More than most episodes, it pivots in the middle, at the Midnight reveal. I knew it was coming, because that’s how life is, and was sus. And I can’t say I liked it. I stared bitterly at the sequence of mounting realization. Especially because it’s so unprompted. “We don’t know what it is”? Seriously? That’s what tips the Doctor off and starts the “do you recognize the plot of Midnight” run, saying “XTonic” and “diamond mine” before doing the title drop and running the quick clips of a, and I’m sorry to do this to you, seventeen year old piece of television. Now, admittedly that seventeen year old piece of television was seen by more than twice as many people as The Robot Revolution, so maybe it’s fair enough to do a throwback seven years longer than bringing back Omega for Arc of Infinity, the previous benchmark for “wait, seriously?” in sequel reveals.
But, to quote the trolls on GallifreyBase, this is cancellation shit. I mean for gods’ sake, it’s even a fucking Saward homage. By the time we’ve gotten to this reveal absolutely nothing in the episode had come close to “something I haven’t seen before,” and my memory only really needs to go as far back as Flux for that to be true. After a cold open TARDIS scene recapping the season and doing an arbitrary needle drop on “Toxic” (I suppose that I need to go back to The End of the World for) it’s just twenty minutes of standard issue sci-fi gubbins—running around on a video game set pointing guns at things. It’s clearly working its way towards horror because modern Doctor Who only uses military sci-fi for a few things, and besides it’s called The Well, but it hasn’t even gotten around to being scary yet. The only interesting material comes in the grace notes around Aliss and her deafness, another example of his determination to virtue signal leading Davies in a useful direction by reminding him that some human drama might be worth adding. And then we get this bland callback reveal. Reader, I am making a face.
It’s not even the same monster! Midnight is vocal repetition; the thing that’s behind you is Hide, which you’d be hard pressed to do a callback to. I’m utterly unsurprised that what’s happened is they belatedly threw out Sharma Angel-Warfall’s actual script, which was an attempt at giving Gatwa his “Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Orisha” request, and just subbed the Midnight explanation in, because it’s an absolute fucking nothing that reeks of a desperate 48 hour rewrite. There’s no reason for it other than giving them something to hype in the behind the scenes footage. Which, I suppose once again making episodes with legs for streaming is a sound strategy. If we get a third season out of Disney it’ll probably be down to the long tail numbers. But I am still just not vibing.
Ironically, then, the back half is rather good. Cassio’s panic and execution is a great payoff to an immaculate performance of “the asshole one that doesn’t like the Doctor”—one of the most brutal and sickening “the wrong guy takes charge” beats in Doctor Who. The Doctor coming right up to Aliss and listening to the creature’s whispers is a fantastic use of Ncuti Gatwa’s trick of playing the Doctor with choking intensity, and I’m an absolute mark for “the solution is Mercury.” The “one more run with the monster” bit is inevitable, but even that concludes with a shockingly hard beat in shooting Belinda. It’s just a chain of sharp, interesting beats that go in novel directions.
On balance I still end up disliking it, purely because the final “oh no the monster escaped” beat felt like overegging the custard and left a bad taste in my mouth. But the reality is that, as midseason inventory episodes go, this is one of the better ones.
-
- Patrons may have noticed that the Unleashed recap never happened. All I can say is that I finished the Unleashed for The Robot Revolution and realized I had taken exactly zero notes about it. It’s just not been a rewarding feature to date this season. I miss the in-vision commentaries. Those were reliably good.
- Patrons do, however, have ten thousand words about Alan Turing, artificial intelligence, and the nature of language.
- “Is 2025 broken” is real “tell me you’re not from 2025 without telling me you’re not from 2025” energy, huh?
- The other part of the first twenty minutes that I liked was the end of the cold open—stepping off the TARDIS straight into the jump off a spaceship was a really nice smash into credits.
- I do like how they shoot Aliss, with a lot of emphasis on the vast space behind her, and really focusing on head-on shots. The production on this one—from the same director as last week—is a big part of what elevates it above its ambitions.
- Odd little shift in Mrs. Flood this week. Obviously part of that is putting her in the milieu of individual episodes, but having her call out the Vindicator—a very gun prop—is a sharp deviation from her thus far frockish aesthetics.
- I expect we’ll get rather more of her next week for our presumptive Doctor-lite episode that’s clearly going to be teasing the finale a bit. And by Pete McTighe no less. I imagine that one will give me a bit more to work with.
- Which does rather get at the problem I’m having here, which came up with The Robot Revolution as well: I’m bored. Nothing about this feels essential or vibrant. We’ve gotten back to doing competent Doctor Who, and thank fuck, but we’re not doing Doctor Who that rises to the moment on any real level. It feels dated. And I’m just not excited by it right now. I enjoy it, and I enjoy writing reviews of it, but it’s not taking up more of my brain than that. Maybe that’s fascism and depression and the fact that the schedule is awful. Idk. But it’s a disappointing way to feel about a possible last season of the show, and I hope it changes sometime before the end of May.
- So, reckon it’s a bad sign that new episodes aren’t getting announced in the rotating banners at the top of the Disney+ frontpage?
- Let’s not end on such a grim note. Here’s Emmylou Harris with “Deeper Well.”
Ranking
- Lux
- Joy to the World
- The Well
- The Robot Revolution
