Mark Harrison | On 04, Jun 2025

This review contains no spoilers for this week’s episode of Doctor Who. Already seen it? Read our Doctor’s notes at the end for additional spoilery observations. For more on Doctor Who, see our Whoniverse channel.

“Well, now you’re going too far.” Writer and showrunner Russell T Davies takes his bumps for his Doctor Who series finales, but perhaps nothing he has ever written for television has been as wackily compromised as his latest. Following on from Wish World, The Reality War brings Ncuti Gatwa’s second season to a dumbfounding denouement.
 
When we last saw the Doctor, he was hurtling to certain doom while his friends remained trapped in the Rani’s insane experiment – a parallel Earth designed to fail so that it will damage reality and release Time Lord founder Omega from another dimension. As the villains start their final countdown, our heroes rally to try and save Poppy (Sienna-Robyn Mavanga-Phipps), who was cast as the Doctor and Belinda’s child in the wish but something else entirely in reality.
 
Simulcast on BBC One and iPlayer and in cinemas, Episode 8 is absolutely stuffed to bursting with surprises that we’ll discuss further in the spoiler section, so let’s talk a little about season arcs. When Davies revived Doctor Who in 2005, he revamped the old serial format in the image of US TV genre shows like Buffy The Vampire Slayer – 13 episodes, including a two-part finale revolving around each season’s Big Bad villain.
 
In the streaming telly economy of the 2020s, his second showrunnership has been made up eight-episode seasons, but kept that story arc and finale format – with the notable exception of 2023’s one-hour anniversary special The Giggle, which introduced Gatwa’s Fifteenth Doctor. But here, for the second year on the bounce, we’re left underwhelmed by the resolution of the larger season’s going concerns – some mysteries are waved away, other questions are left dangling indefinitely, and a huge cast of characters are marooned in a stodgy, scatterbrained plot.
 
There’s so much to talk about that most reviews don’t seem to be leading on the episode’s most unforgivable misstep – the culmination of Belinda Chandra’s arc. Introduced as a cynical, resourceful nurse and a reluctant companion just seven episodes ago in The Robot Revolution, Varada Sethu has been increasingly sidelined as the season has gone on. And as all sense and consistency finally goes out the window, Belinda suffers the worst – at one point early on, she’s literally left holding the baby while the plot meanders on without her.
 
It’s such a baffling waste of one of this season’s two leads, and the episode never really recovers. Barring a delightful surprise return in the opening minutes, the roll call of returning characters ranging from Kate Stewart to Susan Triad is little more than fan service. This redoubles last year’s seat-filling problem by bringing a cast of thousands to stand still and listen to the Doctor and the Rani have a natter. At least Gatwa gets more to play than Sethu, but the redundant ensemble approach has never done his era any favours.
 
As others have pointed out, Bonnie Langford’s Mel exemplifies how messy this must have gotten from script to screen. When she travels from her suburban house to the UNIT tower, notice how she goes from having straight hair to a perm on her scooter journey. You could shrug it off as a continuity error, except it’s only there so she looks like she did when she last met the Rani in a story broadcast in 1987, which they then discuss for a bit.
 
Davies gets accused of self-indulgence a lot, but this one really doesn’t seem like anything so personal. It’s indulging Doctor Who for Doctor Who’s sake, not making jokes or twists or surprises out of it so much as repeating itself, with Time Rings and Zero Rooms and Indigo transmats and other token callbacks that don’t move the narrative – if this is Doctor Who in the image of all those Marvel or Star Wars shows on Disney+, you can keep it.
 
To be clear, Doctor Who has always traded in fabulous nonsense, and the finale doesn’t come without the odd glimmer of fun. As mentioned, the cliffhanger resolution is a delightful pay-off and from there, Archie Panjabi and Anita Dobson are still having fun as the two Ranis (yes, they actually make that joke this week), and those gigantic skeletal monsters from last episode tee up one of the show’s largest action setpieces ever – a showdown that will have looked smashing on the big screen for those who went.
 
Equally, it’s not just random colours and noise. Children and foundlings are prominent throughout the Fifteenth Doctor’s era, whether it’s the yes-and-ing of Chris Chibnall’s Timeless Child lore-splosion or the mysterious origins of Ruby Sunday. For all its chaos, the episode never forgets that Poppy’s significance is first and foremost that she’s a child who needs the Doctor’s help. But it’s not a shortage of ideas that lets this finale down such as its staggering failure of execution, with a slow second half given over to continuity filibustering and abstract plotting.
 
There’s almost certainly more to the behind-the-scenes story of this one than we got in BBC Three’s Unleashed episode – principal photography on this season wrapped just over a year ago, and reshoots took place in February 2025, which might go to explain why it descends into a VFX-lite trawl across standing sets and low-key location shoots. It’s all a far cry from the dazzling creative exploits of an otherwise solid season, and it fully runs out of steam before the end of its extended 65-minute runtime.
 
Upset by clumsy writing and glaring reshoots, The Reality War is rough even by the recent standards of Doctor Who finales. With the show’s future as yet unconfirmed, there’s a sense that this will be the last we see of some of the many, many characters stuffed into it, and it’s not a satisfying finale for any of them. The fun bits keep it from being an outright disaster, but its climax is so wildly discomfiting, it’s hard not to feel deflated by this messed bed of a finale.

 

 

Doctor’s notes – contains spoilers

– Where do we start? As mentioned, Belinda is the biggest letdown here, as if it wasn’t enough to keep her alternate wish self out of the loop last week, the ending more or less canonises this version. The mad thing is, having Belinda be a single parent trying to get home on time for her daughter would have been an even better hook for this season, but played as a twist like this, it makes one of the single worst companion exits to date.
 
– In the very same episode, Ruby Sunday’s ending may be a close second. It was odd enough that Wish World seemed to be deferring a confrontation between her and Conrad after Lucky Day, but odder still that this just wishes away that conflict rather than playing it. As it stands, Ruby’s last scene in the show is the Doctor condescending to her about her memory of Poppy being real, right before he runs off in the TARDIS to fix it, never to be seen again.
 
– We could go on and on about the characters this incorporates and then discards, but think of this. Everyone else gets introduced with a hug and a wave and sent off with warmed-over dialogue about how the Doctor’s real children were all those crazy kids working for UNIT all along. Incidentally, Kate Stewart microchips kids – pass it on.
 
– Never mind the two Ranis, give it up for the two Anitas – the return of Time Hotel employee Anita Benn (Steph De Whalley) from last year’s Joy to the World makes a fun, unexpected start to the action, and Anita Dobson has arguably come out of this season better than anyone with Mrs Flood’s endless cheeky asides. Bring them both back, we say.
 
– Similar to last year’s Empire of Death, all the sturm und drang dissipates with the Big Bads being dispatched fairly easily. Upon his release, the monstrously mutated Omega states his intent to feast on his Time Lords, starting with the bi-generated Rani. Mrs Flood gets away to fight another day, and the Doctor fettles Omega with the Vindicator energy that brought him forth in the first place. Easy peasy!
 
– The difference with this year’s finale is the emotional stakes that take precedence in the rest of the runtime are wholly pulled out of this episode’s backside. There’s no payoff to the glimpses of Susan, a full retcon of Belinda’s character and, finally, the Doctor’s decision to sacrifice himself to bring Poppy back is pure sci-fi phlebotinum, apparently devised to explain the lead actor’s departure. Like Sethu and Gibson, Gatwa deserved better.
 
– In retrospect, it’s galling that this season has Chris Chibnall’s Doctors back for cameos (Jo Martin in The Story and the Engine and Jodie Whittaker in this) with dialogue about how unfulfilled their characters were, only to write out Gatwa as this does. It pulls off a surprise regeneration for the Doctor, in that it wasn’t announced in advance of broadcast, but misses a lot of story and emotional beats to preserve that surprise.
 
– “This has been an absolute joy.” Well, not at the end, it wasn’t, but as the Fifteenth Doctor taps and then triggers his next regeneration to turn Poppy into a real girl, the light fades to reveal… Billie Piper??? She’s not credited as the Doctor at the end, so she could as easily be The Moment or Bad Wolf or somehow Rose… but that’s for the future, and if this season has shown us anything, it’s that guessing is a mug’s game.

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