Wild Blue Yonder

Wild Blue Yonder.

Many years ago, I was at a sci-fi charity fundraiser in Croydon. Nicholas Vince was there taking a Q and A. It was all ages. Paul McEvoy was there from Fright-fest hosting the Q and A.

A 9-year-old was in the audience, and Nicholas was asked. “Could you explain Hellraiser to my Son?”

Wild Blue Yonder is Russel’s attempt to do the same thing with ‘Event Horizon’. But with great skill, it makes me think I should give goosebumps a go.

The edge of time and space is nothing new to our duo. But I was won immediately when not only the Tardsi but the super doo whop Sonic that upset me so much last episode got thrown out the airlock.

Being the only two people on the screen for an hour is heavy. Let alone with the space being Saturday night prime time on BBC1, but once the monsters kick in, Catherine and David deploy a great deal of range. Without issuing too many spoilers, you see their best and worst traits written more than ample and given great style for their characters.

The pace, suspense and paranoia work so well in the story that we even recognise that this is not the 10th doctor with a new coat and a haircut. It filled me with great warmth to see this is not some sort of sidelined retcon but a genuine continuation of all the doctors who had come in between.

It does jar at points where the snappy dialogue is trying to convey such heavily shadowed threats and menace. The pre-title skit is given too much weight for the rest of the episode, which could work as a tonal change into the Pandorum territory but sadly becomes a running gag that devalues the threat.

But the concepts here are filled with weight. The anxiety is palpable, and the scale is immense. The sense of how to slow everything down when we are signed up for a running skippy toothy doctor. And my, what big teeth he has.

By the show’s end, we had been on an extraordinary journey while spending it in many corridors and flashy box rooms. To do this on a Saturday night and risk a lack of colour and spectacle for absurdity and fear is an excellent chance that one is worth visiting. 

There will be a lot of talk in the final scenes that set up the next episode. Olf friends for my generation appear, and it’s hard not to be moved more than care for the set-up for the next.

It’s a great episode that takes the template from the first and evolves it. I much like to end with my anecdote. Nicholas Vince took the Lamont configuration and told a tale of it as a Rubik’s cube but with no less pace and commitment. That is what happened here.

I am excited for the next