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While the Doctor became Ncuti Gatwa way back in The Giggle<\/em>, Ncuti Gatwa only became the Doctor with the Saturday-night debut of this episode. The actor\u2019s abilities have, up until this point, been more or less a matter of faith and guesswork, since the material he\u2019s had to work with hasn\u2019t given him the chance to shine. In Boom<\/em>, however, he\u2019s finally given the opportunity to make the role of the Doctor his own and he fucking nails it. We see the rage and intellect and compassion of a Time Lord for the first time since Gatwa got the gig and it was, I have to admit, well worth the wait.<\/p>\n Right, then. The premise: the Doctor and Ruby arrive in a futuristic warzone and the Doctor, rushing to help an injured man, steps on a landmine. It\u2019s a single, easy-to-make mistake that defines the whole episode. The landmine works by turning the person on it into an explosive using a DNA-level chain-reaction. The Doctor, however, is a Time Lord, so if he blows up, he\u2019ll take the whole planet with him. Thus begins Doctor Who\u2019s<\/em> answer to cult horror classic Landmine Goes Click<\/em> (but with sci-fi taser murder instead of rural French farmhands committing al fresco sex crimes).<\/p>\n Now, this is companion Ruby Sunday\u2019s first time on an alien planet and her grasp of the tech and stakes just isn\u2019t quite there yet, so she gets to be brave and loyal and insightful, but only up to a plausible limit. The fact she didn\u2019t<\/em> step on a landmine doesn\u2019t make her a convenient ex machina <\/em>figure. Before long, the landmine is also surrounded by a couple of soldiers, a child looking for her father in the war-torn wasteland, a hologram of said father (who is, like, super dead<\/em> by this point) and a for-profit AI \u2018ambulance\u2019 that can and will kill anyone whose treatment would be prohibitively expensive. And absolutely none of them are listening to the Doctor as he tries to explain what will happen if the landmine goes off with him standing on it.<\/p>\n I won\u2019t spoil the ending, but we get to see the Doctor at his best here: trapped in an impossible situation and a de facto prison cell the exact size of his own body (he can\u2019t even move without triggering the explosion), yet clearly the only person who can defuse the situation. We see him calculate the planet\u2019s gravity in order to shift his mass and allow himself some movement. We see him gradually persuade those around him of the importance of not setting off the world-ending fucking landmine<\/em>. We see him fighting the impersonal algorithm of the \u2018ambulance\u2019 in a way that I\u2019m categorically not<\/em> going to reveal and the trenchant stupidity of the military-minded berks around him at the same time. It\u2019s great.<\/p>\n The evils of capitalism<\/strong><\/p>\n Of course, all this would be show-offy, cerebral cleverness devoid of substance if the episode didn\u2019t pivot on a compelling theme that serves to incite great emotion in its protagonists. To whit, Boom!<\/em> is about the evils of capitalism. Yeah, it\u2019s not exactly an original sentiment that arms dealers are the scum of the Earth (or universe) but the thought has rarely been expressed so viscerally, nor linked so directly to the logics of capitalist economics themselves.<\/p>\n See, the landmine was supplied by a company that sells to all sides in all conflicts. The ambulance and weapons were supplied by the same. And the horror isn\u2019t just that someone is profiting from war: it\u2019s that all these pieces of tech are part of the same system. A system that is specifically designed to kill people at just the right rate<\/em> to keep them invested in the war and keep them buying new products. The guns and bombs and mines and field ambulances don\u2019t serve the people using them. They serve the bottom line of a faceless, remote company that regards people as part of a fiscal equation: disposable and expendable so long as they turn a profit.<\/p>\n The Doctor gets a little speech about it, and it\u2019s here we get to see the rage and pain of a man who has seen more war and suffering than anyone else in the universe. I\u2019m normally against straight-to-camera speeches, since they\u2019re basically the writer of an episode or film beating the audience over the head with their own personal viewpoint rather than leading them to it organically, but here it\u2019s completely in character, beautifully acted and justified by context. Yes, the Doctor is talking to us, but in-universe, he\u2019s talking to Ruby, and the questions she\u2019s asking, coupled to the extremity of his plight, would<\/em> provoke a bit of a rant.<\/p>\n Also, the speech itself shows more joined-up thinking than most straight-to-camera mouth-blarts. This isn\u2019t a right-on, smash-the-[insert-oppressor-class] woo-hoo moment. This is a meticulously laid-out, carefully extrapolated explanation <\/em>of evil that dares to look at the way it functions on the wider, systemic level instead of just picking a group of perceived perpetrators and yelling about how rubbish they are. It\u2019s a hard-left message which will probably turn off a few viewers, but it\u2019s proper<\/em> hard-left, not fucking Hollywood-style, boneless wokeness. It\u2019s true, and important and dark and bitter and, for once, as a dyed-in-the-wool lefty, I\u2019m happy to say that \u2018yes, this man does<\/em> represent us\u2019.<\/p>\n Boom!\u2019s<\/em> hard-left leanings are also a necessary bit of course-correction for a show that\u2019s always had<\/em> those implications but which has strayed away from them recent years in favour of insipid bandwagon-jumping. Let me take you back, gentle reader, to the loathed and despicable Chibnall\/Whitaker era of Doctor Who<\/em>. There were a lot \u2013 and I mean a lot<\/em> \u2013 of bad episodes during Chris Chibnall\u2019s time as showrunner. In fact, there was rarely a good one. But the episode that made the whole run completely irredeemable in my eyes was Kerblam!<\/em>, the episode in which Whitaker\u2019s \u2018Doctor\u2019 (a title she never really earned, hence the Inverted Commas of +10 Sarcasm) discovered a giant mega-corporation exploiting its workers and sided with that corporation over the freedom-fighter trying to blow it up.<\/p>\n It was morally disgusting, and revealed Chibnall for the rancid little corpo-Tory fucksponge he is. Now, what\u2019s a synonym for Kerblam!<\/em> (with an exclamation point)? Answer: Boom! <\/em>(also with an exclamation point)! Both episodes are about capitalism; both have the Doctor making explicit commentary on the system itself; both have titles that denote an explosion appended with a certain piece of well-known punctuation. Boom!<\/em> isn\u2019t just a very good episode of Doctor Who<\/em>: it\u2019s an address to the fans of the show. It\u2019s disowning, in no uncertain terms, the ideology of the Chibnall era. For in-universe purposes, it\u2019s saying \u201cThese slimy, pro-corporate, pro-exploitation views were confined to the Thirteenth Doctor. She doesn\u2019t speak for any other regeneration.\u201d<\/p>\n Fuck, BBC. What are you going to do for an encore? Show up at my house with a letter of apology and a free sex robot that both me and my wife can enjoy? It\u2019s interesting, of course, that Boom!<\/em> wasn\u2019t written by showrunner Russel T. Davies but by fellow Who <\/em>alumni Steven Moffat. Now, Moffat\u2019s tenure as showrunner back in the day was divisive in its own way, of course, but it\u2019s nice to see that the man still has balls the size of fucking Jupiter. He might as well have called episode \u201cFuck You, Chris\u201d and had done with it. Guess we know who wears the trousers in the Davies\/Moffat Odd Couple Household that I just involuntarily and reflexively imagined (complete with theme-tune).<\/p>\n Don\u2019t get me wrong, Boom! i<\/em>s not a perfect episode. Even confining ourselves to the current era, it\u2019s not as fun as The Giggle<\/em> or as conceptually interesting as Wild Blue Yonder<\/em>, but it is a sign that the show is finally hitting its stride. It\u2019s a lean, claustrophobic no-bullshit episode free of unnecessary cameos, gratuitous musical numbers and over-the-top Disney-esque villains. Happy ending aside, it\u2019s brutal and vicious and doesn\u2019t mess about for one gosh-darned minute. More of this, please.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" While the Doctor became Ncuti Gatwa way back in The Giggle, Ncuti Gatwa only became the Doctor with the Saturday-night debut of this episode. The actor\u2019s abilities…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":505,"featured_media":16988,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1649],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tv-radio-internet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16992","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/505"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16992"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16992\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}