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Doctor Who Goes WandaVision! Our S02E07: "Wish World" Deep Dive

This week, Doctor Who went WandaVision in a big way. Here are the big reveals, continuity deep cuts, and questions raised by "Wish World."

It's all spoilers all the time here as we delve into this week's episode of Doctor Who. We're assuming you've watched S02E07: "Witch World" because this is going to talk about all the stuff in it, including all the questions answered and the new questions that popped up at the cliffhanger ending.

The Rani is The Wicked Witch of The West

The opening in 1600s Bavaria feels like an old school Brothers Grimm fairy tale with the Rani (Archie Punjabi) riding a white horse in a fabulous cape and red dress (SO MUCH SYMBOLISM!) to a humble cottage in the woods to… steal a baby. It's the seventh son of a seventh son, which is steeped in superstition and magic, so that means The Rani is playing around with the new rules of the universe. And like a witch, she reduces the baby's protesting parents to petals and turns their other kids into ducks. She knows the baby; she somehow knows the baby is Desidarium, the God of Wishes, and she's going to use the baby's power to enable Conrad Clark (Jonah Hauer-King) to wish his perfect, horrible world into existence as part of her plan, her latest grand scientific experiment. Conrad thinks he's getting what he wants, but The Rani knows the world he wishes for is deeply flawed and can be destroyed by enough people doubting it. It's the destruction she wants so that it opens a portal to the underverse that she wants to see. Hey, this is all spoilers, so we're just saying what her endgame is because you've already watched it.

A Very British WandaVision

Russell T Davies is a fan of WandaVision, and "Wish World" feels like he combined that with Terry Gilliam's Brazil in the latter's nightmarish Orwellian satirical take on an idealised 1950s-style England. The Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and Belinda (Varada Sethu) are living as Mrs. and Mrs. John Smith, a middle class couple living in the London suburbs with their adorable baby Poppy (Sienna-Robyn Mavanga-Phipps, who is going to get a side gig as a convention guest for the rest of her life for being Doctor Who canon, and at this age, she probably won't even remember being on the show by the the time she's in school). This is a right-wing world where men work and women are expected to be tradwives. Mel (Bonnie Langford) is unmarried and childless, so she is a bit of an outsider in this society. It's all Conrad's manosphere paradise. Except both The Doctor and Belinda feel a creeping doubt about whether this is the world or they are right. The Doctor, as an ultra-conformist suburban salaryman, is definitely not him, and Belinda has no memory of giving birth to Poppy. John Smith is the cover name that the Third Doctor (Jon Pertwee) took way back when he was stuck on Earth and became Scientific Advisor to U.N.I.T.

The Rani's bone palace and her ghostly giant bone dinosaur sentries are a bit reminiscent of the giant BTs (Beached Things) in the Hideo Kojima video game Death Stranding. They're pretty much dai kaiju ("dai" means "big" or "giant' in Japanese, by the way, so "dai kaiju" means "giant monster").  Think there's going to be a UNIT vs Dai Kaiju battle next week? Davies just loves to load lots of Chekov's Guns, including several you never knew were coming, like the sudden return of The Doctor's granddaughter Susan Foreman (Carole Ann Ford, and of course, she's going to be back for the big climax next week – that's Screenwriting 101).

U.N.I.T. – Unified National Insurance Team

In more shades of Brazil and Orwell's 1984, UNIT is now a government bureaucratic agency for handling National Insurance, which is what the British call Social Security. This is Conrad's revenge against the real UNIT, to render them dull and ineffectual. Everyone is buttoned down and conformist. The former Colonel Ibrahim (Alexander Devriant) can't bring himself to declare his feelings for their boss Kate Stewart (Gemma Redgrave), and Susan Triad (Susan Twist) is their tea lady in a meta nod to her cameo as a tea lady in the 1960s back in season one. LGBTQ people are also cast out, as when Ibrahim reacts with disgust at The Doctor calling him a beautiful man, because Conrad isn't just racist and ableist, but – surprise! – a homophobe. This part isn't hammered home but used for plot. Doctor Who has always been political, kids. Everyone lives in fear of being cast out, even John Smith and his wife Belinda, but not The Doctor, but he doesn't remember he's The Doctor.

Is Ruby Still a Space-Time Anomaly?

Ruby doesn't work for UNIT in this reality, and is the only person in the world who knows instinctively that the world isn't supposed to be like this. She still has flashes of the true reality and even of the alternate lifetime she lived through without The Doctor in "73 Yards". When she first raised her doubts, her mother and grandmother grassed her up and got her picked up by the police. We don't know what she went through in captivity. Still, she was eventually cast out and homeless, one of society's forgotten and invisible people, along with Shirley and anyone with a disability.

Conrad is Still a Case for Major Therapy

Conrad gets his wish: a perfect world designed to his toxic, masculine, and fascistic world, where he gets to lord it over the world, well, London anyway, like a God King. Except he's not in control at all. He was never going to be the Alpha, much as he fantasised and grifted off it when he was a podcaster. He's a patsy and might be vaguely aware of that – he's subservient to Mrs. Flood and the Rani, who play on his Freudian need for his mother's love, so Mrs. Flood can manipulate him by being the doting mother figure and The Rani can be the stern mother figure who kicks his ass to get stuff done. He's not the cocky, mean creep we last saw but a needy little boy. Who's toxic. He's the culmination of the recurring theme of Toxic Masculinity that's run throughout this season starting with Belinda's incel ex Alan in "The Robot Revolution", Cassio in "The Well", the Barber in "The Story and the Engine", Kid in "The Interstellar Song Contest", but Conrad is the worst since he's the one closest to a real-life version.

The Multiple Layers of Those "Doctor Who" Books by I.M. Foreman

It's no accident that the production designed the covers for the "Doctor Who" books that Conrad reads to the nation to look like the covers for the UK edition of the Harry Potter novels. Ostensibly, stories meant to bring joy and comfort to children have taken on a more sinister meaning due to the change in their authors' reputations. The author of these books is "I.M. Foreman", which is the proprietor's name at the junkyard where the TARDIS was parked in "An Unearthly Child", the first episode of the series in 1963. A retcon in the early 2000s Doctor Who spinoff novels made the unseen character a monk from Gallifrey with deep connections to The Doctor, who created that South London junkyard as a safe haven for the First Doctor and Susan (who took her Earth surname from the junkyards). The latter is a kind of "is it canon or isn't it?" deep dive that Davies almost certainly knows and put here as a shoutout to those books. You might think The Rani wrote those books that Conrad is reading out loud, but it might be the actual I.M. Foreman who might have become a keeper of Time Lord lore. For a show that's intended to attract new viewers, Davies has loaded this season with more lore and past continuity than any other season in the last sixty years.

Of Course, The Doctor Dances – with The Rani, if Reluctantly

It feels a bit like a Peter Davison Fifth Doctor era story where The Doctor is usually on the wrong foot for most of the story until he pulls out a save at the end. And of course, The Rani has a disco ball in her bone palace to dance in. After all, The Master (Sacha Dewan) danced to ABBA's "Rasputin" in "The Power of the Doctor." Time Lords, especially evil ones, are incredibly campy, and most of all, they're such drama queens. They love showing off to each other, and The Rani just loves gloating to The Doctor about her master plan. She wants to mess around with Magic now that it's a thing in the universe. She deliberately enabled Conrad to wish for his flawed and awful "perfect" toxic male world, knowing The Doctor's doubts about its reality would destroy all of Reality so she could break open the portal to an Underverse and free Omega, the First Time Lord who could arguably be considered The God of Time Lords.

So… Who's Omega?

If there's anything iffy about the climax of "Wish World", it's that reveal of the final  Big Bad in the Unholy Trinity. New viewers and those who don't follow the classic show's continuity from the 1970s and 1980s. His first appearance was in "The Three Doctors", the series' tenth anniversary special. He was originally revered almost as a god by the Time Lords, but like nearly all Time Lords, he became an insane megalomaniac. All Time Lords are insane, including The Doctor. He showed up again in the Fifth Doctor story "Arc of Infinity" in the early 1980s. Omega showed up in loads of spinoff novels, comics, and, most of all, Big Finish audio dramas.

And yes, that was the late Stephen Thorne, the last actor to play Omega, voicing, "Omega shall be free!" That was directly taken from the Big Finish audio drama Gallifrey: Intervention Earth. Russell T Davie is a fan of the Big Finish audio dramas, collects them, and has probably listened to all of them.

Omega doesn't even show up at the end. The Rani names him at the cliffhanger ending, where The Rani reveals he's coming, and immediately has to explain to new viewers who he is. It's a reveal that's completely dependent on dialogue in a "tell, not show" which is common in Doctor Who and too many scripts these days. Let's hope Davies sticks the landing next week without having characters stand around explaining what's happening while CGI effects swirl around them.

The Biggest New Question

As the world crumbles under them, The Doctor seems to have worked out how he's going to fight three baddies. But he declared that Poppy is his daughter, and The Rani should know what that means. What does it mean? We don't know. How is Poppy the Doctor's daughter? If that's true, now we know who Susan's mother is. Looks like Davies is out to answer a lot of questions that have lingered for over fifty years.

Doctor Who is streaming on Disney+ outside the UK.

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