Doctor Who (2025) The Interstellar Song Contest – An Explosion of Camp and Fan Service, and Unexpected Politics

So this episode was a lot, wasn’t it?

The Interstellar Song Contest will go down as one of the most extravagant episodes we’ve ever had, and that’s before you even get to the moments of fan service that, trust me, we will discuss. Reportedly the most expensive episode in the show’s history, the Interstellar Song Contest is a deliberate attempt to tie in with Eurovision – aliens are singing pop songs to a universal audience, Rylan and Graham Norton make cameos, and there’s enough glitter and camp to choke every person decrying the show’s new brand of supposed ‘wokery.’ 

Personally I think the complaints about this idea being too gimmicky and populist are a bit unwarranted. Russell has always had an inclination towards popular TV stars and trends – Bad Wolf in Series 1 incorporated parodies of contemporary gameshows, Fear Her was inspired by the announcement that London would be hosting the 2012 Olympics, and The Master managed to get the endorsements of McFly and Ann Widdecombe when he runs for Prime Minister as Harold Saxon. Still, I have never given a single damn about Eurovision, and I’ve had good reasons in recent years, so the idea of Doctor Who going all-in on a Eurovision homage was not something that filled me with joy. And despite everything, it worked.

When the episode is not teasing for the finale and making my fanboy brain dribble out my ears, it’s an incredibly fun and surprisingly politically-pointed Eurovision pastiche. Described by Russell as ‘Eurovision meets Die Hard,’ the script was penned by Juno Dawson who has previously written for Doctor Who expanded media, with a Thirteenth Doctor book, the BBC radio show Doctor Who: Redacted, and she was also supposed to write an episode for Series 2 of Class, which of course, sadly, never happened. This is her first episode for the main show and her previous experience with the programme bleeds through – this is a confident script that has all the right elements and gets a lot darker than I’d initially thought.

Easily my main worry going into this was the appearance from Rylan Clark as himself as, while I’m not opposed to him, I could completely take or leave him. Luckily, I think he slots in rather well in the opening scenes and the idea of him being cryogenically frozen to come out and present it every year is really funny. To his credit he’s got enough self-awareness to pull this off and I felt he was used as tastefully as possible.

The sci-fi recreation of Eurovision was pretty spot-on, in the sense that it was intergalactically camp and tasteless in just about every way possible. People have pointed out the song Dugga-doo, a stupidly catchy earworm in the same Eurovision mould as Ooh Aah (Just A Little Bit), but it’s not just that that feels authentic. It’s the garish alien make-up and costumes, and the songs that should probably sound different from each other but all end up bleeding into one. Yeah, have I mentioned I personally don’t care for Eurovision?

So aesthetically this episode gets things right. Story-wise, things get unexpectedly dark. Not long into the live broadcast, a vengeful alien named Kid hijacks the studio and breaks the space station’s oxygen dome, causing most of the spectators (including Rylan and the Doctor) to be sucked into space. At first we think they may be dead, but it’s then revealed that they are just frozen and suspended in gravity – oh sorry, mavity (love the continuation of this running joke). However, Kid plans to use a lethal delta wave, first mentioned in The Parting of the Ways, and transmit it to everyone watching the contest, so he’s prepared to kill three trillion people. So the stakes of this got really big really quickly.

I think Kid is a really interesting character, played very well by Freddie Fox (yes, he’s related to you-know-who), but he’s more interesting in revealing the episode’s socio-political themes than he is as a standalone villain. So when we think of current political issues at the moment, and we consider that this episode is about a member of a population who have been subjected to genocide at the hands of a brutal invader… things begin to fall into place somewhat.

To start with the positives here, I think this is really brave. To have an episode so tied in to Eurovision also be an attack on the contest’s close ties with Israel is a bold move and kudos to RTD and Juno Dawson for going through with it. However, there are some unintended ramifications here that maybe weren’t thought of ahead of time. The main thing is that Kid, the member of a race whose planet was razed to the ground by the Contest’s sponsor for honey flavourings, is presented for a majority of the episode as a heartless bastard who is prepared to kill trillions just to get his revenge on a corporation. People have been comparing this episode to Kerblam, a Jodie Whittaker episode which people have condemned as pro-Amazon, and while the Interstellar Song Contest certainly handles its political themes better, at face value this can be seen as a bad look. 

The second half certainly opens the debate around the gap between good and evil. When the Doctor finds out what Kid is planning to do, we get a glimpse of his darker side as he promises to find Kid and watch him freeze to death. We don’t quite expect him to use a hologram to appear in the control room and use an electric glove to torture Kid, until Belinda comes in and looks at him in shock (and he gets a vision telling him to stop from a character that we’ll get to). 

While I love seeing the darker side of the Doctor, akin to moments in The Waters of Mars and Face The Raven, here it feels a little bit unwarranted. OK, the Doctor normally doesn’t like it when someone’s threatening to kill trillions, but I didn’t see Jodie’s Doctor going apeshit on Swarm and Azure when they tried to do this in Flux, or the Fourteenth trying to claw the Meep to shreds when they were trying to destroy London. Fifteen says that he was triggered this time round by the loss of his people in a genocide, but shouldn’t that cause at least a bit of sympathy for Kid who is in a similar situation? Let’s not forget that Ncuti in real life is a genocide survivor – his family fled Rwanda during the genocide of the Tutsi when he was an infant. I’m not saying that this story shouldn’t be allowed to blur the lines between good and evil, but doing it this way produces slightly bad optics. 

Still, it’s better than the way Kerblam tackled it, and here there is hope for a better future for the Hellians. When the contest is back up and running, contestant Kora, who has been hiding her identity as a Hellian out of fear, begins singing a song in protest against the Corporation to rapturous applause and a moment of reconciliation for Kid. It probably should have gone a bit further, but 45 minute syndrome strikes again. Or rather, series arc syndrome.

So, final point: let’s talk about those bombshells. For pretty much all of revived Who’s lifespan, whenever a mysterious new female character is introduced fans wonder whether it’s either the Rani (an evil Time Lady scientist that appeared in two 1980s stories), or Susan Foreman (the Doctor’s granddaughter and first companion of William Hartnell). Both characters haven’t been seen in ages and there’s plenty of story opportunities for both of them, especially Susan who was left behind on Earth by the Doctor at the end of The Dalek Invasion of Earth in 1964.

Well, Russell’s clearly been hearing all these moments of speculation and so decided to just kill two birds with one stone. You want Susan? The Doctor suddenly see her as glimpses in his mind encouraging him, her first on-screen appearance in 40 years. You want the Rani? We’ll give you two of them, as Mrs Flood will bi-generate into another Rani played by Archie Panjabi. 

There have been rumours that Mrs Flood is the Rani for months now so, while that still filled me with excitement, that wasn’t a complete surprise. What made me audibly gasp and start whispering incoherent syllables to myself was when Carole Ann Ford told her grandfather to ‘go back.’ To have Susan appear again so suddenly like this will automatically get Whovians frothing at the mouth and, with Susan rumoured to appear in the finale as well, it seems like this wasn’t just fan service – this is the first time Susan has appeared in decades and it’s looking like it won’t be the last. 

While I loved the Susan scenes, I’m a bit mixed on the Rani reveal. We’ve had many scenes in New Who of mysterious characters being revealed as old ones, and I like that this plays it up for camp – both Dobson and Panjabi are hamming it up hilariously. However, Murray Gold’s music is trying to make this sound like a terrifying apocalyptic moment, when it simply isn’t – it’s a more playful and fun reveal. It’s not like the Sutekh unmasking at the end of The Legend of Ruby Sunday, or when Derek Jacobi acts his heart out and reveals himself as the Master. I’m definitely excited for the finale, as it seems like a very strange and off-kilter story, but the tone in this scene was a bit off.

The Interstellar Song Contest is simultaneously exactly what I expected and not what I expected. It’s a camp and colourful celebration of Eurovision, while serving as a sharp indictment of the cruelty that funds the contest itself, and that presents itself here in a much darker story that the promotion made it out to be. The exploration of right and wrong is one that the episode doesn’t execute perfectly but it was a brave thing to try nonetheless, and the episode also succeeded in making this particular Whovian weak at the knees with its revelations and teasing while not sacrificing the standalone story it was telling. I’m not sure all of it worked, but I had the time of my life watching it.

And next week is the start of finale time. Strap in folks – let’s see what happens.

Alex’s Archive – Doctor Who (2025) The Interstellar Song Contest