First broadcast 24 May 2025.

The Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) wakes up, not as a time-travelling alien but as John Smith, insurance seller, living in suburban London with his wife Belinda (Varada Sethu) and young daughter. The city is a bland utopia, over which the benevolent storyteller Conrad Clark (Jonah Hauer-King) tells the mysterious story of Doctor Who to an audience of millions.

This review assumes that you have seen last week’s Doctor Who episode “The Interstellar Song Contest”, and also explores the general storyline of “Wish World”. As with last week, there are one or two surprises that will not be revealed here. Everything else is fair game.

The planet Earth has been captured and transformed by the Rani (Archie Punjabi), an old enemy of the Doctor’s who has bi-generated out of Mrs Flood (Anita Dobson). It has been a running joke for the past 20 years that the Rani was going to return: every mystery in every season finale appears to have been met with ardent fans confidently predicting the character would come back. If any of them correctly guessed it this year, it was through sheer perseverance rather than insight. Punjabi is a phenomenal actor, best known for her work in American legal drama The Good Wife, and is very well cast indeed.

The Rani’s return, however, is far from faultless. For one thing, it means that doddery old Mrs Flood is the Rani as well: it’s a version of the character that seems wildly out of line with the late Kate O’Mara’s original performance. Not that Punjabi receives much better from Russell T Davies’ script. The refreshing part of the Rani in her first appearance (1985’s “The Mark of the Rani”) was that she was not evil so much as amoral: a ruthless scientist whose experiments held no consideration for the people upon whom she was working, and in whose first appearance found the Doctor and the Master equally tiresome to handle. To be honest the rot set in a little within two years, when O’Mara’s second appearance in “Time and the Rani” portrayed her as a much sillier and ill-intentioned character.

In 2025 the character has been weakened again, adding both a touch of resentful ex-girlfriend (Davies cannot help but give his Time Lords romantic lives) and a level of over-the-top craziness (Davies cannot help but make his villains bug-eyed wacky either). There is still an episode next week in which he can improve the writing, but so far he has transformed a relatively striking antagonist into just another villain. Frankly speaking Punjabi may as well be playing the Master.

As for the episode in general, Davies spends a lot of time setting up a strange parallel Earth and then dismantling it in turn. The Doctor does very little, because he does not realise his true identity, and the bulk of time is spent explaining what is happening to the audience rather than simply showing it happen instead. There are several references and tie-ins to other episodes from the past two years, but rarely in a manner that advances the story. All they do is muddy the water.

Good actors work well with some particularly high production values, and director Alex Pillai gives everything a nice aesthetic look, but the script here is an absolutely nonsense. Very little actually happens, and it is hard to determine how much of it is setting up next week’s final episode and how much is simply treading water. Is it any good? Is it bad? Honestly, it is difficult to decide until audiences see what happens next.