Hey look at that! An episode not written by the showrunner/former showrunner…..I know! What a rare find nowadays! Rogue is a solid entry to the series, again much like Dot and Bubble, not a feeling I really expected especially with this one as its setting is on a genre I’m not a big fan of. Lots of people coined this as Doctor Who does Bridgerton with its period drama setting and high society romantic ballroom location. But underneath the surface lies an alien menace and a bounty hunter that the Doctor forms a romance with. I mean poor Yaz, she spends three seasons having a crush on the Doctor that’s never reciprocated and in just one episode the Doctor forms a close attachment with Rogue the bounty hunter.

I’ve said before that I’m not really a fan of the Doctor having a romance, or at least not in the conventional sense. The Eighth Doctor and Charley Pollard’s exploration from Scherzo was a perfect example of a Doctor romance done right, where the Doctor believes that he’s in love with Charley but he doesn’t quite understand what it means from a human perspective. That or the idea of a companion having romantic feelings for the Doctor but it goes unrequited. Anything else I feel just robs the Doctor of his more alien mystique. But with that said, Jonathan Groff and Ncuti Gatwa do have some great back and forth and Rogue is a charismatic character that reminds me of Captain Jack in a lot of ways. The highlight of the episode being how the Doctor convinces Rogue he’s not one of the aliens he’s hunting by showing him holograms of all his previous faces (which honestly isn’t the best strategy for trying to convince someone you’re not one of the shape changing aliens he’s hunting). And as you may have noticed in the picture above, one of those faces includes Richard E. Grant, the originally intended Ninth Doctor from Scream of the Shalka back in 2003. It’s really just there as a bit of fan service for long-time fans and to make canon obsessive’s heads explode. It’s a divisive argument but I’m not really bothered by that sort of thing, Doctor Who is old and vast enough that I kind of enjoy when they play a little fast and loose with what is or isn’t canon, the books and audios pull these sorts of tricks all the time. The Eighth Doctor books for example once made a reference to the three-fold Doctors, a subtle in-joke at there being three different versions of the Ninth Doctor; Christopher Eccleston from the show, Richard E. Grant from Scream of the Shalka and Rowan Atkinson from Curse of Fatal Death. Honestly, they should’ve included faces from Curse of Fatal Death just to really f**k with the fans!

Not much else to say really, it’s not my particular sort of Doctor Who episode but it is one of the better episodes of the series.