I normally don’t like putting reviews of two of the same thing in a row on the site, but it’s been a very busy week at work (as tends to happen in the summer, sadly…) so back-to-back new Who episodes it is! Rogue was a strange one, on the one hand I enjoyed The Doctor exploring a more romantic side to himself, but on the other hand the rest of the story was quite generic. Not bad, but felt very samey. Still, Ncuti Gatwa pulls the story up with his performance yet again! Let’s take a look…
The story starts with your classic body-swapping alien scene as a Lord Barton (Paul Forman) is drained of his life force as an alien takes his form and heads back to an early 19th century party. After the opening though we see that The Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson) are already in the ballroom having a bit of a dance and enjoying themselves, so no need for a TARDIS landing scene this time. As Ruby heads off with the “delightfully posh” Duchess of Pemberton (Indira Varma) The Doctor spies someone glaring from the balcony and heads up to meet him. The two have a snide chat where he calls himself “Rogue” (Jonathan Groff) and The Doctor finds his act amusing, even exciting when later Rogue takes him prisoner onto his ship, revealing himself as an alien bounty hunter. Rogue has mistaken The Doctor for the shapeshifter due to his scan revealing him as an alien with changing physiology and as this is going on The Doctor is having great fun making fun of the nerdy D&D reason for his name and the fact he has a Kylie Manogue song on his ship’s playlist. Eventually The Doctor does the “look at my past regenerations” scene that all Doctors get at some point (though this one oddly included Richard E. Grant… is the Shalka Doctor canon now?) and convinces him of his innocence.
“Shall we dance?” “I think we’re already dancing…” “Oh right.”
As the two head to the TARDIS and begin properly flirting with each other the Duchess is taken over by a second shapeshifter who meets up with the one masquerading as Barton and soon Ruby befriends a young girl called Emily Beckett (Camilla Aiko), who then reveals herself as also a shapeshifter and goes after Ruby. The Doctor and Rogue come up with a plan to send the Chuldur (as they’re apparently called) to an alternate dimension but just as they arrive in the ballroom they see that not only are the Chuldur out in full bird-like form rather than shapeshifted but Ruby walks in seemingly having already been killed and transformed into a Chuldur…
Like I said in the opening paragraph, I really enjoyed The Doctor and Rogue’s scenes, there was some good back-and-forth and although the whole romantic part came about a bit swiftly (which to be fair they only have 45 minutes to do all this in, after all), it was fun to watch. The rest though? Meh. Shapeshifting aliens, “has the companion just died in a throwaway episode in the middle of the season?” “clearly not…” reveals, it was fine, just not particularly gripping. Plus one of the birdmen looked like a muppet with massive grey eyebrows and it was really distracting due to being so funny. Is that a good thing? No idea, but it was a thing.
The Continuity:
The Fifteenth Doctor gets his “look at my past faces” scene (pictured: only one past face).
Nothing major. Shapeshifting aliens are rather a common sci-fi trope so it’s been done far too many times in Who to list, with enemies like the Zygons, the Krell (well, okay they created android duplicates, so sort-of connected…) and the Slitheen coming immediately to mind, and many more I’m sure (though thankfully only one of them farts all the time… guess which one!)
Rogue has a touch of the Captain Jack Harkness about him, and appearing towards the end of RTD’s first season brings even more coincidences, but hey-ho. Plus as mentioned the weird addition of Richard E. Grant in the Doctor lineup, referring to his single online webcast story “Scream of the Shalka”, which was thoroughly de-canon-ised by Russell himself, who said he wanted to keep McGann as canon but absolutely laid into Grant’s performance in the animated special as the reason that Eccleston was the “real Ninth Doctor”, not Grant. So change of mind, or did the writers of this episode weirdly insist? Who knows…
Overall Thoughts:
The stars of show… as in the highlight of this episode, obviously Ncuti is literally a star of the show…
“Rogue” was an entertaining episode thanks to the performances and chemistry between Ncuti Gatwa and Jonathan Groff, the rest of the episode was pretty sci-fi paint-by-numbers, which at least isn’t bad, just not particularly exciting. Looking forward to the two-part finale, as per usual it will go up as one story when both parts have aired, so there’ll be no new Who TV review next Sunday.
The Doctor reveals to Rogue that the Chuldur are addicted to Earth TV and are essentially going to “cosplay the planet to death” so he and Rogue dance together as men and argue romantically to create a drama that the Chuldur wouldn’t be able to resist, though there is clear actual romance involved, especially when Rogue seemingly purposes. Blatant inter-racial homosexuality in the early 1800s was indeed enough of a scandal to gather up all the Chuldur in one place and trap them, but as The Doctor is about to send them to another dimension the now-trapped Ruby reveals she fought off her attacker and that she’d been playing along.
You didn’t think I’d miss out the Chuldur, complete with weird muppet eyebrows man, did you?
The Doctor is unable to bring himself to send Ruby away with the aliens, so Rogue manages to take Ruby’s place and take the button to activate the trap for good measure, activating it with a final “come find me”. The Doctor sets Rogue’s ship to circle the moon in stealth mode “until he comes back” but says there are as many dimensions as there are specs of dust so the odds of the finding the right one are next to zero. He and Ruby hug before heading off to their next, two-part finale adventure!
Hogan Reviews 