03/12/2023
Thoughts on Doctor Who (2023): Wild Blue Yonder
Wow.
I know last time, I avoided talking spoilers as much as possible, but this time I'm just going to get right into it, since this episode was barely shown in trailers. Also I realized after posting about the last episode that I spent way too long with the preamble and didn't really analyze the episode itself. Don't read any further if you have not seen both The Star Beast and Wild Blue Yonder.
This episode was fantastic. I absolutely love when Doctor Who gets experimental and goes off the rails, and Wild Blue Yonder is a prime example of that. Obviously, it's drawn comparisons to the series 4 episode Midnight, which like this one was also written by showrunner Russel T. Davies. I think Midnight was overall a better episode, but this is still great, and the best episode of the show since around 2017.
Starting with the beginning, while I found the cold open entertaining, the episode might have flown better if they just skipped it and went straight to the intro. From there, I felt the episode had a great, deliberate pacing to introduce all the questions that would be resolved by the end before introducing the main threat.
As for the Villains this episode, the Not-Things, as the fandom seems to agree calling them, were probably the most similar element of this story to Midnight, but with a unique spin on the idea. Wheras in the other story, the Midnight Entity took control of other beings, the Not-Things instead copies appearances and thoughts, but with the odd quirk of not fully understanding real-world physics. This leads to many uncanny sequences where their bodies distort into different shapes, or grow too large to fit in the giant hallway at the centre of the spaceship the story takes place on. The effects during these sequences didn't exactly look the best, but considering it was most prominent for these sequences, I think it fits that it didn't look right.
There's a lot more I could get into with this episode, but to speed things up a bit, I'll move on to the epilogue. When the Doctor and Donna make it back to Earth, they finally encounter Wilf, and this scene was great. Sadly this was the only bit of footage that was shot with Bernard Cribbins before his death in 2022, but it was just great to see him as Wilf one last time.
Overall, this was a brilliant episode, and I hope that Russel T. Davies continues to deliver more out-there concepts going forward with his second run.
