Review: Doctor Who, “The Reality War” | Season 2, Episode 8
Doctor Who ends an era with an overstuffed episode—and a couple surprise appearances
The secret sauce in the Doctor Who recipe is time. To prep for this finale, I rewatched “Space Babies”—an episode I all but hated the first time I watched it—and found myself weirdly nostalgic for and charmed by the early dynamic between Ruby and The Doctor. This episode, meanwhile, had me tearing up at a mention of Yaz and the Thirteenth Doctor, which is just about the last thing I ever expected to be saying about Ncuti Gatwa’s regeneration episode.
When you’re in the middle of an era or a big moment for Doctor Who, there’s so much pressure on the show to live up to its legacy that watching it get things wrong can be really frustrating. With time, however, I almost always find myself softening on the show’s past once a new era is in place. (Give or take a “The Time of the Doctor.”) So I’m trying to look at “The Reality War” from two points of view: How I feel about it now (baffled, overwhelmed, frustrated, unexpectedly emotional) and how I think I’m going to feel about it in the future when I reflect back on Gatwa’s run as the Doctor.
Obviously, the biggest problem is that there wasn’t enough time—within this individual episode, over the course of these shortened seasons, and for the Fifteenth Doctor’s tenure as a whole. Gatwa has appeared in just 19 episodes of Doctor Who, four of which used him as more of a supporting player. True, that’s more than Paul McGann’s one TV movie and a few more than Christopher Eccleston’s 13-episode run. But cramming two companions and two Christmas specials into the mix somehow made things feel overstuffed and unfinished in a way they didn’t when the Ninth Doctor regenerated after the end of a single, cohesive season.
And maybe there’s a reason for that dissonance. Though Doctor Who Unleashed is acting like this episode was always designed as the Fifteenth Doctor’s send-off, the Who rumor mill seems to suggest that Gatwa only decided to leave after Disney hemmed and hawed about whether or not to renew the series (we still don’t know where or when Who will return next) and that all the regeneration stuff was filmed just this February after the original episode was shot back in spring 2024.
