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Doctor Who S02E06: "The Interstellar Song Contest" starts as a campy pop satire before becoming a dark parable with surprises thick and fast.
Posted in: BBC, Disney+, Review, TV | Tagged: doctor who
Doctor Who S02E06 "The Interstellar Song Contest" Marries Camp, Menace
Doctor Who S02E06: "The Interstellar Song Contest" starts as a campy pop satire before becoming a dark parable with surprises thick and fast.
You might think this is good news or bad news, but even in the far future of Doctor Who, the Eurovision Song Contest is eternal, expanding into an Interstellar Song Contest. It's currently a decades-long annual festival of camp, kitsch, and increasing surrealism. So when the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and Belinda (Varada Sethu) show up at the Interstellar Song Contest, of course, they will take a break from trying to get back to Earth on May 24th, 2025. Naturally, things go pear-shaped because things always go pear-shaped whenever The Doctor shows up anywhere. The TARDIS knows and takes him where he'll be needed. That's canon.
Novelist Juno Dawson, who has previously written the occasional Doctor Who novel as well as two seasons of the spinoff audio drama podcast series Doctor Who Redacted, creates possibly the most extravagant SciFi episode of the Disney era series so far in the portrayal of a massive decadent cultural spectacle full of pop culture in-jokes that make the most sense if you're a British or European viewer. Eurovision host Rylan Clark plays a satirical future version of himself, somehow still alive to host the song contest when it takes the stars. He seems okay with it when some might consider that Hell.
Another internationally-known media personality (you know who it is if you've been reading the news) shows up in a hilarious guest spot as a version of himself in the future, as well as in a hilarious bit of commentary. It's all campy fun and games until terrorists attack, and suddenly things take a dark turn with mass murder, corporate-driven genocide, xenophobia, and all the political commentary that Doctor Who has been doing for over sixty years. It becomes more impactful and moving than you expect because the writing and acting are that good.
"Doctor Who" Surprises Galore
This review is written for those of you who haven't seen the episode, so we're not spoiling anything. The plot enables several surprises, including one totally unexpected one that will make some people gasp. Ncuti Gatwa shows another side of The Doctor, one that becomes cold, calculated, and murderous in ways that previous Doctors hinted at but never showed before, and he's chilling. The season has been the strongest for a long time, and the ending rushes right into the two-part finale, where you get the feeling Russell T. Davies might be tying up every single dangling thread and mystery not just since last season but the last unresolved threads in the series' sixty years.
Doctor Who: The Interstellar Song Contest is on BBC iPlayer and BBC One in the UK and Disney+ outside the UK.
Doctor Who Season 2 Episode 6: "The Interstellar Song Contest"
9/10
Juno Dawson's first script for Doctor Who, S02E06: "The Interstellar Song Contest," is a breathless combination of campy fun and dark parable, going from pop satire to meditations in corporate greed, genocide and xenophobia, with surprises coming thick and fast throughout the plot, some truly unexpected before a cliffhanger ending that rushes into the two-part finale.
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