Mark Harrison | On 25, May 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.

 

 
“Happy morning!” Following last week’s explosive cliffhanger, Doctor Who takes an altogether unexpected tack in Wish World, the first instalment of this year’s two-part season finale. We last saw the TARDIS doors exploding inwards on the Doctor and Belinda as they arrived on Earth on 24th May 2025, and Mrs Flood (Anita Dobson) turning out to be the Rani (Archie Panjabi) by way of bi-generation.
 
So, naturally, Episode 7 picks up with a happy suburban family in a London under the shadow of an imperious Bone Palace. Women belong in the kitchen, men go to work 9 to 5, but also enormous beasts roam the city, and a fascist police force disappears anyone who doubts the way of things. And, apparently, only Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson) is looking for the Doctor.
 
Media and communication have been major themes throughout the season, ranging from the robots of Missbelindachandra’s timey-wimey misunderstanding of Belinda and her coercive ex to last episode’s villainous plot to hijack the broadcast of the Intergalactic Song Contest. The Well and The Story & the Engine both mined stories from the Doctor’s past, while Lux and Lucky Day each focused on different types of monsters in media.
 
It’s Conrad Clark (Jonah Hauer-King) who returns from the latter episode, this time positioned as the Big Brother-like figurehead in Wish World’s retro dystopia, reading stories about the Time Lords and Gallifrey on CRT television screens. Writer Russell T Davies started the season lampooning the half-remembered past that angry young men want. Now, he sets the stage for his finale with a surreal vision of Conrad’s never-nude heteronormative fantasy world overwriting present-day Earth. It’s a sci-fi scenario that dramatises the toxic complacency of saying “it is what it is”, especially when it isn’t.
 
And what of the Rani? The character’s track record on telly is less than stellar but Archie Panjabi is reintroduced with a fabulous fairytale flashback, where the amoral Time Lady scientist gathers materials for her most audacious experiment yet. Flanked by Anita Dobson as her former and subordinate self, Panjabi vamps for all she’s worth, with a performance that does the late, great Kate O’Mara proud. She even manages to look right at home in the Flash Gordon-esque trappings of RTD’s wacky sci-fi set-up.
 
“Set-up” is the key word, though – the difficulty with Davies’ season arcs, and especially his finales, is that their plots are backloaded and bottom-heavy. As with Season 1’s The Legend of Ruby Sunday, this brings back a lot of players from elsewhere in the season, whether in alternate personas or fleeting cameos, but it’s also another episode that has surprisingly little of Ncuti Gatwa as the Doctor, and even less of Varada Sethu as our favourite new companion, Belinda, which adds to the oddity of its all-star holding pattern.
 
Plus, while it gestures at those themes we mentioned, it studiously keeps back any answers until next week’s one-hour finale and filibusters its way to the cliffhanger. “This is not just exposition”, one character intones, and you almost want to Dervla Kirwan to chip in with: “This is RTD exposition.”
 
As it goes, it’s a very handsomely made episode – less showy than last week’s space-Eurovision spectacular, this WandaVision-flavoured dystopia sees the production team mixing 1950s aesthetics with CGI bone monsters and airborne villainous lairs to exhilarating effect. Director Alex Sanjiv Pillai had to start on this two-parter immediately after completing work on the 2024 Christmas special Joy to the World but excels himself with this visual feast.
 
With only Part One to go on, Wish World is an imposingly weird outing, stuffed with promise for the finale it spends 45 minutes setting up. Frankly, the bar is low for this to be the best Rani story ever told, but as it doubles down on callbacks and returning characters, it comes with the uneasy feeling that it’s just moving pieces around the board. Only Part Two that will tell whether Davies is playing chess or checkers, but at this stage, it could as easily be KerPlunk.

 

 

Doctor’s notes – contains spoilers

– Last of the Time Ladies, the Rani is studying how the Pantheon of Discord have changed reality and starts by abducting the god of wishes – Desiderium, the seventh son of a seventh son of a seventh son – from his cradle in 19th-century Bavaria. True to her old knack for biological transmogrification, she turns the baby’s mother into violet petals, his father into an owl, and his older siblings into ducks. She’s every bit the wicked witch in this scene and it’s a suitably bizarre intro to this particular episode.
 
– For most of the episode, Gatwa plays John Smith, husband to Belinda and dad to Poppy (Sienna-Robyn Mavanga-Phipps, last seen in Space Babies and The Story And The Engine). Melanie Bush (Bonnie Langford) is their neighbour and Kate Lethbridge-Stewart (Jemma Redgrave) is John’s boss at UNIT – the Unified National Insurance Team on Wish World. Doctor Who continues to tap 2007’s Human Nature for inspiration, but here spreads the delusion across a whole bunch of regular characters for the Rani’s experiment.
 
– Gatwa still gets plenty to play but Sethu is the biggest casualty of another two-part finale that’s mostly about building to next week. Belinda is not herself and it’s times like these that an eight-episode season feels too short. Sethu has been particularly poorly served in the second half of Season 2 and whatever Doctor Who’s future is after next week, it would be a shame if it doesn’t pick up the thread with her character again.
 
– Ruby recognises the Doctor and Mel and UNIT’s Shirley Anne Bingham (Ruth Madeley) but can’t place them. The Ruby of this world seems aware she’s gone through Season 1’s 73 Yards, another alternative reality in which she’s shunned by those who know her, but as she organises with London’s “dispossessed” outcasts, we can’t yet see if and how that will figure in next week’s solution. Even the shock of fully recognising “Uncle Conrad” as her former love interest is deferred. She’s more active than Belinda, but like so many of the supporting characters this week, she’s running in place.
 
– “Tables don’t do that.” Casual viewers might also have trouble placing Poppy, Susan (Carole Anne Ford, reprising last week’s mysterious cutaways), and Rogue (Jonathan Groff, last seen getting lost in another dimension in the Season 1 episode of the same name), who appears to Smith and gives him the information the Doctor needs to break out of his delusion. Television itself is both oppressor and liberator here, and we wonder how it goes to Season 2’s over-arching sense that this Doctor Who thing is all a TV show.
 
– And because the show turns supernaturally now, there’s method in the Rani’s madness. Conrad’s narrow reality is designed to be unbelievable and unsustainable, because doubt is the catalyst that collapses it and breaks open what’s underneath – the Underverse prison of lost Time Lord, Omega. The Gallifreyan founder previously menaced three Doctors in 1973’s The Three Doctors and then tried to steal the Fifth Doctor’s appearance in 1983’s Arc Of Infinity. This could yet be a misdirect, or else for the second finale running, Davies is rummaging deep in Doctor Who’s toybox for returning characters while all the other characters stand around waiting.
 
– “I have a daughter! Poppy is real! Don’t you understand what that means?” As the Doctor plummets to certain doom, he voices the biggest question about his family history into the cliffhanger. Will Poppy from Space Babies turn out to be Susan’s mother? Is the Rani her grandmother?? And will Doctor Who ever be the same again??? Tune in next week, same Who time, same Who channel – except the 8am iPlayer premiere is off for The Reality War, so we’ll reconvene after its broadcast on BBC One next Saturday…

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