TV Review: ‘Doctor Who’ Episode “Wish World” Presents Us With a Horrifying Heteronormative Dystopia

The right wing has made it very clear that their ultimate goal is to return us to a version of the 1950s that never really existed, where gender roles are never challenged and LGBTQ+ people don’t exist, a world where men go to work and women stay home with babies and nobody ever questions the way of things. This week’s Doctor Who gives us a terrifying glimpse into a world just like that, a version of 2025 wished into being by an incel. It’s a terrifying dystopian nightmare, but it’s clearly the kind that conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic are trying to build, and the episode reminds us how important it is to resist such a world from ever being built.

But that’s as much as I’m willing to tell you before I give you my spoiler warning for this week, so don’t read on if you don’t want to be spoiled for “Wish World.”

The episode starts with one of the newly bi-generated Ranis (Archie Panjabi) traveling back to 1865 Bavaria to steal away a baby who was born as the seventh son of a seventh son and a seventh son, making him part of the pantheon of gods and giving him the ability to grant wishes. She brings the baby forward to 2025 where Conrad (Jonah Hauer-King), who we met in the previous episode “Lucky Day”, uses it to wish into being a new world.

The Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) wakes up as a man named John Smith, living in domestic bliss with his companion Belinda (Varada Sethu) as a married couple with a baby named Poppy (Sienna-Robyn Mavanga-Phipps) who was previously seen in the episode “Space Babies.” John Smith works at an insurance company while his wife stays home with the baby, but every now and then they have doubts about the world they’re living in, which cause the fabric of reality to tear and causes things like coffee mugs to fall through tables. If people express enough doubts, then they are reported to the police who take them away.

But there are people who can have more doubts than most. Former U.N.I.T. scientific advisor Shirley (Ruth Madeley), who is disabled, has been reduced to begging for spare change like most disabled people in Wish World. But disabled people can see that something is wrong with the world because Wish World doesn’t really have a place for them in society, so they sit on the edges and can see everything that’s wrong with it. Somehow, the Doctor’s former companion Ruby (Millie Gibson) can also see the flaws in reality as well as the disabled people and teams up with them to begin the takedown of Wish World.

One night, the Doctor receives a message on his television from Rogue (Jonathan Groff), The Doctor’s love interest from the episode “Rogue,” telling him that “tables don’t do that,” leading the Doctor to start seeing there’s something seriously wrong with the world. He and Belinda are taken away to the Ranis’ (Panjabi and Anita Dobson) headquarters where it’s revealed that the Doctor’s doubt was the whole reason for the creation of the Wish World. The more the Doctor doubts, the more the fabric of reality tears, giving the Ranis the chance to bring back a classic series villain who has been lost for a very long time called Omega. The Ranis toss the Doctor from a tall height to die, but as the Doctor plunges to his death, he reveals that Poppy is a real baby, and that’s going to be important to what is to come next.

When the Rani started talking about bringing back “The One Who Was Lost,” I felt like it was likely going to be Omega. Bringing back The Master would be too easy and obvious after a surprise reveal like the Rani, and I knew it had to be someone a little more obscure. I narrowed it down to the Meddling Monk, the Valeyard, or Omega. The Meddling Monk was, potentially, too obscure and lacked the grandeur of Omega. The Valeyard’s storyline in the 1980s was so convoluted that the head writer back then sent out a memo telling writers not to address him. So that left Omega as the obvious choice. I almost wished they had gone for the Valeyard because it would have been more surprising and ambitious.

Omega is one of the founders of Time Lord society who helped create the Time Lords’ ability to travel through time. However, his experiment that created time travel sent him into an antimatter dimension where he lived for centuries, harboring resentment towards the Time Lords for abandoning him to his fate. His first appearance came in the show’s 10th anniversary special in 1973 when the Time Lords brought together the first three Doctors (William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, and John Pertwee) to battle Omega (Stephen Thorne). But it turned out that Omega’s time in the antimatter dimension had left him with no physical form and he was only consciousness.

The three Doctors banish Omega back to his antimatter universe, as does the 5th Doctor (Peter Davison) when Omega (Ian Collier) tries to make a comeback in the 1983 episode “Arc of Infinity.” How they did so is overly complicated, as the classic series frequently was, but what you need to know is that he’s still stuck in the antimatter universe with no body, just pure consciousness. So if the Ranis are bringing Omega back from his imprisonment, he’ll definitely need a body, and my guess is they’re going to try to give him Conrad’s.

The episode does a great job of making us really hate Conrad and the Ranis and the whole world they created. The socio-political commentary that runs through this episode is likely to further infuriate those who complain that the show is getting too woke, but that’s exactly the point. Doctor Who isn’t for those people anyway and it never has been. The episode sets up a situation where we really can’t wait to see Conrad and the Ranis get their comeupance as they created the perfect heteronormative hellscape, and next week’s episode promises to be a satisfying conclusion to this intricate web that Russell T. Davies has created. While I wish that he had brought back someone a little less obvious than Omega, the rest of the episode is such a perfect commentary that I can forgive the slightly obvious twist at the end of the episode.

Rating: 91/100

Doctor Who is now streaming on Disney Plus.

Featured photo courtesy of James Pardon/BBC Studios/Disney/Bad Wolf