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BBC Wild Blue Yonder |
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| Story No. | 333 | 
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| Production Code | Series 14 special | |
| Dates | December 2, 2023 |
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With David Tennant, Catherine Tate, Bernard Cribbins
Written by Russell T Davies Directed by Tom Kingsley Executive Producers: Russell T Davies, Julie Garner, Jane Tranter, Joel Collins, Phil Collinson |
| Synopsis: The Doctor and Donna explore a deserted ship on the edge of the galaxy. |
Everything you know is (a little bit) wrong by Stacey Smith? 18/9/25
Donna Noble sang the titular Wild Blue Yonder song in school... only it's not called that. The song is actually called "The U.S. Air Force", although it was originally titled "Army Air Corps" before World War II, and it's the official song of the United States Air Force. Her teacher, Mrs. Bean, thought it was jolly, even though her grandfather said it was a war song, but how Mrs. Bean could deny that when the title clearly ---
I'm sorry, what? Donna Noble, born in Southampton, grew up in Chiswick, sang a U.S. Air Force song in her British school? Why on earth would she do that? Why wouldn't she be singing "Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines" or something? This is the sort of thing that sounds perfectly reasonable at first, but it's just downright bizarre the more you think about it.
That pretty much describes Wild Blue Yonder to a T.
The trailer for the three specials barely showed anything from the middle episode. Partly that's because it's hard to do without giving the game away, and partly that was because we now know that the production team wanted one of the episodes to be pure surprise, but it also had the effect of setting up Wild Blue Yonder as a curiosity. What on Earth was happening here that they couldn't even edit more than a few scenes into the trailer?
The wrongness starts with Isaac Newton, and it's not just the colour-blind casting. Back in Classic Who, plenty of white actors wore blackface or yellowface, because that was the style of the times. The style of today is exactly what we get with Nathaniel Curtis playing Newton, so I have no problem redressing the balance here. No, the first thing that's weird about this scene is its very existence: what it is even doing in this episode? The light-hearted tone and breezy feel are completely at odds with the bulk of the story on the spaceship. It's apparently just a random comedy add-on with no connection to anything else.
The second thing about this scene that's weird is the "mavity" joke. Not because it's a strong joke (it's not), but because it's played for real throughout. The Doctor and Donna are gone before Newton even says the word "mavity", yet they use it multiple times throughout. The Doctor only uses the word "gravity" once in the future, and Donna doesn't understand what he means, so he corrects himself and says "mavity" instead. The only thing we can surmise is that they changed the timeline by crash-landing in that tree, and Donna has now never heard of the word "gravity". Which is fine, I guess, but... why? And yet, for all that, "mavity" has a staying power and became a meme generator, so even the wrongness here is somehow right.
There's a theory that the second story of every new Doctor could be a Hartnell story. After a whizz-bang introduction, the second stories tend to be quieter and more thoughtful, showing the investigative nature of the new Doctor in a place of wonder. That pretty much holds up here. Yes, the special effects are... let's say "bigger" than anything the Hartnell era could have conceptualised, but the fundamental story involves the TARDIS crew exploring what appears to be a deserted structure and finding monsters that look like them and have their memories, using heightened emotions to gain strength, so they rile up the character attacks. This could have been written by David Whitaker as a way to get to know the TARDIS team.
However, the wrongness comes from so many different angles. The HADS is a continuity reference from wayback, except that a) it works quite differently here and b) the TARDIS re-appears just as the ship is exploding, which is kind of the opposite of avoiding hostile action. The Doctor knows 57 billion languages... but why would he, when he has a universal translator accompanying him at all times? The Doctor is suddenly bi, for the first time ever, and says the word "bum" in precisely the way he never did. The technobabble about the universe actually having an edge is so clearly fan service to explain a scientific error in Planet of Evil... and then they go ahead an contradict it a few seconds later when the Doctor says he's never been this far out. None of these are necessarily strange on their own, but the sheer mass of them in this single episode adds up.
Jimbo the robot is a marvellous addition, moving slowly to the countdown because it's just a very old robot. I love the aged futurism here, contrasting with the gleaming spaceship and the futuristic hovercar. Only, in retrospect, why is the first step we see taken out of synch with the countdown? Fenslaw happened quite a while before we see Jimbo's first step, whereas all the others are synched to the the announcements. It's all just slightly wrong.
The fact that the spaceship countdown works in Base 10 is itself pretty strange. Base 10 is natural for us because we have ten fingers, but not even every human culture uses it. The Mayans used Base 20, the Egyptians Base 12, and the Babylonians used Base 60. So why would a race of bipedal horses in the far future be using Base 10 for their countdown? And would the Doctor --- the man of science and learning and super-fast thinking --- really read numbers on a screen that he then couldn't recognise when said out loud? I can't stand the confusion in my mind!
Then there's the duplicates, of course. They look wrong, and they act wrong. They're described as "not-things", and their very raison d'etre is to be creepy and slightly off versions of something familiar and comforting. This happens both diegetically and non-diegetically. Because they adapt only when emotions are heightened, they need to frighten and push the Doctor and Donna into charged situations, mentioning hot-button topics like Gallifrey, Wilf and the Flux.
This works brilliantly when each pair is trying to figure out who's real. What's especially clever is that Donna succeeds where the Doctor fails. He tries to use logic but is taken in by the deep emotions of not-Donna's insight into his recent past, only escaping by chance because she couldn't hold her form. Conversely, Donna fools the not-Doctor by running off her mouth about her Aunt Iris and then deducing his nature from the missing tie. It's a masterclass in character, because Donna gets emotionally charged about even minor things, so she uses that as a distraction, because the not-things can't tell the difference. Conversely, the Doctor is much more an intellectual, burying his deeper emotions, which means he's more susceptible to having his demons released, culminating in the scene where he punches the wall because they've played him so well.
A key moment in the 14th Doctor's arc occurs when he stares at the not-Doctor and knows for a fact that it doesn't understand why the captain threw herself outside... because he knows his own face. If this were an original regeneration, that wouldn't have worked at all, but this scene is built on the fact that the 14th Doctor is reusing his tenth face. This is another example of things seeming reasonable but actually being quite, quite unexpected, because the Doctor has never had this kind of confidence in himself in the second adventure of a new regeneration. (Think The Beast Below, when Amy knows him better than he does, because she's spent a decade thinking deeply about who he fundamentally is, while he's only known his eleventh self for a few hours.)
The climax sees the Doctor inadvertently taking the not-Donna with him in the TARDIS, because she gives a funnier answer to his question about Mrs. Bean. ("It just is!") This is the sort of Donna line that would have a live audience cheering in response. However, both answers are perfectly Donna, indicating that the copy has almost precisely perfected her. The Doctor realises his mistake by noticing that her arms are 0.06 millimetres too long, but this kind of technobabble explanation is much weaker than one arising out of character would have been. There's some precedent for this: the Doctor only recognised the fake Martha in The Poison Sky because of a technobabble explanation, rather than because he intrinsically knew her, but it still feels wrong here, because the contract with the viewer is that the Doctor and Donna are intimately connected and hence should fundamentally know each other.
Leaving the true Donna behind to face the exploding ship almost makes it look like the show was going to kill off the real Donna and let the fake one travel with the Doctor. That would have been a bold move, dramatically superior to the twee ending we got... but Doctor Who isn't the kind of show to kill off a beloved character. There would have been riots on the street had they killed off the beloved Donna, especially after rehabilitating her Series 4 ending in The Star Beast. But how much more brilliant would The Giggle have been if the Doctor had been travelling with the not-Donna? And there could have been a get-out-of-jail-free ending here too, if the real Donna had turned in surprise at the last moment --- only for The Giggle to reveal that she was being rescued by the Ncuti Gatwa Doctor. Ah well, sadly they don't let me write for the show...
In the final TARDIS scene, Donna tells the Doctor that only the not-Donna could see into his past, but it's pretty clear from her body language that she's lying. Likewise, the Doctor shuts down and avoids talking about his trauma with her, saying that it will take a million years for him to be okay. Donna had earlier pointed out that even after all this time, they didn't stop to just talk, only that was to the not-Doctor. Once again, they're supposed to be reunited because of their close connection, only they talk past each other and withhold stuff from the other, unable to face up to the emotions that the not-things generated. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
In the coda, we inadvertently end up with Wilf's final scene, which feels completely out of place for this episode, let alone that this was his last-ever appearance. Wilf so clearly should have been in The Giggle but sadly died before he could film those scenes. And yet, his appearance at the end here is as bizarre as the Isaac Newton scene at the beginning. Both sit very oddly against the claustrophobic and tense action on board the spaceship, feeling as though they belong to entirely different episodes.
To a casual observer, Wild Blue Yonder looks like Midnight with a larger budget and smaller cast. But dig deeper, and it's so much more than that, set at a strange angle to reality even before the weird clones show up. It draws on sci-fi movies like 2001 and Us to create tension, while being a character study of two beloved leads that nevertheless manages to keep everything off kilter. It looks like a typical Doctor Who story, but it's most certainly not, largely because everything is ever-so-slightly wrong. In the end, all we can really do is appreciate the mavity of the situation...