October 13: "The Interstellar Song Contest"

Stopping off one last time for a Vindicator reading, the Doctor and Belinda decide to take a break and enjoy the 803rd Interstellar Song Contest -- only a pair of terrorists have decided to make a statement by planning to kill not just everyone at the Harmony Arena, but all 3 trillion viewers as well...

"The Interstellar Song Contest", as its name implies, is a take on the annual Eurovision Song Contest (this episode actually aired the same night as the final), which is a very big deal in the UK and Europe.  US viewers might therefore not quite get just how much of a loving tribute this episode is.  It even has Rylan Clark and Graham Norton in it!  And this episode does a good job of pastiching the sort of songs you get in Eurovision, from the triumphant ballads to the upbeat pop songs to the slightly weird acts (stand up, "Dugga Doo"), with everyone coming together to have a good time and enjoy a wide variety of music.

Well, in theory.  This is Doctor Who, of course, so things can't go as simply as that.  This time around we've got a couple terrorists from the planet Hellia, who've decided the best way to protest the destruction of their homeworld by a corporation only interested in a honey flavouring from the Hell Poppy is to kill everyone on the Harmony Arena (where the contest is taking place) as well as everyone watching at home.  You can understand Kid and Wynn's frustration, but this seems like a very bad way to garner sympathy and/or put blame on the Corporation that's sponsoring the Interstellar Song Contest, since it will almost certainly turn public opinion against Hellions.  (And here we'll note the real-world protests against Israel's participation in 2025 in the wake of the Gaza War and then quietly move on, since it doesn't seem like writer Juno Dawson -- our first openly transgender writer for the show -- wrote this with that deliberately in mind.)  Kid feels like a child lashing out, which is why (despite the magnitude of his attempted crime) it feels a bit off for the Doctor to be so angry and full of rage against him.  Mind you, it's not completely unjustified -- he did watch 100,000 people nearly die, saved only by his turning up the strength of the (sigh) mavity field³⁰⁵ so that they're merely frozen in suspended animation, rather than just dead, including (he thinks) Belinda, who he promised to take home.  That plus the 3 trillion viewers Kid plans on killing with a primitive delta wave (the same wave, you may remember, that the Doctor was rigging up back in "The Parting of the Ways") does seem to push the Doctor over the edge.

The Doctor's hard-light hologram shocks Kid. ("The Interstellar Song
Contest") ©BBC

And to be fair, we've seen the 15th Doctor have this anger inside him before -- witness his confrontation with Conrad in "Lucky Day", for instance -- so I think it's more justified than some commentators felt.  But since Kid seems more angry and misguided than truly evil, the intensity of the Doctor's rage may be what put people off.  (Particularly when you contrast this with the previous episode, where the message was about forgiveness and redemption -- the Doctor offers nothing like that here.)  That's made even more clear when Cora, the contestant from Trion (Turlough's homeworld, interestingly enough), reveals that she's also a Hellion, and that Hellia was a beautiful place before the Corporation razed it.  That may be the point, that Cora's approach is more likely to change hearts and minds than Kid's, but if that's the case then it makes the Doctor's rage stand out even more.  I don't find it as out of character as some did, but I do wonder if it's maybe they didn't spend quite enough time with Kid to really justify the Doctor's reaction.  Mind you, even the Doctor seems to recognize on some level that he's reacting too strongly, given he has a vision of his granddaughter Susan telling him to stop that he ignores.  (Oh right!  Susan is back!  It's a rather odd cameo, since she only appears as this vision, but still!  Is this foreshadowing for the series 15 finale, maybe?)  It's only when Belinda appears, having not been sucked into space after all, that the Doctor seems to realize he's going too far.  This should probably be a more powerful moment than it is, mainly because they don't really spend enough time examining the after-effects of this.  The Doctor stops shocking Kid and then what feels like a minute later is back to his old self, rescuing everyone and celebrating along with the crowd afterwards.

But in some ways it doesn't matter.  Although Kid is driving the Doctor Who part of the story, that doesn't really seem to be what interests Dawson and the rest of the production team.  They seem to be having far more fun with the contest side of things, from all the musicians to Gary the super-fan and his partner Mike to the joy everyone seems to be experiencing during the show, from the Doctor and Belinda on down.  This feels, more than anything else, like it's meant to be fun, and at that it succeeds.  Pulling Rylan Clark out of suspended animation just to host the show, or having the Doctor rescue himself via a confetti cannon, is far more in tune with the tone of "The Interstellar Song Contest".  The celebration of rescuing everyone at the end to the tune of "Making Your Mind Up" may be the perfect encapsulation of what the episode wants to be.

So yeah, this episode does suffer from some tonal whiplash.  But when it's on it's a big success.  The fact that this is probably the weakest episode of series 15 to date says more about the quality of the previous episodes than anything else.  It's by no means perfect, but there's enough charm to "The Interstellar Song Contest" to keep you entertained.

Mrs Flood and the newly bigenerated Rani ("The Interstellar Song
Contest") ©BBC

And so as the credits roll it's time to finally head to 24 May 2025 to find out what's happening to Earth.  Will the Doctor be able to—wait, what's going on?  It's Mrs Flood, and she seems to be bigenerating?  Yes, this is the moment where we finally learn just who Mrs Flood is: namely, the Rani (at Ncuti Gatwa's request, apparently).  To be fair, there weren't a lot of options left from the 20th-century run for Mrs Flood to be (unless you thought she was somehow the Black Guardian or Omega), but it's still thrilling to have her officially reveal herself as the Rani.  I know my wife, who's been waiting for the Rani's return since basically 2006 or so, was literally bouncing up and down on the sofa in excitement.  And it helps that Archie Punjabi plays the new Rani to the absolute hilt, making a huge impression just from these few moments as she stalks sensuously around.  It really feels like the Rani of old, the way Kate O'Mara might have played her.  (She also makes an interesting contrast with Mrs Flood, who Anita Dobson plays as much more obsequious once the new Rani appears, but who even before that point seemed less commanding than Archie Punjabi does here.)  So then what does the future hold?  "Wish World" awaits...







³⁰⁵ Do we really have to keep this "joke" going?