Doctor Who Reviews: "Wish World"

Doctor Who does Pleasantville. That is essentially what the initial conceit of “Wish World” boils down to as it conjures up a conservative paradise of a reality where the nuclear family dominates, women are near universally subservient to men, disability and marginalized identity are unacceptable in public life, and any doubt in the system is an egregious taboo that must be punished. And of course there is a ‘friendly’ white male overseer to keep everyone in their place. Doctor Who has done a few dystopias in its time, but it is rare that one is so concise as this, that seems equal parts ludicrous hyperbole and exhaustingly authentic. If it weren’t for the fact both this Doctor and companion were people of colour, I’m sure they would be excised from this perfect world as well (and I’m honestly surprised Belinda’s grandmother was still allowed to wear a sarong in a white Christian country).

It is of course a leapfrog off of “Lucky Day”, where Russell T. Davies really dived into the reactionary manosphere world of modern alt-right politics and got a lot of his own sentiments on those movements off his chest in an extremely pointed way. And he doubles down here, with an equally blunt illustration of what the world such movements pursue would look like. It is a somewhat awkward didactic, to the point it comes off a little as parody more than salient point, but it does build some interesting infrastructure going into the series finale.

The scene is set in Bavaria in 1865 with the new Rani, as introduced at the end of the last episode, arriving at the isolated woodland home of a man who happens to be a seventh son whose wife has just given birth to another seventh son (in the age of high infant mortality rates, this couldn’t have been too uncommon an occurrence). The Rani determines she needs the child with its special abilities and kidnaps it, while in true witch fashion transmogrifying the rest of the family (and murdering at least the mother). It’s unclear what purpose this baby serves but it has clearly had an effect on the present as, ignoring (for now) the blown open door of the TARDIS when last we left the Doctor, we find him and Belinda in bed together in present day London on May 23rd, under the impression they are an unusually cheerful married couple. They even have a small child together, Poppy, one of the creepy babies from “Space Babies”, less creepy here because she doesn’t ever talk. They have a small TV from where they are greeted every morning by a Dear Leader -Conrad.

Conrad is more than just a figurehead in this world though, he is essentially determined to be a god and one the human race has the utmost faith in, including the Doctor and Belinda -or rather John and Belinda Smith. Conrad is just as much the broad strokes egomaniacal psychopath, but what makes him a little more fascinating here is the soon revealed context around him. He has created this encompassing reality based on his personal wish for the world, and it requires blatant patriarchal dominance (John Smith, who works for a buttoned-down repressed version of Kate Stewart bemoans that she ought to get married so she doesn’t have to work -which is ‘improper’), and yet Conrad himself is compliant to a pair of women, whom he would be completely lost and powerless without: the dual incarnations of the Rani, who keep him aboard their Bone Palace which towers over London, and is one of the coolest designs for a Doctor Who setting in quite some time. Conrad’s power derives though from that baby, the god Desiderium, who has built this world and cast the spell via Conrad’s desire. There is perhaps too a hypnotizing power in Conrad’s broadcasts, which feature a storytelling time focused on the story of Doctor Who -read from a book with cover art patently evocative of the Harry Potter series, which I feel is a shrewdly subtle way of connecting the rhetoric of one Harry Potter creator to the kind of views espoused by Conrad and the social architecture of this repressive world (though with enough plausible deniability to avoid litigation from the lawsuit-addicted bigot). A decent apology too perhaps for the shameless Harry Potter pandering from Davies’s earlier tenure as showrunner.

This matrix however is not perfectly controlled. Even fleeting moments of doubt are punished by the state, and John Smith certainly encounters some slivers of it. The first comes in the form of Ruby Sunday, the pair meeting for the first time since “Empire of Death” but not in the way either would have intended. She seems largely immune, dressing more modern compared to everybody else’s 1950s cosplay, and immediately knowing the Doctor as the Doctor and that Poppy is not his and Belinda’s child. Ruby’s name stirs something in him before he dispels it, Belinda reporting her as John wards her off from haranguing his next-door neighbour Melanie. We then see a couple further indiscretions in his job at UNIT, when he calls Colonel Ibrahim (Alexander Devrient) a beautiful man (as any expressions of affection between men are prohibited) and when he openly wonders who the lady is who rides out on a hovercraft in advance of the big holiday the following day. Even these minor infractions are looked upon with suspicion and the Doctor has to quickly self-correct. A similar thing happens at the home when Belinda, receiving a visit from her mother and grandmother, finds she can’t remember the details of Poppy’s birth and begins to question her own history. Her outlet is to leave the house and run out to a field where she can safely scream, the most pronounced illustration the episode gives us of authoritarian repression.

It is however a very American aesthetic that the episode adopts in this regard (the white picket fence wasn’t much of a thing in the U.K.), likely because it is the most familiar pop cultural image of this subject. The exception is of course the Doctor’s outfit -a pinstriped suit, umbrella, and bowler hat that brings to mind John Steed of The Avengers and actually looks quite good on the Doctor. But otherwise it is the simply the popular iconography that Conrad recreates here, and which he of course has no real reference point to. It relates well the fact that this world is a fantasy created by marketing and media that never actually existed in the U.K. or America, and that might explain too why the world is a bit haphazard in design, with some places such as UNIT being very 50s-derivative in style, but others like the areas of downtown London that Ruby goes to (and even her own home in flashback) don’t appear to have changed substantively at all beyond the propaganda posters for Conrad. And on Ruby’s part, she very instinctively does not trust him.

Ruby is not completely aware of the charade it turns out, but her former proximity to either Conrad or the Doctor it is implied led to her doubts early on, and a gradual embrace of those feelings -which she finds is also true of Shirley Bingham, left impoverished on the fringes of society due to her disability, and eventually she introduces Ruby to an encampment for the disabled and marginalized, where we see the blind and deaf and gender-diverse have fostered a community together and all share to some degree Ruby’s intuition and a desire to take down Conrad. It is again Davies very directly making his point -a meeting Ruby has with a bunch of these outcasts is even under rainbow-like tapestries- and it is hammered to dullness; but I appreciate the way it depicts a slight dissonance Ruby has with this community in one poor attempt at levity and the fact that she is called out for previously ignoring these people  in her everyday life. But we do get a Ruby and Shirley C-thread out of this in their plot against Conrad, though it really won’t go anywhere until next week’s finale.

Meanwhile John Smith at home finally begins to crack out of his shell when the continuing story of Doctor Who (that also includes another brief invocation of Susan) is interrupted by a message broadcast on the television by Rogue, still trapped in some obscure dimension telling him to remember that “tables don’t do that”; and sure enough when John sets a bunch of mugs out on the table and watches them closely they periodically begin to fall through and shatter on the floor -two had already done this earlier. While Belinda isn’t able to rationalize what is wrong with that, John can -but doing her duty, Belinda calls it in and he is arrested; though so is she, her mother (much like Ruby’s mother apparently) had called her in as well, and the Mrs. Flood-Rani arrives to take them to the Bone Palace where the Rani eagerly awaits.

In more than a cameo now, Anita Dobson gets to shine here, playing up that mixture of malevolence with kindly old sweetness and getting a couple sharp deliveries off. The dynamic between her and the new Rani is interesting too -with a clear degree of envy on her part and dissatisfaction with being the lesser partner at best and a servant at worst. She still believes in their evil plan and is key to manipulating Conrad but there’s resentment there too very unlike the situation between the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Doctors. But even metatextually she is overshadowed by the thrilling charisma oozing off of Archie Panjabi’s reinvention of the Rani.

It is a very fun performance, easily the stand-out of the episode, and I think Panjabi fairly quickly supplants Kate O’Mara as the better version of this character -articulating with nuance how she is different from The Master for instance while chewing scenery as well as any classic Doctor Who villain. She gets to show this off as she endeavours to jog the Doctor’s memory in her lair, invoking the Seal Rasillon, the TARDIS (where is it?), the mystery as to their mutual past, and the things that were laid out through Conrad’s story. It’s been part of the plan to nurture John’s doubt and unleash the Doctor. There is a pretty huge and lampshaded exposition dump here on how the Vindicator created a powerful web through time and space that the Rani can harness and amplify through the infant Desiderium and the scale of the wish it has granted Conrad. But doubts in its validity create holes which in that power if sustained enough will crack open the world. In effect the Rani is working against Conrad’s fantasy, using his wish as a tool to destroy the world, to the ends of drawing out Omega, the first Time Lord, from the depths of time -likely to wreak havoc or destroy him or some other outrageous villain plot -it isn’t made clear yet.

Leaving aside various retcons over the years, the most recent of which posited the Doctor themselves as the first Time Lord, Omega is a figure who last appeared in a Fifth Doctor story called “Arc of Infinity” (and is perhaps more recognizable for his very Sauron-like appearance in “The Three Doctors” from 1973) -officially now the fourth classic era villain who has come back in this incarnation of the show. And it would appear as though he is the Thanos who both of these last series have been building towards -The One Who is Lost, presaged in this episode with fitting grandiosity as to the stakes he represents. It’ll be curious to see how he is portrayed -although the pattern of this reveal with “The Legend of Ruby Sunday” is very notable, and I think speaks to a potential weakness of Davies’s showrunning. While he has always been somewhat repetitive in how he structures a series, the surprise return of an old villain with a convoluted connection to the trajectory of the Doctor’s journey over the series in the second to last episode, with the fate of the world in the balance is a poor creative premise to get stuck in. The fact that so much of the last act of this episode is devoted to merely setting that up, much as Panjabi does some good work with it, doesn’t help things. I feel like it also stems a little from that Marvel mentality I haven’t been able to fully let go of that Davies implied was coming to Doctor Who a few years back. Quite frankly, it does not work anymore.

But the Doctor’s identity comes back to him at the stroke of midnight May 24th, when the big expected holiday sets off and the Earth begins to crumble below. Belinda zapped away somewhere, the episode concludes on the Doctor trapped on the balcony of the Bone Palace, itself having fallen apart, plunging towards the chaos below.

Much of “Wish World” is preoccupied with the not unearned venom Russell T. Davies has towards the world that conservatives and fascists are actively trying to create, and his points are drilled so broadly as to overpower other aspects of the episode. There are some interesting layers here and there, and the more nuanced points about Conrad and the faults and origins of his reality ring out a lot more effectively than a half dozen versions of the same statement about women belonging in the home or disabled people being less than human in the eyes of the state. The episode’s conceit feels almost too simplistic though -like the much too obvious version the Wachowskis might have made of The Matrix. Its better aspects are where the Rani is concerned and her exquisite evil flare. Still, there is some fun in Ncuti Gatwa and Varada Sethu’s performances as drones slowly giving in to their doubts, and a handful of moments do have effective weight behind them: Belinda’s scream or Shirley’s resistance. It’s going to be a big task putting the world back together, and with the Doctor having to go up against a trifecta of villains (though honestly Ruby will probably be the one to take on Conrad). There’s a lot in play and a lot of stakes, let’s see how Doctor Who can handle it.

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