Hogan Reviews

Well… that was a thing. A pretty crap thing, honestly. Thank goodness they opened with a double bill because at least I really enjoyed the second episode, but I’ll get to that later. As for “Space Babies” it was a classic case of “had some good ideas but the bad ones drowned them out”, plus it has a lot of Series 1 Russell T. Davies lowbrow toilet humour, which isn’t my kind of thing either. Oh well, let’s take a look quickly, then we can move on to the good one!

The story opens with a “this is what Doctor Who is all about, potential new viewers!” scene where The Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and his new companion Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson) take a quick spin to the time of the dinosaurs, where Ruby steps on a butterfly and becomes a weird lizard person before The Doctor somehow brings the butterfly back to life and everything’s okay again…? Okay, so that’s not what Who’s all about, new viewers, but hey-ho. They then do the opposite and jump to the far future and arrive on a “Baby Farm”, a space station literally used to grow children for struggling populations or to help colonise new worlds. There’s an interesting analogy on abortion here, with the babies left on board because it was illegal to shut the machines down but that left the children to grow up abandoned, but sadly it was lost almost immediately due to the horribleness that was to come. You see, the babies’ minds grew up but their bodies didn’t and the way the special effects team decided to do it is use actual babies but CGI their mouths to talk. Not only was this creepy to begin with but the fact that the babies were often looking away in the wrong direction or looking upset when the dialogue being spoken was supposed to be happy meant it just failed spectacularly. Creepy at best, laughably bad at worse.

For an opening shot, this was a pretty good one!

I should say that before they find the “Space Babies” The Doctor and Ruby find a monster in the lower floors that managed to instil fear in both Ruby and The Doctor, the latter finding it odd that he instinctively ran in fear rather than looked at it with curiosity like he normally does. The Babies call it the Bogeyman and soon the A.I. nanny tells The Doctor and Ruby to go a specific room and reveals that it isn’t an A.I. but the only member of staff from the station that stayed behind with the children. The Doctor reveals he has a way to get the children to a nearby planet as refugees (there’s another clever bit of writing about the refugee crisis but again, completely lost in all the cringe) but in order to get to the TARDIS they’ll have to deal with the Bogeyman, and just at that exact moment they find one of the babies headed down to the lower levels to take it on with a small wooden sword…

I don’t even know where to begin, it really reminds me of “Aliens of London / World War 3” two parter from Russell T. Davies’ other Series 1 as it has some good ideas and I liked the creature effects but everything gets bogged down in so much childish nonsense that it all just gets lost. We’re talking Sylvester McCoy’s first season levels of aiming the show at a younger age group here, which is not a compliment. I will say that once again our lead duo are great in their roles and that’s the only reason I’m not giving this the lowest score…

The Continuity:

Ruby admires space for the first time… well, for the first time from somewhere other than Earth’s surface, I assume she’s looked up at the night sky at some point in her life…

Not much, beyond already mentioning the negative comparisons to “Aliens of London / World War 3” and a lot of re-used scenes from Rose’s first trip to space in fellow Ninth Doctor story “The End of the World”. There are several direct callbacks to the previous episode, “The Church on Ruby Road”, including setting up a very Clara-like “there’s something special about you, let me secretly scan your body” scene…

Overall Thoughts:

It’s the titular creepy Space Babies! Hooray!

“Space Babies” was among the worst ways to kick off a season, thank goodness they dropped a double bill to launch the series as I really enjoyed Episode 2, where as if this all there was for this week I’d be worried about the show’s future. Creepy CGI mouthed babies, lots of un-Doctor Who-y lowbrow humour and generally a poor script mean it was literally only Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson’s great performances / double act that stopped this episode from being a straight up 1/5…

The Doctor and Ruby manage to save the baby and decide to have a poke around and find out what the Bogeyman is and in doing so find that the computer software that was supposed to look after the children got corrupted and it instead decided to bring the stories it was telling to life, so created a literal Bogeyman in the basement, and when I say literal I mean it was created from the snot the babies created by blowing their noses. Yep, there’s even a moment where Ruby gets some snot dumped on her head! Haha! … Anyway, the Nanny manages to direct the creature into an airlock and begins to vent it out into space but despite it being an artificial lifeform created with the sole purpose of scaring children everyone from The Doctor to the Babies gets upset that the “innocent” creature is going to be killed.

A shot of the Bogeyman would’ve made more sense here, but I only had access to the preview videos before writing this review, so… here’s Ruby’s weird brief lizard form!

The Doctor manages to pop into the airlock and shut the doors, saving the Bogeyman much to the relief of everyone for some reason. The Doctor then reveals that six years of used nappies are being stored in one area and so he “let’s one rip” and vents the gas to push the station towards the planet where they can be saved, complete with part of the space station looking like a bum being the part that “ejects the gas”. The Slitheen would be proud. The Doctor and Ruby return to the TARDIS where Ruby is given a key and agrees to do some time and space travelling to close us off.