Doctor Who: Boom

The Lennon-McCartney of Doctor Who is back with Russell T Davies running the show and for this episode Steven Moffat writing. We do get a kind of medley of some of Moffat’s favourite things from the obvious (Anglican marines) to broader tropes (remanents of dead people continuing on electronically), as well as callbacks to multiple episodes. It is all neatly done though and most of the various nods & references don’t get in the way of a very tense and compact story.

The Doctor and Ruby land on a war torn planet, within moments the Doctor finds himself trapped on a partly activated landmine. From there things only get worse as The Doctor and Ruby has to extract themselves from (not actually) certain death while also unravelling the turth about the war, the mines and the apparently psychotic AI ambulances that wander the battlefield.

Gatwa and Gibson have been doing very well as a pair so far and this episode lets them push that dynamic further. I’m still at that stage with Gatwa that I see him as an actor playing The Doctor rather than just a version of The Doctor but this is another good step in creating his version of The Doctor partly because you can see how other iterations of The Doctor would have been both the same and different in the same story. The same is true of Gibson and Ruby Sunday here. You can almost play in your head a different version of this same story with any of the New Who Doctor-Companions and get a similar yet different episode. Eccleston/ Piper in particular I think would have been great here but that maybe because there are some thematic similarities to Moffat’s The Empty Child/Doctor Dances.

That point where the actor and the character pull together is an arbitrary one and something of an illusion. For me with Matt Smith’s Doctor, it was another Moffat two-parter The Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone (more Anglican Marines) but in reality that was one of the first of Smith’s stories filmed. So it’s more the impact of successive stories than necessarily the actor. Still, it was good to give Gatwa something more serious to play with and he does some fantastic work here.

It isn’t, though, one of those absolute classic episodes. There are parts that don’t work as well. The child character’s dialogue and actions appear to have been written with a much younger child in mind. However, plot-wise having a much younger child in the role wouldn’t have made much sense. More broadly, both Moffat and Davies are prone to let sentimentality overwhelm their stories and this story is an example.

So not a story that I’d put in Moffat’s top 10 but a Moffat Who episode in the upper mid-range is still a pretty good Doctor Who episode. In terms of both plot and setting, the story has nothing in common with the similarly titled Kerblam! from the Chibnall era but the common theme of automated capitalism run amuck is done much better here. The underlying evil at play is cold, calculating and almost lacking in intentionality, which adds to the monstrosity but which plays out at a very personal level.

I’m not doing rankings yet partly because I don’t know how to rate this against The Devil’s Chord. There were parts to The Devil’s Chord that were much stronger than this episode but Boom was stronger taken as a whole — but then again The Devil’s Chord had more new ideas while Boom was something of a remix of the familiar.

As for the kind of plot-arc and mystery-box shenanigans that both Davies and Moffat like to play with, well there were some big ones but I don’t want to spoil things…