Tripwire’s Man In Los Angeles Reviews Doctor Who Season Two: Episode Eight The Reality War

Reality Shifts

Tripwire’s man in Los Angeles Robert Cave takes a look at Doctor Who Season Two’s eighth episode, season finale The Reality War…

The Reality War
Written by Russell T Davies
Directed by Alex Sanjiv Pillai

Warning! Spoilers abound from here on out.

I really enjoyed that. It was definitely bigger on the inside. It was also disappointing, but disappointing in the best possible way. And, like it or not, disappointment is as inevitable a part of life as death. I would go so far as to say that it key aspect of British cultural identity, but that’s another story…

Yes, this episode ended in the regeneration of Ncuti Gatwa, and that feels like a waste, even if within the story, as well as our reality, it definitely wasn’t. The Doctor sacrificing himself for the sake of one random, or maybe not so random, individual is very much the core of who they are. One could, if one were so minded, make the argument that showrunner Russell T Davies has repeatedly portrayed the Doctor as a kind of secular space Jesus, divorced from the rest of the trinity. But I think that such arguments would quickly ruin the enjoyment of Doctor Who as a rattling good story. And the reality war was a good story.

I was thoroughly engaged and on the edge of my seat throughout attempting to work out what was coming next. The return of Omega who was not the Omega we remembered, but a voracious shadow of his former self both worked and was disappointing. The Rani’s plan to bring back a version of Gallifrey in her own image, her failure is another disappointment .The prospect of the return of Gallifrey and its continued absence, yet another disappointment; and that is the point.

I get why Russell T. uses Gallifrey so sparingly. He views it as the Arcadia of myth; a utopian place that is, necessarily, always unreachachably in the past. The perfect world doesn’t exist, can’t exist, never existed except in our imaginations of a perfect past. Russell T. even overtly named a Gallifreyan place Arcadia in Doomsday. The roots of this notion go even farther back to the classic era of Who to Robert Holmes and the Shobogans, the agrarian people who spawned the Time Lords, but that is a whole other topic. Then Steven Moffat explicitly made Arcadia a city in the Time War and went and brought back the planet and the whole Time Lord civilization. Which was promptly re-destroyed by the Master in Chris Chibnall’s run.

“That genetic explosion…” as The Rani puts it, was a genocidal event that ended with the Timelords being rendered infertile. “There can never be another Gallifreyan child.” She says. Which casts the whole notion of Susan in a whole other light. Her reappeance implies that she isn’t being removed from reality. But how she came to be the Doctor’s granddaughter remains an as-yet unresolved mystery. I only hope that, as with Johnathan Groff’s Rogue, a little bit more was filmed with Carol-Anne Ford that has actually been let on, allowing for Susan to make a further appearance in the future. And there were a few other hints for a continuing future. Who is the boss at the Time Hotel? The same boss who employed the Meep and Rogue? Or someone else? Answers still to come.

I am disappointed Ncuti Gatwa’s era has come to an end. I fully realise I am being selfish here, but selfishly, I feel some level of aggrievement that, aside from the bigeneration in The Giggle, we only got 18 episodes; 16 stories, once you exclude the two-parters. I wanted so much more. But isn’t this the best possible response to a story? To leave the fans wanting more? And there is always the opportunity to return one day, as Jody Whittaker’s own return as the Thirteenth Doctor this very episode underlines.

Gatwa filmed only slightly more stories that Christopher Eccleston got. And, seen in the rear view mirror, his era was so tightly written. In fact it goes back further through the whole Disney+ era with overarching plots and themes woven to intricately into the whole two and a bit seasons, like one of those narrative webs we kept seeing in the Story and the Engine, and 73 Yards. Themes of parents and children; each of the Fifteenth Doctor’s two companions personifying one of these architypal roles, it all feeding back in to the latest iteration of Doctor Who being all about myths and gods and architypes. Baby Poppy from Space Babies being an echo of Belinda’s child Poppy. I don’t think I feel fully satisfied yet with the revelation of Belinda as always having been a mother, but I will just sit with that a while.

In fact it was all so tightly woven together it felt like was very little space for missing adventures, but I am sure those enterprising writers at Big Finish and fanfiction everywhere will find a way. And, as a fannish aside I am exceedingly glad that a dalek that was on set and filmed for this episode. Ok, so Ncuti never met them on screen; that will have to wait for the Big Finish crew, or a some comic strippers, or whoever.

TITLE:Doctor Who S2,EP NUMBER:8 – The Reality War,TX DATE:31-05-2025,TX WEEK:22,EMBARGOED UNTIL:31-05-2025 20:00:00,PEOPLE:The Doctor (NCUTI GATWA),DESCRIPTION:,COPYRIGHT:BBC Studios,CREDIT LINE:BBC Studios/Bad Wolf/James Pardon

And then there was that regeneration, that Billie Piper regeneration. Whether it a regeneration at all. It’s a very Interesting move, again, something very different from what has come before, and I’m all for that. Not that I think Billie will be playing the role for a long time. In fact, quite the reverse. I suspect what we are seeing is a shift in how we think about regenerations. The old limits have long been abolished, rendered obsolete and forgotten. The role of playing the Doctor doesn’t need to be some vast multi-year commitment for actors. It can be something smaller, making the list of potential actors able to take the role becomes far larger. We can have  Billie Piper play the Doctor for a single episode at Christmas, or a single scene, as was the case with Romana at the beginning of Destiny of the Daleks, and then regenerate again. There are no limits to where this can go.

And then we have the new spin-off, the War Between the Land and the Sea is still to come on Disney+. I know I’ll be watching, but I also know I’ll be watching when Doctor Who returns, as it inevitably will. See you next time.

Doctor Who is available on BBC iPlayer in the UK and on Disney Plus in the US