The Cutprice Guignol

Alright, I’m going to split this review into two parts: the episode, and then, everything surrounding it.

Because, to be quite honest, Rogue might be my favourite episode of this season so far on the pure basis of what it did in these fifty or so minutes of television. It’s such a classic Who set-up, and one that I think is brought to life beautifully by writers Kate Herron and Briony Redman; Ruby and the Doctor head off to regency England for a little Bridgerton cosplay, only to run into shapeshifting killer aliens. Oh, and the bounty hunter who’s pursuing them, Rogue (Johnathan Groff).

This episode felt like such a throwback to me in all the right ways (well, mostly, but we’ll get to that soon): witty without being cloyingly silly, with a great sense of time and place that tapped into the Bridgerton trend in a way that I’m told works (I haven’t personally watched Bridgerton, because seeing Nicola Coughlan getting romanced in the back of a carriage would catapult me into a state of such erotic frenzy I would have to be medically rehydrated). It’s probably my favourite Ruby Sunday episode so far, as Millie Gibson navigates most of the episode by herself, bringing a wit and warmth to the role and feeling more settled in her place as companion than she ever has before. Of the supporting cast, Indira Varna was honestly a delightful addition as the arch Duchess, and the monsters themselves were one of the cooler designs we’ve had in a while, a bit arts-and-crafts in a way that scratches my brain just right.

But we must, of course, talk about the title character and this week’s (and arguably this season’s) big swing: Rogue, played by Johnathan Groff. Now, if you’ve read my ill-fated Glee reviews, you’ll know I’m an enormous fan of Groff, and I was utterly enchanted by him here; he’s such a tremendous actor, able to move between tones with ease and grace, and what he brings to Rogue here is downright perfect. At first a stoic and brooding antihero, as he and the Doctor spend more time together, he slowly unfurls into this nerdy, compassionate, and curious love interest, as he and the Doctor share their experiences of love and loss as solo travellers.

It’s a tremendous episode for Gatwa, too, and one that really fleshes him out as this version of the Doctor. I wrote a few episodes back about how much I love Gatwa’s underplaying of emotional moments, and this episode had a handful of them that really underlined this Doctor’s approach to his past and his future, especially in his conversations with Rogue. While I think the show has been far too reliant on tell over show when it comes to the building of Ruby and the Doctor’s relationship, I did love that moment where the Doctor thinks he’s lost her, and wonders aloud how long these monsters live for – how long he will let them suffer for in revenge. The Doctor is at their best with a streak of hardness running through them, and it’s something that’s often been lacking in the writing for Gatwa’s season so far. Also, and this is purely my deranged fangirl kicking, but that glimpse of Jo Martin’s Doctor had me feeling every kind of way imaginable. Give her a spin-off! Let her live in my house! I don’t care!

And a love interest he is – there’s no pussyfooting around here with he and the Doctor having an ice-cream on top of the TARDIS (Chris Chibnall, I am in your walls), no. Rogue and the Doctor have a good old snog at the episode’s end, before Rogue sacrifices himself to save Ruby. The chemistry between Gatwa and Groff was spot-on for me throughout the episode, their flirtation building to that point that made this kiss feel like the only natural end to their story (though, obviously, this is far from the last we’ll be seeing of Rogue). I know there will be some people out there who hate this romance subplot, but there are plenty of episodes in the show’s canon where the Doctor has a one-episode love interest (Girl in the Fireplace springs to mind), and Rogue makes perfect sense to me as part of that.

So that’s the episode. But what about everything else?

Because it has been a profoundly bizarre experience to see the marketing for and reaction to this episode over the course of the last week. The BBC ads promised that Rogue would “change the Doctor’s life forever”; a number of articles from major publications hailed this episode as featuring the show’s first same-sex kiss. And look, I’m not saying this isn’t a big moment for the show, because it is; having the Doctor share an explicitly romantic kiss with a male love interest on-screen matters, and it’s a celebration of the queerness of this version of the character, something I’m totally happy to see.

But the first same-sex kiss of the show’s run was, of course, between Jack and the Doctor at the end of the first season of the show’s reboot. And let’s be honest here, it’s hard not to be thinking about Jack Harkness in this episode – much like Space Babies (which got a terrifying shout-out this week), Rogue felt like a bit of a retread of many of the character beats that introduced Jack in the first season. The psychic paper showing the character’s attraction, the rogue-ish bounty hunter, out-for-himself character who sacrifices himself at the story’s end, even the running theme of dancing throughout this episode – it’s such an obvious connection as to seem deliberate, as though perhaps this character has a connection to Jack.

But even if he doesn’t, it’s an obvious and unavoidable invocation of that character, and the fact that both the marketing surrounding this episode and so many of the mainstream reactions are framing this kiss as totally new territory for the show is decidedly odd to me with that in mind. Perhaps it’s because this kiss is outrightly romantic as opposed to the more platonic kiss between the Doctor and Jack in the first season – but regardless, that kiss is still an iconic and important moment in the show’s run, and it seems so strange for it to be retconned out of existence like this in the media surrounding this episode. Even though I don’t care for how it’s handled, there was a lot of furore over the lesbian kiss in Deep Breath – even outside the Doctor, it’s far from the first same-sex kiss in the show’s history.

And even beyond a kiss, it didn’t make much sense to me that this episode was framed as so fundamentally changing the Doctor as a person. If we’re taking the word of the writers, the Doctor has been canonically bisexual since Matt Smith’s era – in David Tennant’s brief return to the show, his Doctor acknowledged an attraction to men. Both within the show and out of it, we’ve known the Doctor is attracted to men – while I get that this kiss is a more direct depiction of that and matters because of how explicit it makes that desire, we did already know, right?

It’s weird – I don’t want to downplay how important this is as a moment for the show and for Gatwa’s Doctor as a whole, but it’s strange to see how this kiss between two men is being treated like it’s never even come close to being done before on Doctor Who, when it just…has? And when the Doctor’s attraction to men, even when played by a man, has been part of the show for the better part of fifteen years now? I think it’s a great moment, part of a great episode overall, but downplaying the impact of the show’s forays into LGBTQ representation seems like a real shame. It seems to me like the marketing around this episode deliberately ignored other important LGBTQ moments in the show’s history for the sake of making this one feel even bigger, and that just doesn’t sit right with me.

I’d love to hear what you thought of this episode – I want to reiterate that I did really love it, I’m just confused at the media and marketing surrounding it. Are you hoping to see Johnathan Groff return? How did you feel about the orchestral Bad Guy cover? Let me know in the comments!

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(header image via Radio Times)