It’s time for a Doctor-lite episode that shows us how Ruby has been doing. Uhhh…
Recap
It’s New Year’s 2007, and Conrad Clark (Benjamin Chivers) is an eight-year-old kid who witnesses the Doctor and Belinda exit the TARDIS and use the Vindicator on their next stop. The Doctor offers the kid 50p he found in the street, saying it’s his lucky day, and Conrad runs off to tell his mother what he’s seen. She accuses him of lying and smacks him in the head for spoiling her night. Years later, Conrad (Jonah Hauer-King) runs a podcast and is interviewing Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson) for it. He details how last year, he saw the blue box for the second time, and walked into an empty department store, getting his hand covered in green slime. A monster with red eyes gets zapped away from his location, and he sees the Doctor and Ruby. The Doctor gives Ruby an antidote—she’s also been covered with green slime, which is how the creature known as a Shreek (Gethin Alderman) marks its prey.
During the podcast, Conrad asks about what the Doctor and Ruby did together, wondering about aliens they’ve encountered. Ruby can’t tell him much, but notes that everyone knows aliens are real, and that UNIT is doing great work protecting folks, despite the trolls online who insist that it’s all a coverup for something else. The interview ends, and Conrad asks Ruby out for coffee, telling her that he met the Doctor once. They go out on another date, and Carla (Michelle Greenidge) and Cherry (Angela Wynter) are excited—Ruby is finally getting on with her life. On the date, Conrad admits that he only had his mother growing up, and she died of liver cancer. Ruby tells him that he was marked by the Shreek the day that he saw her and the Doctor, but thankfully she’d got the antidote, and UNIT captured the Shreek anyway, so he’ll be safe.
A little while later, they go on a weekend away to a town where many of Conrad’s buddies still live. Ruby admits that Conrad is her boyfriend, and he seems pleased about that. At the local pub with his pals, the lights start flickering—a sign of an impending Shreek attack. She goes outside and calls Kate Lethbridge-Stewart (Jemma Redgrave), who’s working late at UNIT. Kate finds no activity in the area and suggests that maybe Ruby is experiencing PTSD or something similar after her time with the Doctor. Ruby thanks her and hangs up. She tells Conrad about how she’s been feeling and he’s sympathetic. Then the lights go out and two Shreek appear: Conrad didn’t take the antidote, wanting to be brave like the Doctor. He apologizes, and Ruby rushes off, calling UNIT to the scene. She goes outside to confront the creature and Conrad joins despite being marked as prey; he wants to help after making such a big mistake.
UNIT arrives as they get cornered by the two Shreek, and Ruby realizes that… they’re not real Shreek. The two creatures stand and take off masks: They’re people in costumes, and this whole thing was a set up: Conrad reveals himself to be part of Think Tank, a group that work to “expose” the lies of UNIT, and they’re live-streaming the entire event. Conrad admits that getting to know Ruby has been a chore and his only goal is to show how their tax dollars are being wasting paying for their lies. When Shirley Bingham (Ruth Madeley) offers to show him proof of alien existence, he accuses her of personally stealing tax dollars due to her disability while lying. They group are arrested and news goes wild about how this brave young podcaster stood up to UNIT and confronted them about their work; he’s quickly released and doxxes all UNIT employees. Ruby is at UNIT talking to Shirley about how Conrad was likely desperate for attention because he got none from his now-dead mother. Shirley tells her that Conrad’s mother is alive and living happily in a French villa he pays for: Conrad is wealthy from his subscribers and also a tax dodger.
Conrad breaks into the UNIT building with help from a man on the inside, Jordan Lang (Kareem Alexander). UNIT figures out that Jordan is their inside leak too late, and Commander Christofer Ibrahim (Alexander Devrient) asks Kate to order a deadlock seal on the floor, but Kate insists that they confront him. Conrad is live-streaming again, has stolen a weapon, and demands a confession from the group about their lies, insulting Kate’s father—Brigadier Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart—as well. They learn that Jordan has been hurt by Conrad and Kate decides to show Conrad what they’re protecting the world from, releasing the Shreek to go after it’s prey. It hunts Conrad down, and he begs them to stop it, admitting everything he said was a lie. Before it can kill him, Shirley hands Ruby a taser and she stuns the thing; Kate was unmoved to do anything, furious at the man for lying for profit.
Conrad stands, insisting that it was probably all faked, and the Shreek bites into his arm. The next day, Commander Ibrahim tells Kate that Conrad is fine, Jordan is out of the ICU, and that she went way too far this time. Kate is unbothered, but very worried for Ruby, who realizes that she’s in limbo and needs a real change. Kate tells her that she should do what she needs to do, and that she’ll always be there to talk. Shirley teases that Ruby keeps collecting mothers. In prison, the TARDIS materializes around Conrad and the Doctor tells him off for all the stupid things he’s done. Conrad laughs at him and gives the Doctor spoilers about Belinda being his next companion, so the Doctor returns the favor, letting him know that he’ll die alone and unimportant, forgotten by history. Conrad says that he rejects the Doctor’s reality and tells him to get off “his” world. Conrad is back in his cell and a guard approaches with keys—Mrs. Flood. He asks if that was real, and she tells him it was… and that she’s releasing him.
Commentary
This episode could have been so good, and I can’t decide if this is down to eight episode seasons and not having the time to develop things? Or if folks are just letting things slide when they shouldn’t. This reveal could’ve been built to over time! It could’ve taken all season, and would have likely been so much better for it.
Peter McTighe wrote “Lucky Day,” and also the thinly-veiled Amazon commentary episode “Kerblam!” a few seasons back. Many folks found “Kerblam!” similarly overwrought, and while I was (mostly) a fan, this episode takes a lot of the same weaknesses and dials them up past the point of credulity. I simply cannot get over the fact that the setup of Conrad’s little social media empire makes no sense. At the very least, it makes every one of the Doctor’s friends look utterly brainless.
To start: If this is Think Tank’s big reveal to the public, then Conrad wouldn’t have the level of followers he’s attained, and certainly wouldn’t be rich already. But if this is just the first big antagonistic move by an already sizable platform then… what podcast did he put Ruby on, exactly? Is it the Think Tank podcast, or a fake one he created to make her look like a fool, one where he pretends to be a more moderate guy? If the whole podcast had turned out to be fake, it might have made a little more sense, but we know that’s not true because we see his listeners tuning in, Jordan Lang included. Sure, he’s trying to bait Ruby, but this kind of scheme demands way more forethought than the episode has built in.
Ruby looks him up on the internet! They talk about his Instagram! He’s not using a fake name, so all of his alt-truth fear mongering should have turned up in that search, especially if he’s got enough followers to make a considerable amount of money off of them. More importantly, if he’s reaching enough people, UNIT should have already flagged and tagged this guy—so now they look like idiots, too.
Moreover, using UNIT as the scapegoat we’re supposed to ally with exposes a horrific flaw in the mechanics of Doctor Who’s universe: Sure, the audience knows that UNIT is (eh, mostly) doing good stuff. But that doesn’t change the fact that shadowy militarized government organizations that hoard technology, keep off-the-books prisoners, and operate largely without oversight are bad. We all know they’re bad, right? We are aware of that, yes? But the viewer is meant to trust UNIT, and know they’re the good guys in this instance, which is always how military/police/intelligence agency propaganda works in entertainment. “Sure, maybe that wouldn’t be okay in real life, but these are my shadowy agents and I love them.”
As a viewer and a critic, I’m usually willing to accept those mechanics because I am capable of separating fiction from reality, and accepting different parameters in each. But making UNIT the heroes in a plot line designed to interrogate the post-truth information era is a sizable misstep in this.
That’s all without even getting into the fact that UNIT originally stood for the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce, but was later changed to the Unified Intelligence Taskforce when the real-world U.N. expressed displeasure at being associated with the militarized fictional force in 2005. And even so, Doctor Who has suggested that UNIT still answers to the U.N. somehow? But also is maybe funded by U.K. tax dollars? And the U.N. isn’t demanding that UNIT develop alien tech for the betterment of humanity, they’re just allowed to warehouse these things and keep it to themselves? Sorry, this could warp into a much longer tangent, I’m just fascinated by the fact that they chose to shorthand this conflict in a way that actively makes Conrad’s point for him.
And I understand the impulse to let the Doctor have the last word with him, but this is one situation where it doesn’t really make sense. Ruby should have been given that moment, or even Belinda, but again, rules for this season prevent that. Humans are the ones affected by Conrad’s lies more than the Doctor could ever be. It’s a point where the desire to let the actor deliver this important lesson is superseding the character. And I want Gatwa to do everything, but this didn’t ring true the way it needed to as a result.
Hauer-King’s performance gets better once the reveal takes place, but the episode couldn’t be more obvious in how it telegraphs that he’s lying to Ruby. No guy is this tuned in and precious on a first cup of coffee. We can all tell something’s up, and again, it makes Ruby seem dim for not seeing it coming. Which is, in turn, extra insulting in an episode that is also trying to tackle her PTSD??
The fact that this is shoehorned into an episode that’s meant to be about something else entirely is such a shame. The woman is literally targeted and trapped by people who use her trauma against her, and there’s only time for lingering closeups of the heartbreak on her face. I’m still glad that Kate is making it her personal mission to be there for the Doctor’s former companions, but she’s drowning, y’all. Help a girl out.
All in all, this episode was trying to make a lot of very important points, but botched the execution entirely. I really wish we’d been given time for Think Tank to build steam, like the “Vote Saxon!” days of old.
Time and Space and Sundry
- Cherry is worried about small towns because of
racismthe bees, because she’s just watched Wicker Man. My love for the Sundays overflows with every new scene they offer up.
- There’s something strange happening in the harbor in Sydney, huh? Hope Mel is okay. Wonder if that’s coming back…
- Yeah, I really love the idea that Kate is staying late for work because she’s maybe got a thing going with Ibrahim. And that said thing might be a little rocky now that she’s done something morally squiffy. It’s a standard flip of the usual power dynamic in this sort of situation—normally the guy would be in charge and a female subordinate who is into him would be talking him down. They’ve even got the (typical, annoying) sizable age gap included on the flip! Not saying that age gaps are suddenly fine when they’re gender-reversed, just that it’s always fun to see a trope inverted.
- Conrad mentions yeti in the Underground when he sites all the things UNIT has ostensibly made up. Always mention the yeti, Doctor Who. (It’s from the Second Doctor story “The Web of Fear,” which also marked the first appearance of Kate’s dad, the Brigadier.)
Next week, everyone! See you then!
I enjoyed this episode, and really liked the flip from what was building up to another “Love and Monsters” into something FAR different.
Just to note we don’t have (or say) “tax dollars” in Britain!
We pay our taxes in pounds £, and we don’t say “tax pounds” either, that would be weird
I agree: the concept is great, but the execution was atrocious. As you said, nobody knowing who Conrad is after checking him up is absurd, but even worse for UNIT: they show that the Vlinx can gather all relevant data in a second. And that’s for a man who has interviewed here, and who is now getting close to Ruby, who Lethbridge-Stewart is keep her eye on. Also, I fail to understand Conrad’s motivations: he saw the TARDIS disappear, so he knows everything is real. But rather than trying to get famous on that, this prompts him to try to prove that the thing he definitely saw is not real? And what was his plan in the village? Catching UNIT… being professional and doing their best handling a threat that he reported? And what would even be Jordan’s motivation for betraying UNIT: he works with alien’s every day, how would he not know the threats are real and UNIT is important?
Meanwhile, the episode ignores important questions: “our technology would tear the world apart”: well then maybe it shouldn’t exist in the first place? How many times has UNIT proven that their security is lacking? And if Conrad can take them down single-handedly, then he has proven his point far better than he did with his stunt in the village. Don’t they have any system in place to stop him or even jam his signal to stop the podcast? In the end, what Conrad’s feed proved was that the threats are real, and UNIT is completely powerless to stop them.
I did like the ending though (even though it would have been better coming from Ruby, but good for her for just shutting Conrad out of her life). The fact that even being attacked by the monster, being harmed by it, even being warped inside the TARDIS and meeting the Doctor won’t be enough for some people. This episode acknowledges that once someone is incapable of accepting the reality in front of their eyes as the truth, it’s basically impossible to make them change their mind. So it is essential to prevent them from reaching out to the people who are still on the fence on those conspiracy theories.
The other thing I loved with this episode was continuing the tradition started in 1965 with The Rescue, that the monsters really do look like shitty special effects, and there is no way to tell one from the other even diegetically.
It’s not that Conrad didn’t believe the reality, it’s that he refused to admit he was wrong. The thing people often fail to understand about malignant narcissists like him is that they don’t care about objective reality or truth, they only care about winning the argument and dominating others. So they’ll pretend absolute certainty of something they know is a lie, because admitting they were wrong would mean losing dominance. So nothing they say can be presumed to reflect their real understanding of reality. Conrad knows perfectly well that aliens are real, but he’s based his power on the lie that they’re a hoax, so he’ll never admit that they’re real.
It is, in other words, a fairly classic Lex Luthor/Rest of the World dynamic: HE is the Hero, Superman is actually an Evil Alien and you are FOOLS, all Fools, for pretending otherwise.
Well, maybe, but I was thinking more of certain narcissistic authority figures and pundits that we see every day in real life — the kind of people that Conrad was no doubt intended as an allegory for.
I took it that Conrad was well-known for his podcast as it was presented to Ruby, and it was only with the Think Tank reveal that he came out with his true agenda. A lot of the time, this kind of propaganda is dog-whistle coded, so that it seems innocuous on the surface, but those who are indoctrinated into the mindset can recognize the coded racist or far-right messages that the public doesn’t notice. (For instance, ancient-astronaut lore is often used to promote dog-whistle racism, because it’s predicated in the assumption that nonwhite peoples lacked the intelligence to create their own civilizations without alien help. But that’s easy to miss if you aren’t indoctrinated or haven’t had the racist coding pointed out to you.)
As for Think Tank, I wonder if it’s meant to be the same Think Tank from Tom Baker’s debut story “Robot.” Given the role UNIT played in defeating their plans there, I can see them holding a decades-long grudge.
I hadn’t really thought through the problems you bring up with this story, but I can see the issues now. I did think it was a little sketchy to present UNIT as the good guys in this scenario. But I liked the inversion of the usual story tropes — the existence of aliens is commonly accepted, and the crazy conspiracy nuts are the ones trying to prove aliens aren’t real.
The Doctor showing up to chastise Conrad at the end rang a bit false to me — it’s not like the Doctor to single someone out for a confrontation like that when they mess with an ex-companion. If that were the case, he would’ve been dropping in on Sarah Jane Smith’s enemies after every episode of her show. It did feel like the writer putting a polemic in the character’s mouth, as much as it was a worthwhile statement in its way (aside from the awkward moral alignments in the story).
I finally get a character with my name and he’s a heel. Just great. Did not enjoy episode due to reminder associations with real life truth deniers here in Missouri. I was really hoping for some
Time Lord Triumphant retribution from the Doctor, and the pronouncement of dying alone and forgotten just didn’t get there for me.
Not least because the episode then proceeds to let ‘Old Handy’ out of his cell immediately after The Doctor assured him he was going to die there – completely robbing that prophecy of any actual Oomph.
For my money the episode should have ended with Mrs Flood walking past Conrad’s cell, completely ignoring his questions, on her way to contact another prisoner (At least if it wanted to give The Doctor’s speech full credit).
Great review. It’s a good and timely premise and I like the “ripped straight from the headlines” feel of it to begin with. I also liked the idea of Ruby dealing with PTSD. You get a sense of that with Tegan’s recent appearance (and her original departure) but this is the first time they’ve picked it up and it could have been a whole episode.
Yes, the bit that started the decline of the episode for me was the bit where Kate declares that UNIT is safeguarding the world by ensuring no one gets any of the wonderful tech. It’s particularly chafing as how far are we from Yvonne Hartman’s Torchwood, where stockpiling alien tech for imperial reasons was very clearly an issue for the characters? UNIT hasn’t been well-served on screen since its return, and part of that is the gloss of their operations and the loss of the cosiness of the original gang from the 70s, which helped soften the idea of a paramilitary operation. I’m also not a fan of the idea that somehow you inherit UNIT if you’re a Lethbridge-Stewart, especially when there was already a replacement for the Brigadier in Bambera from Battlefield that they could have brought back who was a lot less cardboard and a lot more fun as a character than Kate, who isn’t played with any of Nick Courtney’s twinkle by Jemma Redgrave. For her to then let the monster loose to terrify and maim a civilian, well, is it likely that she would still have that position after that? Maybe this is the Zygon Kate?
Millie Gibson is capable of carrying off a whole episode by herself, and the fact she gets played and then sidelined by the story is a huge weakness because she gets left in a weakened position. I tend to agree with Christopher’s comment that it seems more likely that Think Tank was hidden and that Conrad was playing a long game to expose UNIT that likely was coy with how it presented itself. I’m not entirely sure how “my friends dress up as monsters and then take their hats off on camera” exposes UNIT, but these sort of groups don’t need to be logical in how they create noise, they just have to create noise.
And the Doctor showing up at the end to ineffectually tell off Conrad smells a little bit of a production note about the lead being missing. It isn’t helped by how clearly it was filmed at a different time to the rest of the episode, because why would the Doctor not check in with Ruby or UNIT? It clunks heavily, even if I don’t mind how didactically the scene is played as it’s a bit of a throwback to the Third Doctor telling people off which does make sense in a UNIT heavy story.
A story like this needs a character to be undone by his own hubris, but maybe that’s coming later. It probably isn’t but maybe it is.
There are only 8 episodes a season so the unfinished feel to the episodes doesn’t make a lot of sense, beyond the fact that we know they were done quite a bit ahead of transmission with these episodes being recorded at about the same time as the first set.
That said, it wasn’t a failure. It just wasn’t quite as good as it could have been.
In all fairness Conrad was an active shooter who had already badly-injured a UNIT agent and was threatening several others: whilst I too side-eye Kate Lethbridge Stuart’s decision to sic an alien beastie on the man, it’s impossible to describe Conrad as anything but a full-blown terrorist at this point (Albeit one so arrogant he assumes that this is a hostage situation and he’s the hostage taker).
True, but Ibrahim or anyone could very easily have taken him down. (Also a bit surprised that UNIT weaponery doesn’t have biometric locking.)
This being DOCTOR WHO, my default assumption is that if a technology exists it can be subverted when somebody tries hard enough – especially when that person is a hero or a villain.
You’ve summed up better than I could everything I didn’t like about this episode – good idea, terrible execution, and makes everyone in UNIT look like a bunch of idiots and also in the wrong, since Kate’s solution to the problem is… release an alien menace and let it eat the guy criticizing her on livestream? That’s a terrible idea and not just in the “you’re lucky the Doctor isn’t here to stop me” sense, but mainly because it won’t win her any points in the mediatic war that Conrad has launched against her.
And then the Doctor swoops in anyway to try and cow the bad guy with his big words and… fails. Conrad isn’t listening to him, and so he taunts him with his future death and leaves. And yeah, we’ve seen the Doctor being vindictive many times over the years, but this felt more like Time Lord Kindergarten Argument than Time Lord Victorious.
(Also this is probably an old guy sort of complaint, but I feel like RTD and his writer’s room are a lot more cynical about humanity these days. In RTD1 there used to be a lot of “humanity sucks but still you reach the stars and survive and mingle and you’re fantastic”, but these days it seems to be just “humanity sucks except a select few, and I’m telling you why in detail”.)
It’s definitely deeply, deeply weird that there’s not one sign of the UNIT lobby (and those who’ve seen their lives saved by the agency first hand) responding to think tank efforts to blacken the agency’s name – I can imagine the ignoble Opposition shouting loudest, but I can’t imagine UNIT’s defenders (Even those outside the Agency) being completely silent as Conrad tries to gaslight the whole darned planet into believing that aliens do not exist.
It makes sense that the episode emphasises the Negative to build up the threat posed by it’s villain, but failing to include any kind of public backlash against his contentions seems like poor world-building, on top of being poisonously cynical.
I tend to agree with those who call this episode a good idea BUT … (Although in all honesty I thought it held together decently well as the study of a poisonous personality, producing one of – if not THE – most viscerally loathsome villains in the show’s history right up until Mrs Pool reduced The Doctor’s most excellent takedown of Conrad from a strong finish to a laughing stock*).
I do feel that those wonder how Ruby could be taken in are perhaps ignoring the fact that Miss Sunday is barely out of her teens: she’s undoubtedly been through a lot, but while no longer a child she’s still quite painfully young (Not given her very vulnerable emotional state).
*If you want to convince us that a villain is condemned to die in obscurity, at least postpone his ‘Get out of Jail Free’ moment until another episode: as executed, this twist just makes The Doctor look cluelessly naive, without offering any sense that this is another, more powerful villain working to remake history to her own ends, as opposed to history taking it’s natural course.
I would argue that this episode is a bad idea performed even worse.
There are 2 things that made me stare at the screen asking myself “They really thought that it was a good idea to put this on screen?”
The first one is the idea that people that takes part in protest are simply stupid: a blog tells a lie about an auto evident truth and people gets to the street shouting and holding cards. That’s not how it works, but the author wanted to made a point about Brexit, anti vaxxxers movements and so forth that he relied on common places and banalities such as “anti establishment protests are made by stupid people steered by people that failed to get into the establishment” (if any, pro brexit politicians are the perfect example of members of the british establishment).
The second atrocious idea: is it a good idea to show the Doctor telling a political prisoner (yep, that’s what it is, even if he is quite the a*****e) that he is goint to die in jail? Does the authot even thought that it heavily sounded like a summary execution?
Nice review. I had many of the same criticisms as you — seems like he’d spent YEARS building up podcast about how he believes in the Doctor… so presumably those listeners would be his thousands of followers? And yet… wouldn’t they view his sudden turn to “It was a sham all along!” as a betrayal? If that’s the case, then where did all of his Think Tank followers come from? I guess he’d amassed a huge following via the dark web? Or maybe he’d been anonymously in charge of Think Tank and building a following that way, and this was just him publicly associating himself with that previously underground movement… but you’re right, it’s messy, and I’d have to do more work to make it make sense than the episode is willing to.
Also, by all appearances, Conrad slept with Ruby under false pretenses (this is an assumption, but they were at the stage where they were taking romantic weekend trips together, so…), so am I off base to say that some form of sexual assault can be added to his list of charges? Maybe he doesn’t fit the legal definition of sexual assault, but if I were Ruby, I’d DEFINITELY be feeling physical violation in addition to emotional violation. I understand why the episode doesn’t want to touch that with a ten-foot pole, but that’s a hole other minefield that the content of the episode messily falls into.
–Andy
I’m more inclined to believe that the weekend in question was to be the point where Ruby took their relationship from romantic to outright sexual – partly for my own peace of mind, it must be said – and that Conrad’s little scheme rather killed his chances of polishing off this particular Ruby stone dead.
…
I’m fairly confident that if Conrad had practiced rape by deception Kate Lethbridge-Stuart wouldn’t have needed an alien beastie, she and Ruby’s other mums would have torn him limb from limb with their own fair hands.
I’m inclined to agree with this; I took Conrad’s comment during his big reveal about putting up with Ruby’s “lip gloss” to indicate that their relationship was at the kissing stage, but had not gotten any further.
Well, it is a family show, so even if they’d had sex, the dialogue would avoid saying as much. So that isn’t really definitive.