*Episode premise spoilers*
I’ve never watched Eurovision myself, but I know enough to recognize the analogues in this episode and am able to infer a few of the specific shoutouts. Given the politics of the episode and of the real-world Eurovision right now, there are some troubling things going on here.
The TARDIS’s latest stop has taken the Doctor and Belinda to the Interstellar Song Contest of 2925, a frothy, campy televised extravaganza hosted from a space station with a packed auditorium. The show has barely begun when the station is hit by a terrorist attack—Belinda and the Doctor are separated, neither knows if the other is alive, and both are determined to save whoever they can.
I’ll start with the fun aspects and work my way down to the more serious stuff. With the timing of the attack, we only get to see a bit of the Interstellar Song Contest, but the brief glimpse we’re given is a delight. The show is hosted by a cryogenically preserved Rylan Clark, a real-life Eurovision commentator—hee!
It’s a great episode for continuity references. We get a shoutout to Trion (hey, Turlough!) and delta waves (last seen in “The Parting of the Ways,”) and there are a couple big surprises that I’ll get more into in a future post. But these moments had me screaming and hand-flapping, and I’m definitely eager to see where next week’s episode takes us.
Once the adventure kicks off, both the Doctor and Belinda have some good oneshot characters to interact with. The Doctor’s newfound buddies are Gary and Mike, a squabbling couple who are rediscovering their love for each other amid the emergency. It’s hokey that they have the exact skillsets the Doctor needs at the moment, but I’ll forgive that. When Mike, a nurse, steps in to give the Doctor medical attention, I love his affectionate, “Two hearts, you showoff.” And as Gary reckons with the nigh impossible task of stopping the attacker and saving the victims, he argues, “You’d need to be some sort of insane genius”—naturally, that’s when we get, “Hello, I’m the Doctor,” with a grin and a handshake.
Meanwhile, Belinda is paired up with Cora, one of the singers in the contest, and her associate/partner(?) Len. Her side of the plot has a stronger dose of drama than humor—Belinda is freaked out at the realization that she’s on her own with no way to get home, and with Cora and Len, we start to unpack some of the rhetoric we’ve been hearing about Hellions, who include the antagonists of the episode.
Okay, so I’ll get into more details on a spoilery post once the season is over, but there are some issues here. The episode goes the route of making a member of the oppressed minority the villain, giving them legitimate grievances but a plan so evil that it’s impossible to side with them. While this is an archetype that shows up a lot in media, and it’s frequently uncomfortable, the troubling aspects are magnified here due to the real-world controversies surrounding Eurovision in recent years.
Furthermore, in dealing with the villain, the Doctor goes way past Oncoming Storm and Time Lord Victorious. Although his response is prompted by the scope of the threat and not knowing if he’ll be able to save Belinda, this is probably one of the darkest moments we’ve ever seen from the Doctor. Even if he doesn’t have all the relevant information at the time, and even if the episode clearly portrays the Doctor as wrong for doing so, it’s unsettling that this is what triggers his berserk button in such a vicious way. I’m right there with Belinda in being disturbed at seeing him like this, and I think he gets off too easily for it at the end.
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