is enjoyable in spite of glaring flaws, this new season has proven that the program needs some time off and a complete creative overhaul from top to bottom.

Unfortunately, the season kicks off with one of the worst episodes Davies has ever written. “The Robot Revolution” begins by following the new companion, Belinda Chandra, an ordinary nurse living on Earth who is kidnapped by robots belonging to an alien planet humorously named “Missbelindachandra One”. The robots claim she is the queen of the planet and forcefully install her as such under the command of a mysterious entity. A later twist reveals that this entity is actually Belinda’s ex-boyfriend, who she had broken up with due to his obsessive and controlling behaviour. The episode is upfront about it being a takedown of incel culture, but the twist (and the episode as a whole) is handled with such a lack of dramatic weight that it is a baffling choice as the introduction of the new companion. Doctor Who is not inherently a bad show when it gets goofy, but as an episode intended to get to know a character we are going to be following for the rest of the season, it is shockingly dramatically inert.

Things do improve from the premiere, as the overarching story arc of season 2 starts off promisingly. In a change of pace for the show, Belinda spends the majority of the season as an unwilling companion, determined to leave The Doctor and return to her normal life. The only thing stopping her is the apparent destruction of Earth on the 24th of May, 2025. Her arc naturally becomes one of warming up to The Doctor and the idea of travelling with him, and her no-nonsense attitude plays off well with Gatwa’s natural charisma.

That being said, even during the better episodes of the season, I find there are continuous issues that hold them back from greatness. This season more than any other season of Doctor Who I’ve seen feels constrained by its 45-minute runtime. You have these high concept premises, like a cartoon come to life that traps people behind movie screens in “Lux”, or the Eurovision-inspired “Interstellar Song Contest” that becomes an analogy for the Israel/Palestine conflict, but it is very noticeable that they have been written around a chosen runtime, rather than scripted based on what feels appropriate for the story at hand. The show’s pacing and structural issues could not be more apparent in episode 5, “The Story and the Engine”. A prior relationship is established between the Doctor and the regulars of a barbershop, but the script's communication of this comes off as contrived rather than genuine. It is an ambitious narrative about culture, identity, and the power of stories that falls flat because it has to verbally explain its convoluted concept in a way that ends up barely making sense anyway. It is the type of “tell, don’t show” style of storytelling that plagued the worst of Chris Chibnall’s tenure with the series.

I had hoped that the conclusive two-parter could end this season on a high note, as it had a lot going for it that would make for a classic Doctor Who series finale. It features the return of two classic Who villains (The Rani and The Omega) and a fresh initial premise. “Wish World” kicks off the two-parter on a decent foot, as The Doctor and Belinda are placed into a false reality in which they lead the average life of a married couple. The episode slowly unwinds this false reality as The Doctor comes to grips with just how clearly wrong everything around him feels. On its own, it is an enjoyable episode, as it relies less on exposition and the technobabble that weighed down stories like “The Story and the Engine”, and more on simply letting its inventive premise play out naturally. It’s not particularly special, but to say the finale, “The Reality War”, is a disappointment in comparison would be an understatement.

In “Wish World”, The Doctor and Belinda’s marriage in this false reality includes a baby named Poppy. Naturally, as this world is established to be fake, we assume the child is too. But a bizarre revelation reveals that The Doctor and Belinda’s child is an actual baby, and Belinda is her real mother. In one of the most flagrant cases of character assassination that I have ever seen, every character trait she once had is replaced with that of a loving mother, with her only motivation in the finale being to save her child’s life. To accomplish this, The Doctor alters reality in such a way as to make Belinda’s motherhood a canonical part of her human history. Previous scenes of the season are rewritten so that it looks like she had been searching for her daughter the entire time. There’s two ways to take this twist, as the show barely explains how it works. The first is that The Doctor essentially erased Belinda’s original life in order to canonise her as the mother of Poppy, and the other is that Belinda was always Poppy’s mother, and that her life as a nurse was in fact the false reality that The Doctor needed to erase. To be charitable to Russell T. Davis as a writer, I chose to interpret this decision as the latter, as it shouldn’t have to be explained why The Doctor erasing an ordinary person’s regular life in order to force motherhood on her is deeply immoral. Regardless, the Belinda we knew across the season is essentially gone, so to ask the viewer to relate and empathise with her struggles to save a made-up child is just mind-boggling.

To put the cherry on top of an already awful finale, The Doctor’s plan to save Poppy results in Ncuti’s regeneration. This was unannounced beforehand and only written into the episode after Ncuti Gatwa decided to not renew his contract. I understand that this decision was out of the writers’ hands, but it is handled so sloppily. It feels like we had barely gotten to know the Fifteenth Doctor as a character before we already had to say goodbye, and it’s the first time since becoming a fan in the 2000s where I do not trust the stability of Doctor Who as an actual show with long-term plans. With actors constantly dropping out, Disney likely to not renew their production deal with BBC, and an incoherent over-arching plot that changes on a whim, I can’t blame fans for deciding to move on. After this season, I certainly have.

4/10