Doctor Who: The Reality War Review - 4 Ups & 7 Downs

In last week’s review, I expressed concerns regarding how little time we had to build up Omega as a threat before getting rid of him again. I made what I thought was an exaggerated joke about Omega being on screen for five minutes before being defeated. It turns out, even my pessimistic joke gave this episode too much credit – Omega was on screen for three minutes, and this includes a scene between Ruby and Conrad.

We spent the best part of an hour building up to this reveal last week, only for the Doctor to immediately pull out Chekov’s technobabble machine and blast Omega into oblivion with it (good job we changed the sonic because it looked too much like a gun though). There’s also the question of Omega being a giant bone baby… what? This marks the second classic who villain that RTD has inexplicably turned into a CGI Kaiju for no reason whatsoever, and both times round he’s managed to take a truly fearsome foe and turn them into something far less compelling.

That’s not even the only wasted villain of the week. Our newly introduced Rani, the one we spent a week a half building up as a major threat? Yeah she’s dead. She gets eaten alive almost immediately. As for Mrs Flood, who we’ve spent two seasons building up, and hinted multiple times last week she might turn on the Rani? She leaves the episode half way through and doesn’t come back. She was, and I can’t stress this enough, entirely irrelevant to the plot.

All this amounts to perhaps the biggest waste of time this show has ever seen. Reveals for the sake of reveals that lead to absolutely nothing. It seems you can’t teach an old dog new tricks…