Spoilers for “Boom” follow.
Any new series needs time to find its footing, even if it’s a revival of an already ongoing hit. The first three episodes of “New”. Doctor Who it was fun but no without themselves idiosyncrasies that complicate them to love Now it’s time for Steven Moffat, the series’ greatest writer of the 21st century, to show what this new season is capable of. There’s the usual level of showmanship and wit, but it’s hard to deny the man’s genius when he penned the first original classic of the Disney+ era. Bloody hell.
Boom pushes the Doctor and Ruby into the tiniest corner of the war, letting it play out in microcosm. It’s an angry story about how money, power and cruelty make people inhuman, and it’s kind of an episode. Doctor Who is superior. This story makes no bones about the futility of war and why money is the engine that keeps it going. Its framework may be modern—there are many uses of the word “algorithm”—but its central thesis is timeless.
On the field battlefield in Castarian 3, two paramilitary Anglican chaplains return to base. Carson (Majid Mahdizadeh-Valoujerdy) guides his friend John Francis Water (Joe Anderson), who was blinded in battle and will take four weeks to recover from his injury. In the distance they see an ambulance, but they are afraid of it and want to take a long way around it. Carson loses his footing and slides into a small crater, setting off a mine that destroys him instantly. Anxious calls for an ambulance, a large-screen tank-monitored device with a friendly-looking avatar (Susan Twist) detects his injury and injects Vater with his wand. He decides that four weeks is an unacceptable amount of time for recovery and terminates him instead. Her cries are heard by the Doctor, who rushes out of the TARDIS to help, but winds up planting one foot on the same mine that killed Carson.
Ruby arrives to find the doctor frozen in place and asks him to describe what he’s standing on: Willengarde my It’s an anti-personnel explosive made by a notorious weapons manufacturer that Moffat has referenced several times before. The Doctor asks Ruby to find something heavy to hold on to so she can shift her weight and put her foot down without triggering the mine. What he finds are Vater’s compressed remains, attached to an AI box containing a Vater simulator. The Doctor asks Ruby to throw it to him, but she instead opts to walk into blast range and hand it over. As Gatwa’s Doctor vacates the role of the big-chested hero, Ruby goes to work to fill the void, confirming the dynamic.
Mina, however, is unsure if the Doctor is a viable target and thus remains frozen on the edge of activation. Villengard’s weapons are very bad, and the company has created a war algorithm to limit the number of bodies on the battlefield at once, while also making wars cost-effective and indefinite. This gives the company a license to kill the wounded rather than spend money to treat them.
Before dying, Vater was talking to his daughter Splice (Caoilnn Springall), who was brought into the war because there was no one else to look after her. While his father was on patrol, he was left under the care of Mundi (Varada Sethu), a low-ranking soldier in the army. But he loses track of his father’s GPS-marked final location. He activates the hologram attached to Vater’s remains, delivering his valedictory to his daughter.
Mundy soon tracks down his wayward ward and is able to explain the rest of the plot to the TARDIS crew. Anglicans have been at war for six months against an enemy they have never seen or heard of. Mundy and the Doctor argue about the nature of religion and how faith—rather than a higher power—helps create willing material for the meat grinder of war. Mundy is skeptical of the Doctor and Ruby, but when he scans the Doctor, he’s convinced that he won’t just explode on a mine. As a complex spatio-temporal event, the activation of the mine would not only kill him, but destroy half the planet. It gets worse: Once stuttering is enabled, the mine will time out and turn off anyway.
After discovering the wrinkles, the ambulance arrives and jams its dreaded sticks into the Doctor. Refusing to let anyone else control the story, Ruby grabs Mundy’s rifle and tries to create a distraction that has no effect. Mundy tells Ruby to shoot him using the lowest mode that will attract an ambulance without being fatal. But when Ruby takes aim, Canterbury (Bhav Joshi) arrives in time to misjudge the scene and shoot Ruby to defend his fellow soldier. On the brink of death, Ruby creates more snow, but fades quickly
The Doctor solved the problem, which is that there are no enemies on the planet – it is barren. Villengard’s algorithm sends soldiers to their deaths with traps they buy and probably set themselves. The only solution is to surrender, but that’s not something Mundy is willing or empowered to do, so the Doctor must find evidence to show the high priest. He uses Vater’s AI, appeals to his duty as a father, and searches a military database to find evidence that whatever is inside is no enemy.
More ambulances arrive to evacuate the people in the crater, and they are all on top of it. As Mundy and Canterbury talk, the latter chops up for reasons that will suddenly come down to… we’re in the last few minutes of the episode. In the chaos, all seems lost, but as Willengard projects an AI hologram, his love for his daughter is quickly captured by Vater, causing some kind of feedback loop that hopefully ends the war and disables the mine. As the war ends, Ruby is revived by an ambulance and the four survivors are able to enjoy the beautiful view in the sky above Castarian 3.
The doctor even has time to tell him about the “zealous old man” who once told him that “it is love that will survive us.” This is a reference to the work of the famous acerbic poet Philip Larkin Arundel Tomb, refers to a long decayed statue of two people lying in position. The Doctor notes that Splice may have a bright future and prepares to go on his next adventure.
There is no good place to address this later, so I will add that Varada Sethu has also been cast as a new companion. Doctor Who second season. Initial rumors suggested she would replace Millie Gibson, but the BBC said last month the trio would travel together. It is not unusual for an actor to play a minor role in an episode and then return as a main cast member. Peter Capaldi, Karen Gillan, Freema Agyeman and Colin Baker made one-off appearances before joining as the Doctor or companions. I have no idea if Mundy will return or if Sethu will play a new character, but I’m not sure Mundy is a compelling enough character to be revisited.
“Boom” is a master class in building tension in such a way Doctor Who rarely tried. I wouldn’t want to experience this level of stress every week, but it’s a nice change from the status quo. One thing that doesn’t quite work with the episode is the uneven pacing. Despite all the effort put into building tension, the ending just happens.
I feel like Moffat was tight against the running time, because the last few minutes are ignored as much as I’d like them to be. Interestingly, at other times Moffat had written such dark stories as The Idle Child / The Doctor Dances and The World Enough and Time / The Doctor Falls, both of which were double-entendres. I’m not sure Boom needed 90 minutes, but an extra 10 minutes would have helped things breathe.
Despite being rooted to one point for most of the story, Gatwa’s Doctor still commands every frame he takes. There’s enough chemistry between him and Millie Gibson that the pair’s interactions are completely believable. But the rest of the cast don’t get much time to shine, given their limited focus and the pivotal roles they play in the narrative.
It’s entirely in Moffat’s style that he would return to a show now equipped with a budget the size of Disney to create an episode in just one location. As a writer, he always enjoys tying one hand behind his back and then letting those limitations force him to be better. It was his Swiss watch, clever storylines and snappy dialogue that ensured his episodes were always events. History has also silenced his critics: Last year Doctor Who magazine He polled readers to rank each episode of the show. Out of the top 10 surprisingly Moffat was charged with five yearsunseated the show’s greatest writer, Robert Holmes.
And as I said above, Boom stands proud as the first bona fide classic of the Disney+ era.
Susan Twist Corner
This week, Susan Twist played the avatar of the evil Willengard ambulances roaming the battlefield. On several occasions, the Doctor addressed Vater’s AI homunculus about whether or not they were both fathers. If it’s not clear, I think the show wants the audience to know that the Doctor is a father with a child whose whereabouts are unknown. The vague premise is that it’s Susan, or Ruby of some sort, who takes up the mantle of The Waiters. Yes.
