‘Doctor Who' Plays a Weird Waiting Game for the Beginning of Its End
'Wish World' straddles a peculiar line between killing time and presenting a very weird world for the Doctor and Belinda to be trapped in.
There are a lot of parallels between 'Wish World' and last year's 'The Legend of Ruby Sunday.' They are both, of course, penultimate episodes of their respective seasons of Doctor Who. They are also both built around the return of a classic Doctor Who villain, and paying off a mystery that had played out throughout their respective seasons. Unfortunately they also both share a pretty fatal parallel: they're both aimless waiting games that have little meat on their bones as they count down to a last minute cliffhanger reveal.
'Wish World' has even more of a problem than 'The Legend of Ruby Sunday,' however. That latter episode could at least hinge some tension and atmosphere on the fact that we didn't already know that the last moments were building up to the reveal of Sutekh's return (unless you read the rumors, that is). 'Wish World,' for the most part (more on that later), is building up to a dramatic moment its audience already knows while its main character doesn't: for the Doctor to encounter the returned Rani, and understand what that may mean. And that just makes it a very weird experience, even before you get to the mechanics of how Doctor Who is ticking down to that big reveal.
The titular world of 'Wish World' is a contemporary Earth before its apparently fated obliteration, except it's a sideways version of it. Thanks to the help of a convenient magic baby the Rani goes and picks up in medieval Bavaria in the opening moments—the seventh son of a seventh son of a seventh son, which doesn't feel very Evil Science Villainess of her, especially when the baby just essentially starts letting her bend reality in whatever way she wants—noted Utter Bastard Conrad from 'Lucky Day' is the apparent benevolent dictator of the world, broadcasting from a bone palace upon high in London to decide the state of the world, weather, and creepily pleasant lives of everyone in it with a little help from this magic wunderkind.
Those subjects include the Doctor and Belinda, who are now Mr. John Smith and his wife Belinda, living a retro-modern nuclear family dream with their baby daughter Poppy as Belinda revels in being a stay-at-home mom and Mr. Smith goes to work at UNIT, now a unified insurance team rather than a vanguard against alien threats. The creepy vibe of this overtly heteronormative existence is in part the point, it turns out: everyone makes very pointed acknowledgements about the role of women being good daughters, good wives, and then good mothers, and when 'Mr. Smith' passingly describes a male co-worker (none other than Colonel Ibrahim, blissfully unaware of who he's meant to be) as handsome, reality almost turns in on itself around him, as if the mere thought of something not cisgender or heterosexual is an affront to this world that Conrad has wished up for everyone.
It turns out we can also add 'Hates Disabled People' to the Bumper List of Conrad's Shitty Bigotries, because aside from retrograde thoughts about women and queer people, his bigotry around disabled people has led to an underground society of disabled people who, because they are 'unseen' by Conrad in so much that he doesn't ever think or care about them, are practically invisible to the world around them… except Ruby Sunday, who's likewise unaffected by what's going on around her, letting her team up with Shirley and her friends in the disabled camp to start trying to figure out what's going on. Good job Conrad really sucks in some very specific ways!
This is just about where 'Wish World' checks out of trying to tell much more of a story, which is a shame, because the weird creepy vibes are quite good, even if they also mean continued exposure to Conrad (again, no disrespect to Jonah Hauer-King, he's just incredibly good at playing a man with utterly rancid vibes). After 'Mr. Smith' has his brush with the curse of fatal compulsory heterosexuality (spurred on again by a wild, random returning cameo from Jonathan Groff's Rogue, who gets a message out to the Doctor to help him doubt the nature of the Wish World by basically saying 'I am gay and in a hell dimension but please remember that you like men!'), his entire role in the episode is to sit around swirling with doubt about the nature of his existence until he remembers that he's the Doctor. After she links up with Shirley, Ruby's 'investigation' essentially slams the brakes on its own momentum so the two of them can basically look up from below the giant bone palace as it sits above London.
And then there's the Rani, or rather the Ranis plural, who are sitting up in that aforementioned bone palace, who are also largely just biding their time, as the latest incarnation of the renegade Time Lady practically begs the Doctor to figure out the world that she's dominating through Conrad is a falsehood, so he can remember who he is, and more importantly, who she is. But it's a weird vibe of the less intentional sort than those given off by Conrad's Bigot Paradise. The episode is, essentially, ticking down until you get to that moment of realization between the Doctor and the Rani, even after she spends much of the third act of 'Wish World' expositing to his face in an attempt to get the artifice to crumble around him once and for all.
But because we already know that she's the Rani, and that the Doctor is not an insurance salesman named John Smith, there's no tension or mystery in what's being built towards, you're just a knowing audience waiting for the shoe to drop for the show's protagonist, a shoe you've known all along is going to drop. At least 'The Legend of Ruby Sunday' had the mystery of Susan Triad to build a sense of dread around, even if there wasn't much more to the episode beyond that—all 'Wish World' has is a compelling creepy concept it largely discards halfway through and then a literal ticking clock as we wait for the episode's final moments.
So it turns out 'Wish World' needs to throw in another mystery reveal right at the last moment, because the Doctor realizing who the Rani is is not that much of an actual reveal to us any more. It turns out the Rani's big ticking clock counting down to May 24 has been powered by collecting the doubts of anyone who's questioned Conrad's reality, the Doctor included, juicing up the Vindicator the Doctor and Belinda have charged throughout the season even further to rip a hole through Earth and reality itself… opening up a dimension where none other than Omega, the ancient, godlike co-founder of Time Lord society (well, Timeless Child stuff nonwithstanding!), awaits.
Admittedly 'Wish World' does get the leg up on 'Legend of Ruby Sunday' by putting its 'devastating destruction of pretty much everyone but our hero that will be inevitably undone next episode' moment before the cliffhanger this time, as we watch Earth splinter apart and collapse into the underverse, seemingly blipping everyone but the Doctor, Conrad, and the Ranis out of existence, Belinda included. But the Omega reveal is more confusing than it is shocking in the moment, because it feels like it comes out of nowhere after the episode builds towards an already dramatically compromised reveal. Sure, we don't know why the Rani is doing all this weird stuff with Conrad and a magic baby, but the episode never treats that as a mystery to interrogate, it's just ticking in the background while the Rani yearns for the Doctor to recognize her.
So when Omega is invoked—we don't see him, it's just his name being dropped—what could've been something 'Wish World' built to just largely comes out of left field (unless you already happened to see that Russell T Davies teased on Instagram last week that there was a mystery third party in the villainous mix between Conrad and the Ranis, but should you have to check the showrunner's social media for suitable dramatic tension?). The Rani and the Doctor's encounter is all that 'Wish World' was building toward up to that point, and because it's building up to it for all of its runtime, the moment itself doesn't really get to sit beyond the climactic final minutes, robbing it of what little tension could remain.
And so again, we're left waiting to see if next week's grand finale will retroactively make this week's preparation feel worth the clock-ticking… and if we really needed the Rani's return to herald Omega, and all the implications that then has for the Time Lords and Gallifrey at large beyond that. That feels like a lot to dig into, at least. Imagine if we'd gotten a two-part finale that actually leveraged its time to do just that?
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