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Doctor Who Season 2: Our "The Interstellar Song Contest" Deep Dive

From plot twists and political commentary to Rani-level surprises, here's our look at Doctor Who S02E06: "The Interstellar Song Contest."

Aaaaand we're off to the races with Doctor Who S02E06: "The Interstellar Song Contest," an episode that looks like another procedural with some camp and some satire before it gets dark and full of political commentary and some surprises and reveals before things rush into the two-part season finale. Juno Dawson's script is a combination of old and new: a traditional procedural of the week plot with social commentary and updated emphasis on emotions and some twists, both expected and unexpected. This is not a review but a deep dive into the episode that is all spoilers.

Doctor Who: Rylan Clark and Graham Norton are Forever

So, current Eurovision host Rylan Clark is alive centuries into the future because he gets cryogenically frozen and defrosted to present another year's contest. He seems happy to do it but is this more of a capitalist hell where he's indentured to the contest even in the future when it's bought out by an evil intergalactic corporation who effectively own him as a mouthpiece for the the Interstellar Song Contest they now own and run as some Opium for the Masses?

At least the real Graham Norton gets to be dead, but not before he signed away his likeness and voice to the corporation to live on in perpetuity as an AI clone. Corporations are evil, kids! And Graham Norton gets to serve a plot purpose by revealing to The Doctor and Belinda that the Earth was mysteriously destroyed on May 24th, 2025, which brings them up to date for the cliffhanger ending.

Terror and Grace at the Song Contest

Things take a dark turn when Kid the Hellion (Freddie Fox) takes over the control room and seems to murder the hundred thousand spectators, including The Doctor. This is where the political allusions come in. The Hellions are a race discriminated against by decades of propaganda from the evil corporation that bought and burned their planet for their resource, which is Poppy Honey (again with that combination of whimsy and darkness that is a hallmark of modern Doctor Who as established by Russell T Davies, though established in the 1980s). Kid is driven by the genocide of his people and the colonial exploitation of his planet. The poppies made into honey are a reference to the poppy as a symbol of Remembrance Day. Kid has a genuine grievance, but his willingness to kill three trillion people becomes, as The Doctor said, an excuse for someone who just wants to kill people. And Freddie Fox plays him as so gleefully vicious and callous that he never comes off as justified or slightly sympathetic. You can read Kid's terrorism as an allusion to all kinds of current events.

In the end, it's Cora revealing she's been a Hellion who has hidden her true ethnicity for years – another allusion to racism – who does more for the Hellion cause not by murdering people but by singing a ballad of her people at the contest.

Doctor Who: The Rage of the Doctor

Kid finds out that driving The Doctor to murderous rage is a very bad life choice. If The Doctor decides he wants to kill you, he will coldly calculate the most agonising and slow way to kill you. That darkness has always been hinted at in The Doctor, all the way back to the Seventh Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) and nearly came out in the Eleventh (Matt Smith) and Twelfth (Peter Capaldi) Doctors. This is the first time that the murderous side of The Doctor came out, and Gatwa is chilling in his hatred of malicious killers, only pulled back from the brink by his discovery that Belinda is alive. Juno Dawson knows how to write The Doctor.

Mike and Gary – More Everyday Heroic Folk

Dawson writes a couple who are a recurring motif in Davies' Doctor Who – the heroism of everyday people. Mike (Kadiff Kirwan) and Gary (Charlie Condou) are a fun and believable lived-in couple: one's a Song Contest fan, the other is so not a fan but agrees to go as a sacrifice. They're lucky they're not in their seats – usurped by The Doctor and Belinda – and escape Kid's death trap, which leaves them free to help save the day in a bit of good, coincidental plotting. It's very convenient that Mike is a nurse and Gary is a computer technician, essential skills needed to help save the day. Apart from that, they're the audience viewpoint and become fans of the Doctor in the process.

The Biggest Surprise

Susan's (Carole Ann Ford) return comes completely out of the blue, but is appropriate. Davies set up the promise of her return last season when The Doctor brought her up and thought Susan Triad (Susan Twist) might have been her. Davies doesn't bring anyone's name up by accident with the eventual payoff of them showing up, see also: The Rani. Susan telepathically calls out to The Doctor when he needs her most, before he loses consciousness, and calls him back to action, and to call him back from the brink when he tries to murder Kid. This sets up a promise to answer what happened to her for over fifty years. She seems to be calling out to him when he needs her, and now she needs him. A reunion is probably set for the finale. Wonder if she'll regenerate or bigenerate to a younger self.

It was The Rani All Along

Of course, Mrs. Flood is The Rani. Who else could she be? She's not a god or Omega or The Black Guardian, thankfully. It was so obvious it was staring us in the face right from the start, from the moment The Doctor mentioned The Rani in passing at the start of episode one of season one.  Fans have speculated since last year, and it almost feels anticlimactic, but it's still fun. And it's not just one Rani – bi-generation is now the rule, so there are two Ranis. The other new Rani is Archie Punjabi. It's like an echo of The Master's return when Derek Jacobi regenerated into John Simm. Funnily, Mrs. Flood is quirky and subservient to Punjabi's new Rani, who has the arrogant, officiously camp personality of Kate O'Mara's version from the 1980s.

The Rani reveal echoes the series in 2007, where the new Master was revealed before the two-part finale of that season. This season feels like Davies is going to tie up some of the last "where are they now?" loose ends from the last fifty-five years, namely "where's Susan?" and "where's the Rani?", and tie up season two with a bow.

Doctor Who is streaming on Disney+ outside the UK.

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