The following contains spoilers for “Boom.”

It should be a given any new series needs time to find its footing, even when it’s a revival of an already-running hit. The first three episodes of “new” Doctor Who have been fun, but not without their own idiosyncrasies that made them hard to love. Now it’s time for Steven Moffat, the series’ greatest 21st century writer, to show what this new season can do. There’s the usual degree of showboating and cleverness, but it’s hard to deny the man’s genius when he pens the first genuine classic of the Disney+ era. Bloody hell.

“Boom” thrusts the Doctor and Ruby into the smallest corner of a war, and lets it play out in microcosm. This is an angry story about how money, power and cruelty make people inhuman, and is the sort of episode Doctor Who excels at. This story makes no bones about the pointlessness of war and why money is the engine that keeps it going. Its framing may be modern — there’s one too many uses of the word “algorithm” here — but its central thesis is timeless.

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In a wasteland battlefield on Kastarian 3, two militarized Anglican clerics are walking back to base. Carson (Majid Mahdizadeh-Valoujerdy) is leading his friend, John Francis Vater (Joe Anderson) who has been blinded in the fighting, an injury that’ll take four weeks to recover from. In the distance, they spot an ambulance but seem afraid of it and look to go the long way around it. Carson loses his footing and slips into a small crater, activating a land mine that instantly obliterates him. The disturbance summons the ambulance, a tank-tracked device with a large screen with an apparently friendly avatar (Susan Twist) which injects its tendrils into Vater, identifying his injury. It decides that four weeks is an unacceptable amount of time for recovery and terminates him instead. His scream is heard by the Doctor, who sprints out of the TARDIS to help but winds up putting one foot on the exact same mine that killed Carson.

Ruby arrives to find the Doctor frozen in place, asking her to describe what he’s standing on: A Villengard mine. It’s an anti-personnel explosive made by a notorious weapons manufacturer that Moffat has referenced several times before. The Doctor asks Ruby to find something heavy for him to hold, so that he can shift his weight and put his foot down without triggering the mine. What she finds is Vater’s compacted remains bolted to an AI canister containing a simulacrum of Vater. The Doctor asks Ruby to throw it to him, but she instead opts to walk within the blast range and hand it over. It affirms the dynamic that as Gatwa’s Doctor has vacated the role of big-chested hero, Ruby has stepped in to fill the void.

The mine is, however, unsure if the Doctor is a viable target, and so remains frozen on the edge of activation. Villengard’s weapons are notoriously vicious and the company has created a warfare algorithm to limit the number of bodies in the battle zone at one time, while also dragging wars on profitably and indefinitely. It gives the company license to slay the wounded rather than spending the cash to cure them.

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Before he died, Vater was speaking to his daughter Splice (Caoilnn Springall), who was brought along to the war as there was no-one else to look after her. While her father was on patrol, she had been left in the care of Mundy (Varada Sethu), a lower-ranking soldier in the army. But she slips her minder to reach the last GPS-tagged location of her father. She arrives, triggering the hologram attached to Vater’s remains that delivers his valediction to his daughter.

Soon after, Mundy tracks down her wayward ward and is able to explain the rest of the plot to the TARDIS crew. The Anglicans have been fighting a war for six months against an enemy that’s never seen or heard. Mundy and the Doctor spar on the nature of religion and how faith — in more than just a higher power — helps create willing material for the meat grinder of war. Mundy’s skeptical about the Doctor and Ruby but is quickly convinced when she scans the Doctor to see he’s not just going to explode on the mine. As a complex space-time event, the mine’s activation won’t just kill him but destroy half of the planet. It gets worse: The mine is going to time out and go off anyway after its stuttering activation.

Having detected the fracas, an ambulance arrives and jams its menacing tendrils into the Doctor. Ruby, again refusing to allow anyone else control the narrative, grabs Mundy’s rifle and tries to create a distraction to no effect. Mundy tells Ruby to shoot her using the rife’s lowest setting which would draw the ambulance without being fatal. But, as Ruby takes aim, Canterbury (Bhav Joshi) arrives just in time to misappraise the scene and shoot Ruby to defend his fellow soldier. Ruby, on the edge of death, generates more snow but is fading fast

The Doctor has worked out the problem, which is that there’s no enemy on the planet at all — it’s barren. Villengard's algorithm is sending soldiers out to die with the traps they themselves bought and probably placed. The only solution is to surrender but that’s not something Mundy is willing, or empowered, to do, so the Doctor needs to find proof to show to the senior cleric. He uses the AI of Vater, appealing to his duty as a father and whatever humanity is left inside to search through the military database to find evidence there is no enemy at all.

More ambulances arrive in an attempt to overwhelm the people in the crater, looming down on them all. As Mundy and Canterbury speak, the latter is suddenly minced for reasons that boil down to… we’re in the final few minutes of the episode. In the chaos, it looks as if all is lost, but as the Villengard AI projects a hologram, it’s quickly taken over by Vater, whose love for his daughter has hopefully triggered some sort of feedback loop, ending the war and disabling the mine. As the war is ended, Ruby is resurrected by the ambulance and the four survivors are able to enjoy the beautiful view in the skies over Kastarian 3.

There’s even time for the Doctor to mention a “grumpy old man” who told him once that “what will survive of us is love.” That’s a reference to notoriously acerbic poet Philip Larkin’s work An Arundel Tomb, referencing a long-decayed sculpture of two people lying in state. The Doctor mentions Splice may have a bright future ahead of her, and gets ready to head off to their next adventure.

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There’s no good place to address this later, so I’ll add that Varada Sethu has also been cast as a new companion for Doctor Who’s second season. Initial rumors suggested she was replacing Millie Gibson but the BBC said last month the trio would travel together. It’s not uncommon for an actor to play a minor role in one episode and then return as a member of the core cast. Peter Capaldi, Karen Gillan, Freema Agyeman and Colin Baker all played one-off roles before joining as a Doctor or as a companion. I have no idea if Mundy will return, or if Sethu will play a new character, but I’m not sure Mundy was a compelling enough character to warrant a revisit.

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“Boom” is a masterclass in perpetually-building tension in a way that Doctor Who has rarely attempted. I wouldn’t want to experience this level of stress every single week, but it’s a wonderful change from the status quo. The one thing that doesn’t quite work with the episode is the uneven pacing. For all the effort put into building the tension, the ending just seems to happen.

I feel like Moffat was straining against the running time, since the last few minutes are just dashed off without as much attention as I’d have liked. Interestingly, the other times Moffat has written stories that are this bleak, like “The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances” and “World Enough and Time / The Doctor Falls,” they were both two-parters. I’m not sure “Boom” needed 90 minutes, but an extra 10 or so might have helped things breathe.

Despite being rooted to one spot for most of the story, Gatwa’s Doctor still commands every frame he occupies. There’s enough chemistry between him and Millie Gibson that the pair’s interactions are entirely believable. The rest of the cast, however, don’t really get as much time to shine, given the limited focus and the stock roles they play in the narrative.

It’s entirely in keeping with Moffat’s style that he’d come back to a show, now equipped with a Disney-sized budget, only to make an episode set in one location. As a writer, he’s always enjoyed tying one hand behind his back and then allowing those restrictions to force him to be better. It was his Swiss watch plotting, smart storylines and snappy dialog that has always ensured his episodes are events. History has also silenced his critics: Last year, Doctor Who Magazine polled readers to rank every episode of the show made. Staggeringly, of the top 10, Moffat was credited with five, knocking Robert Holmes, the show’s greatest writer, off his perch.

And, as I said at the top, “Boom” stands proud as the first bona fide classic of the Disney+ era.

Susan Twist Corner

This week, Susan Twist played the avatar of the sinister Villengard ambulances that roamed the battlefield. Several times, the Doctor appealed to Vater’s AI homunculus on the fact that they are, or were, both fathers. If it isn’t clear, I think the show really wants the audience to know that the Doctor is a father with a child, whereabouts unknown. The hacky premise would be that it’s Susan who has taken the mantle of “The One Who Waits,” or that she’s somehow Ruby. Yeugh.

The following includes spoilers for “The Devil’s Chord.”

For a show about time (and space) travel interwoven with British pop culture since its start in 1963, a trip to visit the Beatles is an obvious premise. So obvious that this is the second time we’ve had a “what if” episode hinging on the Fab Four’s cultural impact. After all, both the Beatles and Doctor Who became global cultural exports as Britain flexed its post-imperial soft power. But while there’s plenty of material to mine in that premise, this isn’t an episode that’s interested in doing that, relegating the Beatles to little more than window dressing.

This has always been a trick in Doctor Who’s toolbox, especially when Russell T. Davies is in charge. He loves dangling an idea, or eye-catching visual, to lure in an audience before moving the focus to something else. I’m reminded of the kung-fu monks from “Tooth and Claw” which looked great in the trailers but had no real impact on the story. It’s “Tooth and Claw” that “The Devil’s Chord” feels similar to — an early season one episode that doesn’t quite work in and of itself, but does spend a lot of its time gesturing to this year’s recurring themes. (FilmStories reported from a recent Q&A, where Davies said that this episode lacked a central plot and was, instead, "Just some subplots.")

James Pardon/Bad Wolf/BBC Studios

But to understand that, and my stance, we’re going to have to take a little look at The Context before we get to examining the meat. You see, during its history, Doctor Who has bent itself to fit the vision of its primary creative figure and Davies is a voracious watcher of TV. He’s obsessed with the form and format of TV as much as its content, and this is reflected in his work. His episodes often develop with news reports, CCTV clips and deeper forms of exposition revealed through screens. “Bad Wolf” is a great example, where the show lands at a TV studio that’s making sci-fi versions of the then-current pantheon of British reality TV.

Davies also trusts his audience to instinctively know the unspoken rules of TV even if they can’t name them. Which is why I think it’s worth looking at “The Devil’s Chord” as an episode that is, for want of a better phrase, collapsing in on itself. When Mrs. Flood talks to the camera at the end of “Church on Ruby Road,” it felt Deliberately Wrong, especially after she was seemingly unaware of the TARDIS earlier in the episode. Here, the numerous fourth wall breaks and lapses in storytelling are similarly an intentional sign of How Wrong Things Are. What starts out as a by-the-numbers celebrity historical quickly collapses into a fever dream like Sam Lowry’s descent into madness at the end of Brazil.

James Pardon/Bad Wolf/BBC Studios

We open in a concert hall in 1925 as a teacher outlines the basics of music theory for a young child. He shows off that he has “discovered” The Devil’s Chord and, by playing it, unleashes Maestro (Jinkx Monsoon), the embodiment of music. Maestro is a godlike elemental force and a child of the Toymaker – featured villain of the 60th Anniversary special episode “The Giggle.” After praising the musician for their genius, Maestro then sucks the music out of their heart and eats it like cotton candy before staring into the camera and playing the show's theme tune on the piano.

When the titles end (notice the theme is playing out of the jukebox) it’s clear Ruby has been on the TARDIS for some time. She asks the Doctor if it would be possible to visit the recording of the Beatles’ first album at the EMI’s studios on Abbey Road. Before they open the doors, she asks if it might be worth them changing into less conspicuously modern clothes and they spring off to sample the delights of the TARDIS wardrobe, complete with a wig for the Doctor.

James Pardon/Bad Wolf/BBC Studios

The pair sneak into George Martin’s producer’s booth but quickly spot something is wrong with the scene in front of them. Rather than playing any of Please Please Me’s big and recognizable hits, they’re turning out mop-top music about animals. The Doctor doesn’t know it yet but Maestro has spent the last few decades swallowing all of the music out of people’s hearts. It’s a genius way to get around the fact that, even with all the cash thrown at Get Back and Disney’s vast bank balance, Doctor Who still can’t readily afford to license Beatles songs.

Next door, (famous British singer / TV presenter / notorious diva) Cilla Black is similarly stricken with a case of the muzaks while a concert orchestra is just about mustering a version of Three Blind Mice. The Doctor and Ruby head to the canteen to corner John and Paul to try and find out what went wrong with history. They then head to the roof with a piano, where Ruby plays a tune she wrote to help a friend get over a breakup. But once the Doctor hears Maestro’s giggle, he sprints away, hiding in a nearby basement.

James Pardon/Bad Wolf/BBC Studios

The Doctor explains that any villain who laughs is tied to the Toymaker and is a sign of the fractured universe. Fighting the Toymaker in “The Giggle” was sufficiently draining and difficult, especially given how powerful these elemental forces are, that he doesn’t want to do it again. Maestro is hunting for them, but the Doctor uses his sonic screwdriver to kill all of the sound in the area. (The Doctor knows just enough about how the form and format of TV works to turn the tables on their opponent.) Maestro works out how to undo the blocking – with some magnificent sound editing — but is then distracted from their pursuit of the Doctor by an older woman Ruby had inspired to play the piano.

The eagle-eyed among you will notice that this is the second time in two episodes that Ruby has inspired another person to be bold to their detriment. Her words were enough to encourage Eric to try and take on the bogeyman single-handed in “Space Babies,” nearly imperiling him. The older woman isn’t so lucky and gets consumed by Maestro

Because of how long Doctor Who has run, it's often its own source material. Ruby, once they’ve escaped, assumes that everything is okay because she recalls listening to music as a child and so therefore Maestro can’t have won. So, in a scene pulled from “Pyramids of Mars,” the Doctor takes her to 2024 in the TARDIS to show the wreckage of the alternate future. Because while she’s protected from the ravages of continuity by the fact she’s traveling through time, the rest of the universe isn’t so lucky.

Natalie Seery/Bad Wolf/BBC Studios

But this flash-forward, in an echo of the meeting with the Toymaker, flips from a visage of a bombed-out London to a stagey set. Maestro arrives behind a white piano to outline their plan to rid the universe of music, leaving just the aeolian tones of the wind brushing against objects. But the Doctor says that a universe without music, unable to express joy or anger through art, turns sour and destroys itself. It's a feeling I can relate to — like when love becomes so painful in its absence that you'd rather disappear into the void than keep going on. Davies is also a nihilist so many of his episodes have revolved around the dark face of humanity that reveals itself when denied Earthly pleasures.

Escaping back to the ‘60s, the Doctor and Ruby meet Maestro and find the walls of reality are collapsing. Murray Gold’s swirling soundtrack isn’t just the background music, it’s bled into the fabric of the show itself. The Doctor and Ruby start trying to find a chord that will bind Maestro with the Mrs. Mills piano, a (real) fixture of Abbey Road’s studio. As they play, the notes are rendered floating over the piano, but the pair fail to identify the final note before Maestro turns up.

Maestro begins attacking, throwing around musical scores as weapons and hurling the piano into the hall. It’s here that the episode’s coherence starts to sag, the scenes get longer and odder, a wonky version of a standard monster-of-the-week TV show conclusion. The tension builds, and all looks lost, until John and Paul stumble upon the piano in the hallway. They’re able to see the notes hanging in the air over the piano and with their, uh, innate musical nous, and complete the chord to bind the villain. But before they’re whisked away, Maestro has time to reveal they aren’t the only one of the Toymaker’s minions coming, and “the one who waits” is lurking in the background.

Out of nowhere, the episode ends with a big musical number that features the cast dancing through the Abbey Road sets, delighted at the return of music. Even the steps of the road crossing light up as the Doctor and Ruby cut a rug across them. I can’t work out if it’s simply an indulgent sequence, or another big sign that the show’s structure is breaking down. That the Doctor and Ruby are blind to the apparent Wrongness of it all hints at the latter, especially given the deeper context of the song’s title — see below.

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There are other signs that Doctor Who is collapsing into its own TV series, including the casting decisions. The older woman who plays the piano is June Hudson, the show’s costume designer from 1978 to 1980 — who famously redesigned the fourth Doctor’s costume. The musician at the piano during the dance number is Murray Gold, while the figures the Doctor and Ruby dance with at the end are Strictly Come Dancing stars Shirley Ballas and Johannes Radebe. Maybe the big nemesis haunting the series will be some form that could threaten its existence as a TV show itself.

It’s worth saying that Doctor Who has an uneasy relationship with “big” villain performances which can turn hard into hamminess. But Jinkx Monsoon manages to pitch Maestro as just big and flamboyant enough to steal every scene they’re in, but never too silly. It’s also the right side of charming and magnetic, and while they don’t have anywhere near enough time to properly face off against Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor, it’s still a great match-up.

The problem of Susan Twist

As much as I don’t want to get into the weeds here, it’s possible this stuff is going to come up later that I need to flag it. Doctor Who has been running for more than 60 years with a revolving door of creative figures who paid little-to-no attention to consistency. A convenient way to justify these is by suggesting time travel, by its very nature, would always mess up your personal history. But, in latter days, the show has often preferred to overlook the thornier parts of its backstory, like the existence of the Doctor’s granddaughter, Susan.

When the show started, the Doctor was joined on his adventures by Susan and a pair of teachers who followed her home one night. Long before any mention of Time Lords or Gallifrey, she was just the kid figure who often wound up needing rescuing. Then, in “The Dalek Invasion of Earth,” the Doctor exiles her to 22nd century Earth because she wants to kiss a boy. His goodbye speech has been long since de-contextualized and made to sound noble. But it is essentially him going “yeah, you’re interested in boys now, so you go make babies (eww babies) and stay here while I go off running around the universe.” Yes, it is a bit yikes.

This ties in with a small body of writing about this trope in children’s literature about the way female characters are treated when reaching adulthood. In combination with a sexual awakening, this is often used as justification to dump them out of the narrative. It’s even called “The Problem of Susan,” albeit named after Neil Gaiman’s rebuttal of what happens to Susan at the end of The Chronicles of Narnia. If you’d like to learn more, you can read Elizabeth Sandifer’s essay on "The Dalek Invasion of Earth" which talks about this in some detail.

Why is this relevant? Because when Davies’ returned to Doctor Who, he cast the same actress in two different episodes. Susan Twist played Mrs. Merridew in "Wild Blue Yonder" and was seen again in "The Church on Ruby Road," which sent keen-eyed fans into a frenzy. She pops up here as a tea lady and, on the roof of Abbey Road; the Doctor even talks about the fact another of his incarnations is living in Shoreditch in 1963 with his granddaughter. That the episode ends with a musical number called “There’s always a Twist at the end” with Ncuti Gatwa winking to camera is as big a neon sign as you could hope for.

Doctor Who fans — never ones to not scour the text, metatext and paratext of each episode — took Twist’s repeated casting as a signpost. They assumed, not unjustifiably, that this series would feature a twist about Susan, and that Davies was subtly signaling this to diehard fans. Given Twist’s appearance here, and that we get a song saying the quiet part out loud, seems to vindicate those theories. Unless, of course, it’s all a triple bluff, but I’m not sure how anyone could game that successfully. The only question that remains, of course, is what Davies' plan is, and how exactly it’ll play out in the next six episodes.

The following includes spoilers for “Space Babies.”

You can’t help but admire Russell T. Davies’ audacity. He plucks the rights to make Doctor Who from the BBC. He gets Disney+ to write an enormous check to bring the show to life in a way never before attempted. Then, with so much money at stake and a months-long promotional campaign, he opens season one and the door to new fans with this.

We kick off at the end of “The Church on Ruby Road,” with the Doctor's latest companion, Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson), entering the TARDIS for the first time. The Doctor introduces himself and offers a quick run-through of the premise for the folks at home. They’re an alien, adopted by the Time Lords of Gallifrey who were then wiped out. That leaves the Doctor (once again) as the last of their kind; a quasi-immortal time traveler who can go anywhere in the universe.

To set the scene, the pair hop back to prehistoric Wyoming to gaze at a detailed vista of some CGI dinosaurs. This is the show boasting about what it can do even for a throwaway scene with its new bigger budget. And it helps banish the memories of some of the less successful attempts to do a dinosaur episode from way back when.

Ruby is already savvy to the conventions of the time-travel genre and asks about the risks to causality if she steps on a butterfly. The Doctor dismisses this idea out of hand before Ruby does and causes unutterable damage to the timeline. The butterfly is quickly revived and the Doctor nips back into the TARDIS to activate the Butterfly Compensator. Which is as close as this show gets to saying that it has never been a hard sci-fi show and it never will be.

James Pardon/Bad Wolf/BBC Studios

For their next trip, they travel into the far future, landing on a space station that grows babies for colony projects. The bowels of the vessel are being stalked by an eyeless, teeth-heavy monster while the upper deck is crewed by talking babies. Mere seconds after proving the show can do decent-looking dinosaurs, it overreaches and adds an appallingly creepy CGI mouth to a baby. I’ve seen this done in movies, and commercials, and it never works, and please God stop trying.

The Doctor and Ruby encounter the crew, a bunch of babies with the minds of preschoolers and the mouths of adults, or something. They’ve been left to run the station, with pulleys and cables letting them control specific onboard functions, and smart strollers to carry them around. The only other presence on the ship is an AI, NAN-E, which acts as a comforting voice for the kids.

Ruby’s genre-savviness kicks in again here, and she notices there’s almost a storybook quality to the situation. A bunch of kids being menaced by an unwelcome, bogeyman-esque presence below, and the need for a hero to step in and rescue them. The pair give the babies some much-needed cuddles and are then invited to another part of the station by NAN-E.

On the way, the pair discuss origin stories and how Ruby, following on from the events of “The Church on Ruby Road,” wants to use the TARDIS to find out who her parents are. While they talk, snow — the same snow that fell when Ruby was left on the steps of the eponymous church — starts to fall inside the corridor. Ruby’s memories and history are somehow seeping through into the present, or she’s able to do something to alter the universe.

James Pardon/Bad Wolf/BBC Studios

But they can’t focus on that too much, since they’re interrupted by NAN-E, who turns out not to be an AI, but a person. Jocelyn Sancerre (Golda Rosheuvel) is the last adult crew member, who stayed on the station to care for the children when everyone else was ordered to leave. The government of the planet below pulled funding for the stations and ordered the adults to leave, abandoning the children in place. But, because the planet is also anti-abortion, they wouldn’t terminate the as-yet unborn babies, preferring them to slowly die from external factors. Geez, do you think they might be talking about us?

Much as this will be framed as a post-Roe story by US audiences, it’s worth saying the UK’s Conservative Party has taken a similar approach. In 2010, the Labour government had worked to greatly reduce child poverty and homelessness with a number of targeted programs. These were quickly unwound by the incoming Conservatives, not only undoing all of those gains but making the issue a lot worse. So much so that the UN – the UN! – of all people upbraided the nation.

The streak of saying the quiet part out loud continues when, while hatching a plan to save the babies, they opt to take them to another planet in the system. It’s a world that takes in refugees, but you have to turn up on the planet’s doorstep to get any help, because it won’t lift a finger to help rescue people in need from further afield. Again, this is a not-so oblique reference to the UK’s monstrous policy of attempting to block refugees from reaching the country via sea. It is a point of enormous pride for the Prime Minister that he has boasted about his work to prevent boat crossings.

This is made all the more painful as, for a brief moment, the country was reconsidering its approach following the death of Alan Kurdi, a two-year-old boy who drowned while attempting passage to Europe from Syria. The image of his body became a harrowing and defining image of the day, but the press quickly worked to stifle any pro-migrant sentiment, enabling the country to engage in an enormous boondoggle by spending millions of pounds building a detention center in Rwanda to forcibly-relocate people seeking asylum in the UK as a “deterrent.”

James Pardon/Bad Wolf/BBC Studios

The grown ups can’t mull their problems for long as Eric, one of the babies (sorry, space babies) heads down to the lower level to tackle this bogeyman. There’s a telling moment where Ruby sprints out to rescue the child far ahead of the Doctor, continuing a thread from the Christmas special: Ruby Sunday is willing to throw herself head-first into the action rather than waiting for help, steel pipe in hand. Doctor Who has always thrived when the companions — a name we’ve been saddled with since 1963 — are active figures in the narrative. Every one of the show’s sidekicks, bar one, has their ardent fans, but commanding figures like Sarah Jane and Ace are always the most beloved.

Once the baby is rescued by the other babies wielding a gas pipe as a flamethrower, they’re sent back upstairs while the Doctor and Ruby take on the bogeyman. Ruby’s assumptions are proved further right when it turns out the alien is actually a bogey-man, as in made of snot. The station’s malfunctioning systems sought to build an appropriate environment for the kids, and used children’s literature as its template.

Jocelyn works out that she can force the bogeyman toward an airlock while keeping the Doctor and Ruby safe. She then exposes the monster to the void of space, but the Doctor can’t be so cruel to another lonely, misunderstood figure. He makes his way into the airlock room and closes the door to seal them both in to save the bogeyman’s life.

The episode ends with the Doctor realizing that the station can eject its six full years worth of soiled diapers to propel it towards the refugee planet. It’s entirely fair game to resolve a crisis precipitated by rogue bodily fluids with a poop joke.

Crisis averted, he and Ruby walk back to the TARDIS where he gives her a key and welcomes her to the team, before adding that, as much as she may want to, he can’t take her back to the moment she was abandoned. He covertly begins scanning Ruby to work out what exactly is her deal, and why she’s capable of bending the universe. (And yes, there are shades of the Impossible Girl arc in how this is playing out.)

The TARDIS lands back at Ruby’s home, smashing up the kitchen and the Christmas dinner therein.

James Pardon/Bad Wolf/BBC Studios

I imagine it won’t be long after the episode airs that the usual corners of the internet will scream culture war. Davies was always a political writer and feels a duty to be unapologetic about his viewpoint on current-day matters. His original tenure on the show was rooted at the tail-end of the Blair and Brown years, fueled by righteous fury around the invasion of Iraq. This is, again, all the more surprising given it’s being broadcast on Disney+, the model of conservative restraint.

During his first tenure, Davies would begin the production of every episode with a tone meeting which outlined how each episode would maintain a consistent feeling in the writing, acting and direction. By comparison, “Space Babies” lurches wildly: Poop and fart jokes in one scene, unsettling horror in the next, weighty examinations of human morality between. The scenes of Jocelyn’s adult dialog being run through the “nanny filter” is a good source of comedy, it’s just odd that they’re juxtaposed with high drama.

But that’s more or less what makes Doctor Who one of the best shows on TV — its ability to do anything it damn well pleases. If the weirdness of what you’ve just seen appeals then you’ve just become a Doctor Who fan. If it didn’t, then you might find the next episode will serve up what you were looking for.

Doctor Who is famous for constantly reinventing itself while remaining more or less exactly the same. The show has had a rough few years, which has led to some dramatic changes behind the scenes. Russell T. Davies, who was behind Doctor Who’s 2005 revival, has stepped in to rescue the show. What was historically an in-house BBC production is now being handled by a Sony-owned production company. And Disney has bankrolled it, with this new revival billed outside the UK as a Disney+ Original.

The dramatic behind-the-scenes changes prompted some fundamental questions about how Doctor Who would thrive in this new world. Would Davies be able to bring the show back from the brink a second time? And would the show appeal to Zoomers in the same way it found a devoted audience of Millennials? And would Doctor Who survive intact under Disney, which is used to obsessive levels of control?

It’s that last question I can already answer, having watched the first two episodes of this new eight-episode season: Doctor Who hasn’t been watered down to suit its new paymasters or the broad international audience who will see this show pop up every Friday. In fact, Who ‘24 has doubled down on being weird, avant-garde, difficult to handle and harder to pigeonhole. It’s a little punk and a little rough around the edges which makes it all the more interesting compared to, say, some other Disney+ series I could choose to mention.

I’m not allowed to share much of what I saw, but episode one, “Space Babies,” features the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and Ruby (Millie Gibson) visiting a space station crewed by babies. As you can see in the trailer, there’s liberal use of unconvincing and creepy CGI mouths for said rugrats. “The Devil’s Chord,” meanwhile, sees the TARDIS head to Abbey Road to meet the Beatles at the dawn of their careers.

If this is your first experience of Doctor Who, please start with the Christmas Day special “The Church on Ruby Road.” These first three episodes are the jumping-on point, and form Davies standard “Present,” “Future” and “Past” trilogy he uses to open his runs. All three are sold as fun romps, but there's a spikiness that stems from Davies’ underlying cynicism. As much as he may paint in primary colors, his worldview is a lot darker than some of his colleagues.

Davies is a strong advocate for better queer representation in film and TV and is arguably one of the most powerful gay men in media. Many of his shows, including Queer as Folk, Cucumber, A Very English Scandal and It’s a Sin center on queer narratives. Davies has made it clear he wants to foreground queer experiences in this season of Doctor Who and does so, proudly. He told Variety that the Doctor “chimes with queer energy” and that he’s not a “neutered Doctor.”

Some context: In 2021, Davies called out Disney+ for its lack of real representation in some of its other shows. During a virtual panel as reported by Pink News, he pointed at Loki’s single reference to the lead character’s fluid sexuality as a warning sign. “Loki makes one reference to being bisexual once and everyone’s like ‘oh my god, it’s like a pansexual show,” he said. Adding the single spoken reference was a “a ridiculous, craven, feeble gesture towards the vital politics and the stories that should be told.”

Davies returned to the job after the failure of his immediate predecessor, Chris Chibnall, who will likely go down in infamy. Chibnall inherited a successful show and opted to broaden its horizons by hiring a far more diverse crew both in front of and behind the camera. That included writers like Malorie Blackman and Vinay Patel and casting two women, Jodie Whittaker and Jo Martin, to play the Doctor. Chibnall also refused to bow down to culture war pressure when tedious people started screaming that the show had “gone woke.”

But for all of the goodwill the show had — and which Chibnall’s early decisions helped accrue — the showrunner quickly started to burn his own legacy as he built it. The quality of his episodes were never great and he wrote episodes that were incoherent, or said some pretty awful things by implication. He then started using the show as a vehicle for his own fan theories, re-litigating niche matters of continuity so nit-picky even I rolled my eyes so hard my skull caved in.

And then he created a secret origin story for the Doctor that essentially overwrote much of the previous 60 years’ worth of character development. He turned the Doctor into some sort of Space Jesus and then set about destroying a significant amount of the series’ fictional universe. Audiences were not thrilled: 8.2 million people watched Chibnall’s first regular-season episode but, by the end of his tenure, the figure had tumbled to 3.47 million.

It would have been smart to ditch all of this and declare a fresh start but Davies took a different approach. He has opted to Yes-And Chibnall’s hamfistedness, incorporating the catastrophic events of the last season as a new backdrop for the series. The universe is now "knackered," which has led to the show’s fictional reality warping in new, weirder and more whimsical directions. Whereas before Doctor Who sat at the crossroads of science and fantasy, it has now become a soft fantasy show. Villains like the Toymaker and the Goblin King push the Doctor into a more mythic register than ever before.

BBC / Disney+

CGI baby mouths aside, Doctor Who’s slick production values don’t work unless they're tied to great writing and great acting. Ncuti Gatwa had already become a superstar thanks to his work on Sex Education and Barbie and is a magnetic presence on screen. I struggle to take your eyes off him, but he’s clearly willing to cede space and time to his co-stars. Millie Gibson has the harder role as Ruby Sunday, having to keep her character grounded and believable in this fantastic world. The role of the Doctor’s traveling companion has minted many British A-listers since the show’s return and Gibson is clearly destined for big things.

If there’s one thing that comes across too much in these opening episodes, it’s that Doctor Who isn’t the same show from one week to the next. It revels in being chaotic, freewheeling through genres and styles with the freedom its lead character so relishes. So, if this is your first time on board the TARDIS, welcome, and strap yourselves in for some silly and serious fun.

Oh, and they fixed the title sequence.

The first two episodes of Doctor Who arrive globally on Disney+ on Friday, May 10 at 7:00pm ET and in the UK on BBC iPlayer at midnight on Saturday, May 11. One episode will arrive at the same time for the following six weeks.

Ring makes a camera for pretty much every corner of your home but, until now, has never gone near one with a motorized base. That changes today with the Ring Pan-Tilt Indoor Cam that, as the name implies, lets you spin the unit around 360 degrees to keep up with what’s going on. The new unit has a tilt range of 169-degrees and offers color HD video no matter the lighting conditions. You’ll get all of the usual features with a standard indoor cam, including motion alerts and two-walk talk, plus the extras that come with a Ring subscription.

Given the tendency for folks running AirBnBs to covertly film their guests, there’s a built-in hardware kill switch. A mechanical shutter can be slid over the front of the camera, and Ring promises that both the video and audio feeds will be disabled until the cover is moved back. The company is also aware its usual range of colors, or lack of, might cramp your style if you’re buying one for the living room. That’s why this unit will be the first to launch in black and white, but also three new colors: Blush (pink), Charcoal (grey) and Starlight (off-ish white). These new colors will also come to Ring’s standard second-generation indoor camera in due time.

The new Ring Pan-Tilt Indoor Camera is available for pre-order today for $80 and will begin shipping on May 30.

It’s never good to recommend a comedy by saying it makes you weep, but somehow Bluey, a comedy for kids, feels more real and more truthful than anything else on TV. I see so much of myself in Bandit’s triumphs and failures as he tries to parent his two daughters. I nod along to all of his unsuccessful parenting tactics that, I’ll admit, I’ve also tried on my own two kids. And then, at the end of so many episodes, I’ll realize that the front of my t-shirt is wet with tears because I've been crying.

There can’t be many people unfamiliar with Bluey, the biggest kids’ TV series on the planet, if not the biggest series overall. Each seven-minute episode is a slice-of-life sitcom about the Heelers, a family of anthropomorphic dogs living in Brisbane, Australia. Bluey and her younger sister Bingo live with parents Bandit and Chilli. The show started out focused on the playtimes the kids would have with each other or their parents. But it quickly sprawled out to create a rich world in the vein of The Simpsons, with a whole city’s worth of storylines. It can now regularly relegate the Heelers to the background to focus on the show’s deep cast of characters.

It closed out its third season with last Sunday's “The Sign,” a (comparatively) epic 28-minute episode and this week with “Surprise,” a sweet little postscript. The former’s long running time was described as a dry-run for any potential Bluey movie, wrapping up a number of the show’s storylines. It focuses on a wedding taking place at the Heeler’s home in the shadow of the family’s plan to relocate to another city. I won’t spoil too much beyond saying “The Sign” is a story about the bigness of change and how that affects parents and kids alike. Much of it focused on Bandit’s decision to move for a better-paid job and the way that impacted Chilli and the two girls. It’s a complicated issue, especially because it highlights that parents often just want to do what’s best for the kids.

Ludo Studio

“Surprise,” meanwhile, focuses more on the mundane struggle of Bandit trying to play two different games with his daughters at the same time. Much as Bluey wants to be just seven minutes of silly fun, it can’t quite help but be honest about the emotional and physical labor of parenting. All Bandit wants to do is sit down and watch sport on the TV but his daughters won’t allow him that luxury. He’s chased around the house, forced to pretend to teach a tennis ball to ride a bike and then pelted with ping pong balls fired from a toy launcher. (Bluey’s happy to highlight how often Bandit will get hit in the groin as a consequence of whatever game the girls are playing.)

The payoff to all of that effort comes in the final half minute of the episode, which is when I started sobbing. As much as it may be pitched as a palate cleanser after the scale and emotional heft of the previous episode, the final moments offer a real (if pleasant) punch to the gut. I can’t help but feel plenty of parallels in Bluey’s life and that of my own (similarly-aged) daughter, and feel a lot of kinship with Bandit as well. If I’m one one-hundredth as good a parent as this silly cartoon dog who often gets it wrong, then I’ll feel like I’ve done a good job.

There’s been speculation that this third season may be the end for Bluey. Bloomberg reported the uncertainty around creator Joe Brumm’s future with the show, although producer Sam Moor has said it will continue in some form. Any delay would also risk that the child actors – who remain anonymous for their own safety — will age out of being able to play their roles. But in many ways, Bluey can’t not continue given the show is now a multi-billion dollar cash cow for the BBC, which owns a big chunk of the show’s rights.

I don’t want to say goodbye to Bluey and the Heelers, and I’d prefer they kept the cast as-is and let them grow up alongside Bandit and Chilli. That, to me, would be an honest thing to do, rather than indulging in the fakery that dogs so many TV shows which face this problem. But if they have to go, I’ll choose to remember Bluey’s three perfect seasons through the highs and lows of parenting.

ASUS has updated its 16-inch Zephyrus G16 for 2024 with fresher chips and graphics options all the way up to an RTX 4090. There’s a new OLED display with a 240HZ refresh rate and a full size SD card reader for transferring files. But, as much as ASUS is positioning this as a laptop for media makers as well as gamers, we need to know if its promises match its power. If you’re as curious as I am, you’ll have to read Sam Rutherford’s review to find out for yourself.

— Dan Cooper

The biggest stories you might have missed

Media coalition asks the feds to investigate Google’s removal of California news links

TikTok is trying to clean up its For You recommendations

Amazon says a whopping 140 third-party stores in four countries use its Just Walk Out tech

There’s a TV show coming based on Sega’s classic arcade game Golden Axe

Cheaper Evercade retro consoles will arrive in July

Apple renews For All Mankind and announces a spinoff series set in the Soviet Union

TikTok Notes is basically Instagram for your TikTok account

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, by Sayonara Wild Hearts devs, comes out on May 16

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Shadow platformer Schim is coming to PC and consoles on July 18

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X’s AI bot is so dumb it can’t tell the difference between a bad game and vandalism

They’re called euphemisms, Elon.

Basketball’s Klay Thompson had a rough time of it at a game, leading X users to suggest he was “throwing bricks.” This is a basketball term meaning he wasn’t throwing well, but if you didn’t know it, don’t worry too much, since neither did Grok, X’s homegrown AI. After reading the messages, it confected a news story suggesting Thompson was vandalizing homes in Sacramento.

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Good riddance, WH-XB910N: Sony’s confusing product names are going away

Sony catches up to the 19th century.

Sony’s always been capable of making a great product, but it’s never quite nailed the knack of naming them. For instance, it makes the best pair of wireless headphones on the market today but saddles them with the name WH-1000XM5. Now, however, the company has pledged to simplify its naming scheme, including renaming its headphone range as Wear.

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Nintendo emulator Delta hits the iOS App Store, no sideloading required

Apple’s relaxation of rules around what it permits on the App Store has seen the arrival of Delta. It’s a Nintendo emulator (and a successor to GBA4iOS) that runs a plethora of older titles from the company’s older consoles. Given its long-running enmity with game emulators and the ease with which it wiped out Yuzu, it can’t be long before Nintendo’s lawyers turn up with a fat stack of cease and desist letters.

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The dawn of the 3D-printing age was full of sky-high promises that had no chance of matching the reality of what was possible. Companies like Formlabs have taken the subsequent decade to look for places that the manufacturing process can work, and refining its technology to suit. Today, the company is announcing its Form 4 and Form 4B printers that, it says, offer a substantial improvement on what has gone before. And with maturity comes a shift in focus from just being able to create custom doodads on the fly toward a real manufacturing platform. The headline promise is simple: The Form 4 series will crank out prints up to five times faster than its predecessors. Rather than waiting a full day for a prototype to print out, the company is now suggesting you’ll be able to get something usable in just two hours.

(For the uninitiated: The B suffix stands for “biocompatible,” meaning the unit can 3D-print materials for medical applications. Formlabs has made inroads into the dental and medical industries, making cheap, custom-designed dentures as well as training models, prostheses and custom-fit medical equipment.)

The faster print time is enabled by better hardware, including a new print engine and a new light processing unit, as well as better resins. Formlabs is today announcing a set of new resins, including ones that help you crank out quick-and-dirty initial prototypes, as well as ones with more rigidity and color retention. Plenty of effort has also been jammed into ensuring that the resins (and the printers themselves) last longer, making prints cheaper and more efficient. The company is suggesting that prints made with the new gear will be around 40 percent lower thanks to the efficiency savings made elsewhere. This emphasis on speed, efficiency and lower cost should help bolster the sales pitch that these units are ready for bigger and better manufacturing jobs.

The Form 4 and Form 4B are available today, priced at $4,499 and $6,299, respectively.

Movie-industry shindig CinemaCon was the venue at which Paramount Pictures announced it has started work on a new Star Trek movie. Slashfilm reports Untitled Star Trek Origin Story will be a prequel to Star Trek (2009), J.J. Abrams’ glossy prequel to Star Trek (1966). It’ll be directed by Toby Haynes, most famous around these parts for helming episodes of Andor and Black Mirror’s USS Callister. The screenplay has been written by Seth Grahame-Smith, who wrote The Lego Batman Movie and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

So that we’re clear, Untitled Star Trek Origin Story will serve as a prequel to the 2009 origin story and a sequel to 2001’s origin story, Enterprise. It will likely be set before Discovery, which was conceived as a prequel to Star Trek (1966) and Strange New Worlds, which is a prequel to Star Trek (1966). And, look, if you’ll allow me to get a little personal for a moment, I am deeply overjoyed at the news. Given the dearth of origin stories, prequels and nostalgia-parades in the Star Trek universe, an Untitled Star Trek Origin Story is a welcome, necessary and life-giving addition to the franchise.

Let’s be honest, it’s high time we got something insular and backward-looking after so many years of non-stop groundbreaking, original adventures shorn from the burdens of continuity.

Sometimes, you’re in bed and the glow from your smart ring’s optical heart rate sensor creeps into your peripheral vision. It got me thinking about how Samsung (and potentially Apple) will join the smart ring market, and why that’s a terrible idea. You see, these companies want devices that make their presence known in your life, embedding themselves in your routine. But smart rings blend into the background on purpose, which limits how much you can, or will want, to do with them.

Back in February, Samsung announced the Galaxy Ring, a health-tracking wearable baked into a ring. When it launches later this year, it will continuously monitor your sleep, breathing, movement and reproductive cycle. Entirely coincidentally, I’m sure, Bloomberg reported Apple was also conducting investigations into its own smart ring platform. Both companies are not-so secretly gunning for the Oura Ring, the market leader in finger-worn wearables. And I’ve been testing one of these for a long while.

Oura tracks your sleep, temperature, activity, post-exertion recovery and menstrual cycle. It’s a marvel of engineering to get so much technology into such a small and elegant package. The downside, if you can call it that, is there’s no way to access the data the ring collects, or its insights, unless you have a phone on hand.

But here’s the thing: It’s not that often I find myself actually opening the app to see what the stats are saying. If I wake up feeling like crap, there’s normally a self-evident reason why that needs no further explanation. And on those rare occasions when I wake up and don’t know why I’m feeling bad, the last thing that would occur to me is to check my phone. Who wants to look at fine-grain data when your head is pounding and your eyes refuse to focus?

That friction, that small gap between having the information there and it being easily accessible is a problem. Yeah, you can get a notification if your "Readiness Score" — Oura's proprietary metric for overall health — falls below a certain level. But I’ve been using this thing for long enough that I’ve never taken up the habit, and I suspect others would struggle to do so, too. It’s nice to have that information on those rare occasions when I’m thinking enough about it to look at my data over a longer period of time. But I can’t imagine myself looking at this data once or twice a day.

It’s also not that useful for workout tracking, principally because you won’t want to risk your $300 gadget in the gym. The first time I took it to work out, I picked up a pair of metal dumbbells, realized their knurled handles were rubbing against the metal of the ring and quickly took it off.

Because there’s no direct method of input, it’s far too easy to forget it’s there and not make use of its information. If you’re all-in on using a ring to track your fitness because you won’t wear a smartwatch or fitness tracker, and you’re always checking your stats, then it’ll work for you. But, deep down, I prefer a watch with a display that’s easy enough to check as a matter of instinct. And it’s this that I think should be a concern for Samsung and, potentially, Apple, as they look to move into this space. A smart ring caters to a niche inside a niche – quantified self obsessives who refuse to wear a watch. They obviously believe that’s enough of a draw to devote time and money to building their own, but I’m not sure it’ll be a blockbuster.

Not to mention these rings only have a few hooks to keep users inside their specific corporate bubble. Both Apple and Samsung have dedicated health-tracking apps and it’s likely whoever buys one of these will have one fewer reason to switch providers in future. But compare that to the watches, which offer health tracking, messaging, app interactions and mobile payments. Smartwatches are beneficial to these platforms because they help draw together various features from the phone. Rings do not.

Perhaps this is another sight tech’s biggest players now just need to copy and destroy their smaller rivals rather than striving for new products. Smart rings cater to a small market, albeit one that big tech could dominate with very little time and effort. Especially given the strength of their relative brands, which means these devices will more or less sell themselves to diehard fans. But is that all a new product can be in 2024, and is that what we could or should expect these companies to be doing?