The 15th Doctor's new era has started on a strong footing. Across its Christmas Special and double episode debut, Doctor Who quickly established its new tone, characters, and the generally wilder and more carefree approach to expect in the future.
All this makes episode three, titled Boom, a very strange and unexpected swerve so early in the season, with its bleak, dramatic, and restrained tone not being what you would expect from this era or from returning writer Steven Moffat.
After a rather chilling opening scene, the Doctor arrives on this mysterious world and almost immediately, he steps on a landmine.
If he shifts his balance, tries to leave, or even waits too long, it will explode with no hope of survival, and impressively, the entire story will focus on this peril.
In many ways, Boom feels more like a stage play than a typical TV episode. We remain in this one location for the entire outing and all the dramatic action happens in the form of conversation and arguments.
This early stretch exclusively featuring the Doctor and Ruby is very dynamic and while we still don’t have a handle on Ruby as a character, this sequence demonstrates why she is great for the Doctor, with her relentless optimism and courage keeping him calm when he needs it most.
The real scene stealer here, though, is Ncuti Gatwa. He is on-screen for the entire episode, and the story hinges on his performance, keeping things tense and varied while his character struggles to remain calm and resolve the situation.
Like a stage play, it's heavy on theme rather than plot. The Doctor refers to the mines as ‘death by capitalism', and all the weapons on both sides are sold by one company who profit from their suffering. Even the ambulances will kill people if it helps drive sales up
It's also worth noting that the soldiers are anglican marines. The Doctor challenges them when observing that they may be in this battle for no reason, but being predisposed to blind faith they don’t question that they are part of a pointlessly cruel exercise.
However, the episode isn’t anti-religion by any means. It is only after the death of Vater, the blind priest from the episode's opening, that an opportunity is provided to change things – he regains his sight and clarity in a life-after-death kind of thing, even as an AI character.
Dense as this all is, this isn’t typically what you’d expected from the more whimsical Steven Moffat. It could be that since he’s finished his tenure as showrunner, he’s free to do something bolder, not unlike Robert Holmes' The Caves of Androzani in the classic series.
Then again, Moffat's work has generally been quite bleak and darker in recent years with some of this other TV work including Inside Man, Dracula and even the fourth Sherlock season, all of which are much different from his early work.
That being said, Boom still has his signature complexity, even if it doesn’t have his humour, making this an enjoyable yet definitely not funny episode like Space Babies the previous week.
Overall, Boom is a terrific episode of Doctor Who and while it might not be a crowd pleaser like The Devil's Chord, it's an episode that stays with you afterwards and showcases the talents of Gatwa and the whole creative team of this era.
