Tom Salinsky

Stakes are funny things. On the surface, the idea seems obvious. Two people amusing themselves predicting the outcome of a coin flip is dull. Two people betting fifty quid on the outcome of a coin flip is a bit more interesting. Two people betting their life savings on the outcome of a coin flip is fascinating. Two people flipping a coin for their actual life is horrifying and compelling. But it doesn’t always work like that. Consider how many stormtroopers get mown down or blown up over the course of any given Star Wars film. And yet when Luke Skywalker fills in a gap in his family tree, or loses a hand for all of ten minutes of screen time, it seems to matter far more. Stormtroopers are anonymous. Luke is someone we care about and that makes all the difference.

So it almost doesn’t matter whether ten or a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand spectators get sucked out into space, just as it almost doesn’t matter when a hundred or a million or a billion or a trillion viewers stand to get whammied when Kid does the thing with the whatsit. They’re all anonymous. But – hang on! The Doctor is one of those sucked out into space too. That raises the stakes, right? Actually, it kinda lowers them. If this is happening to the Doctor, then it must be survivable – and if it’s survivable, that lowers the stakes again.

Now, this is a problem in any adventure story all of the time (you can only do the ending of No Time to Die once per hero) so the trick is to play these events with conviction and brio, and try to engage our emotions and stop us from thinking too hard. And that’s why I enjoyed this episode so much. The shot of all of those bodies being drawn up into space is an astonishing one and the solution is far from obvious. Nor does the explanation of how they survived make any kind of scientific sense, but it is properly executed in terms of structure, because we saw the Doctor fiddle with the thingamajig before the roof blew off.

I’m a bit less interested in the viewers at home to be honest, but the plot requires that Winn and Kid (named after their fathers perhaps?) are in the process of doing an awful thing and need to be stopped, and this all went off very smoothly. The evocation of the contest is brilliantly done, on paper and on screen. The contemporary references to Rylan and Graham Norton don’t grate too badly, the songs are amazing, the aliens look fab and the backstage shenanigans with Mike and Gary and Belinda and Cora are all well-handled. Well, maybe Belinda is stuck in her own sideplot which goes nowhere, and maybe Susan steals her thunder a bit, but I admired how elegantly the political backstory was sketched in, and I loved seeing this Doctor completely lose it.

The pacing is good as well. This is a nice simple story, which starts strong and still manages to build to a climax, leaving enough time for the various bits of plot admin to be dealt with without it feeling like the episode reaches the end and keeps going. The huge number of people who need to be individually rescued is a bit of a problem, but once again this is recognised and papered over with shots of whole groups being retrieved and revived.

And Mrs Flood is the Rani. I’m not a huge fan of this reveal, to be honest. It’s a bit thrill-by-surname, like Benedict Cumberbatch revealing himself as Khan in Star Trek Into Dullness. The Rani wasn’t a brilliant character in Mark, was a frankly terrible character in Time, and although Archie Panjabi is great, it was only Kate O’Mara who made it watchable at all. Still, I’m not going to prejudge, but as a cliffhanger ending, it had nothing like the power of the return of Sutekh – a return which crucially didn’t require viewers to have seen Pyramids of Mars to understand what was going on.

This is probably worth four stars, given the solid construction, while also taking into account the slight overreaching and the sidelining of Belinda. But I had such a good time watching it, I’m going to bump it up another half. A strong year so far, making me very hopeful indeed for the season finale.