Doctor Who Reviews: "Wild Blue Yonder"

So if the purpose of “The Space Beast” was to follow up on and resolve a lingering story thread from fifteen years ago, “Wild Blue Yonder” was Russell T. Davies’ opportunity for another Doctor and Donna adventure -possibly one he’s even been sitting on all this time. And while the episode is just a Doctor Who episode with disappointingly no real milestone connotations to it, it is at the very least a very good episode. And one that I’m glad had this Doctor and Donna back for.

Because “Wild Blue Yonder” could not have simply been done as something like a Big Finish audio drama, it’s an intensely visual story that is dependent on a particular atmosphere, which Davies and director Tom Kingsley strike very well. This is an episode that is going to stick around in the head for a while.

After a joke of a cold open, where the Doctor and Donna land in 1666 right as the apple falls on Sir Isaac Newton and he mishears a joke from Donna resulting in the word “mavity” being coined instead of gravity (I don’t know if this is going to be a Futurama-style “ask/aks” scenario but it’s funny for this episode), the TARDIS materializes in a vacant spaceship corridor. Donna’s coffee fiasco has kind of broken it so the Doctor is forced to reboot. As this is happening, the TARDIS swiftly leaves upon detecting a severe threat. Relying on a chance that it has rebooted a long switched-off program that’ll bring it back when the danger is gone, the Doctor and Donna have no choice but to explore what turns out to be a very big and very abandoned ship -save for one robot that does nothing but move a single foot every hour.

Right away the episode signals its eerie tone incredibly smartly. The vast emptiness of the ship, a giant endless corridor, with only the solitary figure of that barely moving robot gives off a mysterious, haunting vibe, even as it is punctuated by the Doctor and Donna’s banter (which includes among other things the subtle reveal that this Doctor is bisexual). The fact it frequently recalibrates, its walls and doors rotating, adds to the impulsive ambiguity. And when they reach the control area of the ship -with a little help from a golf-car- and some of the reveals start to come, it only gets spookier. The Doctor and Donna it turns out have been deposited at the edge of the known universe: there are no stars outside the spaceship and the last life-form on board had apparently abandoned ship three years prior. The void of nothingness is treated by both Davies’ script and Tennant with the utmost mavity. It piques your attention too. The bleak undercutting terror of this situation -the emptiness that surrounds this isolated pair with no certainty of return- is impeccably well-articulated, helped a lot by Murray Gold’s score -a very welcome return to the show- who captures a dark and unyielding mood.

And all of this is well before the nightmare fuel rears its head. So the Doctor and Donna, as they’re learning about this ship and trying to find a way to reach anyone, split up in different sections of the command centre. The Doctor goes off to check on some power source in a room that looks like a toilet, while Donna moves grids from one shelf space to another. She starts talking about her family moving on without her if she doesn’t come back -really tender stuff, like envisioning Shaun or Rose coming to the alley where they took off from every day to wait for her. The Doctor comes back into the room and seems to just sit quietly listening empathetically. But then the scene cuts to the other room and the Doctor is still there …and Donna enters.

Just a great way of relaying a twist through editing, letting the audience know that there are doppelgängers here -not a new concept to Doctor Who but decently fascinating within this context. We then cut a little between the two scenes and the Doctor doppelgänger makes a comment that his arms are too long, which Donna and the audience just take as a joke at the expense of Tennant’s lankiness. But then the doppelgänger Donna makes the same remark multiple times and the Doctor’s suspicions are aroused. And then she demonstrates by bringing into view a freakishly long arm, complete with a jump scare music cue, hanging down onto the floor in front of her. A moment later we see the Doctor’s double with gargantuan hands.

It’s not these effects themselves that are so scary but the jarring way they’re employed so unexpectedly. The Doctor double’s jaw falling all the way to the floor is about as believable as Jacob Marley’s in the 1999 Christmas Carol movie (which is to say, not at all), but it just comes out of nowhere, as does the next sequence where the Doctor and Donna attempt to drive away from these creatures down the long corridor only for them to assume giant-size crawling after them with freaky distorting faces -looking a lot troll youtuber thumbnails- and a mess of chaotic limbs. It’s so visually unruly and unsettling, and I’m willing to say maybe the scariest thing to show up in a Doctor Who episode in years. Of course apart from their frightful physical manifestation, the details of these anomalies are just as creepy. They are vampiric entities from the nothing just beyond the pale of the ship capable of copying, if imperfectly, more tangible lifeforms. Lost in the void and attracted to the war and hate of our universe they are desperate to enter it. And their copying goes beyond the physical -they can read their targets in a way that gives them access to their thoughts and memories, which makes them harder to pin down as imposters. This is swiftly discovered when the Doctor and Donna are once again separated during a recalibration and in different parts of the ship each run into the other.

And I like a lot how in these encounters, which happen a couple times -the audience is kept in suspense as to who is who. Both Doctors and both Donnas seem very authentic once the doubles have better mastered their form, making arguments for themselves with points of reference that are fully in line with the characters as we know them. The Doctor that we later learn is a double even suggests a plausible theory of how to detect the difference between the real Doctor and the creature, only to amusingly fail that test himself before crab-walking after Donna like Regan in The Exorcist. And there’s a good mix of humour and suspense to this, also a wee bit of deep character drama. At one of my favourite points the Donna double calls out that the Doctor doesn’t actually know where he comes from, apparently pulling from the Doctor-Donna’s memories. And it’s nice to see that with this, as well as a reference to the Flux, that Davies isn’t papering over the work of his predecessor, regardless of how popular those choices were. Instead he seems to be choosing to run with them, possibly even expand on them -the whole Timeless Child thing being ultimately underdeveloped by the time Chris Chibnall left the show. And that’s what I like to see. It’s the anti-J.J. Abrams approach. Though a certain segment of the fanbase would prefer Davies just retcon it all, it’s far more interesting to see him carry it and develop it in his own way. Where the Doctor solemnly acknowledges that pain and confusion, both here and at the end, I can even feel a bit of Thirteen in there.

Following this is a great bit where the four of them meet up and try to deduce which ones are real in a very classic Star Trek kind of manner, the Doctor resolving it through a very Doctor Who kind of intuition. Eventually he learns that it was the captain who ejected three years ago, whose corpse is still disturbingly circling the vessel (this is a kid’s show, right?) after the last time these creatures got on board, putting into a place a delayed self-destruct -which is what the robot is slowly making its way towards, what the recalibration and the countdown are in service of, and the Doctor of course finds a way to speed it up again.

For the mood the episode had successfully been building, this last part is perhaps a little too convenient, as one Doctor and Donna race down the corridor to stop the robot while the other Doctor and Donna pursue to stop them. Everything slides into place as the TARDIS comes back and the Doctor and Donna escape just before the ship explodes. There is a final bit of tension when the Doctor pulls the wrong Donna aboard and leaves the real Donna behind, leading to a kind of beauty as Donna watches the far parts of the ship blow up little by little coming towards her, but in the last second the Doctor realizes his mistake and exchanges Donnas. It’s a fairly standard ending to a Doctor Who adventure with the Doctor’s quick-thinking and technical know-how saving the day. I do sort of wish the episode had kept some of its moodiness into those parts of the episode after the spontaneity to the scares had waned, but I also don’t begrudge the comic opportunities found in this bottle show where Tennant and Tate are the only actors, and played them with clearly a lot of enthusiasm (there’s certainly more amusing mugging from both of them than I can recall even from the fourth series).

There’s a tiny bit of foreshadowing mixed in with the existential pathos about a bad feeling the Doctor has related to invoking superstition (referring to a moment where he laid a line of salt to deter the creatures and which, for a moment, worked) at the edge of the universe. Next episode is going to be his last so we’ll see if it has bearing on his impending regeneration. “Wild Blue Yonder” was good, and funny, surprising and atmospheric. But here’s hoping the next episode is some of those things and also a fitting legacy tribute -now is the time for fan service after all.

Just before the end, we got a little bit of that. The Doctor and Donna arrive back home in that alley, and sitting right there waiting for them is Wilf. It’s really lovely to see Bernard Cribbins one last time, as a character so beloved among Doctor Who fans for good reason (he always knew the Doctor would come back). It looks like he’ll be around through next episode -according to Wilf the world is ending, and there does seem to be chaos going on around them to lead into next week’s special- but this was the final scene he shot. It was just a few weeks later that he passed away. Such a pleasure to see the old soldier again, from whose memory the episode title is derived. The kindest, sweetest old man. And that goes for Cribbins as well. R.I.P.

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