*Episode premise spoilers, including spoilers from “Wish World”*
Up top, let me just say that the post-season spoilery posts will be lengthy. I’m going to get into…all this stuff starting next week. No specific plot spoilers here, but I will be talking about my feelings and reactions to it.
At the end of “Wish World,” the Rani revealed her ultimate aim: using the artificial wish world to break open the fabric of reality and retrieve Omega from the “Underverse.” After a quick save from a surprise ally, the Doctor is in a position to fully wake up his friends from the wish, so they can work together to stop the Rani(s).
There are a lot of major twists and turns in this episode, and while one in particular made me scream in delight, quite a few felt unearned or badly executed. And when a lot of the “big” moments in the episode are the ones that work the least well for me, that definitely puts a big damper on the episode as a whole.
Not that I disliked everything. I continue to love Archie Panjabi’s brutally cold performance as the Rani. This time around, my favorite line reading from her is when she looks at the Doctor in disgust and says, “I think she’s asking us to mate.” And of course, Ncuti Gatwa is an absolute gift to the show. The Doctor and the Rani’s scenes together are excellent, Gatwa is positively stellar in a scene with a surprise character who shows up late in the episode, and I love how much relish he puts into the line, “Oh, I would love to be called Bad Penny!” I’m glad Mel gets to interact with the Rani a tiny bit and that Ruby and Belinda get to meet, although in both cases, I’d have liked more than we got. A previous episode comes back into play in a way I definitely wasn’t expecting.
But there’s a lot that doesn’t work for me. After all the build-up, the Omega/Rani/Wish World stuff feels like it’s dealt with too fast, giving us an anticlimactic resolution. And I’m really, really aggravated by how Belinda is treated in the finale. As I said in the last episode, I’m happy for more Ruby, but I don’t want her screentime coming at the expense of Belinda’s. Unfortunately, Belinda gets sidelined here big time, and what the show does with her character in the final act leaves a super bad taste in my mouth. I love Belinda, but the show doesn’t seem to.
Okay, that’s about all I can talk about for now. We’ll pick this up next week with full spoilers.
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