The Cutprice Guignol

I hardly even know what to say about Space Babies. An episode so bad, so depressingly awful, so childish and stupid and soulless – I don’t even know where to begin.

After Ncuti Gatwa’s introduction-proper as the Doctor in The Church on Ruby Road, I’ve been thoroughly looking forward to seeing his tenure as the Doctor on the show – he’s got such a phenomenal charisma, such wit and charm, and, more than anything, I’m slavering to see him get into some of the more emotional stuff this season (that “I’ve got no-one” in Ruby Road caught me off-guard in the best way possible, and I look forward to getting an emotional suplex of a similar flavour from him at some point in this season). Millie Gibson as Ruby Sunday has serious potential, and the mere thought of a teenager being in the TARDIS snaps me into sci-fi mothering mode, whether I like it or not.

But, to be quite honest, this is the first new run of the show that I’ve gone into with serious doubts. The shift to Disney is the biggest reason for that; as soon as I saw the news of the new release schedule (not just a usual Saturday evening teatime slot, but hitting streaming the night before), I knew things were going to be different, and not necessarily in the way that I like. Disney already got their hands on Star Wars, a property truly woven into the very fibre of my being, and wrung me out of giving a shit with a trudge of mediocre-to-bad shows and movies. I’m not saying the same will happen with Who, but, with Disney’s habit of milking popular properties for every little thing they can get, it’s hard not to feel like it might.

Not that their haven’t been spin-offs to Who that really worked, but they’ve been few and far between – a Who-niverse of content? I just don’t know. I hate the thought of this world (or, rather, worlds) getting the Marvel treatment, and perhaps that’s daft – things are always going to change with Doctor Who. But, after watching for the better part of twenty years now, maybe I’m just a bit too set in my ways for my own good.

But! Enough of my hand-wringing and banging on: let’s talk about Space Babies, the first episode of this season, released as a double-header with The Devil’s Chord (which I’ll be getting to soon). Russel T Davies has described this season as a bit of a re-pilot for the show, an understandable response after the cool reception to Jodie Whittaker’s era (even if everyone who doesn’t like it is WRONG and my PERSONAL ENEMY). If that’s the case, then Space Babies is his statement as to what this new version is going to look like. Question is, is it any good?

Well, judging by this episode: no, it’s fucking abysmal. Every time I thought the episode had reached a peak of asinine, juvenile, derivative bullshit, my jaw would unhinge another few inches as they took it to the next level. Yes, Russel T Davies has been known to love a silly opening episode – but, usually, what those lower stakes gave space for was a great exploration of the newfound chemistry between Doctor and assistant, and that was just absent here.

I mean, let’s kick things off with the Space Babies of the title, shall we? Not only did I have to hear Ncuti Gatwa exclaim that descriptor at least a dozen times over the course of the episode, but it was just such a baffling choice to me to make the first creatures Ruby and the Doctor really interact with this season be…babies with terribly-CGI’d mouths? They’re unfathomably awful to look at, and totally devoid of real ability to emote or bounce off Gatwa and Gibson – what it came down to was Ruby and the Doctor concisely explaining the episode’s cack-handed themes while the baby’s mouths moved like tiny little Eldritch horrors.

And speaking of those themes – God, this episode just didn’t trust us as viewers at all to be able to string any of the pieces together. Gatwa pretty much has to monologue straight down the lens at the episode’s open about how he’s the last of the Time Lords and all that (and tantalize me with a mention of the Rani, slaver slaver), only for Space Babies to insist on a flashback to that scene later on when he rescues the bogeyman (mispelling deliberate) of the story from being sucked into outer space because it’s also the last of it’s kind. I get that this ridiculous repilot has to shove in as much of the Doctor’s backstory as possible for new viewers, but at least it could have been done a little more elegantly, you know?

You know it’s a repilot, by the way, because there are scenes lifted almost wholesale from Russel T Davies earlier tenure of the show: the Doctor shows Ruby her planet from an orbiting space station, and then hooks her up with a phone call to her beloved mother in the process. And, if that sounds familiar to you, it’s because the exact same thing happened in The End of the World between Nine and Rose – it’s not homage, it’s just…the same scene, same beats played out, except this episode doesn’t even have Toxic by Britney Spears in it. Later, the Doctor warns Ruby that the one thing he can’t do is take her back to the site of her abandonment to see her mother – the same warning Nine gives Rose about visiting her father. I know that the show has been around long enough for now that there is going to be some overlap in terms of story beats, but this is virtually shot-for-shot. I hate it. Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor and Ruby Sunday deserve better.

There’s also some social justice commentary sprinkled through this episode, and I want to make it very clear that I don’t believe that Doctor Who isn’t the place for these kinds of conversations – on the contrary, some of my favourite episodes have dealt with issues of social justice, and I think the show’s expansive universe has plenty of room for a nuanced and intelligent exploration of these topics. But the throwaway lines here just feel like hasty, pointed tags rather than an earnest attempt to comment on the issue at hand – from a throwaway line about babies being born with no intention of caring for them, to refugees struggling to find safe harbour in the face of their troubles, it’s social justice as set dressing, not as sincere theme.

Because this episode is so much worse, too, than their initial outing together, to the point where it feels as though they’re playing different characters. These are, at best, sub-par CBeebies presenters; I feel bad coming after these characters so hard, given how much I liked them in Ruby Road, but Ruby and the Doctor here are grating, cheesy, cringey blights on an already-bad episode. I put a lot of this down to the writing and direction of Space Babies, but Gatwa and Gibson feel like two kids who’ve learned to act for the back of the room in a hip new take on a primary school nativity. I could have forgiven a silly or even stupid plot (the “bogeyman” being made, of course, of actual snot – it wouldn’t surprise me if someone had come up with this pun and then reverse-engineered a plot to fit it) if it was a good introduction for Ruby and the Doctor, a chance for us to get a feel for their dynamic and their chemistry, but it was a full wet fart. And not the kind that propelled the station across the galaxy at the episode’s end, either.

There were about three non-consecutive seconds of this episode I didn’t hate. I don’t like the new credits, I don’t like the way the time vortex looks, I didn’t like the weird, choppy direction and messy action scenes. I don’t like the jokes, I don’t like the messy repiloting strategy of just having Gatwa deliver a lore soliloquy down the lens. If Space Babies is a mission statement on what’s to come for this new era of the show, then I am clambering into the escape pod and ejecting myself into the void of space for my own wellbeing.

What did you think of this episode? How does it stack up to other season openers? I would love to hear your thoughts below.

If you liked this article and want to see more stuff like it, please check out the rest of my Doctor Who reviews! I’d also love it if you would check out my horrible short story collection, and, if you’d like to support my work, please consider supporting me on Patreon!

(header image via Doctor Who TV)