Doctor Who – Season 15 Episode 6 'Interstellar Song Contest' Recap & Review
The Interstellar Song Contest
Episode 6 of Doctor Who season 15 begins with us over at the Harmony Arena in 2925. Rylan Clark is here, having been in cryogenic freezing for all this time and unfrozen for this contest.
Within the festivities, Ncuti Gatwa's Doctor and Belinda touch down with the Vindicator. However, Belinda is surprised when she notices Rylan up on stage announcing the Song Contest. This Interstellar Variety features a number of different songs from singers hailing across 40 different worlds. Hearing this, the pair decide to stick around.
There are over 3 trillion lifeforms that apparently watch this live, and Belinda is now one of them. She purrs how this used to be one of her favourite nights of the year and got to stay up late until the voting took place.
Mrs Flood is among those in the audience, and she's been keeping tabs on the Doctor's Vindicator status for a while. Now that it's complete, she holds a strange contraption that seems to be full of juice. Still, she's sticking around for the show just like everybody else.
The Doctor and Belinda's touchdown though is not good news for everyone. A couple of men whose booth has been hijacked are unable to get a seat in the audience now and end up arguing.
However, backstage things take a crazy turn. Robots activate Phase One while a Hellion called Kid shows up in the studio and blinks Rylan out of view on the TV monitors.
As Phase Two commences, the air shield above the arena collapses. The Doctor does what he can to try and stop it but 100,000 people are sucked out and fly through space, along with the Tardis and a number of other people, including Rylan.
Phase Three begins with Kid bringing a strange box called a Delta Wave into the studio. He shrugs off the concerns of the officials here, claiming he's just doing what's expected of him, pointing out the horns.
Hellions, as we later find out, hail from the planet Hellia, which is covered in Hell Poppies. However, the planet has been ruined thanks to Corporations that have shown up and destroyed everything. Public sentiment is that the Hellions did this to themselves, but of course that's far from the truth.
Signals on this station have been completely destroyed and are unable to be broadcast out (except in the main studio) and when Belinda finds out she does what she does best- she thinks of herself. She's not happy that she's got no way home and begins spiralling.
However, she befriends someone called Cora and learns from her that someone (whom we know is Kid) is overriding the software.
Out in space, the Doctor manages to stave off the effects of oxygen depravity and freezing cold after having a vision. He then uses a confetti cannon to blast himself back to the station, where he meets Gary and Mike.
Here, the Doctor explains that just before they were all sucked out into space, he managed to triplicate the mavity field so they're in navitic suspension. In other words, they're not dead but basically in a state of suspension, floating about until the Doctor can bring them back. I
For now, the Doctor intercepts the sound wave the Hellions are working on which includes a primitive delta wave pointed at the temporal lobe of the brain. With 3 trillion people watching, it'll kill every single person watching.
The Doctor manages to find Kid and speaks to him on the coms, threatening to kill him if he enacts his plan. The name Kid, as we later find out, is given to a child that hasn't been named on Hellion, and as we soon learn, Cora is actually one of those native to the planet too, having had her horns cut off by the very same Corporation that burnt the Poppy fields.
They're not allowed to sing on the planet, for reasons we're never really told, but it sets up the final act of the episode so there is that.
Kid is out for revenge against this to let the Corporation burn, so Belinda believes Cora could be the one to talk him down. However, the Delta Wave that Kid intends to throw out is through Cora's dress rehearsal performance, which has overwritten the current events happening on the station.
The Doctor shows up as a hologram and threatens Kid, with no kindness whatsoever, taunting and belittling him. The Doctor then destroys the Delta Wave and proceeds to do his best Emperor Palpatine impression and electrocute him constantly.
Belinda and Cora show up in the midst of The Doctor's torture and it works to snap the Doctor out of his mood. Belinda hugs the Doctor while Kid is taken out by the robots. The same robots that were apparently working for Kid earlier in the episode but have since been put back in place.
The Doctor then uses a makeshift tractor beam from the Station, bringing Rylan to life and then one by one bringing everybody else back too.
Cora eventually gets up and sings a song in Hellion on stage, in memory of her planet. Afterwards, the Doctor and Belinda leave with the newly found TARDIS.
After witnessing the Doctor torturing another lifeform, Belinda tells him that he's 'wonderful' although he did scare her. Despite saving worlds and millions countless times, this time it actually triggered the Doctor into memories of the Time Lords, hence why he snapped.
On the way off the planet, the Doctor and Belinda learn that the Earth is destroyed on May 24th, which we've known for a while. Anyway, the cause is unknown so with the Vindicator having finished calibrating, the Doctor heads inside the Tardis and jets off for May 24th.
When they leave, Mrs Flood winds up bi-generating and we see The Rani, who's back.
The Episode Review
So Doctor Who returns with an episode that remembers Peter Capaldi's last words: 'never be cruel, never be cowardly' and decides to do the complete opposite for ol' Ncuti's camp Doctor. Sure, we've seen the Doctor being dark before but we've never seen him outright torture a guy and look to be enjoying it.
The episode itself also throws in some metaphors around acceptance and respecting cultures, although Kid's plan is flawed from the off. He intends to use one of his own race to broadcast out a Deltawave to kill trillions, but in turn will just basically reinforce the Corporation's feelings against the race.
That's before the questionable way of how robots are used in this episode, along with nobody thinking to use the studio to broadcast out a distress signal. Surely there's some sort of failsafe here in case they're hijacked? Apparently not though.
Ultimately, Doctor Who is a shell of the show it once was and this episode pretty much exemplifies that in the way the Doctor now thinks. This Doctor is happy to let a maniacal God go and feast on Light across the entire universe but a man with a podcast deserves to be belittled and rot in Hell. Gio figure.
Still, we've got two part finale coming up now ready to end this one on a bang.
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