Doctor Who (2024) Space Babies: A Strange but Suitable Opener for The Series (Review)

For this series of Doctor Who, I’ve tried my best to go in as blind as I can. It’s a little hard to do, especially when I’ve been plugged into the Doctor Who Twitter for the last eight years, and I have seen some rumours of things that may happen, but this time I was able to not get as sucked in as I normally am. University means I have more priorities now, and I have less of an excuse to be bouncing off the walls with excitement in the days leading up to the start of the series. It still hadn’t hit me that a new series of Doctor Who was about to start with just half an hour to go (to be fair I had just seen The Room for the first time).

Whatever the reason for my somewhat tempered excitement, I’m going into Series 14 (I’m not calling it Season One and you can’t make me) with hopeful expectations and a clear conscience.

Besides, first episodes very rarely kick the door down with a spectacular opening to the series. They serve more as cosy re-introductions to the world of the Doctor and their companions, as more laidback and low-stakes stories like The Pilot and Smith & Jones have taken centre-stage as openers over more lore-heavy and less accessible scripts. Space Babies definitely slots into this trend well, and while it’s definitely not perfect, it’s a nice and fuzzy watch to kick off a new run of episodes.

So far, Ncuti’s incarnation is one of the most exuberant and confident Doctors we have ever seen. He’s a really unique presence, with a really distinct personality and cool quirks, but he is unmistakably the Doctor and has a phenomenal acting range. His chemistry with Millie Gibson is instantaneously infectious, with a punchy spark to the interplay that felt somewhat lacking in the verbose dialogue given to Jodie Whittaker and her company. 

The first five minutes are a re-introduction to the show’s basic tenets and rules, and while the dialogue does feel natural it can feel like we’re stalling for time, since the brief detour to the time of the dinosaurs has little to no bearing on the rest of the script and felt thrown in there as a shot for the trailers to show off the new Disney+ budget. It’s a shot they most certainly didn’t need though because the Disney money can be seen all over the bloody place, particularly the exterior shots of the space station which looked beautiful.

Less beautiful were the space babies themselves, though in this case it’s intentional. They look like ordinary babies, but they all speak fluent English, and the mouth movements are even more uncanny than the body contortions of the Not-Things in Wild Blue Yonder. They still think and act like babies would, as they are excited to hear the voice of “Nan-E” and are naturally terrified of the bogeyman monster downstairs, but the amazing warmth of Ncuti’s Doctor and Ruby Sunday towards them keeps things from becoming too weird. 

It’s strange to see Millie Gibson’s Ruby be so plucky and confident on her first trip out into space, especially when this station happens to house a creature whose stream is engineered to strike fear into whoever hears it, but overall I am really loving Ruby as a character. Millie’s got bags of charm but also an underlying sadness that makes her really endearing as a character and, although I’m a little nervous we’re in for another mystery box companion, I have faith that Russell can strike a happy medium, giving her both solid characterisation and the mysterious mythology.

Another key feature of series openers, aside from their lighter and more laidback tones, are their somewhat weak and frivolous plots. Not to say that they’re bad, but it’s best to not think about them too much. That’s kind of similar here, although Space Babies is slightly more frustrating with its attempts to swing for the fences and tackle more lofty themes. 

Much like The Star Beast and The Giggle explored gender identity and culture wars respectively, Space Babies sprinkles in discussions on both abortion and immigration. The results are mixed to say the least: I found the pro-choice rhetoric was delivered about as elegantly as it could have been, but the line about refugees having to rescue themselves felt clumsily inserted into a scene that didn’t need such an observation. It could just be the memory not serving me well (I’ve only seen this and Devil’s Chord once so far), but the application of these social themes did seem inconsistent, even if it does show that Russell T. Davies is being completely unapologetic about wearing his politics on his sleeve.

And final point – I always love it whenever Doctor Who takes an obviously silly situation and plays it completely straight. Recent examples of this are the conversation with the Solitract frog in It Takes You Away, one of the strongest efforts from the Chibnall era, and the interactions with Karvanista in Flux. Here though, Russell T. Davies has delivered a doozy – the Bogeyman monster is made up of actual bogeys. There is a routine mechanism on board the ship which blows the baby’s noses, and that – how do we put this, “leftover matter” – only serves to make the Bogeyman grow.

I love this show.

The actual reason why the Bogeyman and the babies exist, as a result of the ship attempting to create a children’s fairytale, isn’t as fleshed-out as seamlessly as it could be, but this is continuing the trend of being a toybox of mad ideas that the 60th anniversary specials started, and although I would appreciate it if they were more well-organised, I can still appreciate that they’re here all the same.

Space Babies is definitely not one Russell’s most airtight scripts, with a slightly confusing narrative and some haphazard dialogue, but for the things he gets wrong here, he gets more things right. In just one episode, Ncuti has already been given some amazing things to say and do as the Doctor, Millie has seized the chance to show how good she is an actress and a companion, and we’ve been given some promising signs as to where these overarching plot threads might go. So really, Space Babies has done its job and, as the second episode proved, the fun is only just beginning again…

Alex’s Archive – Doctor Who: Space Babies