Doctor Who: Wish World

At its most potent, Doctor Who weaponises the uncanny. The greatest episodes have often been those where the rules of reality itself begin to warp, where the world turns subtly wrong and no one but the companion notices. Wish World leans squarely into that tradition, attempting a heady cocktail of dystopian allegory, psychological horror, and cultural satire. It is bold. It is brimming with ideas. And yet, for all its ambition, it’s also deeply unsatisfying.

Russell T Davies’ script posits a manufactured utopia built in the image of one man’s ideal society, Conrad Clark (Jonah Hauer-King), a cipher for a quietly regressive worldview in which women are domesticated, the queer are erased, and the disabled rendered invisible. This is tradwife totalitarianism with a smile: a brittle 1950s aesthetic so aggressively curated it might have been designed by a Pinterest algorithm. It’s Stepford with a sonic screwdriver.

And yet, the critique, while present, is oddly muted. These rich ideas deserve full-throated exploration, but Davies deploys them in shorthand. There are gestures toward fascism disguised as nostalgia, but no deeper dive into how such ideologies root themselves or persist. In a lesser show, you’d shrug and move on. But Doctor Who once made fascism resonate in a pepperpot. It’s not unreasonable to expect more.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle Wish World faces is structural. It’s not an episode so much as it is scaffolding, a prelude to the impending finale, The Reality War. As such, its function is less to resolve than to destabilise. It operates in the key of deferral: questions raised but not answered, ideas introduced but not explored. There’s a ship made of bones. There are roaming dinosaur skeletons. There’s a literal God of Wishes. Any one of these could anchor a story. Here, they’re ambient noise, window dressing for a plot more concerned with theme than narrative.

This is not to say there aren’t moments of brilliance. Ncuti Gatwa, as ever, is magnetic. His take on the amnesiac John Smith walks a fine line between comfort and uncanny, so convincingly domesticated you forget you’re watching the Doctor until you catch the flicker of suspicion in his eyes. When he sees Rogue (Jonathan Groff) on a television screen, a moment of pure rupture, the performance momentarily grounds the story in something raw, recognisable, and tragic. It’s just a shame the rest of the episode doesn’t rise to meet it.

Elsewhere, Ruth Madeley’s Shirley Anne-Bingham is a revelation. In a world gone anaemic, she provides the steel. Her defiance is quiet but absolute, a reflection of the dystopian world that ignores the disabled under Conrad’s ideology. Bonnie Langford’s Mel Bush makes a return, but is largely wasted, while Susan Foreman (Carole Ann Ford) remains an enigma wrapped in a cameo. The episode also teases the return of Omega, but like so many of its narrative threads, it feels like set-up rather than payoff.

Alex Sanjiv Pillai’s direction is visually assured, if occasionally overreaching. The choice to echo WandaVision in both staging and tone is clever, a nod to the seductive dangers of unreality, but the episode lacks WandaVision’s emotional coherence. Instead, we’re left with a tonal mishmash: part Black Mirror, part Russell T Davies maximalism, part postmodern pantomime. It’s exhilarating in the moment and frustrating in retrospect.

And that’s the crux of it. Wish World is not a bad episode, but it is a maddening one. Its ambition is undeniable. Its aesthetic is immaculate. Its themes are urgent. But its execution? Scattershot. What we get is spectacle without consequence, ideas without interrogation. It gestures toward critique but rarely commits. And by the inevitable hitting of the reset button at the next episode’s end, as it almost certainly will, it undercuts its stakes. If reality can be rewritten so casually, why care when it’s rewritten again?

Still, there’s a case to be made: Wish World isn’t meant to satisfy, its disjointedness is intentional, and the doubtful discomfort is deliberate. In that reading, the episode functions as a dream you can’t quite place: familiar, yet off; full of meaning, yet impossible to parse. Whilst this reading would give understanding to Davies’ decision-making, it does, however, feel wasted alongside a series reduced to only eight episodes.

Wish World tries. Earnestly. Desperately. But trying is not the same as succeeding. And in the absence of narrative closure, all we’re left with is that central, unshakeable image: The Doctor falling into the collapse of reality itself. Ultimately, Wish World isn’t a disaster; it’s a detour. One rich in provocation, poor in payoff. It promises a reckoning with the very fabric of the show’s morality and mythology, but we’re caught in limbo for now. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe not. But for a story built on dreams and wishes, it’s remarkable how little of this one will linger.

Doctor Who: Wish World is available for UK audiences on BBC iPlayer. The final episode, The Reality War, will air simultaneously on BBC One, BBC iPlayer and Disney+ worldwide where available on Saturday 31 May at 19:00 BST.