TV Review | Doctor Who: “Wild Blue Yonder” by Russell T Davies

This review contains SPOILERS from the outset. 

I didn’t know very much about “Wild Blue Yonder” going into it. Its title was cryptic; there had been no “Next time...” trailer at the end of “The Star Beast”; the episode description published on iPlayer was almost Breaking Bad-vague; and, having been saddened by Bernard Cribbins’ death in July last year, the last character I was expecting to make a comeback here was everybody’s favourite granddad, Wilfred Mott.

But with secrecy comes expectation, in an anniversary special even more so, and for many viewers that expectation was not paid off by an episode in which the Doctor and Donna, as showrunner and writer Russell T Davies put it himself, “...arrive on the spaceship and they meet evil versions of themselves. That’s it.” It’s not, though, it is Russell?

Those expecting a multi-Doctor romp to the tune of an old war song may have felt let down by this second special, but I certainly didn’t. Being treated to a fifty-five-minute two-hander between two of my favourite-ever Doctor Who stars would have been gift enough for any anniversary, but to also have them isolated at the edge of the oblivion and grotesquely duplicated in perhaps the darkest and most twisted narrative that we’ve seen since “Midnight” is nothing short of stellar.

After the rampant, comic adventure of “The Star Beast”, “Wild Blue Yonder” gives the Doctor and Donna some much-needed time to reconnect one-on-one and broach some potentially thorny issues about the events of the subjective millennia for the Doctor that elapsed between “Journey’s End” and the return of Donna’s memories. This enables David Tennant in particular to really establish his new Doctor, who, despite his mannerisms, is gradually being revealed to be a subtly different man to the one who first wore that particular face. There’s emotional maturity there, buried in Davies’ dialogue and etched into David Tennant’s older brow. Don’t be fooled by the gags about the new Doctor finally finding certain human beings attractive - “Fourteen” (we’ve really got to give up with the numbering now...) is more like a regretful ghost sent to make amends for his past life than he is the Time Lord equivalent of a pubescent teenager.

Despite its creepiness and often emotionally heavy subject matter, “Wild Blue Yonder” isn’t without its sense of fun. The pre-title caper involving Sir Isaac Newton, one of the few historical figures of note yet to appear on screen in Doctor Who, instantly re-establishes the Doctor and Donna as the gung-ho adventurers in time and space that they once were while also serving as an amusing setup for a timey-wimey plot point yet to come. The fun of the skit even extends to the post-special furore surrounding the “racebending” that some viewers saw in the casting of Nathaniel Curtis (It’s a Sin), an actor of mixed race, as an individual who, in real life, was most probably Rodney Trotter-white. There’s certainly great irony in armchair pundits bemoaning the colour of an actor’s skin, yet having no issue at all with the time machine nestled in the apple-dropping tree or the inadvertent rebranding of the mutual attraction between all things that have mass from “gravity” to “mavity”. If you want to complain about historical revisionism, I think the latter point has more weight. In fact, if you want to complain about historical revisionism, Doctor Who really is not the show for you. Historical revisionism is exactly what the Doctor does*.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about “Wild Blue Yonder” though is its beautiful ending, which gives the Doctor – and gives us – the chance to say goodbye to one of Doctor Who’s most enduring characters and one of the franchise’s most beloved contributors. I honestly had no idea that Bernard Cribbins had recorded his cameo for this special so close to his death, and last week’s amusing exchange on the subject of Wilf threw me off the scent of his return completely – I’d thought that bit of banter, beautifully written and played as it was, was the Whoniverse’s goodbye to the old soldier. This, needless to say, is a far more welcome send-off, particularly as it segued magnificently into a cliffhanger ending for the ages. Never waste time on a hug.

“Wild Blue Yonder” is available to stream in the UK on BBC iPlayer and overseas on Disney+.

 

* Since the events of The Highlanders, anyway. Prior to that, the Doctor was much more of a historical conservative (provided he found himself in an era prior to the mid-1960s. History was obviously open to revision after that, even for the first two TV Doctors).