TV Review: ‘Doctor Who’ Season Finale ‘The Reality War’ is Equal Parts Delightful and Infuriating

The trade-off with a show like Doctor Who is that, for all its ability to amaze, it has the equal ability to disappoint. While I appreciated the show’s expansion of their own mythology with the Timeless Child arc during the 13th Doctor era, a lot of people didn’t. I’ve always tried to brace myself for the fact that, someday, the show would do something that would disappoint me, be it a choice for lead actor or a plot device that I don’t approve of. In a lot of ways, the introduction of David Tennant as the 14th Doctor was a big disappointment, but his subsequent episodes weren’t that bad.

But in the finale of what can alternately be called Season 2, Series 15, or Season 41, Russell T. Davies’ big finale “The Reality War,” we finally got a shocking change that I really didn’t appreciate, but we also got some moments that were absolutely delightful. In fact, one could say that, out of the entire one hour and five minute runtime of the episode, the only really disappointing moment came in the last five seconds of the entire episode. But those five seconds packed a wallop.

But with this being the season finale, that’s all I’m willing to say without a spoiler warning, so don’t read beyond this point if you don’t want the episode spoiled for you.

Following last week, the Ranis (Archie Panjabi and Anita Dobson) had thrown the 15th Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) off of their evil lair along with the entire balcony, sending him hurtling towards the ground. At the last moment, Anita (Steph de Whalley) from the Christmas special “Joy to the World” shows up as an employee of the Time Hotel and opens a door in reality that the Doctor can escape through. Now that the reality of the Wish World has been revealed to the Doctor, he can start to free other people from the Wish as the members of UNIT reassemble to start fighting the Rani. In the midst of all the magic that has been created, the Doctor and Belinda’s (Varada Sethu) daughter Poppy (Sienna-Robyn Mavanga-Phipps) has become a real person, and it’s a race against the world to keep Poppy alive while trying to undo Conrad’s Wish.

The Doctor puts Poppy in something called a Zero Room, which is supposed to keep her alive if the Wish that created her becomes undone. Meanwhile, the Ranis have finally succeeded in bringing forth Omega from the underworld, but underestimated how his time in the underworld would affect him. Rather than being cursed to live without a body like before, he’s now turned into a massive, hideous monster that needs to feed and eats one of the Ranis with the other escaping with a Time Ring. The Doctor uses his vindicator to fight Omega back into the underworld. At the same time, Ruby (Millie Gibson) is sent to stop Conrad (Jonah Hauer-King) and undo the Wish. She does, and wishes Conrad to be happy, leading to him becoming a chef in a restaurant and everyone forgetting his previous endeavors.

With the Wish undone, the Doctor opens up the Zero Room to find Poppy still alive, but she soon disappears again. Luckily, Ruby can see changes in the timeline and informs the Doctor of Poppy’s existence. The Doctor says that, to bring Poppy back, he needs to shift reality about one degree. The only way to do that is to force himself to regenerate and force his regeneration energy into the Time Vortex. As he starts his regeneration, the 13th Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) shows up to comfort her future self as he makes the difficult decision. The plan works, and Poppy is brought back into existence, but now her father is an old boyfriend of Belinda rather than the Doctor. The Doctor, satisfied that he’s saved the timeline, regenerates … into Billie Piper, the actress who played the Doctor’s companion Rose in the early seasons of the reboot.

The Rani’s demise at the hand of Omega was far too easy of a solution to the episode, and the Doctor simply firing the vindicator at Omega to defeat him felt too much like the Doctor using a gun, which is a big no-no on Doctor Who. But then, the episode seemed to be disinterested in solving the cliffhangers from the previous episode, favoring the plotline around Poppy instead, which was a tad annoying. Melanie (Bonnie Langford) has a great speech where she sums up who the Rani is, and says that everything is just an experiment with her. In many ways, this two-part finale perfectly represents a classic Rani story and fully captures the essence of her character. It’s a shame that her part in the episode was shrugged off so easily.

The appearance of the 13th Doctor was, by far, my favorite moment of the episode and had me jumping to my feet with excitement in a way that I only do in extreme moments of excitement on Doctor Who. The 13th Doctor is highly underrated and often unfairly maligned by the fandom, and her surprise appearance in the episode seemed to be a message to toxic fans that the character is not being removed from canon anytime soon. She’s part of the show and she will always be, whether so-called “fans” like it or not. And her dialogue was absolutely lovely, making for a tender scene between the Doctors.

Strangely, the episode did not address the previous two episodes’ appearance of Susan (Carole Ann Ford), which seemed like it was building up something for the season finale. In fact, Susan was neither seen nor mentioned in any way in “The Reality War,” suggesting that she’s a setup for a future season, which could be a problem as the show’s immediate future remains uncertain. If the show temporarily ends at this episode, then it’s going to be hard to follow up on that thread in future as Ford is already in her 80s and is unlikely to survive long enough to make an appearance too much farther into the future. We can only hope now that the show isn’t cancelled so they can wrap up what they started to do with Susan.

Finally, we get to the Doctor’s shocking surprise regeneration, something that has never been done on the show before. The show always announces when the Doctor is about to regenerate and, while Davies wanted the 9th Doctor’s (Christopher Eccleston) regeneration into the 10th Doctor (David Tennant) to be a surprise, he couldn’t keep it under wraps and had to admit the regeneration was happening. This surprise regeneration was leaked in tabloids, but it seemed like such a far-fetched rumor that I couldn’t believe it to be true. The Doctor regenerates into Billie Piper? Why?

As a few fans have pointed out, the final credits list Jodie Whittaker and Ncuti Gatwa as the Doctor, but the credit for Piper just said, “And introducing Billie Piper.” That raises a lot of questions, but it seems difficult to explain how what we just saw could be anything other than the Doctor regenerating into Piper. But even Piper’s cryptic comments about her appearance seem to suggest that something else is going on, as she says, “It’s no secret how much I love this show, and I have always said I would love to return to the Whoniverse, as I have some of my best memories there, so to be given the opportunity to step back on that Tardis one more time was just something I couldn’t refuse, but who, how, why, and when, you’ll just have to wait and see.”

In general, if Piper is the Doctor, I fear for what that means. I am very much on record that I support a woman playing the Doctor, as I really enjoyed Whittaker’s era, but I don’t think that Piper has the chops to pull off such a role. She’s much better suited to playing the companion than she is to playing the Doctor. But furthermore, I dislike the gimmick of bringing her back for the same reason I didn’t like the gimmick of bringing back David Tennant: it overly romanticizes the David Tennant era and tries to make it out to be more important than other eras of the show. David Tennant was good, but his era wasn’t the end-all-be-all of the entire series.

So, while parts of the episode were fun, that ending raised a lot of annoying questions. And, if the show isn’t coming back for a while, then that leaves us on an absolutely bonkers cliffhanger. I suppose that means that Davies will retain control over the show, as anyone who takes over the show now needs to get Davies’ dear friend Billie Piper on board. But if there’s no Doctor Who for a while, I bid you adieu with the Doctor’s final words to his granddaughter Susan in 1964:

“One day I shall come back. Yes, I shall come back. Until then, there must be no regrets, no tears, no anxieties. Just go forward in all your beliefs and prove to me that I am not mistaken in mine.”

Rating: 83/100

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Featured photo courtesy of BBC Studios/Bad Wolf