The Interstellar Song Contest Review

Shooting on this season began on October 23rd, 2023, by which point five thousand people had already died in Gaza; Israel’s actual invasion of the territory would not even begin until five days later. Doing the math, you figure this must have started shooting late March. Somewhere around, say, the 28th, when the death toll was at 32,552. Seventy-one more people died that day, eight when Israel bombed a refugee camp. 

But Juno Dawson’s script for this must have been ages earlier. Most of it would have been locked in before shooting started on Joy to the World. Despite the fact that the allegorical reading is about as tight as saying The Monster of Peladon is about the miners’ strike, this legitimately was not written to be about the Palestinian genocide and the subsequent controversy over Israel’s inclusion in the Eurovision song contest. It’s just that Die Hard at Eurovision—the apparent starting point of this episode—can’t really be read any other way an hour before the finals start in 2025. 

I’ve got my Discord server open (btw did you know the invite link is one of the rotating taglines on the site?), and I just watched a bit of dialogue whiz by in the thread for this episode of people who loved the episode wondering if this’d be the one I’m shockingly out of consensus on because they all love it. And fair enough. Between the authorial intention problem and the fact that it doesn’t do anything as clangingly fascist as “the systems aren’t the problem,” you can probably justify giving this one a pass if you want to.

But why? I mean that. There were five months where they could have redone the script, whether because of Davies’ evident desire to create television with some sort of moral rectitude or because they realized it was a bad look. There was a year of post-production in which an ADR session could have been scheduled. But more to the point, they could have just not done “his cause is good but he goes too far” again. Sean Dillon messaged me just as I was getting ready to watch the episode wondering what the last time they actually did “the Doctor starts a revolution.” Which, the answer is kind of “the season premiere,” but in a more traditional sense, it’s really The Lie of the Land. It was actually a relatively common move in the Moffat era. But it’s just not been where the show’s head is, and instead it pointedly does this “fine people on both sides” shit and it ends up feeling like a kinda bullshit parable about Palestinian violence. I don’t actually have a lot of sympathy. 

But equally, I love Kill the Moon. The political reading is good for four hundred words or so, but it’s not the whole review; I haven’t even talked about the Rani. What we have here is a curiously on edge piece of television. On the one hand, thousands of bodies exploding out into space. Even if they’re quickly established as not dead, it’s a viscerally shocking image—especially because the audience doesn’t know about the mavity shell yet, and so it’s plausible that we really are watching something that gruesome. And it’s further emphasized by the starkness of the Doctor’s freezing body. It’s a genuinely weird episode, especially alongside the Doctor’s outright snapping and torturing the villain—an aggressive escalation of “he’s gone too far” stylings that stands alongside The Twin Dilemma in sheer unpleasantness. On the other, Eurovision. 

The tension is worth thinking about in terms of the precision of its engagement with the television schedule. Obviously Doctor Who cannot do Eurovision. It certainly can’t do Eurovision the hour before actual Eurovision. For one thing, Murray Gold isn’t that good. Probably nobody is, but Gold certainly isn’t, and it shows in the songs, which manage to be neither good nor bad enough save, perhaps, for “Dugga Doo,” plainly his best work since “Heaven Sent.” And so instead Doctor Who works heel and does the disruption of Eurovision by having this unpleasantly violent gun episode muscle in on the nice frock episode so that Eurovision can serve as the restored order and be a lot of fun right up until some shitty ballad wins it again.

The details in this regard are largely spot-on—note how “Dugga Doo” is used to play over Belinda’s panic attack, or that glorious visual of the slushy cup floating past her sobbing. There’s always the sense of deferred camp—something sold by the bickering gay couple as the Doctor’s temporary companions. And the overall juxtaposition is used effectively—especially when Graham Norton is used to explain that the Earth blew up and the contrasting tones are briefly used to set up “Wish World” instead of Real Eurovision. 

And then, of course, the Rani.

• I’m mostly going to leave her until the episodes she’s actually substantively in, and not just give a gut level reaction to the self-evidently trolling decision to actually bring back the Rani. I at least like the degree to which she continues the episode’s engagement with camp, and next week can be next week. 
• I was at least right that it was all building to Susan. Still, what a genuine frisson of surprise when Carole Ann Ford appeared on screen. It’s clever to drop her an episode early, and so casually.
• “Hell poppy” is a really weird word, and sticks out like a sore thumb whenever it comes up. Although it’s part and parcel of the larger and also interesting decision to make the oppression of the Hellions so starkly propagandistic in nature. Loved the bitterness of Kid’s “I’m only doing what you expect me to.” There’s these fleeting engagements with misinformation and the illiteracy crisis throughout the Davies era, and I hope we get a story someday where they actually play out in a substantive way.
• “Hell poppy” is also interesting when you’ve got weirdo Captain Poppy teases floating around. Bet this will never get meaningfully expanded on, but I still like it.
• A cute fanwank detail—Kid’s weapon of choice, a delta wave, is the same one used in Parting of the Ways, whose underlying thematic juxtaposition of camp television and mass death The Interstellar Song Contest shares.
• Loved the opening beat of Rylan coming out of cryogenic suspension and just plowing right into hosting with no context. But why the fuck is he alive to keep in cryogenic suspension in the first place?
• The most chilling part of the Doctor’s going too far here for me is that it comes so close after his comments about Kid’s sadism and cruelty. 
• I am allowing myself precisely one sentence of enjoying that Doctor Who has gotten its first transgender writer. I’m allowing myself a second sentence of enjoying that she takes Gareth Roberts’ old Space Eurovision premise and proceeds to scrawl gun graffiti all over it. Eh, I’ll give myself a third one for that.
• There’s a neat implication that bigeneration leaves the previous iteration somehow lesser than the new one—a Rani vs the Rani. This is implicit in how Tennant is treated once Gatwa shows up, but much more literalized here, and broadly sorts out some of the messier implications of the concept and Davies’s absurd “and all the past regenerations turned to bigenerations” nonsense. 
• Somehow you don’t think Gatwa’s gonna bigenerate though.
• The decision to make the final song untranslatable is obviously necessary—no words can possibly work for what that song is supposedly doing. And yet it’s hopelessly facile. One wonders if it accomplishes a damn thing, or if the Hellion genocide just continues. Real-world parallels suggest the latter.
• It’s sweet that the Zygons get a new habitat though.
• Anyway. This was very good at what it did. I even, at several points, quite enjoyed it. But at no point did I actually like it, and I think that should probably matter.

Rankings

1. Lux
2. The Story and the Engine
3. Joy to the World
4. Lucky Day
5. The Interstellar Song Contest
6. The Well
7. The Robot Revolution