Boom, believer a little a lot passionately

Overall, the answer is no, despite a few pitfalls that the episode nevertheless tries hard to avoid, which is very much to its credit. Put simply, the Doctor and Ruby land on a battlefield where military Anglicans are fighting the local species, which no one has actually seen through the surrounding smoke and fog. The Doctor steps on a mine and, in order not to end up vacuum-packed like a dried sausage, he has to figure out how to disarm it while moving as little as possible. So Moffat sets himself a genuinely tricky formal challenge here: making an episode where the Doctor does not move. Either a difficult exercise, or, on the contrary, a clever restriction that makes his imagination more fertile. In any case, it once again reflects this season’s desire to toy with the show’s conventions, since Doctor Who is known for having the Doctor run around. On the other hand, another familiar convention returns: the battlefield set in a quarry. The set is of course far more detailed and beautiful than the description I am giving it, but you can still feel the influence of that highly lovable tradition.

That creates several writing and directing constraints: the Doctor has to remain present without moving, the setting is extremely restricted, the kinds of action available are not hugely varied, and we already know more or less how it is going to end, so the challenge is to build tension while knowing that, despite everything, the Doctor cannot die. If Ruby had been standing on the mine instead, the dramatic stakes would clearly not have been the same. There is a version of this episode where the Doctor blows up loads of people, and one almost wants to know whether something like that has not already happened to him—running around, blowing everything to pieces, and coming out of it traumatised.

What this episode also succeeds in doing is making us want to know more about its secondary characters. The people living in a sort of military camp where children are present (why? they have spaceships, so why put the children in danger?) is rather well portrayed, and it makes us want to see these characters again. Personally, I am not a huge fan of soldiers or religion, so the two together do not exactly thrill me, but seeing that community developed a bit more over the course of the episode might have added some extra stakes. Even so, Moffat and the directing team instead choose to make a kind of Doctor Who bottle episode with a single place and a single timeframe. Why not! The pacing is good, the dialogue is sharp (perhaps a little too Moffat-esque at times, which creates a disconnect with the previous episodes), and the performances are superb.

The only small issue I had with this episode is that its overall message ultimately goes in several directions at once. Presenting the children as idiots who have completely lost their sense of life and death because souvenir photos distract them so easily (even though the little girl is at least ten) conflicts somewhat with the way religion is presented as a kind of mass blindness. Presenting AI as dangerous because of the capitalist companies behind it, rather than in itself, also clashes a bit with the fact that religion is treated as something very individual, even though it too is a tool of manipulation in the hands of the powerful. All of this is there, and I do not have any major reproaches for the episode, but it tackles so many subjects at once that it is inevitably difficult to handle them all properly.

It is also a way of asking questions rather than providing answers, and that is very welcome. Very clearly, the episode is anti-AI. I share that view, so naturally it appealed to me at first glance. But it asks why it is dangerous and does not simply stop at a position of opposition without thinking it through. The same goes for religion, although I do not quite understand why the Doctor ends up somewhat backtracking: religion is awful and he hates it, but in the end, believing in something is good after all, haha lol. The concept of religion does not really make much sense in this episode, and you can tell it is a subject Moffat is preoccupied with, since he talks about it so often. It is a shame that it cannot be explored further and that the final message remains a little blurry.

Still, it remains a very solid episode, one that really helps give the Doctor a style of his own, because the writing allows him to build on what came before and propel himself forward. We can see him gradually appropriating the language, the mannerisms, the movements. Gatwa delivers a genuinely subtle performance here, moving away from his predecessors while still creating a link with them. Ruby increasingly takes on the role of adventurer who puts the Doctor in his place, and that is genuinely enjoyable to watch. The characters are finally coming into their own!

So here is the more detailed, slightly fiercer breakdown of the episode for those who are interested: COMPLETE ANALYSIS OF BOOM