Tôi Không Biết Phải Nói Sao Về Tập Này Của “Doctor Who” Mà Không Làm Mình Phát Điên

## Tôi Không Biết Phải Nói Sao Về Tập Này Của “Doctor Who” Mà Không Làm Mình Phát Điên

Nhiều chuyện đã xảy ra trong tập “Doctor Who” tuần này. Thật khó để diễn tả hết “bao nhiêu” chuyện đã diễn ra—và bao nhiêu trong số đó đáng ngờ ở mức tốt nhất, và có lẽ là suy nghĩ cẩu thả ở mức tồi tệ nhất—mà không phải nôn ra một bản tóm tắt khái niệm nhanh chóng về những gì xảy ra trong “Cuộc Thi Bài Hát Liên Ngành Sao”.

(Phần tiếp theo của bài báo sẽ được viết ở đây, dựa trên nội dung của phần còn lại của bài báo tiếng Anh. Bạn vui lòng cung cấp phần còn lại để tôi có thể tiếp tục viết.)

#DoctorWho #CuocThiBaiHatLienNgànhSao #TheInterstellarSongContest #Review #PhanTich #BinhLuan #Drama #TVSeries #SciFi

A lot happened on this week’s Doctor Who. It feels almost impossible to articulate just how much all that “how much” was—and how much of it was questionable at best, and perhaps wildly poorly thought out at worst—without just vomiting a quick, high-concept summation of what happens in “The Interstellar Song Contest.”

There is a Eurovision Song Contest But In Space, hosted by a TV host almost 100% of audiences outside of the UK are going to be baffled at the Doctor and Belinda’s obsession with, and a cat lady who speaks French. One hundred thousand people are graphically sucked into space. They’re fine. An incredibly fraught “what if both sides maybe made some mistakes” allegory about a fictional genocide plays out in an episode that is broadcasting, intentionally, the same night of the actual 2025 Eurovision Song Contest, a cultural event that has faced two consecutive years of protests and controversy over the participation of Israel, a country in the process of conducting a genocidal invasion of Palestine—an event that Doctor Who star Ncuti Gatwa backed out of representing the UK’s televote results for at the last minute. The Doctor does some mild torturing while lecturing the victim of the aforementioned genocide that revenge is bad, actually, and is only lightly chastised by his companion.

Also, Carol Ann Ford is here reprising her role as Susan, Doctor Who‘s very first companion and the Doctor’s own granddaughter, by occasionally showing up in the Doctor’s mind to do her best impression of a vision of the Lady Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings. Also, also, it turns out that Mrs. Flood is an incarnation of the Rani, a high-camp irregular Time Lady villainess from 1980s Doctor Who, and having been mortally wounded in the whole aforementioned “one hundred thousand people are graphically sucked into space, wait, they’re fine” incident, she bi-regenerates into a new incarnation that immediately despises her former self.

Did we get all that?

Suffice to say, “The Interstellar Song Contest” has an issue with tonal variance that undermines much of what the episode is trying to say, even if, ultimately, what it’s trying to say about its allegorical underpinnings is tantamount to a half-hearted shrug. Doctor Who loves itself a bit of tonal variance: arguably the show is at its best when it can be making you laugh at high-camp shenanigans one moment, and then be terrified the next. But what is so jarring throughout “The Interstellar Song Contest,” putting aside its allegorical pitfalls for a moment, is that its tonal clash rarely feels like a point the episode wants to engage with as it bizarrely jumps between the gravity of the situation (well, the “mavity,” thanks to the return of that joke, although again, it feels kind of out of place when people are saying it about trying to save 100,000 concert attendees who just got sucked into the vacuum of space) and the zillion other things pinging around in its proverbial head.

Actually, really, you can’t talk about the tonal weirdness of this episode without engaging what the episode presents itself as saying more broadly being about beneath the high-glitz facade of its Eurovision knockoff, so we might as well get into that. The inciting incident at the crux of “The Interstellar Song Contest” is that its setting, an interstellar space stadium, the Harmony Arena, is overtaken by two rogue members of a species of horned beings called the Hellions, Kid (Freddie Fox) and his girlfriend/person-on-the-inside, a broadcast operator named Wynn (Iona Anderson). Kid and Wynn are committing this slaughter—first of the attendees of the contest, and then, through highjacking the broadcast with a weaponized high-intensity signal called a Delta Wave (itself a reference to the same technology the Doctor was going to try and kill a Dalek fleet with in “The Parting of the Ways”), the murder of trillions of people watching all over the galaxy—as an act of vengeance for the invasion, and slaughtering of, their homeworld Hellia by the Corporation, the contest’s primary financial sponsor.

The vast scale of the death at stake in the episode—for a good chunk of it, the separated Doctor and Belinda both believe the other died in the spacing of the attending crowds—amid the scenery of a cheesy, sparkly, and camp setting should provide the kind of interplay Doctor Who excels in striking a balance between. But as the Doctor makes clear that he is not only going to stop Kid, but that he outright hates him—unlike anything we’ve seen this incarnation of the Doctor hate before—for what he’s trying to justify, the parallels of what “The Interstellar Song Contest” and the context at which it is playing out in our real world becomes increasingly murky. The Doctor saves all of his hatred in this episode for Kid, even after learning that the Corporation’s systematic occupation and exploitation of Hellia is not just real, but has led to the Hellions’ broad persecution across the galaxy, and never saves a moment of his fury for the system that pushed Hellions like Kid and Wynn to such violent action in the first place, or that forced the Hellion songstress Cora (Miriam-Teak Lee) into hiding to the point of mutilation in an attempt to assimilate.

Things take a further turn when the Doctor eventually does catch up with Kid and stops the Delta Wave’s activation, as he proceeds to vent his anger on Kid in an extended torture sequence. It is a moment that is presented in equal parts horrifying, and in some ways justified by the Doctor. “How many people did you want to kill, three trillion?” the Doctor vengefully growls at Kid as he delivers multiple, excruciating electric shocks to the Hellion. “How about we try this, three trillion times?” Not even the vision of Susan in his head is enough to stop the Doctor from electrocuting Kid well beyond the point of incapacitation. It’s only Belinda showing up and being horrified at what he’s doing that makes him stop long enough for Kid and Wynn to be detained, and even then the Doctor makes clear that if he ever meets Kid again, he will not be able to stop himself from acting in such a similar way, that he has in part been irrevocably changed for the worse by Kid’s attempted actions. And if that wasn’t enough, the episode then initially closes on Belinda—a character introduced with calling him out on his bullshit as a defining trait in her relationship with the Doctor—tacitly walking back her disgust with the Doctor’s behavior, instead having a brief “whoa that was scary, anyway let’s get on with it” conversation.

What the Doctor makes clear, what Doctor Who makes clear, in this moment, is that that can never be any justification for a violent response to oppression, lest that oppressed party face his full and complete wroth. There is no middle ground between the murder of trillions of people and taking the Corporation to task for its ravaging of Hellia to be found here. The only response that is justified in the episode’s eyes in Cora’s revelation to the public that she is in fact a Hellion when the contest resumes in the episode’s final act, singing a mournful native ballad to the eventual applause of the crowd. It is participation in, rather than a rejection of, the system that exploited and oppressed her people that “The Interstellar Song Contest” thematically ends this arc on, and we as the audience are left to imagine if it was effective in aiding the plight of Hellia or not, rather than the episode actually taking a definitive stance on that.

It’s hypocritical considering the Doctor themselves is responsible for the deaths of a countless number of races, deaths that are always justified as retribution in the name of a greater good or against a greater injustice. But what makes this being the thematic message of “The Interstellar Song Contest” feel so heinous is the explicit intention to have this episode release alongside the actual Eurovision Song Contest. It may be considered unfair to frame this episode in the context of the current version of Eurovision—Juno Dawson’s script for this episode was written at least over a year ago, and production on this season of Doctor Who had already begun in the immediate wake of the October 7 attacks that led to the Israeli invasion of Palestine, by which point thousands of people had already died. Both this and last year’s Eurovision contests were subject to protests and boycotts of Israeli participation (the country was the first non-European participant in Eurovision when it began competing in 1971), all of which occurred throughout the creation and production of this episode. Many, many more have died in the time since, accusations of crimes against humanity and acts of genocide by bodies around the world have only continued to mount.

There has been time to reconsider this story, at every step of the way, and instead Doctor Who went forward with it–and wanted to invite direct parallels, otherwise it wouldn’t have so specifically placed this episode in the run of the season directly alongside the broadcast of Eurovision–and went forward with it in a manner that instead presented a fence-sitting allegory for the audience to come down on one interpretation or the other of rather than saying anything with teeth itself. There are ways you could read “The Interstellar Song Contest” as framing Israel’s actions since October 7 as unjustifiable–the real Eurovision has been partially sponsored by the Israeli-owned cosmetics company Moroccanoil for several years, a parallel to the Corporation’s sponsorship of the ISC, although the episode implies that the Corporation is a significantly more influential sponsor than that real-world parallel. But equally in turn the episode can, through the extremity of Kid’s plan, be seen as saying that any violent resistance to genocide is similarly unjustified. It’s not the first time this new era of Doctor Who has struggled to take an effectively clear stance on a serious message—last year’s “Dot and Bubble” saved revealing its own racism allegory until its final moments, this year’s “Lucky Day” muddled a message about conspiracy theories in a defence of unequivocal trust of the state. For all the criticism from right-leaning circles that this era of Doctor Who is supposedly too “woke”, it’s an era that, in reality, has consistently struggled to actually engage with progressive values beyond a surface level when it matters the most, inviting itself to interpretation and critiques, in ways positive and negative, that co-exist  because the material itself lacks clarity on its thematic position.

But an at-best-mild admonishment of the Doctor’s actions and a vague hope that Cora’s song might change things for the better isn’t actually where “The Interstellar Song Contest” leaves things, as if all that wasn’t enough. After the Doctor and his allies manage to successfully save and revive the 100,000 concertgoers left freezing in space for much of the episode (hand-waved in a sequence set to “Making Your Mind Up,” the Eurovision-winning 1981 pop song by UK group Bucks Fizz, because, again, this episode loves a wild swing in tone), a post-credit sequence reveals that the final revived victim is none other than Mrs. Flood, who had been spying on the Doctor and Belinda during the contest. Declaring the incident as an unfortunately mortal wound, Flood then casually reveals to the audience and confounded onlookers alike that she is in fact a Time Lady, and prepares to regenerate. Only, she bi-generates, splitting off into her Flood incarnation and her next form as the latest iteration of the Rani, now portrayed by Archie Panjabi, but having been played by the late Kate O’Mara across her appearances in two classic Doctor Who serials, “The Mark of the Rani” and “Time and the Rani,” as well as the 1993 charity special Dimensions in Time.

O’Mara’s performance as the Rani—a morally unscrupulous renegade scientist who specializes in horrific genetic experimentation on her subjects, willing or otherwise—has been embraced in the years since her appearances as something of a camp icon, from the Rani’s glorious fashion sense to her scenery-chewing declarations of her cackling villainy (please revisit her arguably most iconic line from “Time and the Rani”, “Leave the girl: it’s the man I want!” here, for evidence). On the one hand, this makes her long-awaited, and often long-joked-about, return in modern Doctor Who a rare moment where “The Interstellar Song Contest” actively and engages with its broader tone in a fun way: there’s arguably no better place for the Rani to return than in a queer-coded romp set at faux-Eurovision that, poorly or otherwise, engages with a dark heart at its core.

But on the other, the climax of Doctor Who‘s arc with Mrs. Flood, which has been in play since the very beginning of Gatwa’s tenure as the Doctor, culminating with Flood herself sticking around to be a comedically simpering helpless foil to her next self feels bizarre. Flood has, for better or worse, been something Doctor Who has constantly reminding us that it’s building toward, her regular appearances throughout the last two seasons treading a peculiar line between seemingly pointless beyond existing to tease, and at times, outright negatively impacting the rest of an episode’s narrative. If where that was all going was just going to culminate with setting up what is ultimately an obvious return (people have speculated that Flood could be the Rani ever since it became clear she was set up for something more), depending on how the remaining two episodes of the season play out, renders all that build up even more pointless as it has often felt.

Putting aside that half of the Rani reveal, even then what’s fun about the Rani is that she’s kind of cheesy, hence the aforementioned camp embrace. She’s a little menacing, sure, but she’s mostly beloved for her plans not exactly being series-finale-level, fate-of-all-reality stakes, and she’s arguably as beloved for comically failing to execute those plans than as she is for being a capital-V-Villain. Time will tell if making her the architect of a climactic grand finale years in the teasing will match up to what people loved about her in the first place, but in an episode that is all over the place with the ideas it’s playing with, throwing her in as a final “one more thing” might end up being even more thematically appropriate to its tonal messiness if things don’t live up to expectation.

Even if they don’t, it still remains that that final reveal is going to be what “The Interstellar Song Contest” will be remembered for, rather than its grave misgivings elsewhere. Perhaps that is, at the end of the day, also its point: after all, why not embrace spectacle to distract yourself from having something meaningful to say?

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.

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