[Editor’s note: The A.V. Club will return to recap this season’s finale on May 31.]
For about as long as I’ve watched Doctor Who (that is, since I was a child), I’ve watched Eurovision too. I’m known for my love and knowledge of both, so why did I enter “The Interstellar Song Contest” with such a strong sense of pre-emotive disappointment? If there was to be a bad episode before the season finale, and history has shown there usually is, I would have predicted it to be episode six. From the promo material, it looked to lean too heavily on the concept, staying on the wrong side of wry and camp and veering towards cloying and pandering.
I was completely wrong. Yes, the titular Interstellar Song Contest is Eurovision set on a floating arena space station with alien contestants, but the actual contest is featured so lightly that Eurovirgins will probably enjoy it even more than super fans. And there are songs, but they’re smartly kept to fleeting snippets, with one particularly anodyne Cocomelon-esque clip really tickling me. Writer Juno Dawson has crafted an episode that is all about the rug pull, isn’t afraid to go to dark places, and serves as a playground not just for the guest actors (although Freddie Fox is a maniacal delight) but the leads too. The script allows both Ncuti Gatwa and Varada Sethu to push their emotional performances to real extremes (pure rage for him, pained desolation for her).
Not that you’d get this from the cold open, which like the promotional material straps us in for an all singing, all dancing, all CGI extravaganza presented by a cat-woman called Sabine (Julie Dray) and Rylan Clark. The latter is a real British presenter and national treasure, and in the Whoniverse has been cryogenically frozen and revived for the packed, buzzing arena in the year 2925.
The Doctor and Belinda, who landed to take one last vindicator reading, see what’s happening on the stage and agree they’re staying. In fact, Belinda’s reluctance has completely gone. But also in the audience, watching them watching the show through space-aged binoculars, is a beehived Mrs. Flood (Anita Dobson). She sees the Doctor use the vindicator and celebrates, calling it the “final link” and suggesting that this contraption has been helping her while it’s been helping the Doctor this whole time.
Up in the gallery, a team of production staff led up by Nina (Kiruna Stamell) keep the show, and Rylan, running smoothly. But before the first performer can even begin, a gun-wielding man named Kid (Freddie Fox) with a mullet, edgy smudged eyeliner, and two horns growing from the back of his head charges in and declares that he’s in charge. He shares a kiss with a similarly horned staffer named Wynn (Iona Anderson), who’s clearly been his woman on the inside, the pair being rebels from the planet Hellia whose species are treated like “scum” across the universe.
So that the public doesn’t know about his extremely hostile takeover, Kid switches the broadcast feed to the dress rehearsal. In the stadium, nobody’s any the wiser, but the Doctor spots the difference on the screen and leaps into action to investigate. And just as well. While the first act begins, Kid pulls a lever, switching off the safety protocols. A siren sounds across the arena, as Belinda asks: “Is that…part of the show?” The red lights that have washed over the building and the crackling roof suggest not.
“Do you know my favorite music?” Kid asks. “Pop.” And with that, the roof explodes on the arena; and before the Doctor’s eyes, thousands of screaming people are dragged into space. Seconds later, he’s sucked up too, then the TARDIS. It’s a truly shocking moment, both in the direction this episode has already gone in just 10 minutes and in how utterly brutal a moment it is. The horror of the act is only amplified by the scene’s beauty, the stationary shot of thousands of tiny bodies flying out against the space sunset equally gorgeous and unwatchable.
Forced to watch and weep are the few survivors: Mike (Kadiff Kirwan) and Gary (Charlie Condou), the couple whose box the TARDIS crashed; competition front-runner Cora Saint Bavier (Miriam Teak-Lee); and Belinda herself, who got caught on the roof. Kid looks over the “purged” arena and smiles. When Nina calls him a monster, he spits back that he’s “only doing the things you expect of me”.
The people aren’t dead, however, but slowly freezing thanks to the mavity shell around the arena that the Doctor sneakily extended when he realized something was wrong. But they’re not the only victims. Kid has bigger fish to fry and wants to use a delta wave to attack the brains of all three trillion viewers across the galaxy. Nina tries to appeal to Wynn and points out that she saw her save Cora from being sucked away, but Wynn snaps at her to zip it.
Floating through space but frozen within the mavity field, the Doctor is close to breaking too. But then a face comes into his mind mentioned in words and Easter eggs last season but never seen (or at least since 1963): that of his now grown-up granddaughter Susan Foreman (Carole Ann Ford). Her words, calling him to “find me,” trigger something in the Doctor’s brittle body. He gasps, grabs a confetti cannon (“Camp!” he later exclaims), and blasts through the airlock where he is revived by Mike and Charlie.
Once inside, the Doctor scans into the building’s system but finds it overridden by a script in Hellion. Mike explains that Hellia used to be known for its beautiful Hell poppies, but the planet has now been ruined. “They say the Hellions did it to themselves,” Gary adds, repeating the kind of casual bigotry in which they’re always spoken about.
The trio break into the space station’s museum and are even briefly greeted by another British presenting legend (albeit this time in hologram form) in Graham Norton. Kid gets through to them on the screens and threatens to purge the space station if the Doctor doesn’t stop interfering. Looking at him with loathing, the Doctor replies that he will not only survive whatever Kid does but come find him. “Because you have put ice in my heart, darling,” he says. “I will cast your body out into the void and I will stand and watch you freeze to death.”
Gatwa delivers these words with such a steely, still ferocity that you can’t help but believe them. But that’s not the Doctor, a man who knows anger but for whom kindness and forgiveness have always been key. His own capacity for vengeance has seemingly widened through recent events. Like Conrad in “Lucky Day,” Kid is felt to be deserving of it. The difference, this time, is he has an audience.
“That’s not him,” says Belinda. She’s found Cora elsewhere on the ship, and there’s a big revelation as the singer uncovers two roughly docked horns on the back of her head, and reveals that she too is a Hellion and a former friend of Wynn’s. She explains that the Corporation bought their harmless planet and all its people to harvest and destroy the Hell poppy, which they now use to flavor the Poppy Honey (a “Space Babies” callback no one asked for?) that sponsors the Interstellar Song Contest. It’s not an attempt to justify Kid’s evil actions. No, that guy is still just generally evil. But it at least gives him a reason and Belinda an idea how Cora might be able to stop them.
The delta wave is about to be set off when the Doctor appears before Kid, who shoots him only for the Doctor to be revealed as a hologram. The real Doctor pops up behind him, blows up the Delta Wave and Kid’s gun, then gets his own turn at vengeance. He pulls on a glowing glove and, through his hologram, sends sharp volts of electricity convulsing through Kid. “How about we try this three trillion times, hmm?” he glowers, one for each of the people the now wailing attacker wants to kill. It’s only when Belinda shows up and the Doctor sees the fear in her face that he snaps out of his cruelty. They embrace, but he’s dazed. That ice in his heart will be there forever now, he tells Kid, as he and Wynn are carted away.
So the viewers are saved, but what about all the Interstellar Song Contest attendees stuck in space? They capture Rylan (“You came back from the dead!” Belinda exclaims, the presenter deadpanning, “Sums up my career”), and a system gets underway, bringing back first individuals, then groups at a time to the tune of Buck’s Fizz’s 1981 Eurovision winner “Making Your Mind Up.”
Soon, the whole arena is full of cheering, smiling alien faces again, with Rylan introducing Cora onto the stage. Nervous beneath the spotlight, she publicly claims her Hellion identity and a disgruntled, cheated murmur goes out across the crowd. But then Cora opens her mouth again and sings. It’s a rousing, moving number in an alien language we don’t understand, yet both the written song itself and Teak-Lee’s performance perfectly capture the essence of the Eurovision power ballad. Watching, everyone is silent. The Doctor’s eyes get close to welling up, and even the captured Hellion criminals look upwards, hopeful, before the crowd erupts in cheers. A happy ending. “I thought it was my ‘Waterloo’; turns out it was my ‘Rise Like A Phoenix,’” jokes the Doctor.
But Belinda warns him that he scared her with his cruelty toward Kid, and he says he scared himself. They head back toward the TARDIS, handily also saved from space, when Graham Norton’s hologram pops up on Belinda’s mention of Earth and cheerily tells her that the planet died on May 24 2025, “disintegrated into rock and dust and ashes” on the day she left.
Running together into the TARDIS in a panic, the Doctor tells Belinda, “I’m not just gonna take you home; I’m not gonna save your home” as he plugs in the vindicator. Yet thanks to Mrs. Flood’s revelation, we know what our hero doesn’t: that the vindicator is the very cause of the problem. He pulls a lever, and all the lights turn red, sounding a heavy bell noise that instantly brings to mind one infamous time the TARDIS was co-opted and morphed into a paradox machine by the Doctor’s great enemy the Master in the 2007 episode “The Sound Of Drums.” Whether it’s the Master, or something equally formidable causing it, “that is the sound of May the 24th,” the Doctor says. He and Belinda look fearfully toward the TARDIS’ windows, just as an explosion of flames bursts from the outside of the wooden doors inwards.
Stray observations
- • And that’s all I’m able to comment on this episode, because the final two minutes of it—along with any previews for the upcoming two-part finale—were redacted from reviewers’ screeners.
- • Sweeping shots of a CGI arena are all well and good, but I loved the glimpses of all the different alien species at the contest together and was particularly thrilled to see a return of the pig men from “Daleks In Manhattan” and “Evolution Of The Daleks.” Welcome back kings!
- • Small thought: If Mrs. Flood was in the arena, which she was, why didn’t we see her being sucked up into space or brought back? Seems like a missed opportunity to give her even the slightest bit of screen time. Or is Anita Dobson charging by the minute?
