Season 1, Episode 3: ‘Boom’
After an opening double episode featuring talking babies and a jazzy villain, the latest “Doctor Who” installment is a clear attempt by Russell T Davies, the showrunner, to convey a more serious side.
To write the show’s latest installment “Boom,” Davies recruited Steven Moffat, a former “Doctor Who” showrunner, who is best remembered for a dramatic 2007 episode called “Blink” that fans revered.
With that episode, Moffat struck fear in a generation of British kids (myself included) by inventing the Weeping Angels, terrifying stone statues that only move when you look away. Seventeen years later, the episode remains a master class in small-screen tension building.
Moffat evokes the same simmering tension with “Boom,” right down to the onomatopoeic episode title. Here, though, it’s a land mine, activated when the 15th Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) steps on it and ticking closer to detonation, that causes the stress.
It’s a compelling setup that gives Gatwa the chance to show new emotional depths for the Doctor. But the script and effects are bombastic, and I found myself wishing for something to be stripped back. In this first season with Disney dollars, “Doctor Who” is clearly not doing anything by halves, but the lavish “Mad Max”-esque scenes of destruction threaten to overshadow Gatwa’s pitch-perfect performance.
The episode opens with two soldiers — both deeply religious, one of them blind — hobbling through dense, flame-flecked smoke. The place? Kastarian 3, a planet ravaged by war. The year? 5087. Carson (Majid Mehdizadeh-Valoujerdy) has heard that his army’s enemies are lurking in the fog, but John (Joe Anderson), a devoted father with bandaged eyes, insists this isn’t the case.
Carson dies first when he steps on a land mine that looks like a robot vacuum cleaner, leaving John to inch gingerly, sightlessly forward. Soon, John triggers another electronic device known as an “ambulance” — but this robot is anything but caregiving. In a softly spoken yet eerily sinister voice (Susan Twist), the robot offers John “thoughts and prayers,” then kills him, too.
The TARDIS lands on Kastarian 3 just in time for the Doctor to hear John’s scream and try to help, until he also treads on a land mine. The A.I.-powered device is triggered by the slightest movement — even a change in blood pressure. “One wrong move, and boom,” he warns, wide-eyed. So he stands still, with one foot hovering in the air, and by the time his companion, Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson), finds him, the Doctor is “getting his Zen on,” he says, and singing a traditional Scottish ballad to keep calm.
The physicality of Gatwa’s performance is impressive here: Tears run from his eyes, beads of sweat gather on his brow and a vein in his temple throbs, threatening to burst. Around him, the orchestral score buzzes and swells, while the lights on the ruthless vacuum cleaner flicker. The atmosphere is impossibly tense.
Ruby locates a flask containing John’s smelted remains, which the Doctor uses as a counterbalance so he can his shift his weight and put down his foot. But the green lights on the land mine are building, and, in an attempt to calm himself, the Doctor starts babbling about “the moon and president’s wife.”
This is the latest reference to the first Doctor (played by William Hartnell), who said that when he fled his home planet, Gallifrey, he took its moon and the wife of its president with him. (Although during Peter Capaldi’s era as the Doctor, he said he actually took the president’s daughter.)
The land mine and the ambulance, we learn, are both products of Villengard, the biggest weapons manufacturer in history. An A.I. recreation of John is summoned and insists he was “humanely” dealt with, until his young daughter Splice (Caoilinn Springall) pops up, leaving the Doctor and Ruby to dither and obfuscate when she asks where her daddy is.
More adrenaline-boosting action ensues. Mundy, a self-proclaimed “ordained Anglican marine,” orders the Doctor to drop John’s remains. When he doesn’t, she shoots him, but the Doctor holds firm.
He’s not human, he explains; setting off the land mine wouldn’t just kill him, it would wipe out half the planet. “I am a complex space-time event,” the Doctor tells Mundy, teeth gritted and bared, warning her of his terrifying potential. “I will shatter this silly little battlefield of yours into dust.”
Over the decades, the Doctor’s human appearance has been the downfall of many an adversary. It’s a fairly standard “Doctor Who” formula: Aliens fail to realize that the Doctor is a two-hearted Time Lord and underestimate him until he outsmarts and destroys them. The show’s longstanding villains — the Daleks, the Cybermen — are so feared by the Doctor and loved by fans because they know what he’s capable of, and how to play the Doctor at his own game.
On Kastarian 3, the drama continues. While attempting to deflect the ambulance, Ruby ends up getting shot herself, and the Doctor responds with the pained gasp of a wounded animal. But when the ambulance tries to name her next of kin, it, too, falters. As in the last episode, snow falls, just like on the night that Ruby was abandoned as a baby — though this time, it hangs in the air on Kastarian 3.
The only way to save them all, the Doctor tells Mundy, is for her army to surrender. For the first time, we see the capacity of Gatwa’s Doctor for rage. “There’s nobody else here. You declared war on an empty planet,” he rants, adding that the army’s soldiers didn’t notice they were alone because they were placated by faith: “The magic word that keeps you never having to think for yourself,” the Doctor says.
But the land mine’s clock is ticking down, leaving little room for Mundy (or viewers at home) to seethe at the Doctor’s jab at religion. The Doctor breaks through the A.I. to the real John, but the system glitches and the mine glows green, only this time with green Xs symbolizing a parting “kiss kiss” message between John and his daughter.
It’s a satisfying ending, and Moffat walks back some of the episode’s critique of religious warfare when the Doctor admits that just because he doesn’t like faith, it “doesn’t mean I don’t need it.”
But there are also ongoing questions that remain unanswered: What are the relevance of all the references to the first Doctor? The BBC has said that the actor playing Mundy, Varada Sethu, will be joining the Doctor as an additional companion next season, so we know haven’t seen the last of her. But how will her role evolve?
For now, these mysteries hang in the air like the snowflakes, glistening against this memorable episode’s fiery backdrop.
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