The second special in the Tennant and Tate lead revival takes us into deep space, which is just as well as writer Russell T. Davis was really not kicking any goals with his last Earth based saga. I should mention, because I’m being asked by site readers, that Doctor Who has moved from the ABC to Disney+ Downunder. If you don’t have the streaming service then I guess you may have to wait for the show to hit disc down JBHIFI, if you can be bothered, and judging from viewer figures not a lot of people are going to bother. Rock and a hard place folks, I’m not going to give out any spoilers, for those who may want to watch the show, but will try to flesh out the plot … which given Davis has lost the plot, joke intended, recently really shouldn’t take too much space.

So if we remember back to the last outing, Donna spilt a cup of tea into the TARDIS’s control unit, sending things into unexpected directions. The TARDIS crash lands in, I guess, a storeroom on a large space ship; the purpose of which is never explained, because we are just the viewers here. Anyways the TARDIS does a runner with the Doctor’s sonic screwdriver leaving our crew stranded. As the gruesome twosome start exploring they run across a very slow, think glacial, moving robot and the spaceship’s control room. We quickly learn the Doctor and Donna are stranded way out beyond the edge of the Universe in the big pitch black never never. While the instruments indicate the pair are alone, lack of organic lifeforms though someone did a runner from an airlock, we quickly find there are other lifeforms aboard the massive spaceship, and those lifeforms are extremely antagonistic. Can the Doctor stop the menace escaping from the void and making havoc in the populated universe?

Once again there’s a feeling that this episode owes a heavy debt to a previous episode, with very similar plotlines though lacking perhaps the extra subplot goodness one might expect from decent SciFi writing. For sure Wild Blue Yonder is vastly superior to the last special, that was pretty average if we were to be brutally honest, and will keep the viewer’s attention. Sure there are inherent problems with what we have on screen but the pacing picks up from the initial situation establishment to such an extent that those problems are sort of glossed over.

I was actually all across the visuals in this one, all about that long corridor in the space ship, and was really digging the enclosed and cut off nature of things. The Doctor and Donna have no resources to hand and have to rely on their own abilities without the plot device fulfilling sonic screwdriver to get them out of trouble. Anyways well designed space ship, once again never explained because Davis seems to have lost all writing abilities since Chibs fracked things up, with some slick lines adding to the interest. Guess it goes without saying that with pitch blackness outside the ship, the budget is well and truly in control.

Davis almost pulls this one off, building a mystery, and making the Doctor’s greatest strength – his mind – work against him. Unfortunately, the scribe doesn’t build this solidly and uses up any credit he – there I go with the pronouns again – might have built with offering the explanation way too quickly. This is bad writing folks, especially when you are edging into dark genre territory. Don’t get me started on the Isaac Newton scene, completely not needed, but hey pandering to the twitter non-watchers and the BBC workshop crowd. Once again, why was the space ship out in the void and where exactly did the protagonists come from? Guess the aliens must have been in the void for ever, which could have been played for some pathos and greying the black in the hands of a better writer. Hate to say it but RTD has dropped into the swamp of ineptitude that the writers of the recent few seasons have created for the franchise.

Yes Wild Blue Yonder edges into horror, which if anyone remembers was kind of a mainstay of Classic and Nu-Who. We start with a camera peeking at the Doctor and Donna, in a very backwoods horror fashion, not continued for long as I guess director Kingsley forgot about it, showing extreme attention deficit disorder. The protagonists are of course rocking it, well for a while before they get boring – there’s that attention deficit again. They need to frighten their victims in order to speed up their learning about those victims, in a sort of Invasion of the Body Snatchers fashion. With this rocking on I sort of wonder how you couldn’t keep those balls in the air, as things crashed down to a disappointing conclusion. Yes, the whole “who is the real Donna” was sort of interesting, or would have been if the whole concept hadn’t previously been done to death in other properties.

I’ve got some bad news here kids, and you may need to take a seat before reading the rest of the paragraph. Russell T. Davis, who we had hoped would force a return to the mythos built up over 57 odd years, is backing the whole Chibs’ The Timeless Child bollocks! So the question is what else will Davis jettison from the past, in his crusade to destroy a once great Science Fiction franchise. Davis and the woke crew are like locusts, they see something fertile enjoyed by a lot of people, and have to consume it and shit it out in some new uninteresting configuration that only the apologists will try to justify. True Who fans are abandoning the franchise in droves, so have fun in your kiddie splash pool apologists, I wonder how many of you will watch through to the end of the next season.

Surprisingly Wild Blue Yonder is a vast improvement over The Star Beast, but will still manage to alienate even more long-time fans. Considering the show isn’t successfully attracting new fans, this doesn’t bode well for anything like longevity. If this was a new show, with new writers and actors, I would be saying that the show might be finding its feet, but Russell T. Davis and David Tennant are veterans of the franchise who we expect a ton more from. With Davies definitely jettisoning established lore, I fear where this may go, we are on a slippery slope with burning lava just below us. Worth checking out if you have watched a bunch of previous Doctor Who, it might well be the only one worth catching, but things will be lost on new viewers. I have real issues with what might happen from here, but at least we have this episode that while disappointing is still a shining light in the very dark tunnel that recent Who – say from the start of the Chibs era – has created.