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

This next section somewhat ties into my previous ‘down’, but I wanted to talk about it in isolation.

Poppy is an interesting thread in and of herself, but the execution of this idea sat really uncomfortably with me. The idea of the Doctor having a baby with one of his companions, even via magical means like this, gave me the major ick, exacerbated by the fact that neither Belinda or Fifteen comment on how weird this was at all.

It’s something that could have been fixed by some slight scripting tweaks or a short conversation being added, but having these two basically act like a happy couple, delighted at having a child together, did not seem right at all. Nothing wrong with them being excited to be parents, but in my book, these characters are friends and nothing more, and, at the very least, should have had a moment of “huh, this is a bit weird, right?”. I know romance wasn’t implied, but their willingness to go zipping around the vortex as a traditional little family wasn’t the story I would have opted to tell with our first gay Doctor, especially with Rogue sitting in the sidelines, never to be seen again.

There’s also a question of bodily autonomy here. When we first meet Belinda, she calls the Doctor out for scanning her without permission, she asks a patient’s permission to treat them – in other words, she’s big on consent, which absolutely makes sense as a nurse. This story sees her saddled, by force, with a child, and the episode doesn’t stop for one second to consider the implications of this, even once Belinda understands exactly what has happened. The episode ends with Belinda going on to raise this child, and again, the episode still doesn’t really make it clear whether Belinda had control over this or not. It’s a bit of a violation, and the episode doesn’t seem to realise.

There’s nothing wrong with any of the end results here, but I think the episode owed it to the characterisation of both Belinda and Fifteen to take a little more care with the execution.