Mark Harrison | On 19, May 2024

Steven Moffat has written more Doctor Who stories than any other writer. Boom is his 49th credit or co-credit and his first for Ncuti Gatwa’s Fifteenth Doctor, and for those well-versed in his style and thematic preoccupations, it’s a familiar brew, remixed as a single-location suspense thriller. And, appropriately enough, it’s an absolute banger.

The trailers only give away as much as the pre-title sequence – the TARDIS lands in the middle of a battlefield on the war-torn planet Kastarion 3, where a squad of Anglican Marines are tooled up with high-tech weapons and medical equipment. And no sooner than the Doctor steps out of the TARDIS, he sticks his foot on an advanced landmine that will detonate if he makes one wrong move.

The only other thing you really need to know going in is that Moffat’s one-word description of the episode’s style was “Hitchcock”, presumably referring to the director’s famous analogy about generating big-screen suspense by telling the audience that there’s a bomb under the table. Here, the bomb is under the Doctor before the opening titles play out, and the stakes ratchet up from there.

Like the season’s other returning showrunner Russell T Davies, Moffat has written enough Doctor Who in his time to get really good at it. Even if you were tired of out-of-control technology, precocious child characters, and Moffat’s other favourite tropes by the time he wrapped his tenure as showrunner, the live puzzle-box plotting and fizzy, poetic dialogue can only be a welcome return six years on.

Plus, it’s 180 degrees different from last week’s double-bill, so this is an acting workout at the opposite extremes of Gatwa’s range. It’s a weighty physical performance, turning all the qualities that normally make a great Doctor against the character by forcing him to stand still for 45 minutes. Millie Gibson is also superb in her more active role and Ruby really grows as a character on what we’re told is her first trip to an alien world.

But in this Disney-backed era, even Doctor Who’s single-location episodes have a bigger budget to play with and this marks the show’s first-ever use of LED Volume technology. This seems most effective when used to augment physical sets or objects, so it’s well used here – director Julie Anne Robinson keeps things focused on the drama rather than the digital dressing.

With that battlefield setting, there are points where Boom feels like Moffat picking up where he left off in 2017’s Twice Upon a Time. For the last time he wrote something like this under Davies, we have to go further back to 2007’s Blink. While this is neither a lightning-in-a-bottle classic or as complex and intricate as we’ve come to expect from his showrunning years, it similarly benefits from being a “smaller” episode in this season.

Lighter on gags and timey-wimey shenanigans than the average Moffat episode, Boom is a highly concentrated high-concept story, brilliantly written, directed and acted all round. But beyond the combustible premise, the real fireworks pop out of its story and characters and themes.

 

Doctor’s notes – contains spoilers

– “Keeps you dying, keeps you buying.” After last week’s satire of pro-life hypocrisy and arts budget cuts, the suspense and straightforwardness of this one boosts a real righteous anger about the capitalist nature of war. When technology goes wrong in previous Moffat scripts, it’s not usually designed that way for a bottom line – here, the “acceptable casualty rate” becomes a sales target for the Villengard corporation, and so the algorithm becomes less and less representative of reality.

– Meanwhile “Thoughts And Prayers” could have been an alternate title for the episode. Moffat revives his war clerics from the Eleventh Doctor era, taking as many big swipes at thoughtless faith and tribalism as the literal capitalist machinery around it. Also, per the Ninth Doctor in 2005’s The Doctor Dances, we know that the Villengard weapon forges are eventually vapourised and replaced with banana groves by… well, guess who.

– “Kiss kiss.” Equally, the writer has always been fabulously uncynical about the human solution to technical problems and so it goes with “dad skills” AI John Francis Vater. Accordingly, Moffat has detractors on both sides of the “too clever for its own good” and “love saves the day again” divide. But hey, if you stop rolling your eyes for a second and look straight at the thing you’re watching, there’s plenty to enjoy in dots being connected by meaning rather than plotting.

– There are rumours about the order of episodes changing this season and parts of this would seem to back that up – the Doctor and Ruby have been travelling for six months by the time of The Devil’s Chord, but apparently this is her first alien planet. There are so many great formative moments for Gatwa and Gibson here that this can only have gone earlier, but that’s as timey-wimey as this particular adventure gets.

– Oh, and hello, incoming Season Two companion Varada Sethu! It might take some people all the way to the end credits to notice that she’s playing Mundy Flynn, debuting in an earlier episode like Freema Agyeman and Jenna Coleman before her. We’ve yet to find out whether Mundy is an Adeola or an Oswin, but frankly, we’re still totting up the Ambulance interface alongside Susan Twist’s multiple characters since last year’s Wild Blue Yonder and wondering where that’s heading…

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