‘Doctor Who’ Recap: Beware of Geeks Bearing Gifts

Previously, on Doctor Who: Fifteen’s first season with Ruby had a lot of singing, and ended with a Classic Who call back to Sutekh who’d been squatting on the TARDIS for eons and turned the universe to dust until curiosity killed the bat-faced god. Kind of. Ruby was reunited with her birth mother and decided to stay home for a while.

This week: Fifteen makes some new friends, including the new companion, Belinda (Varada Sethu). Spoilers are ahead!

In 2008, a lovestruck dude called Alan gives Belinda a certificate to show he’s named a star after her and the fact that she’s not married. 17 years later, robots burst into her house to collect the queen of Miss Belinda Chandra One. Always check the small print with presents. Fifteen has been running around trying to find Belinda but is a little too late to prevent the abduction. He follows the Miss Belinda Chandra Bots in their comically toy-like spaceship, back to Miss Belinda Chandra One. On the way, both ships pass through a timey-wimey wobble.

Once there, Belinda discovers that the Miss Belinda Chandra Bots are the robot overlords of the humanoid Miss Belinda Chandra-kind, and are trying to squash a rebel uprising. Sasha 55 speaks for the humanoids and begs Queen Belinda to help them. Sasha and Fifteen — who arrived six months before her due to the temporal fracture — prevent the bots from marrying Belinda off to their AI generator, who wants to be king and has demanded that the bots bring Belinda to him to fulfil the contract, i.e., the star certificate. Fifteen rescues Belinda, but Sasha is killed in the process.

The certificate is mysterious and important for a few reasons; it’s become a foundation myth for the planet, but it also exists in the same space twice, which means a potential paradox kaboom is on the horizon. Temporal fractures, huh? Pain in the butt.

Belinda feels responsible for the horrors and sacrifices herself to the bots in order to protect the rebels from the bombs. She thinks she can embrace AI and use it to make things better, but this is naïve because we don’t need subtext any more. However, it gets worse: they have been reading AI wrong all this time and it actually says AL. WAIT, IS ALL THIS A ‘CALL ME AL’ JOKE? He’s a roly-poly little bot-faced boy! Curse you, temporal fractures! When Belinda protested that they wanted Alan not her, because he bought the certificate and this is all his fault really, they were like, OK your majesty, and got him too, except because of timey-wimey, he got there first and then started the revolution that led to them going out to get her in the first place, and now my brain hurts and we probably shouldn’t try to unpick this any more. Only to say, Alan is The Worst and turned Miss Belinda Chandra One into Planet of the Incels by spending too much time plugged into the computer.

It’s OK though — Belinda uses the certificate paradox kaboom to take him out. Fifteen rescues her from a nightmare montage but it turns Alan into, well, a teeny little sperm cell, which is hoovered up by the Friendly Roomba. POLISH ON.

Peace restored, Fifteen and Belinda leave Miss Belinda Chandra One and he attempts to take her home, but the date is blocked, and various ominous noises ensue. Outside, it looks like the whole planet has gone apart from some recognisable landmark debris floating around. Uh oh.

Belinda is fantastic. She has the warmth, curiosity, and professional competence of Martha, immediately helping the injured rebels with her experience as a nurse. She also has the self-deprecation and fire of Donna. She’s not afraid to challenge Fifteen, and the ‘just-missed-you’ energy in the hospital scenes was also very Ten / Donna coded. She does not want to be adventuring in the stars; she wants to go home, which makes an interesting change.

Belinda is revealed to be a distant ancestor of the Anglican Marine we met in ‘Boom’, so they are going with an acknowledged in-universe lookalikey in the vein of Freema Agyeman and Peter Capaldi, rather than an unacknowledged one like Karen Gillan. However, she’s just a lookalike and not an Impossible Girl like Clara.

However, how did Belinda know the word TARDIS? Fifteen talks about his ship briefly before they are reunited, but doesn’t use the name. When it’s returned to him at the end, she says, ‘I saw that box in space. Is that your … TARDIS?’ It could be something that was lost in an edit, or it could be hinting at off-screen conversations, but in film and TV land, this is usually a Big Whopping Clue that someone is not who they seem and is usually a wrong’un instead.

There’s also the matter of the mysterious man who allegedly told Fifteen who Belinda is and that she is important. As Fifteen has now seen flashes of Belinda’s whole life, is he just talking about himself?

Wibbly-Wobbly Timey-Wimey Stuff

‘Timey-wimey? Am I six?’ Oh Belinda. You would have loved the War Doctor. But a timey-wimey in the wild!

Another notable time robots took names very literally was ‘The Girl in the Fireplace’.

One of the ominous noises at the end was the Sutekh groan from last season.

Mrs Flood is living next door to another companion? WELL, WELL, WELL…

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Next time: Fifteen and Belinda are off to the 1950s!