Doctor Who Reviews: "The Interstellar Song Contest"

I am not a Eurovision guy. I appreciate it in concept from afar, but have never really engaged with the phenomenon openly. Good music though there may come from it and like clockwork a token oddball act of the moment, it’s never quite been interesting enough to resonate to me. I also do not live in Europe, so I’ve got no skin in the game. But I can understand the appeal, especially on a camp factor. This was after all the venue that introduced the world to ABBA. And on that level I understand completely why this incarnation of Doctor Who  -the campest we’ve seen since the classic series- would be drawn to that world as subject matter for an episode. I just didn’t expect I’d like it all that much.

Anyway, “The Interstellar Song Contest” might be the best episode of this series. It did not go in the direction I assumed, which was as either a light, fluffy full-on musical episode paying homage to Eurovision fever (and possibly featuring an appearance from the contest’s U.K. stalwart Graham Norton), or something in the vein of “Bad Wolf” from Russell T. Davies’ first run, that featured cameos from several then-contemporary U.K. reality shows (an episode that feels kind of creatively cheap in retrospect). But while this episode doesn’t not partake in some Eurovision adulation, it’s not so warm or bereft of critique as expected. There are some surprises through it that on multiple levels are incredibly satisfying.

But yes, it is set at the titular Interstellar Song Contest where right from the get-go the familiar face of British TV personality Rylan Clark (who has been a co-host of Eurovision for several years) appears as himself having been apparently cryogenically frozen for this exact purpose, alongside one of those cat-people from early in Davies’s run who we haven’t seen in several years.The TARDIS lands in a box at the Harmony Station arena to get another read from the Vindicator, and Belinda being a Eurovision fan is actually interested in sticking around this time.

Unfortunately for everyone but those not up for listening to alien songs for an hour, a terrorist called Kid (Freddie Fox) with the aid of his girlfriend Wynn (Iona Anderson), planted within the control booth, takes the place over. They are both Hellians, an alien race distinctive for two horns that stretch from the back of their neck to over the head; they are not permitted to partake in the Interstellar Song Contest and in fact are a heavily discriminated against race (if it’s not clear by the horns, they are literally scapegoats). And these two don’t do the public perception any favours by blowing the roof off the arena, causing everyone inside to be sucked up into the space -including the Doctor and the TARDIS (Belinda is sheltered by the booth when this goes down).

The darkness is tempered a bit though by the Doctor fortunately tripling the station’s mavity field (yes, we’re still doing mavity) so as to keep everyone alive but in stasis, floating frozen in the emptiness above -including for a time in an unsettling image, the Doctor himself. 

But Belinda is left back on the station and utterly trapped -there is no communication signal active as a security measure to prevent gamblers from taking advantage of the signal’s speed of light across the galaxy (a nifty explanation I think). Here Belinda realizes just how much she has comes to depend on the Doctor through their recent adventures. It is a great performance moment from Varada Sethu, who conveys the tangible panic of the Doctor being possibly dead and her one way of getting home lost. She runs into a contestant Cora Saint Bavier (Miriam Teak-Lee) and her producer Len (Akemnji Ndifornyen), and a great balance of trauma and comedy is hit when she asks where they are, and none of Cora’s string of answers get her any closer to comprehending somewhere relatable. But she takes a bit of time here to mourn the Doctor and the fact that she never told him how wonderful he was, which is a disappointing sentiment. Certainly the Doctor doesn’t need any more people telling him how wonderful he is, but it is also a step into dull familiarity from where she started in her cautious relationship with the Doctor -which was far more interesting. Luckily, this isn’t the last note on that feeling.

Of course the Doctor is roused though and manages to ‘fly through space via a confetti cannon’ to get back onto the station. The scene proves an unexpected place for Ncuti Gatwa to exercise his physical comedy skills largely untapped on this show. I love his deadpan drop to the ground when he first makes it back and then the timing of his heavy breathing once revived back into his organic charm. He is found by technician and contest super-fan Gary (Charlie Condou) and his partner Mike (Kadiff Kirwan) -a relatively stereotypical gay couple but a good enough foil for the Doctor.

As he sets out to find Belinda and whoever is behind this chaos, we come to learn a little more about the Hellians. The script is credited to Juno Dawson, author of This Book is Gay as well as the first Thirteenth Doctor novel. What it does nicely is suggest the idea of the Hellians through various characters without going into much depth on them right away. It’s the little things in what is said from Mike and Gary and Len to the Doctor and Belinda: they had a nice planet once but what happened to it -they did it to themselves. They say they practice cannibalism and witchcraft. They say… It is a very good way of translating an effective propaganda campaign. Seemingly everyone in the galaxy has just readily accepted without thought this notion that the Hellians are bad and deserve to be alienated at best, vilified at worst. It is a coincidence that this episode drops the first week following the conclusion of Andor (and on the same streaming service no less), and I probably won’t be the only follower of both noting the striking confluence of their messages here. That show did such an apt job portraying the end result of this kind of otherizing that this episode resonates in a much darker way for even alluding to the same methods.

And it gets even more intriguing when Cora reveals that she actually is a Hellian, much to Len’s shock, and that she removed her own horns as a way of hiding her heritage to both partake in the contest, and assimilate more generally. A vivid acknowledgement of what marginalized people often feel the need to do themselves. On a dime Len’s opinion of Cora changes, though Belinda’s does not, and unlike most anyone Cora has come across, actually listens to her story of her people. And it is not too far from the sad state of the Ghormans in Andor. The Corporation (there appears to only be the definite one in this timeline) invaded Hellia, bought the planet to harvest its immense poppy fields for honey-seeds, then scorched the earth to prevent the planet from ever growing its resource again. That Corporation is now the chief sponsor of the Interstellar Song Contest.

There are real world allusions here. I won’t pretend to know the intricacies of any scandals involving companies that have been  involved with Eurovision -but I know they have happened. For a contest that widespread, of course dubious entities have profited from it -there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Here of course it is tied directly to violent cultural imperialism if not genocide outright -and you can certainly think of a few examples of countries that have experienced that and have simultaneously been disallowed representation in a venue like Eurovision. There is a very palatable dark side to these institutions, and this is an episode of Doctor Who making sure you are aware of that.

It doesn’t excuse Kid though, who broadcasts his plan around the station that the Doctor is able to hijack -and Belinda able to confirm he’s okay. But really he is not. Kid’s plot is monstrous: with the contest still broadcasting to sections of the galaxy on another temporal wavelength, he intends to insert a sonic wave into the stream that will kill anybody watching -an estimated three trillion people, and the Corporation would be held culpable. On hearing this, the Doctor promises a harsh, visceral reckoning on Kid, aggressive in that way that we’ve seen him be this series, but this time Belinda really takes note of it and is quite strongly disturbed.

She is right to be, and the Doctor makes his way to the control room, using a hologram to distract Kid before fairly quickly destroying the countdown device that would have set off this charge. But it isn’t enough, and we get to see Gatwa showcase the darker side of the Doctor for the first time. He goes on the attack. With the use of a high-powered glove he essentially starts torturing Kid, possibly giving him the treatment he was about to give the universe -the inhumanity coming out in Gatwa’s crazed expression. It comes to an end only with the arrival of Belinda. And she doesn’t have to say anything, he realizes immediately with horror his impropriety and stops. One of the best illustrations perhaps of why the Doctor needs his human companions -without that proximity to humanity and its effect on him, what does he become? He comments on the ice in his heart on account of Kid -what if it came to both hearts?

Kid and Wynn are taken into custody and the Doctor and Gary figure out a way of using cryogenic technology to bring everyone up in space back to the station, and weirdly enough the show carries on. But thankfully too, because Cora gets to perform her song, and we see what her plan was all along. On the stage, she reveals herself as a Hellian to a chorus of boos, but proceeds anyway to sing a song of her people, a song the Corporation specifically doesn’t want the galaxy to hear. We can only assume how subversive it is, it’s sung in the made-up alien language, but it is still very pretty. Juxtaposed with her singing are some very beautiful images of the poppy fields and the prosperity of Hellia, as well as the devastation and the darkness. Teak-Lee’s performance is exemplary and it is a very moving finale to the episode. Maybe the effect of Eurovision isn’t so foreign to me as I thought.

Before they leave, Belinda does get to exalt the Doctor as she wanted and he is chuffed, but it comes with a caveat. “I never really know what you’re thinking”, she says. “You scared me back there.” In response, the Doctor opens up for the first time to her about the annihilation of the Time Lords, and explains that what Kid was threatening to do triggered his trauma over the loss of his home and his people -something it should be remembered, he experienced twice over. Another very humane failing that we can empathize with, and I like that this trauma has not left the Doctor. It softens Belinda a little bit, but if that scepticism she expressed in “The Robot Revolution” had waned over the series it has perhaps come back and wisely too, just as much as her desire reaffirmed to get back home.

That however is not so easy a thing. Earlier in the episode as I had predicted, we were treated to a delightful appearance by Graham Norton as a hologram of his long-dead self (“wishing I hadn’t sold my likeness in perpetuity but here we are” is the funniest joke of the episode), and when asked about Earth he informs them directly of its destruction on May 24th, 2025 of causes unknown -there’s actually a creepy gravitas to Norton’s delivery too. So the Doctor and Belinda immediately set about getting back -the Vindicator arbitrarily now working for sure and at long last taking them back home for a two-part finale.

But the episode isn’t quite done. The enigmatic Mrs. Flood must be answered for. She of course was a spectator at the contest to collect her ‘final link’ of the Doctor, and once Mike and Gary rescue her it appears to be too late -but that is okay because Mrs. Flood has a secret: she begins to regenerate… no, to bi-generate. Splitting in two with a younger woman played by Archie Panjabi she at least reveals herself as the Rani, last played by Kate O’Mara in 1987. It was a popular theory as to who this woman really was, The Rani being one of the more notable classic series villains (even though she appeared in just two stories) not to have made a reappearance yet in the twenty-first century. But here she is again to go toe-to-toe with the Doctor next week -Melanie Bush is certainly going to remember her.

She is however not the only classic series figure to make a reappearance this episode. I didn’t mention what it was that awoke the Doctor while freezing up in space -he was in fact prompted back to consciousness by the illusion of someone he has not seen in far too long a time. An old woman in a vision framed against the backdrop of the TARDIS: Susan Foreman, his granddaughter.

Ever since I first watched “The Dalek Invasion of Earth” some twelve or thirteen years ago now, I have wanted to see a reunion between the Doctor and his first ever companion, his only direct relative to grace the TARDIS (who in fact took credit for the TARDIS name). Her departure is still perhaps the most poignant of any companion, and it famously ended with the Doctor promising he would come back to her someday. Sixty years later, he never has. In the canonical echelons of the show we have not seen Susan since the Doctor let her go to live a happy life with David, the man she fell in love with during that story. I have always hoped that we would see the Doctor finally make good on his word, and before the lovely Carole Ann Ford, the last surviving original Doctor Who cast member, passed on. I didn’t think it would happen though -it was so long ago and nobody involved in the show presently seemed to remember Susan. But then she got referenced a couple times last series and I wondered if Russell T. Davies was perhaps laying a seed or two. Bless that predictable Welshman! The moment she showed up here, it was exhilarating, it was emotional, and in spite of the Doctor’s later assertion to himself it didn’t mean anything, the implicit guarantee that we are going to get that moment, in the next couple weeks or beyond, was thrilling to the classic series fan in me who has been longing for this catharsis. I’ll be honest, it probably taints my opinion in this episode’s favour at least a little bit.

I am confident though the episode would have been a success without her. It’s willingness to not simply shill for its topic of choice and present some real damning critique on the institution it also goes to the trouble of homaging is pretty impressive. It has its cake and eats it too without much trouble, while pushing the show into severe territory  that it handles maturely. It doesn’t resolve some of that overhanging characterization for the Doctor, but we see again that he is not beyond reproach, and Belinda gets to occupy that moral centre in his place. I thought “The Interstellar Song Contest” might be a write-off episode. But it was nowhere as shallow as it appeared (or as perhaps the real Eurovision is).

Next week is the end of the world. I can’t believe I’m looking forward to it.

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