In Bavaria, in 1865, the Doctor’s old enemy, the Rani (Archie Panjani) kidnaps the seventh son of a seventh son, who is the newborn incarnation of the god Desiderium, with the power to make wishes come true. On 23 May 2025, the Doctor (Mcuti Gatwa) and his companion Belinda Chandra (Varada Sethu) wake up to a created reality in which they are a married couple with an infant daughter named Poppy (Sienna Robyn Mavanga-Phipps). Conrad Clark (Jonah Haver-King) is a man who tells stories on television about the Doctor and time-lords. He uses the desiderium to project his vision of society over the earth. A former Companion Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson), however, knows something is wrong but cannot convince the Doctor.
The Doctor, calling himself John Smith, takes a job at UNIT, which in this altered reality is an insurance firm, where he sees the Rani returning to her Bone Palace. Belinda begins to question that she is Poppy’s mother because she cannot recall her birth. Ruby encounters Shirley Bingham (Ruth Madeley), UNIT’s scientific advisor, who lives now in a camp of displaced citizens. The group tells her they too think there is something wrong with reality.
Returning home from work, the Doctor watches Conrad’s transmission, which is disrupted by Susan Foreman (Carole Ann Ford), the Doctor’s niece from a long time ago, and a bounty hunter named Rogue (Jonathan Groff), who warn him that his reality is wrong, because objects fall through other objects. The Doctor places cups on a table and they fall through, which explains all the broken cups about. He shares this discovery with Belinda, but expressing doubts about reality is against the law, so she calls the police. Mrs. Flood (Anita Dobson), posing as an officer, arrests Belinda along with the Doctor. They are brought to the Bone Palace. Ruby Sunday and Shirley Bingham (Ruth Madeley) use a UNIT tablet to try to hijack Conrad’s next transmission.
In the Bone Palace, which is an enormous structure like a walking skyscraper made of a skeleton and is really creepy and impressive, the Rani gloats over her power over the Doctor and reminds him that she and Mrs. Flood are the same creature. She reveals her plan to rescue Omega, the ancient, mad creator of the Time Lords with the reality she has created. Just before midnight on 24 May, reality begins to collapse and the Doctor falls from Rani’s tower, regains much of his memory and claims that Poppy is his daughter. To be continued…
Wish World is the first of a two-part story, continued in Reality War, which aired one week later. It was written by Russell T. Davies and directed by Alex Sanjiv Pillai. It was difficult to work with animals and a baby, and it received mixed reviews. It had been Gatwa’s idea to bring back the Rani for the Doctor to face again.
Davies thought of the villains as an unholy trinity—The Rani, Mrs. Flood, and Omega, an enemy of the Doctor way back in the Three Doctors in1972 and Arc of Infinity in 1983. The actor who had played Omega was dead, so an archive he recorded in 2019 was used to portray his voice. Several former companions and characters appeared—Mel Bush, Shirley Bingham, Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, Susan Triad, Christopher Ibrahim, and Chris and Cherry Sunday. Jonathan Groff made a cameo appearance as Rogue, and of course Carole Ann Ford as the Doctor’s granddaughter Susan Foreman, from the very first Doctor Who episode.
The UNIT set was given retro styling of the mid-20th Century, including typewriters and rotary phones. The Bone Palace set was a crossover between science-fiction and gothic horror towering over the city. The alternate reality received approval from critics, but some found the characters weak and somewhat obscure for current audiences. I think the pair of episodes were spectacular, fascinating, and full of surprises.