Tripwire’s Man In Los Angeles Reviews Doctor Who Season Two: Episode Seven Wish World

Be Careful What You Wish For

Tripwire’s man in Los Angeles Robert Cave takes a look at Doctor Who Season Two’s seventh episode Wish World…

Wish World
Written by Russell T Davies
Directed by Alex Sanjiv Pillai

Well, that was very much the first half of a two-parter, wasn’t it? There was a lot of set up, and quite a bit of plot threads coalescing, and I definitely want to see what happens next, but personally, I would have liked this episode to stand on its own a bit more.

The story starts in mid-nineteenth-century Bavaria, 1865 to be precise, where Archie Panjabi’s Rani is set on capturing a child, the seventh son of a seventh son of a seventh son, who turns out to be Desiridium, the newborn god of wishes. I’m pretty fuzzy on quite how come gods are born at all in the current era of Who, let alone why they should be born to these people at this particular time. I get the sense that this is the kind of question that I’m not supposed to be thinking about, but that all will eventually be revealed later.

One of the less-appreciated hallmarks of Russell T Davies’ second term as showrunner has been the much longer narrative horizon he has set himself to play in. Who fans have become first accustomed, then habituated, into thinking of the modern show as a series of one-year arcs. But Russell T has been working on a far larger canvas. The Season 2 finale was planned and filmed alongside Season 1. Subsequently, it all fits together more tightly and coherently than perhaps audiences are really used to. The return of commander Poppy (Sienna-Robyn Mavanga-Phipps) and Rogue (Jonathan Groff), perception filters, story webs, underclasses, I really do think it’s all coming together. The story webs especially strike me as being very significant. The story web we saw in The Story and The Engine reminded me strongly of both the web traced across the universe by the Doctor’s Vindicator gadget, but also of the web-like creation at the beginning of 72 Yards. The more I think about it the more convinced I am that coming together is what Wish World is all about.

Now, I was not a big fan of Conrad Clark (Jonah Hauer-King) in Lucky Day. He was very unlikable little conspiracy theorist too close to the whiny little chancers who have grown all too prominent in our modern world. But the undueness of Conrad’s power and position is also the point of him. He is using borrowed authority and borrowed abilities from Desiderium, the infant god of wishes, to create a conservative fantasy world in his own image. And what an irredeemably and abjectly banal world it is, with men wearing bowler hats and suits and working in insurance to earn money for their wives who bring up their babies to go out and repeat the same pattern in perpetuity. Where childless women have no purpose, disabled people are beneath notice and any alternative to heterosexuality is utterly unthinkable. It’s dull homogeneity of ill thought-out received ideas evocative of Philip K Dick’s badly-built universes that fall apart after two days.

The show’s design team really excel in furnishing Conrad’s conservative dystopia. The now-familiar UNIT tower set is given a mid-century office makeover with typewriters agogo, but what really caught my eye was the rotary phones and the same eye-catching slightly curved drawer design seen in the kitchen belonging to the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and Belinda (Varada Sethu) as are in Carla and Cherry Sunday’s iconic kitchen from season 1. I’m not sure if that is at all significant. Maybe that indicates that the Sunday’s flat has been in the Wish World all along. Or maybe that someone on the design team REALLY likes curved drawers. I can’t tell what is significant at this point (see past predictions), but I really appreciate it.

I also really appreciate Archie Panjabi’s magisterially camp turn as The Rani, with her studded ruddy leather outfit, her little sky sled, and syringe-esque sonic screwdriver. I also love the tension between her and Anita Dobson’s Rani. Time Lords seldom seem to like other incarnations of themselves very much, so the friction between the two Rani’s is kind of fitting. Interestingly, the only exception to the antipathy would seem to be the bigenerated Fourteenth and Fifteenth Doctors. Is their better relationship thanks to the wonders of therapy implied to have taken place off-screen in the Fourteenth Doctor’s later years?

Speaking of the Doctor (and Belinda), I was kind of underwhelmed by their arc this episode. We’ve seen the Doctor and his companion trapped in an ordinary life before in Human Nature/The Family of Blood two-parter back in 2007. But in that story, the Doctor’s alter ego, John Smith, is his own character. The drama arises from the tension between wanting John Smith to survive and the Doctor to return. In Wish World, there is no dramatic tension between John Smith, the victim of Conrad’s fantasy, and the Doctor, who must ultimately prevail in order to combat the Rani in the season finale.

Not that the Rani will be alone. She/they seem to have a plan, and it seems to involve capturing/subverting Desiderium, the god of wishes, apparently to facilitate the resurrection of Gallifrey and/or the Omega, the the scientist who pioneered Gallifreyan time travel. But I’m not entirely convinced, chiefly because we never saw Omega return before the end of the episode. He got a name drop and that was all. I’m not ruling out that big Omega revelation is a massive fakeout in place of a bigger surprise next week. All I know is that if Omega isn’t in The Reality War, a lot of Who fans will be very disappointed and disrespected.

And on the subject of disrespect, the new Rani’s disregard to her older incarnation kind of mirrors the disregard paid to the vast underclass of society in Conrad’s Wish World. I can’t help thinking that this will ultimately play a part in the pair’s undoing, but not before they succeed in doing whatever their plan actually is, be it reviving Omega, reviving Gallifrey or some other as-yet-unknown third thing. Well, not long now till we find out. See y’all next week when, hopefully, all will finally be revealed. See y’all next week.

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