This article contains full spoilers for Doctor Who season 14 episode 1, "Space Babies". Doctor Who has entered a new era, one starring the 15th Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa), and he's headed off on a fresh series of adventures across space and time on the BBC and Disney Plus.
In the first episode of the season, the Doctor whisks Ruby Sunday (new companion Millie Gibson) away for her first proper Whoniverse adventure. And after a brief prehistoric problem, the Doctor invites Ruby to suggest a random date and they head far into the future, finding themselves coming to the aid of a group of space babies who are being terrorized by a creature known only as The Bogeyman. Here's a full recap of everything that happened in Doctor Who season 14 episode 1.
The butterfly effect
We pick up right at the end of the 2023 Doctor Who Christmas special, with Ruby approaching the TARDIS. Inside, she is amazed to find that yes, it’s much bigger on the inside. The 15th Doctor welcomes her in to look around and she quizzes him about all manner of things: why the TARDIS looks the way it does, why he’s called the Doctor, and where he’s from. Essentially, it's all the classic companion stuff.
If you need a reminder, that, but if you need a refresh: the TARDIS is meant to camouflage itself to its surroundings but it got stuck looking like a blue British police box due to a malfunctioning chameleon circuit, this Doctor is from Gallifrey, and is the last of their kind, and no, we still don’t know what the Doctor’s real name is.
With that out of the way, the Doctor whisks Ruby Sunday off for a random trip through space and time, landing 150 million years in the past in what will be North America. Outside, Ruby finds herself staring at a prehistoric Earth… but when she steps on a random butterfly (she was worrying about the butterfly effect just moments before), the Doctor is terrified to see her shape and form change into that of an insect-like form and she starts threatening to kill him. Thankfully, the Doctor breathes some life back into the butterfly, and Ruby reverts back to normal. After that blip, they head forward in time, to the year 21506, and arrive at a huge space station.
After a brief encounter with a terrifying creature in the bowels of the station, the pair flee to another level of the station where the Doctor realizes they’ve landed on a “baby farm”, built to support the population of the planet Pacifico Del Rio. Whilst the Doctor is distracted trying to figure out what’s wrong with the station, a baby in a stroller rolls in, complaining about temperature fluctuations in the station. The kid mistakenly assumes the Doctor and Ruby are his mother and father, and rushes off to tell the others as they’ve been waiting for mummy and daddy to show up. Naturally, the Doctor is very interested to see what a baby farm run by space babies looks like, so they follow along.
The baby leads them into a central control room filled with more space babies, all in strollers. Captain Poppy orders them to get back to work ‘to show mummy and daddy what a good job they’ve been doing’ all this time. Turns out the babies took over running the operation when all the crew abandoned ship. The babies “grew up” to take control of the station, but they stayed the same size. When they ask how they’ve done so well, they find out a presence called “Nanny” has been overseeing the babies’ from a remote location on deck.
At the mention of the creature downstairs, all the babies erupt into cries of fear over The Bogeyman. The Doctor demands to know what the creature’s doing down there, and why it’s so scary. He finds a headset and reaches out to the “nanny”, telling them the station’s in serious trouble as a huge amount of pressure is building up elsewhere on deck. In response, the Doctor is directed to Portal 357, a storage room on this floor.
Meeting Jocelyn
En route, Ruby frets about getting back to Earth on her birthday as her mum’s waiting for her. The Doctor tells her it’s strange that she was left as a foundling, just like the crew abandoned the space babies: what a coincidence, right? Ruby maintains she doesn’t know anything about her birth mother; whilst she remembers being left, the Doctor witnesses a mysterious woman pointing at him that very night. Ruby interrupts his vision, as there appears to be snow falling in the space station. The Doctor tells her it's like her memory just “came through”... but this is unlike anything he’s seen before. Nanny interrupts their chat and beckons them into the storage room.
Inside, the Doctor and Ruby review footage from the ship’s log, wherein the crew sign off from duty (with many saying they resent having to do so). Nanny (whose real name is Jocelyn) blames the move on the recession: the government closed the station to save money, but the law made it illegal to stop the birthing machines. Jocelyn was the site’s accountant and doesn’t know how to fix the problems on-site. The Doctor plugs in his sonic screwdriver to her computer system; if left to sync up, it should recalibrate the system.
The Doctor asks why she’s hiding: Jocelyn tells them there’s only so much food and air left, so she doesn’t want the babies to see her die. The Doctor is willing to get everyone off the station and to a nearby world… but The Bogeyman stands between them and the TARDIS. None of them know what the creature’s deal is; Ruby says the whole thing seems like a children’s story come to life; at that moment, they’re all horrified to see Eric (the first space baby we saw) riding to confront the Bogeyman on one of Jocelyn’s monitors.
Jocelyn urges Eric to turn around, but he refuses: Eric was particularly taken by Ruby, and he says he’s going to tell the creature off, seeing as she said there’s no such thing as a Bogeyman. Feeling responsible, Ruby (swiftly followed by the Doctor) rushes to his aid. Luckily, the pair find Eric hiding in a cupboard, but all that noise they’d made to attract its attention has the creature on their trail. It traps them in a dead end… but Poppy and some of the other space babies frighten it off with a flamethrower!
Saving the day
With the Bogeyman frightened off, the Doctor tells the babies to get out of the lower levels and tries (unsuccessfully) to send Ruby along with them. Over the radio, Jocelyn explains that the Bogeyman just appeared about six years ago (around the same time the most recent babies were born), but she’s got no idea how it got down there. The time travelers follow some sort of trail of gunk left by the creature to the ship’s parthenogenesis machine.
This machine oversees the whole station environment, and as a very literal computer, it decided to make the creature because children need enrichment and entertainment, so it made the Bogeyman frightening because it brought a children’s story to life, and it was specifically designed to be scary. Fascinating though it is, the Doctor is loathed to reveal that the Bogeyman is made out of… well, snot, from the babies… and a glob of it had fallen in Ruby’s hair.
The creature emerges and starts to chase them through the corridors. But the sonic screwdriver’s finally recalibrated the system and Jocelyn guides them to safety, trapping the thing inside an airlock, which she intends to use to blast the creature out into space. The Doctor sends Ruby to stop Jocelyn while he climbs inside the airlock, to try and close the exterior doors.
Moved by the fact the creature is one of a kind, like himself, The Doctor climbs in and manages to close the external door, while Ruby pulls the sonic from her monitoring system. Then, Jocelyn leaves her hiding space behind and meets all the space babies, and the Doctor is pleased to show them their favorite monster is okay, too. In a final flourish, he shows them their world, revealing that the pressure build-up in one of the hulls was a huge build-up of methane from the babies’ nappies. With that gas vented, the ship’s set on course for a trip to their new home, leaving our duo to return to the TARDIS.
Outside, the Doctor offers her a TARDIS key, inviting her to come along for the ride. Happily, she takes him up on the offer. Inside, he tells her the only place they can’t go is the night she was abandoned as a baby because it would make a big paradox and could end up causing a ton of timey-wimey trouble. But Ruby wanted him to take her back to be with her adoptive mother, Carla, not long after she disappeared on Christmas Eve. The TARDIS materializes in their kitchen (much to Carla’s chagrin). Before he comes to meet the rest of the family, the Doctor checks the progress on a DNA scan of Ruby… what is he looking for?
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