‘Doctor Who’ Season 2 Episode 7 Review: It’s Time To Give It a Rest, Russell T Davies

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Doctor Who Season 2, Episode 7, “Wish World.”

We’ve finally arrived at the episode Russell T Davies has urged fans to watch the moment it drops — and to avoid internet spoilers at all costs until they do. The time has come for the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) to return Belinda (Varada Sethu), and it’s the same date that Mrs. Flood (Anita Dobson), recently revealed to be the Rani (Archie Panjabi) after last week’s bigeneration, has ominously hinted will bring absolute terror to the Doctor. Doctor Who Season 2 has proven itself to be a well-produced installment of the show and one of the best we’ve gotten in a while, but there are still worries with how the season may wrap up after the disaster of last year’s two-parter, which started well but quickly came crashing down.

In the first part of the finale, the Doctor and Belinda find themselves in a reality where everything has been changed. A palace in the sky, memories wiped, John Smith returns, Ruby (Millie Gibson) remembers the Doctor, Poppy (Sienna-Robyn Mavanga-Phipps) returns once more, but this time as the Doctor’s daughter, and the Rani is planning on freeing a terror that has been imprisoned for 100+ years.

‘Doctor Who’ Meets ‘WandaVision’ in “Wish World”

The last episode ended with the TARDIS doors exploding open and the long-awaited reveal that Mrs. Flood was indeed the Time Lady known as the Rani. This episode opens up in Bavaria in 1865, where we see the Rani, who goes by the name Frau Rani, as she arrives for the birth of Otto Zufall’s (Atilla Akinci) seventh child. That child is later revealed to be Desiderium, God of Wishes, and the power source for this new reality we find ourselves in.

The Pantheon played a huge part in Season 1, and the Doctor is to blame for awakening them, but it feels like a plotline that either should’ve concluded in “Lux.” Either that, or just had better structuring overall to make it feel like it had real connecting tissue instead of just getting mentions here and there.

While that reveal later in the episode isn’t one to turn heads, the mystery behind this new reality does keep the audience on their toes, wondering what the Rani has in store for the Doctor and everyone involved. Similar to Marvel’s WandaVision, this feels like they’re stuck within a certain retrofuturistic version of London with how they dress and talk, but still have modern-day technology present. There are occurrences taking place that can’t be explained, and even when the Rani exposition dumps on the Doctor in the final moments of the episode, it’s still unclear what some things mean.

What is clear is that everything was done to bring doubt onto the Doctor. To use his doubt and power to crack open reality and free The One Who Waits, or as fans of the classic era know him as: Omega, the first Time Lord.

“Wish World” Is a Blast to the Past

It’s not a Doctor Who finale unless there are some returning names and faces to surprise the audience. We already got the return of Ruby Sunday (Gibson) earlier in the season, but she returns this time as one of the few people in this reality who remembers the Doctor and doubts everything in this false world.

The biggest surprise isn’t that Susan (Carole Ann Ford) once again makes an appearance, which we believe to be connected to another character we’ll mention soon. It isn’t that Rogue (Jonathan Groff) finally returns after “Rogue,” and we finally get to see where he ended up after going missing. The big surprise is that Poppy is back after first appearing in “Space Babies” last season, and reappearing in “The Story & the Engine” when she was spotted by Belinda randomly in the streets. The Doctor mentions that stories were likely leaking out, so what story is Poppy a part of? 

After the Doctor finally regains his memories and remembers who he is, he mentions that he does have a daughter and that Poppy is indeed real. The implications of this can imply many things, but what is interesting is that she might have a connection with Susan and the Doctor that has been in front of our faces this entire time.

At This Point, ‘Doctor Who’ Might Benefit From Some Fresh Blood

What hurts most about this episode is that the Rani feels greatly misused. The theories leading up to who Mrs Flood was and her tenure as the Rani are, unfortunately, more captivating than what Russell T Davies has managed to do with the character himself. While the build-up to the end worked perfectly, this episode feels weaker in comparison to “The Legend of Ruby Sunday.” Russell has been known for returning classic villains since he brought back Doctor Who in 2005, and he’s always done a great job of reintroducing them. For those unfamiliar with the Rani, she’ll feel like a character too similar to the Master, and for fans who adore her, this will feel like a complete butchering of the character.

There are a lot of lies fed to the audience through this episode, thanks to the false reality and Conrad’s (Jonah Hauer-King) preaching to the public, but the Rani’s behavior and her exposition dump to the Doctor are not one of those lies. Davies has seemingly combined the Rani and the Master into one character, which unfortunately ruins what made the Rani so special. Mrs. Flood also feels like she’s been put on the back burner. At first, the dynamic of the bigeneration — making one incarnation feel like a lesser version of the current — did seem interesting on paper, but after seeing how it was utilized in this episode, it ends up feeling like quite a disappointment.

Doctor Who Season 2 Episode 7, “Wish World,” lays the groundwork for next week’s finale while unraveling a central mystery, but it packs in so much that it’s easy to see why fans might feel overwhelmed. For a season that has been tremendously better than the last, it feels like “Wish World” drops a lot of information that should’ve been teased throughout the season. Instead, Russell T Davies opts for shock value and having the internet talk about the countless reveals he drops in a singular episode, which diminishes the value.

It would be a true disappointment if Russell T Davies concludes the season with an ending that falls short of the prior episodes’ quality, especially after a well-written run featuring villains more compelling than the Rani (despite Archie Panjabi delivering a performance that’s fitting of what Davies wants from the character).

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