Doctor Who Reviews: "Boom"

Ah, Steven Moffat -we meet again.

I spent a lot of time in my early reviews of Doctor Who on here critiquing Mr. Moffat, whose tenure as showrunner from 2010 to 2017 was inconsistent to say the least. But he is a talented writer, and one thing I always maintained was that his writing for the show most flourished (and was genuinely brilliant) when he was working under Russell T. Davies’s leadership. “Blink” remains one of Doctor Who’s best outings and most original conceits, and so the prospect of him coming back for another one-off was actually very exciting to me. And though it’s not on par with his best work either from the earlier Davies era or his own, “Boom” is gratefully a very good episode that is both modestly experimental in structure and curiously pointed.

It begins on a planet called Castari apparently in the midst of a violent and devastating war being fought against the unseen Castarians (purported to hide in clouds and mud) and an order of Anglican Marines -a bizarre concept until the Doctor refreshes you a little on religious history. The TARDIS lands in the barren battlefield seemingly in response to the cry of one soldier John Francis Vater (Joe Anderson), who is killed by an AI “Ambulance” upon assessing his temporary blindness after his colleague triggered a mine. The Doctor chases after the call well ahead of Ruby and accidentally steps on a mine himself. It activates, and a little green light circles the device without quite linking -but any movement could set it off.

A great end-point for the teaser sure, but as the episode continues you notice how long it is taking for the Doctor and Ruby to figure out a way off that mine. Eventually, once it’s confirmed how catastrophic a Time Lord explosion would be for everyone on the planet, it becomes clear this is where the episode will stay. And I have to admire the ingenuity in that. Moffat seems to have written this episode as a personal challenge -can you set a Doctor Who story entirely in one spot where the Doctor is unable to move? And it very much seems to be in that same spirit where unconventional plots like “Blink” reside. But don’t let the simplistic scope of the episode fool you -as is always the case with Moffat there is a lot going on.

The context is set up so that it better emphasizes the commentary. As the Doctor and Ruby figure out a way out of the situation, it’s determined that the mine belongs to the Villengard Corporation, the most notorious weapons manufacturer of all time. And because Villengard is a deeply capitalist entity (yes, that is the word that the script uses), it has become dependent on constant wars and an “acceptable casualty rate” to maintain its business and profits. “War is business and business is booming” says the Doctor. It is algorithmically generated as well, which is why Vater was determined as a suitable casualty despite the non-fatality of his blindness. Machines will inevitably calculate your value as worthless if you have any kind of disability.

It might be the most virulently explicit Moffat has ever been with a political point -that being this intersection of capitalism and healthcare and war, and the dehumanizing nature of the profit motive. Literally, it is seen to dehumanize -those like Vater who are killed have their bodies compressed (or “smelted”) into biological urns that do come with an AI program of the deceased to relay final messages to loved ones, but are otherwise intangible phantoms. Vater appears in his, which Ruby finds and gives to the Doctor as a way of balancing his weight on the mine -allowing him to put his other foot down. But the matter of his death is still deeply cynical -a Villengard Ambulance with the image of a kindly old woman (for better marketability of course) showing little mercy and offering the staple of meaningless condolences, “thoughts and prayers” -itself of course a loaded term in this context.

Hell, calling the machines that execute Ambulances is also quite loaded. And the fact that they are under this corporate umbrella is deeply on the nose. Moffat wrote this script of course in a time when the threat of privatization of Britain’s NHS is quite real, and in fact also taking foothold in other countries with fluctuating national healthcare services (like my own). And he makes a sharp point about how money in healthcare hurts people more than helps. In fact he draws the line directly to euthanasia and outright ablism.

But the healthcare analogy is mostly symbolic here -it’s the iconography being exploited in a setting of war. It’s almost intended to be comforting, so that those victims don’t think about the barbarity of the system. And this very notion of a required body count for the sake of profit is of course horrifying. Crucially though, Moffat doesn’t attribute this to humans, and it may be the flaw in his conceptualizing here: by casting an algorithm as the chief source of this soulless evil, he excuses or ignores the capacity for humans to view profit as more valuable than other people’s lives. There are very much people who would have the exact same moral attitude as the algorithm he vilifies. But in vilifying the algorithm he makes another cogent point about the inherent apathy of technology, which applies to the concept here as well as it does in other like metaphors. Moffat is a screenwriter, he had to have been thinking about AI in this too.

He walks back that sentiment somewhat in the end, but the more solid points still stand. Just as the Doctor does. The early part of the episode, while sprinkling in these notes of commentary, is a great exercise in tension. Director Julie Anne Robinson builds it out effectively enough in the edit and pacing, but a large portion of it comes from Ncuti Gatwa’s performance -who plays very effectively the monumental stress on the Doctor in this moment and in real fear for what might happen. His Doctor in general seems a lot more mortal than in the past and it’s good at keeping him engaging. It’s also a sizeable challenge for Gatwa, which he comes at with enthusiasm. We see too the relationship between the Doctor and Ruby evolve. Gradually, Ruby’s establishing some nice willpower for herself -reproaching the Doctor when he warns her against handing him the silo rather than throwing it, taking that risk on her own terms. It’ll certainly be interesting to see how this manifests if/when she learns about his secrets regarding her. On that note, we do get another small moment of snow falling -it seems every episode will have some such reminder to the overarching plot.

It doesn’t matter though, the human urn gambit fails to work when an emotional Splice (Caoilinn Springall), Vater’s daughter happens upon the hologram, is confused by her father’s fate and nearly tries to take it from the Doctor -her and Ruby very nearly setting it off. It’s not long before more Marines arrive on the scene in a series of misunderstood scenarios. Mundy Flynn (Varada Sethu) is the first, confrontational and orderly as she demands the return of the urn regardless of its implications for the Doctor -noting that the mine will time itself out and explode eventually. But alerted to the cost of the Doctor exploding she agrees to help -at a point necessitating a plan that involves Ruby shooting her in the arm. But before this can be carried out, Canterbury (Bhav Joshi) arrives and shoots Ruby thinking she’s threatening the woman he has nurtured romantic feelings for for years. An injured Ruby only increases Ambulance attention and infuriates the Doctor, who then lets loose with the other somewhat unexpected big subject of Moffat’s ire.

He attacks these Anglican Marines on their faith.“The magic word that keeps you never having to think for yourself” he boldly proclaims. The unseen Castarians, he points out are almost certainly non-existent, and the Marines being brought to the planet are simply meant to be cannonfodder  for Villengard’s “acceptable casualty rate” -chosen because their blind faith would supersede any question about the reality of their enemies. He basically says that being religious makes them more gullible. Here though there isn’t really as relevant a point being made as the criticisms of capitalism and the military industrial complex -it seems way more like a personal beef Moffat happened to have with the church and wanted to get out in an episode. He tempers it a little later by having the Doctor concede a need for faith, of a distinctly more secular kind, even if he doesn’t like it. But he makes some pretty strong denunciations.

The plan goes awry one more time when Canterbury after confessing his feelings to Mundy is killed by the Ambulance as well, but the Doctor’s appeals to the AI remnant of Vater, which Villengard tries to stifle, ultimately works. And here is that muddy point where AI saves the day -AI Vater, motivated by his love for his daughter, disrupts the entire Villengard mainframe. The Doctor is able to step off the mine and Ruby is treated of her injury.

At the end of the episode and following one silly but charming reference to fish fingers and custard, Moffat expands on one last idea that didn’t really have a strong throughline through the episode but allowed for a little meditative profundity (perhaps just a demonstration that Moffat could still write it). The Doctor apologizes to Splice for the death of her father, but she doesn’t see it in grief -he’s just dead, he’s not gone. Ruby, though sympathetic to the sentiment, can’t quite wrap her head around it “Dying defines us,” so the Doctor observes. “Snow isn’t snow until it falls; we all melt away in the end but something stays -maybe the best part.” He looks at Splice with Mundy and her father’s urn, but the camera remains on his face -encouraging the audience to read its meaning in application to himself in the aftermath of this palpable near-death experience. And of course the audience is meant to take it as well. I wonder if that last comment about “love” being what’s left behind, attributed to a sad old man, is a reference to the Twelfth Doctor -a last little bit of self-indulgence on Moffat’s part, but one that is allowable.

“Boom” is the most interesting episode of the series thus far, both in its structure and dominant viewpoints -even if it lags a little in the last act and rebounds on part of its’ theme. There is still great conviction to the script that comes across. It is an excellent showcase for Gatwa as well, expressing both the deep anxiety and passion we’ll likely see more of out of him. Ruby was great, and the episode was also a curious forecast of another newcomer to the TARDIS, though not right away.

You might have heard that the Doctor would by series end be getting another companion -and it so happens to be Varada Sethu as Mundy Flynn. I appreciate that her intro here came as a surprise and without that very modern Who sort of fanfare for a companion (it’s also obviously not the first time Moffat has partaken in such a thing, having introduced Clara several months before she joined the TARDIS formally in “Asylum of the Daleks”). Sethu is a very good actress, I loved her in Andor, and I find it very interesting how she’ll carry the backstory and tragically lost love interest of this episode into her future appearances. They made the Mundy-Sunday joke already -I hope that won’t be a consistent thing.

It’s a nice little treat on top of the return of a Doctor Who stalwart who demonstrates there is still a place for him in the series. I’d like to see Moffat come back once or twice a series again for a great one-off like this, knowing he’s still capable of them. Old hands can still concoct new ideas for this show -that’s a very encouraging thing.

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