Will they? Won’t they? No…wait…yes! The Doctor does indeed snog the gay Han Solo! Now if this doesn’t have the woke police spitting out their Saturday night curry meal deal, I don’t know what will.
Yes in this playful and emotionally heavy – if slightly weak in action – episode, The Doctor and Ruby are at a Duchess’ ball in Bath in 1813, or rather, as Ruby immediately twigs: “Oh…Bridgerton!”
Because this is indeed an excuse for some bodice and britches ripping action, as Ruby is led into the heart of societal mores where, not even as a time traveller but just a Northerner, she ruins those societal mores. And in the process upsets the plans of some bird-headed shapeshifter aliens who are happily posing as humans at the ball, sucking the life out of guests and taking their form.
Indira Varma is very good as the Duchess/bird-head but I wasn’t really buying these creatures as scary monsters, not when their primary motivation here is to cosplay as humans to get a bit of gossip. And not when they say things like, “We’re going to cosplay this planet to death!”
Yes that is an actual line.
But the real reason we’re all here of course, is for the Doctor to have a bit of a romance. And it came as something of a relief.
I’ve been complaining that Ncuti Gatwa has only periodically dazzled in the role, often left to play second fiddle to Ruby. His Doctor is highly emotional – crying at least once an episode – and it leads the character into a strange passivity.
Here though - in a script by Loki writers Kate Herron and Briony Redman - we have that more convincingly explained, showing how his fragility is framed by his past trauma, and how much of his personality is about masking that. But most importantly, Gatwa is allowed more free reign to show off.
I always thought his Doctor was going to be an intergalactic hottie, dazzling his way through the stars, and here we get to see a bit of that. He’s funnier than he has been (“Try not to get engaged,” he tells Ruby before they part ways, “Or accidentally invent tarmac.”), more swaggering, and playfully sexy. Funny what a bit of talent on the Tardis can do for you.
For this week’s episode is called ‘Rogue’, and is named after the rather dishy swashbuckling bounty hunter who is on the scene at the ball, played by Jonathan Groff. He’s trying to capture the shapeshifters and beam them off to be incinerated, and mistakes the Doctor for one. So he takes him off back to his cloaked space ship in the garden (“My ship is behind that shed,” Rogue says, pointing to the TARDIS. “Shed?” says the Doctor, “That’s my ship.” “You travel in a shed?”), where the flirtation can begin in earnest.
The subsequent scene, first on Rogue’s ship, then on the TARDIS, is a charged whirlwind romance that is brilliantly handled.
The Doctor quickly clocks that Rogue is only travelling alone because he’s lost someone. And that that certain person might have been another man is teased in a hilarious extended gag as the Doctor uses his sonic screwdriver to switch on the ship’s sound system, at which point Kylie’s Can’t Get You Out Of My Head comes on. And the Doctor will not let the flustered Rogue turn it off.
When Rogue is finally convinced that the Doctor is a Timelord, they take a trip to the TARDIS where the flirting becomes more of a romantic connection, as they talk about those they have lost, and speak of travelling the galaxy together. They almost kiss, but then don’t.
Of course, ultimately, the BBC are too scared to let the Doctor be explicitly gay.
Wait… no, then they do kiss!
Yes, it all ends up with a nice snog when Rogue says goodbye to the Doctor, and sacrifices himself to save Ruby, taking her place in the beam she is trapped in, that is taking the shapeshifters off to the far reaches of the galaxy.
So there we go, The Doctor has a love interest to search for and we have another, er, dimension to the show.
It’s not the best episode of this series, but it is groundbreaking in a lovely and warm way, and perhaps this will end up being the love story that finally gives The Doctor the peace he’s been after all these years.
And hey, two men kissed on the telly and the universe didn’t explode.
