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1 June 2025
This review contains spoilers!
The Reality War is a disaster that it genuinely feels like the show will never recover from. Where to even start.
Belinda's ending reeks of misogyny, at the start of the Season, it's shown that she has no interest in being married or having kids and then, she's shoved in a box in this episode and been made to be all about Poppy to the point where she literally snaps that a disabled woman who is ignored in this world and left homeless has no right to be put above Poppy. She literally has her agency ripped away with her entire life being rewritten to suit the role that a bigot designed for her.
Archie Panjabi spoke before Wish World about how she was incredibly happy to be an Asian woman playing a character called the Rani and that Pip and Jane Baker would be really happy to see that, only for her to be eaten by Omega at the halfway mark whilst the white woman playing the Rani is free to escape after two years of build-up with inexplicable fourth wall breaks which are never explained and she doesn't do once in this entire finale which is fine because she doesn't do f**king anything else either.
Anita is brought back, only to be revealed that she's pregnant after being jilted by the Doctor (in a Timey-Wimey way)........Brief moment of excitement there before that. Oh, and then she just stands around holding a door for the rest of the episode whilst repeating a one liner about just being a Hotelier.
Omega, what an absolute stupid inclusion. He's on-screen for two minutes tops before the Doctor just shoots him with what is effectively a gun and when he is on-screen. Once more, he's just a large CGI monster that has nothing in common with his Classic counterpart. He now wants to eat Time Lords for some reason (Literally just a convenient way to get rid of the Rani is the only reason this exists), for anyone who has been waiting for either character to return, I genuinely feel so sorry that this is what you got.
Rose Noble is there.
Ruby does some stuff I guess, she defeats Conrad but only after thanking a literal f**king bigot for making a kind world.......in which people with disabilities are homeless and trans people are erased. What the actual f**k is wrong with Russell T Davies? What the f**k kind of comment is that?
The last 20 minutes of the episode are so painfully obvious that they were tacked on when Ncuti decided he wanted to leave that it's jarring compared to the rest of the episode, it pushes things so far into the insane that it's baffling. The best part of these 20 minutes are genuinely when Jodie Whittaker returns as Thirteen and has a wonderful interaction with Fifteen. The line "I should tell Yaz that" "You don't, but she knows" oh my heart. I will at least thank RTD for making it explicit that the Doctors love for Yaz was reciprocated.
And then, those last two minutes......I knew that there was a chance that this was coming but I hoped that even RTD wouldn't do it. That he would have enough sense to not do so but, it seems my faith was misplaced because Billie Piper is the Doctor. I literally was saying to myself "Please fade to black, please fade to black, please fade to black" but then that didn't happen. Never before has a decision in Doctor Who felt so much like the admittance that the show has ran out of steam but this feels exactly that way. It's cheap stunt casting in the hope that it might convince people to tune back in or maybe it's just to get clicks because RTD loves talking about generating content. Whatever the answer, this is the decision that to me makes me wish to walk away from the show, whether I do or not, I really do not know but, something has to give. Either the show needs to go away for a bit and I accept the risk that if it does then it may not come back or RTD and the BWS gang need to step down and leave because the only other outcome if they don't is Doctor Who dying a slow and sad death.
Planely
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