Doctor Who #1046: Space Babies

"It's snot." "It's not!"

TECHNICAL SPECS: First aired May 10 2024.

IN THIS ONE... The Doctor and Ruby board a space station filled with intelligent babies.

REVIEW: What a way to start the first Disney+ season... Creepy CG babies and gross-out snot humor is... quite the introduction for new viewers. It's a little as if RTD had started his 2005 series with fart monsters instead of building up to them (and even then, the Slitheen were polarizing). Well I suppose this is really episode 5 of the new RTD era, so in the same slot as World War Three, but oof. I really, really, REALLY disliked this one on first viewing, but did remove one or two of those "really"s on the second go. End preamble where I'm trying to come to terms with the fact that I hate having hated it.

I suppose there's one criticism that's more of a "me" thing (me and people like me, which is to say, long-time fans) and which I should be able to give a pass to. Because it's something of an introduction, it repeats a lot of lore for Ruby's benefit and that of new viewers. Russell T Davies had done a good job with this in 2005, spreading it over several episodes. Here, it's really clumsy, and Ruby basically has to put a pin in everything, because the Doctor is rattling off all the main Wikipedia bullet points, sometimes making me wonder whether some of this stuff wasn't covered in the Christmas special. In quick order, we get bigger on the inside, what TARDIS stands for, that it can fly and has a chameleon circuit (even the 1963 story), the Timeless Child,  that he's an immortal alien from Gallifrey and that Gallifrey is gone, why he has companions, translation circuits, two hearts... AND MORE. It's also unfortunate that RTD uses some of the same beats he used with Rose, including opening a big window to look at a planet, modifying his companion's phone so she can call her mother, and really, the very boring destination of yet another space station(TM). The DNA scan and trying to make Ruby yet another Impossible Girl(also TM) is out of the Moffat playbook. Those CCTV shots also put me in mind of possibly the worst Capaldi episode, Sleep No More, also with a gross-out monster, this one made of eye crud. We also get actual repetition about Ruby being an orphan left on the steps of a church, which is damn weird in the context of the story because we're only minutes after The Church on Ruby Road.

The original bit is the space babies. A very silly if cute idea hampered by the mouth movement effects (that look like a bad dub anyway, so why not just give them a little speaker/translator?) and inexpressive babies (I don't blame the kiddies, but if you're going to CG their facial movements anyway, why not make them suit the dialog?). Ruby is obviously good with children (whether babies or 6-year-olds in the bodies of babies) as per her backstory, and this Doctor is quite cute with them too. In fact, the two leads are excellent, and even when the scripts make me frown, their chemistry and performances are a joy to watch. Now if only those scripts didn't make me frown. And Space Babies is a lot of RTD nonsense. Why was the monster created 6 years ago with this last batch of children if there was no way for them to understand the fabricated "bed time story"? Implying it's made from the collected snot of these children hardly makes sense since the snot hadn't been collected yet (could be from previous generations, but WHY?). Why does the machine send out a fear-inducing frequency as if babies needed it to be afraid of a toothy monster? Why make the point that the local language is akin to Mandarin when the whole concept of the Bogeyman is an English-language pun on bogey (in America, booger)? How is the Doctor almost sucked out an airlock at a point where the air ISN'T coming out? Never mind Nan-E being an actual person hiding for 6 years behind a silly censor filter, hitting things with a hammer when they break down. She's rightly stressed about oxygen levels, but opens an airlock that seems to leak more than just its own air out into space? The creature howls at the end of the manufactured happy ending? Huh? Is this some kind of ill-conceived callback to Bad Wolf? The whole Sound of Thunder bit where Ruby steps on a butterfly and is turned into a Silurian might have worked with the Broken Universe  Theory (see Theories, below), but then the TARDIS has a anti-butterfly effect button that just wasn't pushed?! A lot of this just doesn't stand up to scrutiny, and you might say that's true of a lot of Doctor Who. I agree, but there's an accumulation here that pushes things over the edge.

Even when it gets serious, the episode can't decide what it's about. Ruby makes a pregnant (ha!) comment about this society insisting babies be born, but refusing to take care of them (i.e. pick them up from the station), which means something to her as someone who was raised and raised others in a foster family. But is this a story about reproductive rights? It shames pro-lifers who stop caring about the life of a child AFTER birth, but then really doesn't do anything with it. If it's a pro-choice statement, it's at odds with this Doctor's extreme respect for life (here refusing to see even the snot monster get killed), but that's not any kind of specific statement either, though I like how he ties it to uniqueness. Later in the story, it makes a point about refugees and how they can't be rescued, but have to wash up on alien shores. It's another attack on hypocrisy (do we care, or don't we?), but again very vague, with no follow-through.

So how does rewatching the episode after seeing the whole series improve it? RTD loves a repeated meme and there are things to watch out for. The most interesting for me is that the position of the monster trying to hold on for dear life while the Doctor tries to save it is a direct mirror to the finale's own hanging on moment. I like that a lot. Ruby's butterfly murder and Susan Twist appearing on a screen as one of the station's former crew members also connects to the final two-parter. And of course there's the memory of Ruby Road that manifests snow in the real world, but that's an obvious (and sadly never - or as yet to be - explained phenomenon). And yeah, you get to appreciate the performances more once you've gotten over the shock of a goofy, slimy, kiddie plot where a station is launched out of orbit by releasing a cloud of poop.

THEORIES: If you're new to these reviews and possibly reading AS YOU WATCH, let me reiterate that this section does include spoilers because it tries to tie everything together (both backwards and forwards). One of the things I'll of course be tracking through the next reviews is that inexplicable memory, which the Doctor says CHANGES here, probably to accommodate the plot of Empire of Death. How this memory can manifest in the real world (with snow), including inside the TARDIS without either the Doctor or Ruby being present, ESPECIALLY given the truth of Ruby's mother, remains unexplained. I therefore must tie it into the Broken Universe Theory, which is largely unacknowledged by the Doctor in the series (which drives me nuts), but is pretty clear from the evidence. First, the Flux eats a large part of space-time, a wound through which the Toymaker (and his CHILDREN) escape to wreak havoc across the universe, introducing magical effects. In The Church on Ruby Road, the Doctor tangled with Goblins who not only used rope magic and coincidence to power their craft, but also sparked off a musical number. History itself is shaky, as we saw here with the Silurian Ruby, the change in the memory (natch) and "Mavity" still being used for "Gravity" (on the screen looking at the planet). So in a broken universe, where the laws of physics are subject to magic and perhaps the laws of FICTION (we'll come back to this when we see Mrs. Flood again, but note how meme-happy RTD uses story-telling rules to justify his monster in this episode). Now, the production better address this and have the Doctor fix it, or else the nonsense remains pointless nonsense.

REWATCHABILITY: Low - Some have called it the worst Doctor Who story of all time, and it's certainly in the running.