Spoilers for Doctor Who: “Interstellar Song Contest”
Welcome back to our regular look at the new season of Doctor Who, which tackles a space version of the Eurovision Song Contest this week. Discussion will involve heavy spoilers for the episode.
Normally, this is where I throw out a bit of random Doctor Who trivia to reward people who clicked on the link but didn’t want to read spoilers yet. However, this week I am going to use this space to say that Luxembourg was absolutely robbed at Eurovision 2025. Yes, J.J. from Austria absolutely should have won because “Wasted Love” was one of the best musical performances in the show’s history, but Laura Thorn turned in a masterful pop piece that was this year’s equivalent of “Cha Cha Cha.” Some people just don’t know a good thing when it’s dancing in front of them, I guess.
Back to the Tardis shenanigans.
First off, this review has zero discussion about the two big reveals. They’re momentous swerves that are throwing everything about the season and the entire Disney Who era out of whack, but they’re also not going to start impacting the show until next week. Whatever I write is going to be fan wiki recap and pure speculation, and I was already very wrong on one of those points, so let’s all just be patient.
Especially because the episode itself was very interesting even without the plot twists. The Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and Belinda (Varada Sethu) land on the space station Harmony Arena, which is hosting the Interstellar Song Contest, and then get involved in a terrorist attack plotted by a survivor from the world the corporate sponsor destroyed to make their fortune.
It’s too easy to superimpose your own politics onto Juno Dawson’s script. The fate of the terrorists’ planet Hellia is a perfect copy of the actions of the Dutch East India Company in the Spice Islands in the 17th Century. The company took control of some mace fields and torched the rest to create an artificial monopoly, which also happens on Hellia. The only difference is that in this case the Hellion Kid (Freddie Fox) has the opportunity to retaliate against the universe enjoying the company’s treats by murdering trillions of people.
Aside from the clear historical allegory, the episode is something of a Rorschach test. You could see the applause for the formelryl closeted Hellion singer (Miriam-Teak Lee) at the end as a microcosm of the controversy around Israel’s continued inclusion in Eurovision and the protests and threats singers from that country continue to suffer even as Israel took second place this weekend at the contest.
I think trying to fit something as current, bloody, and complex as what’s happening in Israel and Gaza into a show like Doctor Who is a mistake fans shouldn’t make. Expecting the first first openly trans television writer for the show AND the first Black Doctor AND the first Indian companion to carry the emotional weight of justifying any of our points of view is pop culture simony. Just because we see patterns doesn’t mean that it’s a code.
Dawson is a brilliant enough writer to sidestep trying to live up to impossible expectations. Instead, her script focuses on the personal as much as possible. For instance, she crafts a fantastic supporting cast to keep the plot rolling, including a nurse that actually does nurse things accurately when lives are on the line. That alone made me cry after spending years watching shows ignore what nursing looks like in favor of propping up doctors as stars.
Back to the bigger picture. Well-versed in the Thirteenth Doctor era as Dawson is (she wrote the excellent novel The Good Doctor), she seems to have used this opportunity to right the wrongs of “Kerblam!” In that episode, The Doctor ends up a milquetoast centrist who defends Space Amazon from a disgruntled worker that plots to kill people using corporate structure to highlight inequality. Sound familiar?
“Kerblam!” made no one happy politically despite being a pretty fun story otherwise. Here, the mistake of passivity is avoided handlily by showing what the threat of mass violence did to The Doctor. Earlier in the episode, a hundred thousand people are sucked out into space in one of the grimmest scenes the show has ever done. We don’t know they’re alive, and the moment hits like a freight train.
The Doctor responds to this by outright torturing Kid. The memories of his own people’s demise and the deaths of countless other worlds robs him of all reason and goodness. He turns, just for a moment, into something darker and terrifying, the shadow of The War Doctor and The Valeyard and the Oncoming Storm writ large in his face. No tears. Not this time. As he he says, there’s ice in his hearts.
He stops because of course he does, but the shadow remains. There is the lesson Doctor Who has to teach us. Not whether Kid was right or wrong to answer genocide and galactic marginalization with mass murder, but simply that violence creates more violence. Even when it does beget a better world, the cost in blood is high and innocents suffer.If there are revolutionaries who were not monsters at some point in history, I am unfamiliar with it.
This lesson is unsatisfying. Only a naive fan would believe that the song at the end stops the destruction of Hellia, the profiteering of the corporation, or the hatred of the Hellions. Like “Kerblam!” things are left only slightly different than where they started.
But that’s life, y’all. The Doctor has told us for over 60 years that history hinges on little human points that slowly create ripples of change. Some of it is good; a lot of it is bad. The Doctor keeps on checking on us because he likes us, not because we’re right. In fact, he’s pretty clear that we’re not most of the time.
Sometimes saving the day is just that: the day. Get enough days together, enough grateful people with changed perspectives, and maybe we’ll see some progress. Doctor Who didn’t have all the answers for Middle East war this week any more than it had the answers for rampant disinformation two weeks ago. All we get is the reminder that when things go down, we help where we can and try to hold onto what’s right.
Doctor Who airs Saturdays on Disney+.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2025.
