The latest 2025 season of Doctor Who was pretty good. The plots were interesting, a nice mix of different sci-fi vignettes playing on some themes we’ve seen before in Doctor Who, and some pretty new ones. The season was fairly short, with only 8 episodes.

We start of with a confusing time loop episode. Maybe it’s because it was the first one, but I found it kind of forgettable. You’re left with an interesting enough premise – an alien abduction based on a misunderstanding – but I don’t really feel it did much other than serve as an introduction to the new(ish) character Belinda. There were some bland jokes about AI generation, and a lot of sci-fi stuff (characters with names that include numbers) but by the end I didn’t feel especially satisfied by it. Our introduction to Belinda shows her to be a competent and realistic human being. We get an introduction that somewhat echoes Donna’s, where Belinda is put off by being essentially abducted by the doctor, and even calls him out when he scans her DNA without asking permission first. It’s nice to see this considering Doctor Who has a bit of a poor history when it comes to writing women, that has been rectified a lot in newer series.

Episode 2 is a children’s character gone wrong and come to life, mixing some excellent cell style animation and real life imagery. This episode uses some fourth wall breaking to good effect, and the story itself is an excellent display of Doctor Who’s more recent forays into fantasy elements. It’s a nice mostly self contained episode, and I think makes for a much better first episode showing the Doctor and Belinda working together, knowing who each other are.

The third episode features a return to planet midnight, which I was pleasantly surprised by. Doing a sequel is difficult, especially the temptation to try to play on nostalgia for David Tennant’s character, but I felt the story was different enough that it worked. This episode also introduced some interesting concepts regarding accessibility – a future where there is technology to help those who can’t hear, but also that the same tech can be used to oppress or discriminate. I think it would have been interesting to explore these topics more closely. You have a world where there are very strong rules imposed top down about catering to the deaf, and yet there is still exclusionary behaviour, which suggests that there is some ingrained bias against them still present. Has something happened recently that has left a large portion of the population deaf? What kind of an impact would that have on a society. The episode ends without going into this though, and we deal with the monster of the week instead. It’s a good, if tragic, ending that is cheapened a bit by the overly used “ah, but what if the monster’s still here” trope in the epilogue.A technical point I wondered about was, if sign language was more present in film and TV, how would ASL signers react to BSL-signing characters? Would you need to do special subtitling for your syndication, or would something like sub-signing be used?

Next, the season makes a sudden jump away from the doctor back to following Ruby, which is nice, as we kind of just left her at the end of the last season. We see her adapting, coping, and growing with real life after the doctor, and end up with a relationship. Of course, we can’t have nice things in sci-fi, so he’s a horrible person. This episode touches on some important points, and makes good assessments, if very blunt ones. Don’t be a misogynist. And don’t believe conspiracies, though when you live in a world with an actual secret organisation protecting us from aliens that gets a bit muddy. The episode is alright, though it does play a trope I find annoying where the major security branch of a global organisation seems to have completely terrible opsec, and with only a little bit of work, the bad guy can just waltz right in, fully armed. At the climactic moment, our main good guy while the doctor is in absentia is Kate Stewart, and right in front of a camera behaves in exactly the way that would confirm the suspicions of the conspiracy peddlers, which doesn’t seem very clever.

Back following the Doctor, we’re in Lagos for some black sci-fi. When the doctor is on earth, often the stories take place in an anglocentric city, or an abandoned quarry, so it’s nice to see the rest of the world too. We also get some wider hints about what Ncuti Gatwa’s doctor may have been up to off-camera. This story is shot in a very tight claustrophobic environment, which I felt added a lot to the tension. I don’t like going to the barber’s at the best of times, so being trapped in one, forced to make chit-chat is a true nightmare. We get a surprise cameo from Jo Martin’s doctor, and some hints that there may be something more to the Anansi plot that takes place in this episode, unfortunately we never get to see it.

Before the two-part finale we have a final episode in a future space parody of the Eurovision Song Contest. We never name the ESC explicitly, but we know what it is. The episode features a maligned race whose home was destroyed by a corporation that wanted to make cheap chemicals. The race of aliens that nearly everyone hates and demonises (they literally have demon horns. subtle.) could be a stand-in for any number of maligned groups, but in the context of the song contest, I could see it pointing at Israel, taking land from Palestinians; or a bit more loosely Trans participants in competition being maligned without cause. We see the doctor really lose his temper in this episode – something which is incredibly rare, but refreshing in a way. The doctor’s anger is pointed at the alien who lost their home planet and got radicalised into militant action, which I think does mirror a lot of the anger that people feel against militant groups that claim to represent displaced people, all the violence does is end up hurting innocents, both amongst the perpetrating group and the victims. It’s a bold story to tell, and I am glad they did, politics is a core part of good sci-fi. Pretending it is neutral or hand waving it away does no one any favours.

The two part finale starts well, with an episode showing what the world would look like if designed and run by the caring bro we met earlier in the series. Everyone has their place, and everyone is happy. Except, everyone is pigeonholed into a fixed place in society, they’re all miserable and don’t know it, all the women exist to be housewives, and anyone the bad guy forgot about is just forgotten about. It’s creepy and everything feels off, and it would have made for a great episodic sequel to the prior episode 4. Unfortunately, it is part of a Doctor Who finale, so it’s squished up against a bunch of other plot that needs to be there so the final episode makes sense. A really interesting concept is poppy suddenly appearing, the doctor’s and Belinda’s daughter. This would have been an amazing thing to explore, and may have helped to tie in to the references to the doctor’s granddaughter that happened in the prior episode, but which didn’t really go anywhere.

The final episode itself is OK, at least, the first half is. It sets up some pretty terrifying concepts like being stuck in non-space forever. While the bone beasts do look impressive, I’m not really sure why they were there. The big bad omega… I am still confused at what the motivation was there. Some new retconning was done which implies that the time lords are all sterile, which is a very interesting idea that was discussed briefly, but is another one of those concepts that would have benefited from some deeper examination. In this episode we saw the UNIT tower transform into a battle mech towering above London, and this with the announcement of another RTD property of The war between the land and the sea did make me think that maybe RTD just wants to do some remakes of old Gerry Anderson properties, which I could totally get on board with.

The epilogue to this seasons in my opinion was not necessary. I would have been happy to see it end right before or right after poppy disappears, but instead we get some convoluted timey wimey fanservice nonsense that ends with the doctor saving the day and disappearing only to be replaced by a familiar face, which would have been a shock, had RTD not done the exact same thing before the start of Gatwa’s run.

I really enjoyed Gatwa and Sethu’s acting this season, and the interactions between their characters was fun. Belinda comes across as a fairly competent companion that knows what she wants and doesn’t need a lot of hand holding. It is a real pity that we only saw this pair for 8 episodes, and Gatwa for only 2 seasons in total.

There were a lot of hints and references to past doctors and fanservicey stuff this season, and I feel like you need to be really careful to make it work. Individually, they might have been fine, but when every other episode is doing it, it starts to get a bit grating. Doctor Who isn’t the only offender at this, I’ve seen it happen on Star Trek and other big franchise properties. Fanservicey nods work best when they’re subtle and if you’re going to be obvious about it, you really need to do it well.

There were a lot of really interesting sci-fi concepts here, which I feel could have been explored more. I felt some of the potential for sci-fi had to fight for space amongst the monster of the week segments. For example, episode 3 could have been two separate stories, one revisiting planet midnight, and one looking at what deafness in a future society might be like. In episode 5, we get hints at a fugitive doctor story, with no actual story. In the finale, we get a hint at what might a population face if they all became sterile. But it’s TV, so there’s only so much you can cover at once.

Overall, taken as individual episodes, this season was really good. I feel treating the 8 episodes together, it was enjoyable, and pretty on par for a good Doctor Who season with a mix of stuff I found kind of annoying amongst the good stories.