I've been finding it hard to assign this episode a solid rating. On the one hand, I really enjoyed it. I went into it expecting it to just be terrible and, even if it wasn't terrible, I was still not expecting to like it because I didn't think it would have been "for me" as I've never watched Eurovision and couldn't really care less about it. Thankfully, this episode pleasently suprised me, and I felt that it was actually quite an interesting plot with strong characters and (mostly) good pacing. On the other hand, however, I can see that there's some mixed/muddy politics here.

There are other reviews on this site that do a much better job exploring the issues here than I can, but I will try anyway. I really don't like war and violence, so I support the anti-violence message this episode largely gives (although applying this to the real world is, of course, usually much more nuanced), but there's also some messy things with the character of Cora, as working soley within the system is not necessarily a good idea in many cases, and it is important to be able to rebel against problematic systems and institutions, and those that do rebel are painted as villains, which is correct as they try to kill trillions of inocents, but potentially problematic as this is not representative of rebelions as a whole. The episode also seems to suggest that hiding your identity is a good thing, which I also don't necessarily agree with. Moreover, the political commentary doesn't really seem to cleanly end. We don't know what happens to the corporation, or to Hellia, and the Doctor doesn't really make any moves to "fix" the broader situation. On the whole, I think I can see what this episode was going for, but I don't think it quite got there solidly enough, and having it intrinsically tied to Eurovision probably doesn't help. I'm not great with articulating thoughts like this, so I hope all of that made sense and came across cleanly.

Returning to the plot, one reason that I felt that it worked so well was that it was quite simplistic, at its core. I feel that this is in direct contrast to many recent episodes, and I like it. It gives the characters and themes (problematic as they may be) so much more space to breath and be fully explored and, at last in this series, I felt that the episode was quite well paced. The only caviat here is the end, where everything seemed to turn around quite fast and the tone changed a little.

Another criticism that I have of this episode is its treatment of the character of the Doctor. I felt that the level of violence he displays in this episode is in direction contradiction to much of what we know about this character. This could be really interesting, but it just felt so rushed and sudden. There's a line where Belinda says something about the Doctor not being the Doctor (as in, she felt he was acting out of character), and I was completely ready for it to be revealed that the Doctor was a robot or a clone or a hollogram or something but, nope, it was just the Doctor. For an episode that seems to portray an anti-violence message, the Doctor sure is very violent, actually torturing someone, with no consequences. How did they think this was ok!? I feel like they're trying to work up to the Doctor being a bit darker in the finale, but starting this off the episode before just doesn't work. I also felt that the stuff with Susan was a bit out of place, but this doesn't bother me anywhere close to as much.

Then there's the stuff with Mrs Flood or, should I say, the Rani. I haven't really cared about Mrs Flood for any of this era so far, and I still find myself not really caring. There's no enough of it in this episode for me to feel able to judge if it was a good decision. There's also the bigeneration. I'm not really sure what to make of it to be honest.

Finally, I thought that the episode looked great visually. All of the sets looked impecable, and the range of aliens used solely for the background was really good.

Overall, I enjoyed this episode a lot, but its significantly flawed in several ways which, ultimately, brings down my overall ranking of it.