Doctor Who #1048: Boom

"We're all dead eventually. There's hardly any time that we're NOT dead."

TECHNICAL SPECS: First aired May 17 2024.

IN THIS ONE... The Doctor steps on a land mine.

REVIEW: Fun continuity - the Doctor sings one of the songs the 2nd Doctor was known to play on his recorder! But while Boom maintains continuity with the rest of the Disney+ series - Ruby manifesting snow, Susan Twist in a bigger role than before - we are most definitely in the Moffatverse. Anglican Marines, the Villengard weapons manufacturers, light romcom, recordings of your soul that keep you alive as A.I. - how did River Song not come running up at some point? - and of course, heavy subtext that makes the episode more interesting than otherwise. This is a highly political episode that takes aim at the umbrella problem of the current culture wars, with a trickledown effect that includes NHS anxiety (in other countries, the fear of health being privatized, or if it already is, the fear of getting sick at all), gun control, "thoughts and prayers", being brainwashed by the Algorithm (which makes you keep watching/buying), ultimately ourselves as our own enemies because Late-Stage Capitalism can make money off tribalism. The Doctor instructs us that "everywhere's a beach eventually", putting these petty concerns in perspective, but more specific to the plot, entreats parents to think of the children - parent power as benign virus to take down a system that isn't forward-leaning.

And I love me a claustrophobic story, where the characters are trapped in a small space - here, a bomb crater, but for the Doctor, a single land mine - which Boom delivers very well. The emotions are amped up, the tension is cranked up, and things get worse and worse. Despite the limited location, and the Doctor forced to be mostly immobile, Ruby dying on the ground for a good portion of it, etc., the episode is so frantic that we forget to ask where the sonic screwdriver got to. I suppose getting it out of his pocket would have shifted his weight and he couldn't afford that, but I just never gave it a thought until someone pointed it out to me prior to my rewatching it.

There are, of course, some weaknesses, chief among these the girl Splice who is an outrageously dumb character. Perhaps she was cast too old? I'm not having a go at her faith, belief in Heaven, etc. - that tracks - but rather her incapacity to see the hologram of her dead father as anything but, running at an intangible man as recklessly as she does, ignoring the violence around her to look at a Facebook photo album, and generally making a nuisance of herself. If her mind is broken by trauma, then show that. But it's already pretty iffy to have a character who was allowed to bring his tween daughter to the war and allow her to somehow run around on the battlefield. She's just a walking complication. And the writing has the audacity to make the Doctor muse about her becoming president some day as if she hadn't been the dumbest post in the fence throughout, just because her final lines sounded wise. The soldiers who admit their unrequited love for each other just before one of them is killed is traditional RTD/Moffat stuff and not particularly strong either.

THEORIES: While the climax of this story may seem a little magical (and not the first time nuWho has done a kind of "love will triumph" solution), I believe it can be explained logically based on onscreen evidence. If the parent A.I. can be given enough free will to hack itself into Villengard's mainframe and stop its operations, it's because it was connected to the Doctor. We see the signal flash in his eyes, which may be where the Time Lord bolstered its sense of self and hacking abilities. Add to that the fact that Ruby couldn't get treatment from the networked Ambulance, and that she's at the heart of a mystery the season's mystery villain (WHO IS PRESENT AT THESE EVENTS, unseen, and IN CONTROL OF THE AMBULANCE, possibly) is becoming obsessed with, well... Can't very well let Ruby die, can he? Two possibilities that might be working in concert to make this happen.

REWATCHABILITY: Medium-High - A dumb supporting character can't possibly bring down what is otherwise a tense and interesting episode.