Tripwire’s Man In Los Angeles Reviews Doctor Who Season Two: Episode Six The Interstellar Song Contest

Hitting The Right Note

Tripwire’s man in Los Angeles Robert Cave takes a look at Doctor Who Season Two’s sixth episode The Interstellar Song Contest…

The Interstellar Song Contest
Written by Juno Dawson
Directed by Ben A. Williams

Wow. No, really, wow. That was brilliant. Camp excellence. Pure joy. I really enjoyed that, and I am not even a Eurovision fan! Indeed, I would not typically chose to watch Eurovision at all. But an interstellar song contest? That’s another matter entirely. The title really does
tells us everything in terms of the plot this week. Well, ok, maybe not quite everything. It doesn’t tell us about the villains Kid (Freddie Fox) and Wynn (Iona Anderson), two anti- corporate activists from Hellia, a much maligned world that has been subjugated by
rapacious corporate interests. And is it just me, or did the Hellions’ names evoke those campest of Bond foes, Mr Wint and Mr Kidd from 1971’s Diamonds are Forever?
Regardless, I fully bought into the high-concept showrunner Russell T Davies is peddling here, described by the man himself as “Die Hard meets Eurovision.” This is exactly the kind of thing I want from Doctor Who: all the different aliens, the glitz and spectacle, the sheer exuberance. It genuinely felt like proper event television. And that’s before we even got to the guest stars.
Rylan Clark’s rise to fame through reality TV to presenting duties on Eurovision largely passed me by (like I say, I’m not a Eurovision fan) but he was fantastic as a contest host, as was Julie Dray as Sabine the French-speaking cat lady Sabine. In fact, I want them both
doing Eurovision every year from here on in. It was fun to see Belinda (Varada Sethu) fangirling and getting a little startruck meeting Rylan. It was also great to see Graham Norton, who has unintentionally crashed into Doctor Who episodes twice in the past, finally
getting the opportunity to make a proper in-show appearance, albeit in hologrammatic form.

TITLE:Doctor Who S2,EP NUMBER:6 – The Interstella Song Contest,TX DATE:17-05-2025,TX WEEK:20,EMBARGOED UNTIL:12-05-2025 20:00,PEOPLE:The Doctor (NCUTI GATWA) & Belinda Chandra (VARADA SETHU) ,DESCRIPTION:*NOT FOR PUBLICATION UNTIL 20:00HRS, MONDAY 12TH MAY, 2025*,COPYRIGHT:BBC Studios/Bad Wolf,CREDIT LINE:BBC Studios/Bad Wolf/James Pardon

And he wasn’t just making a small incidental cameo: he delivered some significant exposition about the destruction of the Earth on the 25 th of May.
But even outside of the celebrity guests, it was Juno Dawson’s writing that really made this episode sing. Her script positively fizzed and sizzled with love for both Doctor Who AND Eurovision. I also loved her work on the bickering old married couple Gary (Charlie Condu)
and Mike (Kadiff Kirwan) Gabbastone, with vastly differing opinions of song contests, but skills to help in a crisis. But while the real-world song contest often feels like an endurance competition, the pacing here was incredibly tight. The story jogged along at such a pace,
sweeping the audience along. It seems almost absurd that they managed to convey so much of the contest with just four songs. Surely the next challenge for Big Finish is to commission and produce a full album of these four and all the other songs for the 803rd Interstellar
Song Contest.

The popping of the air dome is shocking, as is the way it carries the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and thousands of sundry assorted life-forms out into space. I’m not sure I buy that it would be enough to release the Doctor’s cruel streak to the extent it does here, but I applaud
Dawson and Davies decision to go there. Kid is an unsympathetic in a lot of ways;
particularly in his willingness to kill trilllions of people in revenge for the harms still being visited upon his outcast people. But, as Belinda said last week, “hurt people, hurt people.”
Even the Doctor.
Then we come to the first of the big shock reveals of the episode as the Doctor sees his granddaughter, Susan in his head, played once again by Carole Ann Ford! Imagine returning to a show you helped launch over SIXTY years after you left it as a series regular? I really
hope that, as with the fleeting appearance of Jo Martin’s Fugitive Doctor last week, isn’t all we get of Susan. Yes, we Doctor Who fans are never satisfied. But, come on, how great would that be?

And the Rani returns! Something a chunk of Who fans have been demanding for years to such little avail that many of us had given up all hope. Other fans are probably less excited because, well, the Rani has always been a bit camp, which is something a certain section of
the audience for the TV show about a flamboyantly-dressed time-traveling alien tend to feel a little bit self-conscious and embarassed about. I have sympathy for this. As a younger Who fan, and a younger man, I recall that insecurity; the desire for seriousness, and the dislike of exaggeration that is at the core of camp. But camp is fun. And ultimately it is a core part of Doctor Who’s enduring appeal. As great as Andor is in its portrayal of the toll of resistance to grim brutalist space fascism, and it is great, they still needed camp robots and a killer disco scene.

It is now clear that Davies really has been playing the long game here. Baiting, switching and then delivering over the course of two seasons, when we had all become so accustomed to thinking in terms of story arcs that deliver over the course of a single season. The Rani was name checked in Space Babies, Susan was mentioned in The Devil’s Chord. Last week, all manner of classic villains got a shout out. And they will absolutely return. When the time is right and the audience is least expecting them.
And yes, let’s talk about that bigeneration. Mrs Flood (Anita Dobson) is still with us, but now we have Archie Panjabi too as The Rani. It all makes so much sense. She was hiding on Earth during the Time War and the Galifreyan genocide of the Timeless Child. As was Susan.
Surely, we must be getting a Susan bigeneration next? And, oh, could that also solve the mystery of the Fugitive Doctor? Why our Doctor doesn’t quite remember, but sort of does.
Could the Fugitive Doctor actually be a bigenerated Susan? That would explain why her TARDIS looked like it did…
I don’t know, but I do know I’m looking forward to the next two episodes. See you next week.

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