Doctor Who First Impressions: 60th Anniversary Specials Episode 2: Wild Blue Yonder

(A note before we begin: This was written on Dec. 3rd of 2023, to accurately capture a true "first impression" of Wild Blue Yonder before the airing of the final episode of the 60th anniversary specials. It has been deliberately withheld to await the results of the SAG-AFTRA vote on Dec. 5th, as an abundance of caution and paranoid anxiety over a strike resuming and maintaining the principles I held myself to during the duration of the previous 2023 strike. If you are reading this, it is either just after that vote or after subsequent striking has been resolved. Whenever you are reading this, I hope you enjoy.)

It is difficult, if not impossible, to critically watch Wild Blue Yonder and not have your mind make comparisons to other pieces of science fiction, or even prior episodes of Doctor Who. I could begin this by rattling off a list of things that popped into my head as I experienced this hour of television, but that's the easy route. I don't want to do that, because taking that track would imply that Wild Blue Yonder is just another mélange of influences thrown together into a pot. That would diminish its impact, and lessen my critique. The biggest strength of Wild Blue Yonder is just how fresh it feels. Ignoring the fact that it's a returning face and returning companion to Doctor Who, this is wholly original stuff. After a good three years of the Chibnall years and its parade of references and cameos and eventual exorcism of all that, here we are. A piece of new Doctor Who that is fresh, original, and incredible. A new high water mark for the show, even in this strange liminal period before Ncuti Gatwa.

For once, the active decision not to reveal much about the setting or plot of the episode actually adds a layer of mystery instead of just feeling like desperate spoilerphobia. We didn't need to delete the official Doctor Who Twitter to protect what turned out to be fucking nothing, is what I'm saying. After a pre-titles sequence that gives us the one bit of levity in this hour (TARDIS Wiki, I demand you stay true to your canon hound principles and change every instance of "gravity" on your site to "mavity", it is canon now, you made the rules and now you get to abide by them) we get an incredible range of things happening. The mystery of trying to uncover what sort of place the Doctor and Donna have landed turns into a sense of grand cosmic wonder at the mystery ship at the very edge of the known universe. It's beautiful and compelling sci-fi with a sense of scope and scale, but also a loneliness. Donna and Doctor Who, together and alone at the same time. 

And then, from that vast nothingness, incomprehensible cosmic terror in the shape of their own selves and baggage. The scene where this is revealed is cut so strangely, disorienting and confusing me: I thought we were flashing back and forth between times, stuck and stranded in a nothing world where even time has retreated, but the slow dawning realization and the body horror which follows is so damn effective. These dark mirrors (and you know damn well that's the terminology I have to call them) are absolutely pants-shittingly horrific, the way they don't understand how corporeal forms work and how they contort themselves in grotesque parody of physicality. If that were all they did, they'd still be effective and memorable antagonists, but there's a whole other dimension to this.

Naturally, with the only other players in this story aside from Donna and Doctor Who being their dark mirrors, we have more than a handful of scenes where we're unsure who's "really" Doctor Who and Donna and who is a body horror monster from beyond the boundary of the universe. The battle becomes not just one of Doctor Who and Donna stopping the monsters, but being forced to define themselves psychologically and assert their realness and their humanity/Time Lord-ality against these ruinous reflections. For Donna this leads to some wonderful moments, like the assertion that she believes she's stupid and brilliant at the same time. Not only is that very human, but the nature of believing two things at once is so well complimented in the episode. 

Already I have praised elements of it in that fashion: the cosmic wonder is awe-inspiring but lonely. Doctor Who and Donna are together, but alone. It is such a simple macrocosmic thing, but one that the dark mirrors fail to grasp until the very end. Even this isn't enough, and Doctor Who fucks it up at the end and picks the dark mirror Donna over the real one, preferring her explanation of an inside joke over the real Donna's "It just is funny" and only correcting his mistake through an incredibly observant fluke. For the second time in a row Davies gives us a heart in the throat moment where you believe, just for an awful moment, that Donna is going to die. 

Then there's how Doctor Who has to grapple with his sense of self, and that leads us to the thing that will make most nerds perk up: the callbacks to the lore of the Chibnall era. It is no secret, of course, that Russell T. Davies is a friend to Chibnall. As such, there was no way in hell he was going to disrespect his friends by giving the nerds what they wanted and retconning away the lore bullshit of his friend's Doctor Who run. Not only would that be a shitty thing to do, but what would be the fucking point? I was no Chibnall era fan, but RTD or anybody proclaiming that by official canon it is no longer true and all made-up bullshit would change exactly jack shit. 

I still lived through the Chibnall years, still grappled with what Doctor Who was doing in that time, still experienced them. Unless you affix a memory-erasing laser to every streaming copy of the episode, declaring it's not canon cannot actively change that and only makes a bunch of bitter nerds happy. And the bitter nerds who hated Chibnall aren't even happy with this run so far because RTD yelled trans rights loudly last week, and this week has Doctor Who have the hots for sexy Isaac Newton. They're gonna be bitter nerds anyway, so fuck 'em and respect the work of your friend.

It's a curious reaction I have, then, coming to the Flux mention in this story. On our podcast, we made a bit of a running joke about how Chibnall couldn't be bothered to follow up on whether or not the Flux was reversed and the universe was restored at the end of that story arc. Instead his concerns lay with Aquatic Silurians, shooting down a Doctor/companion ship because Reasons, and the everything of Power Of The Doctor. Chibnall left so many threads dangling and it felt like he couldn't be bothered to tie any of them up. RTD pulls on one here, and it's shockingly obvious in retrospect. Half the universe remains destroyed after the Flux, and the 14th Doctor Who has grief and angst regarding his culpability in this mass destruction.

Were I to have written this an hour after watching Wild Blue Yonder, I would have praised RTD and booed Chibnall in the same breath with this. This, I thought, was the emotional resonance and gravity that Chibnall neglected. Doctor Who having an actual emotional reaction to the events of the Chibnall years, something born of feeling instead of continuity. The absolute bare minimum, and something that David Tennant can play in his sleep thanks to his experience playing the 10th Doctor Who. That last sentence is where the rub comes in, and the nuanced "Well, on second thought..." of thinking about it a bit more.

Chibnall absolutely should have given his Doctor Who an emotional reaction to all of this, to express what his character was feeling about such a massive event. That much is true. I do, however, have enough objectivity to predict how I might have reacted if he had done it exactly like this. If Chibnall had presented the 13th Doctor Who feeling grief and angst regarding her culpability in the mass destruction of half the universe? It would just have been another feather in my cap for his repeated RTD leftovers. The man who ignored Missy's redemption arc to make the Master a camp cackling archvillain again? The man who destroyed Gallifrey again and regressively made his Doctor Who the Last Of The Time Lords once more? If he'd done this, I'd have called it more leftovers. It's Time War angst but for his own made-up mass destruction event. 

Chibnall didn't give us that specific serving of leftovers, though. RTD did, right now. As nice as it is to have good Doctor Who back, this is a bit of a cautionary tale. Yes, it's drama in the absence of none, but is Time War angst leftovers really better than RTD not mentioning this at all? I feel a bit of shame in having spent so much time on this minor continuity aspect of the show, so let me re-emphasize. This episode is near-perfect. I gave it five stars on Letterboxd, and for all I can bitch and moan about numbered ratings I will stand by that. The strengths of this episode outweigh this one weakness, even if I spent all that time talking about it. The mystery, the cosmic wonder, the sheer terror of the dark mirrors... It all combines into something wholly original, something interesting and introspective, and something unforgettable that will stick in my head. 

Even if it's removed from the context of the real world and is just a space adventure, there's so much here to latch on to that it still impressed me. There's also Wilf at the very end, which is a heartbreaking bit of finality in retrospect given the actor's passing. And, oh yeah, the whole world's going to hell in a handbasket as we lead in to the finale of this liminal phase with Tennant and Tate.

God help us, next time we talk about the fucking Toymaker.