Tripwire’s Man In Los Angeles Robert Cave Reviews Doctor Who: Space Babies

Young At Heart

Tripwire’s Man in Los Angeles Robert Cave takes a look at the premiere of Doctor Who season one: Space Babies…

Space Babies
Written by Russell T Davies
Directed by Julie Anne Robinson

Whoop! Or should that be Vworp! Doctor Who is back! Again! With not one, but two episodes! It’s like Christmas! And in more ways than one, as Space Babies picks up the action exactly where The Church on Ruby Road left off, on Christmas Eve. Indeed, Space Babies even appears as episode 2 of Season 1 on Disney +. My headcanon also adds the three David Tennant specials ahead of that to give us something closer to a full 12-episode season, but hey, how Disney groups these episodes feels largely like a marketing exercise at this point. And Disney IS marketing Doctor Who. I’m not a big sports fan, but I spotted Doctor Who ads on Disney’s ESPN channel, playing in a bar I was at. Doctor Who! Being played in sports bars all over the USA and beyond. This is a whole new level of reach giving access to an even larger potential audience.

Moving on from the promotion, the show’s titles have been spruced up a bit from the versions that accompanied the 2023 specials, with a little extension of the TARDIS flying into the Time Vortex. The materialisation of the logo has been tinkered with too, all for the good, and I really liked the titles before.

And then we are into the exposition, as the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) fills Ruby (Millie Gibson) in on the bare minimum of backstory so newcomers can be onboarded efficiently, but not overwhelmed by extraneous details. It’s all so well done as to appear almost effortless, but such consummate writing is the product of showrunner Russell T’s nearly 40-year career. He’s a master craftsman who has honed his skills. One could almost feel sorry for his immediate predecessor Chris Chibnall, except that Chibnall’s work, particularly his Timeless Children storyline, provided the foundations underpinning the reworking of Who that Davies has undertaken. You don’t get here without Chibnall’s contributions.

The Doctor Who fan in me wants to note all the little details aimed at the established fans, such as the early namechecks for Gallifrey as the Doctor’s now adoptive home planet and a mention for The Rani, alongside some other previously unmentioned Time Lords, but to do so kind of distracts from the story which somehow pulls off being fun and silly and still incredibly emotionally moving. I cried twice, both on initial and subsequent re-watches.

Yes, there is something uncanny about the Space Babies; their ability to focus and speak, but they are never off-putting or alienating. They aren’t babies with the minds of adults; they are babies, in automated pushchairs, with the minds of six-year-olds, capable of communication and doing so much, but still learning, still all in need of hugs (that’s where I first cried) and in need of a guardian, in this case Jocelyn (Golda Rosheuvel), who pretends to be an AI because she doesn’t want to risk the babies seeing her die.

The spectre of death and mortality lingers at the edges of this story (and indeed, most stories), a concept that is both inescapable and yet somehow inconceivable, especially to the Space Babies themselves. The Time Lords are all apparently dead now. Again. In a genocide. An event that presumably ties directly back to The Timeless Children, when the Master spliced the timelords and the Cybermen together. Death is also at the centre of Ruby’s first TARDIS trip to pre-historic Wyoming, where the consequences of stepping on a butterfly are demonstrated and then disapplied in a simple joke that also serves to show the scale and budget now available to the show in its latest incarnation.

And there are the monsters. Not the Bogeyman of this story – a creature literally created out of Space Baby snot by an overactive piece of educational software, no, the real monsters are the people who insisted that the babies continue to be born on the baby station while removing the means to care for them because of “the recession”. As Ruby points out, these monsters exist in our world too.

I loved (and cried for the second time) at baby Eric’s bravery, turned to fear in the face of the bogeyman, the visceral guilt and horror Ruby feels at having inspired such bravery. I loved the empathy and moral clarity of the babies and this silly old wonderful children’s show where the monster is not something to be killed, but confronted, told off, and ultimately saved. I love the idea that refugees should be treated with kindness and compassion, and that here they are. And if you don’t like that, you are free to be unhappy at your own failings and inability to experience empathy and joy.

I certainly wasn’t expecting a story with a space station that farts its way to safety, but it turns out that such things can be incredibly satisfying. I’ve watched this episode a couple of times already and I’m already looking forward to watching it again. What more could you ask for from Doctor Who?