TV Review: ‘Doctor Who’ Episode “Boom” is a Triumphant Return for Unfairly Maligned Writer Steven Moffat
Rating: 98/100
Doctor Who is, in some ways, a writers’ show, in that each episode is written by a specific writer rather than a writer’s room and that writer’s name is featured prominently in the opening credits. Because of that, individual writers on the show have their own fanbases. Writer Steven Moffat is one of the most controversial of those writers, and I don’t entirely understand why. During the original Russell T. Davies era, from 2005-2009, Moffat wrote four episodes, two of which were two-parters, and each of which was either nominated for or won a Hugo Award, one of the most prestigious awards for science fiction. His third episode of the Davies era, “Blink,” is considered by many to be the best episode of Doctor Who ever made, topping countless lists.
After Moffat’s achievements during the Davies era, he was the natural choice to take over the show following Davies’ departure from the show. That’s where people started to turn on him, with many people complaining he wasn’t as good of a showrunner as he was a writer of individual episodes. But while this is a common refrain amongst fans, they can’t really back up that claim very well. Many of the creatures and characters that Moffat created remain extremely popular, including both the 11th and 12th Doctors, River Song, the Weeping Angels, the Ponds, and Bill Potts. Yet, somehow, Moffat himself gets maligned by fans pretty frequently.
Despite my love of Moffat, I don’t mean to say that he doesn’t have his flaws. Sure, he’s written an episode or two here or there that didn’t quite work (his final episode as showrunner, “Twice Upon a Time,” comes to mind). And he loves to make boomer-esque battle-of-the-sexes jokes where men make disparaging comments about women and vice versa, which is cringey as hell. But I reject a lot of the other criticisms about him, most notably the popular claim that Moffat can’t write women. I love Moffat’s female characters so much, I literally named myself after one of them. I far prefer the women Moffat created to the ones Davies created, who I feel are largely based on bad stereotypes.
Cut to modern day, as Davies has taken over the show again, and Moffat has returned to write his first new episode in seven years, called “Boom.” I love Moffat episodes, but I also really love when television shows or movies do an entire story that’s confined to a single location. Moffat experimented with that in his acclaimed Season 9 episode “Heaven Sent” when the 12th Doctor spent the entire episode alone in some bizarre torture chamber. “Boom” is another experiment with confined spaces, putting the Doctor in a situation where he can barely move a muscle for the entire episode.
In “Boom,” the 15th Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and his companion, Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson), land on the war-torn planet Kastarion 3. Upon hearing someone in distress, the Doctor races to save them, only to accidentally step on a landmine. The Doctor freezes in his tracks, knowing that even moving a muscle or increasing his adrenaline will set off the landmine. The problem is, this particular type of landmine uses the victim’s own body chemistry to create the explosion, and the Doctor, being a different species than the manufacturers of the landmine had in mind when they made it, has a specific body chemistry that would create an explosion large enough to destroy most of the life on the planet. As the Doctor tries to work out a way to save the planet without moving, he comes into contact with the soldiers in this war and slowly starts to unravel the secret to this war that even those fighting it aren’t aware of.
The episode sees the return of one of Moffat’s favorite creations of his, the Anglican Marines, a religious military force from the future. The Doctor has made several comments in dialogue over the years about how having a religious military might seem strange, but if you look at the history of the church, it’s actually been quite common in the past. Moffat’s episodes frequently show a lot of disdain for both religion and the military, and the Anglican Marines allow him the opportunity to take shots at both of them simultaneously.
However, this episode sees Moffat taking aim at another hallowed and corrupt institution as well: capitalism. I don’t know if there’s really any episode Moffat’s written before that is as anti-capitalist as “Boom,” but the episode “Oxygen”—which was made during the Moffat era but wasn’t written by Moffat himself—is arguably just as anti-capitalist, if not moreso. And Doctor Who, as a whole, is vaguely anti-capitalist anyway, as the Doctor doesn’t have much of an understanding of or respect for money or capitalist institutions. But this episode is a little more blatant in its criticism of capitalism and the military industrial complex, so much so that I’m a little surprised that Disney even allowed it on their streaming platform.
In typical Moffat style, the episode is wildly imaginative. He creates, not only a war zone, but a war zone unlike any we’ve seen on Earth, where ambulances are dangerous and priests fight creatures that may or may not live in the fog and the mud. It’s very outside-of-the-box thinking, which is what I’ve come to expect from The Moff’s fevered mind. It’s truly a feeling of jealousy as a writer to know that I could probably never dream up half of the things that Moffat did in “Boom.”
This story that confines the Doctor to one location for the entire episode creates a unique acting challenge for the fairly new star of the series, Ncuti Gatwa, and it proves to be a challenge that he absolutely rises to. His performance really sells the tension of the episode and keeps the audience’s attention without flying off to different locations throughout the story. It’s a dialogue-driven episode, and Gatwa delivers the dialogue perfectly. While I love Millie Gibson so far as Ruby Sunday, there’s not as much to say about her performance in this episode. She gives a good performance, sure, but the episode doesn’t give her as much of a challenge as it gives Gatwa.
One thing I’ve always found peculiar about Doctor Who is that, while it’s ostensibly a children’s show (although that’s hotly debated by fans), it rarely featured actual children as characters in any episodes before Moffat came along. It’s one of the hallmarks of Moffat’s writing that his stories are often seen through the eyes of a child, and in this case that child is Splice (Caoilinn Springall), a young girl who was brought into the warzone by her soldier father, John Francis Vater (Joe Anderson). John dies in the opening moments of the episode (but still appears throughout the episode), and Splice wanders into the Doctor’s path when trying to find her father. There’s a softness and heart that gets added to the episode by the use of a father and daughter in the plot, and a lot of the emotion of the story hinges on the loving relationship between John and Splice and the excellent performances of the actors who play them.
Following the light, silliness of the season opener “Space Babies,” having a dark, gripping episode like this really gives the new season some balance. Perhaps that’s why so many fans prefer Moffat as a writer of individual episodes under Davies as the showrunner: because Moffat and Davies have such opposite tones to their writing that they balance each other out. But personally, I like Doctor Who when it reaches its darkest depths, especially when it has some dark humor to go along with it. Perhaps that’s why I would enjoy watching Moffat write every Doctor Who episode for the rest of eternity if that were possible, but I realize I’m in the minority in that opinion. Moffat has recently revealed that he wrote this year’s upcoming Christmas special, which will mark the first time the showrunner has not written the show’s festive special, but he’s unfortunately also indicated that the special might be his final episode for the entire show. That’s a shame, as Davies seems to be writing most of the other episodes himself, and I really want a better variety of writers. One can only hope that another writer comes along that is of the same caliber, because this show needs more episodes like “Boom.”
The new season of Doctor Who is streaming now on Disney+.
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