Guaranteed Incorrect Doctor Who Predictions
Throwing my hat in the ring now guys: it’s the Rani.
The Interstellar Song Contest aired 5 days ago at the time I write this, and The Wish World is due in 2 days. I have thoughts.
The episode itself is well-paced, well-directed, generally fun moment-to-moment, has a good cast of side characters, and is unfortunately hopelessly liberal in its politics. It is another in a long line of Who episodes that vastly oversimplify real-world issues so it can champion moderate centrism, non-violence, and compromise. Either you will permit state-sanctioned violence to continue and just peacefully protest and vote really hard about it, or you want to kill everybody who ever lived plus their grandmas and all the kittens.
I also hate how out-of-character they have to write the Doctor to support this nonsense. If this had the balls to be written like Oxygen (S10E05) then the Doctor would fucking do something about the unnamed “Corporation” that’s sponsoring space Eurovision with all the genocide they’re doing. The Doctor’s lines about still having ice in his heart felt downright character-breaking, especially for this Doctor who’s supposed to be more emotionally mature than previous incarnations, but I could only see maybe 6, 7, or 9 doing this, and those are Doctors renowned for being angsty assholes. I wanted 15 to deliver something with the same blunt emotional power as his speech at the end of Lucky Day, something humbling and hopeful. “One day, maybe you’ll find the courage to be a better man than this. A better man than I was, just now.” I don’t know, man, something. As it stands, I agree with Vera Wylde that this had better be some mini-arc that gets resolved by the finale.
Putting the episode itself aside, though, there were two big reveals: the return of Carol Anne Ford as Susan Foreman, and Mrs. Flood being revealed as the Rani and bigenerating into Archie Panjabi.
Susan… what is there to say? Her returning as a vision is bizarre and completely out-of-nowhere, she’s in someone’s TARDIS saying “find me” while standing around. It got a good gasp out of me and it’s amazing to hear someone call the Doctor “grandfather” again, but I can’t speak to the story implications, as it is really only here as a tease, with no bearing on the plot (should’ve been cut to make more room for fixing this script).
The Rani, though. The Rani? Okay, okay, okay. Fine. It’s the Rani, I guess. But… no? That raises far more questions than it answers. And she bigenerates too?!
I watched this compilation of all of Mrs. Flood’s appearances up to the reveal – it even includes her appearance at the Proms – and it’s given me ideas.
Theories, if you will. I figured it would be fun to lay them out here now, while we’re still in that sweet spot between wondering and knowing, and come back to see if I got any of it right. For the record, I’ve intentionally avoided explainers and leaks to the best of my ability (I had the twist that The Well was a sequel to Midnight spoiled for me by opening Mastodon while following the #DoctorWho tag, whoops), so I’m just going off what I have seen in the show.
I think the Rani bigenerated because her Mrs. Flood incarnation is special, I think she specifically was the one to obtain the gift of metatextual awareness – whether this gift was passed on to the new Rani is, well, actually kind of unclear, she seems way more Rani-like, serious, and down-to-business next to Flood’s continued childlike whimsy about it all. One could even suggest that Mrs. Flood is possessed by or fused with some other entity, but that’s a stretch too far even for me. Whether Mrs. Flood is a unique incarnation of the Rani or not, a Rani has the gift of fourthsight – pardon the terrible pun, she can see through the fourth wall. It is a clear and repeated theme, which Davies tried to draw attention to when people complained Flood was too like Susan Twist (sorry, Russ, they were still correct no matter how many hairs you split).
When you assess all of Mrs. Flood’s actions throughout the show as the Rani laying low, it all clicks a lot better. Where the Master is obsessed with power and destruction, the Rani is a lady of science, and her latest subject of interest is the Doctor. Imagine, you, Time Lady Goebbels, having to use your technology to flee the Time War and hide yourself away on some backwater planet as an old woman, tottering around, playing at being chipper and sweet and unsuspecting, and you get so used to it that when a bright blue police box drops out of the sky in front of your flat, you’ve more memories of the actual police boxes this part of the planet had a few months ago. Or was that decades? Insignificant to a Time Lady such as yourself. But then you see someone run inside of it, and you hear a familiar sound, and you realize what it is and who HE is.
When she gained her fourthsight is unclear, if it happened before or after she looks into the camera and asks you if you’ve seen a TARDIS, but ever since then she’s kept a very purposeful eye on everything, almost literally inserting herself into stories she has no part in. A woman with knowledge of the fourth wall could do that, after all. Just write yourself in. Fuck it, tell the characters that the show they’re in is ending on May 24th, it’s not like they’ll understand you. They won’t even be back for that episode anyways.
I think Mrs. Flood / the Rani is running a grand experiment on the Doctor and – ever since she discovered the fourth wall – on the limits of the universe itself. I think that The Wish World will be her pushing the limits of storytelling and believability, presumably something to do with wishes. Maybe letting all wishes come true? Whatever she's doing, it’s clearly tampering with reality, which I guess will cause some kind of The Reality War. I hope these episodes get really surreal and conceptual and strange. The three fans from Lux might come back, it would feel only appropriate for stories like this.
I could be sooo wrong about all of this, maybe the fourth wall stuff won’t be addressed at all and the viewer was meant to take all of that at face value because Russ is just fucking with you and turning the show into a pantomime, maybe the Rani’s plan is way more boring and – taking the worst faith interpretation from the trailer clips we’ve seen – her evil goal is to make dinosaur bones walk around or something, and The Reality War is just, like, a souped up Amy’s Choice (S05E07) where the characters have to choose between a real and fake world, I dunno. It could be sooo dumb. I’m still feeling sore after Empire of Death, so I’m not prepared to put my full faith in Russel T. Davies, but I am hopeful.
Whatever the end of this season has in store, one thing will always remain true: Doctor Who is a television show