The following contains spoilers for “Rogue.”

Doctor Who has always been gay.

From the get-go, many of its key creative figures were queer, and a large proportion of its fans are too. As Tat Wood explained in his essays in show guide About Time 6, the mix of science, fantasy and camp offered subtextual solace for queer youth in less tolerant times. Russell T. Davies returned and pledged to start saying the quiet part as loudly as he possibly could. As it stands, “Rogue” is probably the overtly gayest episode of Doctor Who ever made.

“Rogue” was written by Kate Herron and Briony Redman, the former best known as the director and executive producer of Disney’s Loki. Davies was loudly critical of Loki’s single nod toward the character’s pansexuality, calling it a “craven, feeble gesture.” This, then, is a chance to make amends by embracing all of the modern-day queer-geek touchstones. “Rogue” is an episode that sprints through slash fiction, D&D, cosplay, identity and, of course, the simmering erotic tension generated when two hot dudes face off against one another.

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As for the plot, it’s another modern-day Doctor Who that is carried by performances and vibes rather than mechanics. We open in 1813 at a stately home where two “gentlemen” are arguing in the night over a Lady’s Honor™. But the heroic figure breaks character, annoyed that his wimpy part isn’t as fun as playing the conniving, libidinous villain. Turns out he’s an alien that can absorb other people’s identities, leaving nothing but a desiccated corpse.

Inside the building, the Doctor and Ruby are dancing along to the Bridgerton-esque party, indulging their love of the Netflix series. Ruby is wearing a pair of Sonic Earrings that either control or inform her movements (it’s not clear) letting her partake in the formal dances. The earrings pick up interference, sending the Doctor off to investigate while Ruby immerses herself in capital-S Society. The source of the disturbance is a brooding figure lurking on a balcony above the dance floor: Rogue (Jonathan Groff).

Rogue is a bounty hunter sent to apprehend the alien — a Childer — who transforms into other people at the cost of their lives. The Doctor and Rogue slink off to discuss the matter in private and find the remains of the Duchess of Pemberton (Indira Varma). The pair accuse each other of being the Childer but, since Rogue has a gun and the Doctor doesn’t, he wins the argument. He marches our hero at gunpoint to his spaceship and uses a device to trap him in place, planning to dump him in an incinerator. The Doctor, however, is more interested in flirting with Rogue and hijacking the ship’s sound system to play Kylie Minogue.

Once Rogue has scanned the Doctor and discovered he’s not a Childer (complete with fan-baity images of past Doctors) they agree to work together. They talk about their lives, and the fact they have both clearly lost people along their journeys. After the Doctor has toured Rogue’s ship (it’s messy, he leaves his D&D dice on his main console) they visit the TARDIS. Both offer each other the chance at a better, or at least different, life, although we know deep down neither of them could ever leave what they have now. It doesn’t stop them from getting ever closer, but never quite being able to act upon their obvious impulse to lock lips. Now, with the help of the TARDIS, the Doctor modifies Rogue’s trap to more humanely exile them to an alternate dimension instead of an incinerator.

Meanwhile, Ruby is watching some Bridgerton drama, making friends with a character who behaves like she’s drawn out of a Jane Austen parody. It turns out that she is also a Childer, one of a handful that came to Earth to LARP their way through the evening. The gag being that, much like the Doctor and Ruby, they’re all Bridgerton fans who came to indulge in some fantasy. The night will end with a grand wedding, albeit one that just happens to descend into homicidal chaos.

After a chase, the Doctor and Rogue return to the house to see Ruby, now apparently the latest costume change for one of the Childers. Ruby's apparent death unleashes the Doctor’s vengeful side, and he prepares to sentence all of the aliens to a long and painful exile as a consequence. But when he does trap the Childers, it turns out Ruby was just playing along and had actually beaten her would-be attacker. But once the trap is sprung, it can’t be undone, and so the Doctor is faced with no choice but to condemn his friend along with his foes.

As a payoff, Rogue passionately snogs the Doctor and takes the trap controls out of his hand. Knowing that the Doctor can’t decide what to do, he sacrifices himself to push Ruby out of the trap, taking her place in the process. He triggers the trap, imprisoning himself in the alternate dimension with the Chidlers. As dawn breaks, the Doctor talks a good game about moving on, as we all must do in times of loss, but Ruby sees through it. There’s no way for him to rescue Rogue, and so he must accept what has happened and move on to pastures new. Which, in this case, is the next episode, the first part of the series’ two-part finale.

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One downside of Doctor Who’s abridged season is that we’ve been deprived of a lot of Ncuti Gatwa. He was absent much of the last two episodes and only at the end of “Dot and Bubble” did he get his first showpiece moment. Given Gatwa’s generosity to share focus with his co-stars, it’s gratifying to see him getting a chance to shine. And while Groff has to play Rogue as a stoic for much of the episode, the interaction between the pair is joyful.

I don’t feel as qualified to talk about the queer representation in the episode, but their chemistry felt believable and grounded. I’ll leave it to better, more qualified writers to expand on these themes, but I was urging the pair to kiss every time their faces came close. It’s funny how time changes your opinion on things: When the Doctor kissed in the doomed 1996 TV movie, I hated it. The idea of a sexy Doctor enmeshed in such human trivialities outraged my 12-year-old mind. Now, I just want the Doctor to bang whoever they want, whenever they want.

The nature of a guest-starring role in a running TV series means that there was no chance Groff would not die or be exiled into the ambiguous “if you ever fancy coming back” void. But it does mean Doctor Who’s loudly, proudly queer era has embraced the “Bury Your Gays” trope. It’s sad to see two men who are attracted to one another not get a chance to embrace that future, even if Rogue’s sacrifice is noble and well-telegraphed.

None of that should detract from the fact “Rogue” is a delightful way to spend an hour, and yet another welcome swerve both across genres and tones. It’s a gloriously slashy and fun romp that should help show that Doctor Who is a vehicle through which you can tell almost any story it’s possible to tell. It’s one of the reasons I fell in love with it all those years ago, and I hope you have too.

Susan Twist Corner

I was on vacation and so couldn’t review “Dot and Bubble,” which was a magnificent episode of Doctor Who. Last week, the pair recognized Twist who was playing Penny Pepper-Bean, and the Doctor even took a picture of her face. They also both clocked where they’d seen her before, although Ruby’s memory was shakier given the time-bending weirdness of “73 Yards.”

Here, Twist is depicted in a portrait which, again, the Doctor notices and records. It does appear that the show has managed to find a way to balance the needs of each episode with the knowledge fans will scrub every frame for more meaning. But this isn’t Davies’ first time mining the show’s metatext and paratext to bait fans: 2008’s “The Next Doctor” played with audience expectations after David Tennant announced he would be leaving but information about his successor was kept quiet.

It might be nothing, but Rogue also mentions his bounty-hunting “paperwork” has gotten a lot more demanding since the “new boss” took over. Is that a hint about a big bad or just a character moaning about the admin side of their job?

The following contains spoilers for “73 Yards.”

Russell T. Davies admits his writing eschews narrative formalism in favor of things that just feel right. Two decades ago, his critics pointed to his use of deus ex machina endings as a stick to beat his reputation with. But we’re in a different era now, where vibes matter just as much as logic — both inside the show’s new more fantastic skew, and in the real world. “73 Yards” is the vibiest episode of new Doctor Who so far, but I even found it easy to sit back and enjoy what it was doing.

Doctor Who is a complicated show to make, and some series have started production on Day 1 a week or more behind schedule. To combat this, the show started making “-lite” episodes that didn’t need the leads to be as involved. There are “Doctor-lite” episodes like “Love and Monsters” and “Blink,” and even “companion-lite” episodes like “Midnight.” This production process enables the star, or stars, to be off shooting Episode A while a guest cast takes the spotlight for the bulk of Episode B.

Production of the new series began while star Ncuti Gatwa was still finishing the last of his work on Netflix’s Sex Education. So while he appears in the opening and closing moments of "73 Yards", he’s otherwise absent as the Doctor has been erased from history. It gives us the chance to see what a modern companion would do if left stranded in uncertain territory without her alien ally. The episode takes hard turns from folk and rural horror to kitchen-sink drama before becoming a light homage to Taxi Driver. Suffice to say, this is another episode you wouldn’t watch with small kids.

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The TARDIS lands on a cliff edge in Wales, with the Doctor pointing out it’s another liminal space where magic is allowed to creep in. He even mentions the war between the “land and the sea,” name-checking a rumored spin-off fans discovered after scouring production documents. The Doctor talks about how great a country Wales is, except for Roger ap Gwillam, a Welsh politician who, two decades hence, will lead the UK to the brink of nuclear armageddon. He then steps into a fairy ring, disturbing its web, and disappears while Ruby reads the paper notes tied to it. The notes mention a Mad Jack, a scary figure that sounds like a villain from folklore.

Suddenly, Ruby is alone on the cliff but can now see the blurry figure of an old woman waving her arms at her in the distance. Ruby tries to approach her but the figure remains the same distance away (the titular 73 yards) no matter where she goes. Believing the Doctor has ghosted her, she tries to solve the quandary of this figure on her own. Ruby approaches a hiker (Susan Twist) and tries to work out where she’s seen her before (every episode thus far), but can’t quite put her finger on it. She asks the hiker if she’d be willing to speak to the old woman who is following her, but when the hitchhiker gets there, whatever she says is so horrifying that she sprints away from the scene in terror.

Ruby heads to a pub in the nearby town where the locals mock her — mistaking her hesitancy for condescension. She asks one of the patrons to go speak to the woman and, when he does, the same thing happens. Ruby gets home and asks her mum to try, this time holding a phone so Ruby can hear what she’s saying. But the phone call is disrupted and her mum is similarly horrified by what she hears — locking Ruby out of her home soon after. Kate Lethbridge-Stewart and UNIT are next to offer aid, right up until they encounter the woman, when they all abandon her.

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All the time, the old woman remains 73 yards away from wherever Ruby is, unnoticed by everyone else unless Ruby directs their attention to her. She can’t photograph the woman's face — it's blurry — and can’t get close enough to hear her ominous warning. In fact, even to the end of the episode, there’s a lot of unknowns that are never resolved.

Ruby’s strangely resilient, and once she’s gotten beyond the abandonment, she looks to build a new life for herself. She treats her stalker as a friend, wishing her well as we cycle through a montage of the next chapter of Ruby’s life. She gets a job, moves into her own flat and goes through a series of breakups as she gently ages past 30, and then 40. Then, on the TV, she sees Roger ap Gwillam on the TV, who even mentions Mad Jack, and remembers both the Doctor’s warning and the messages in the fairy ring. It takes Ruby no time at all to be sure that her purpose in life is to save the world, and to avert Gwillam’s nuclear catastrophe.

She signs up to Gwillam’s fascist political party as a volunteer and eventually reaches a position where she’s close to the top. Gwillam’s rise is quick and it’s not long before he’s promising to secede from NATO and put his itchy trigger finger on the UK’s nuclear arsenal, ready to wage war on the rest of the world. Gwillam’s inauguration will take place at Cardiff City Stadium, while Ruby follows the politician along, lurking in the crowd.

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Ruby then starts to approach Gwillam, walking across the off-limits pitch at the stadium, and you expect her to pull out a weapon. But instead, she whips out her phone and starts measuring the distance between her and Roger until she reaches 73 yards. When she does, she gestures to the villain to notice the woman, and when he notices her, he hears the horrifying thing she says. The shock is enough to send Gwillam racing out of the stadium, resigning from the role of Prime Minister and preventing nuclear armageddon.

But while Ruby hoped that would be the end of it, the figure remains with her for the rest of her life. It’s only on her deathbed she realizes she can project herself back in time to act as a warning for the Doctor to not step in the fairy ring. She does so, preventing the accident in the first place and paradoxically nullifying the entire time stream in the process. History carries on its merry way and all is well… for now. But given the risks of paradoxes in Doctor Who, and the general sense that history is unraveling, it might not augur too well for what’s going to happen in the future.

Bad Wolf / BBC Studios

“73 Yards” is an exercise in putting your character in a hostile world and seeing what they’ll do to deal with it. It’s an episode that, when written down, doesn’t feel like a lot happens, because so much of its runtime is an exploration of Ruby as a character. Doctor Who thrives when the companion role is occupied by someone who wants to grab a fistful of narrative for themselves. And Ruby Sunday seems almost too perfect in her ability to draw out the logic from what she’s experienced and work within it.

Much as you can draw narrative and thematic parallels between the new series and Davies’ original tenure, this episode pulls from “Turn Left.” Both tell the story of what happens to a companion when the Doctor is withdrawn from the narrative and what they do to fix that wrong. And it’s no surprise both suggest that the UK, without the intervention of the Doctor, is only a few days away from tipping over into fascism.

Ruby’s humanity shines, even to the point where she’s trying to treat her tormentor with care. She refuses to fly, or travel by boat, lest she endanger the life of the apparition that’s following her, despite how much damage it causes to her life. And when she sees Roger ap Gwillam on the TV, she’s certain that her destiny is to prevent the nuclear armageddon the Doctor warned her about. This is another useful thread — the idea that Ruby has an instinctive grasp of the genre she exists in — much as she did in “Space Babies.”

As for the ending, it’s probably best we talk about those “vibes,” or the sort of slightly skewed associations in the show’s logic. Ruby, at the end of her life, realizes that she’s able to travel, or project herself somehow, through time to avert the Doctor’s fall. There’s nothing in the episode that points to it, no hint that the ghostly figure is Ruby, or if this is tied to the snow or anything else. But perhaps, the trick to an episode like this is simply to let yourself relax and enjoy seeing the character evolve, rather than anything more.

Susan Twist Corner

Obviously, Susan Twist plays the hiker that Ruby first encounters after the Doctor disappears and, for the first time, Ruby notices the familiarity. In the materials that Disney sends along that Susan Twist’s character is named the “mystery woman.”

And on the subject of twists, you’ll recall at the end of “Church on Ruby Road” that, in the post-credits, Mrs Flood (Anita Dobson) breaks the fourth wall. The annoying neighbor character, who lives next to Ruby’s mum’s flat, turns to the camera and asks if we’ve “Never seen a TARDIS before?” (Given her surprise at seeing it earlier in the episode, it’s clear her history may have been changed during the course of the show.) When Ruby heads back to her mum’s house, Anita Dobson’s Mrs Flood is back sitting on her step with her deckchair out. Interestingly, when she notices the ghostly figure — and Ruby and her Mum’s attempts to deal with it, she declares that it’s “nothing to do with me” and goes inside. Which, again, feels like a hint that Mrs Flood and the mystery woman are separate

The following contains spoilers for “Boom.”

It should be a given any new series needs time to find its footing, even when it’s a revival of an already-running hit. The first three episodes of “new” Doctor Who have been fun, but not without their own idiosyncrasies that made them hard to love. Now it’s time for Steven Moffat, the series’ greatest 21st century writer, to show what this new season can do. There’s the usual degree of showboating and cleverness, but it’s hard to deny the man’s genius when he pens the first genuine classic of the Disney+ era. Bloody hell.

“Boom” thrusts the Doctor and Ruby into the smallest corner of a war, and lets it play out in microcosm. This is an angry story about how money, power and cruelty make people inhuman, and is the sort of episode Doctor Who excels at. This story makes no bones about the pointlessness of war and why money is the engine that keeps it going. Its framing may be modern — there’s one too many uses of the word “algorithm” here — but its central thesis is timeless.

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In a wasteland battlefield on Kastarian 3, two militarized Anglican clerics are walking back to base. Carson (Majid Mahdizadeh-Valoujerdy) is leading his friend, John Francis Vater (Joe Anderson) who has been blinded in the fighting, an injury that’ll take four weeks to recover from. In the distance, they spot an ambulance but seem afraid of it and look to go the long way around it. Carson loses his footing and slips into a small crater, activating a land mine that instantly obliterates him. The disturbance summons the ambulance, a tank-tracked device with a large screen with an apparently friendly avatar (Susan Twist) which injects its tendrils into Vater, identifying his injury. It decides that four weeks is an unacceptable amount of time for recovery and terminates him instead. His scream is heard by the Doctor, who sprints out of the TARDIS to help but winds up putting one foot on the exact same mine that killed Carson.

Ruby arrives to find the Doctor frozen in place, asking her to describe what he’s standing on: A Villengard mine. It’s an anti-personnel explosive made by a notorious weapons manufacturer that Moffat has referenced several times before. The Doctor asks Ruby to find something heavy for him to hold, so that he can shift his weight and put his foot down without triggering the mine. What she finds is Vater’s compacted remains bolted to an AI canister containing a simulacrum of Vater. The Doctor asks Ruby to throw it to him, but she instead opts to walk within the blast range and hand it over. It affirms the dynamic that as Gatwa’s Doctor has vacated the role of big-chested hero, Ruby has stepped in to fill the void.

The mine is, however, unsure if the Doctor is a viable target, and so remains frozen on the edge of activation. Villengard’s weapons are notoriously vicious and the company has created a warfare algorithm to limit the number of bodies in the battle zone at one time, while also dragging wars on profitably and indefinitely. It gives the company license to slay the wounded rather than spending the cash to cure them.

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Before he died, Vater was speaking to his daughter Splice (Caoilnn Springall), who was brought along to the war as there was no-one else to look after her. While her father was on patrol, she had been left in the care of Mundy (Varada Sethu), a lower-ranking soldier in the army. But she slips her minder to reach the last GPS-tagged location of her father. She arrives, triggering the hologram attached to Vater’s remains that delivers his valediction to his daughter.

Soon after, Mundy tracks down her wayward ward and is able to explain the rest of the plot to the TARDIS crew. The Anglicans have been fighting a war for six months against an enemy that’s never seen or heard. Mundy and the Doctor spar on the nature of religion and how faith — in more than just a higher power — helps create willing material for the meat grinder of war. Mundy’s skeptical about the Doctor and Ruby but is quickly convinced when she scans the Doctor to see he’s not just going to explode on the mine. As a complex space-time event, the mine’s activation won’t just kill him but destroy half of the planet. It gets worse: The mine is going to time out and go off anyway after its stuttering activation.

Having detected the fracas, an ambulance arrives and jams its menacing tendrils into the Doctor. Ruby, again refusing to allow anyone else control the narrative, grabs Mundy’s rifle and tries to create a distraction to no effect. Mundy tells Ruby to shoot her using the rife’s lowest setting which would draw the ambulance without being fatal. But, as Ruby takes aim, Canterbury (Bhav Joshi) arrives just in time to misappraise the scene and shoot Ruby to defend his fellow soldier. Ruby, on the edge of death, generates more snow but is fading fast

The Doctor has worked out the problem, which is that there’s no enemy on the planet at all — it’s barren. Villengard's algorithm is sending soldiers out to die with the traps they themselves bought and probably placed. The only solution is to surrender but that’s not something Mundy is willing, or empowered, to do, so the Doctor needs to find proof to show to the senior cleric. He uses the AI of Vater, appealing to his duty as a father and whatever humanity is left inside to search through the military database to find evidence there is no enemy at all.

More ambulances arrive in an attempt to overwhelm the people in the crater, looming down on them all. As Mundy and Canterbury speak, the latter is suddenly minced for reasons that boil down to… we’re in the final few minutes of the episode. In the chaos, it looks as if all is lost, but as the Villengard AI projects a hologram, it’s quickly taken over by Vater, whose love for his daughter has hopefully triggered some sort of feedback loop, ending the war and disabling the mine. As the war is ended, Ruby is resurrected by the ambulance and the four survivors are able to enjoy the beautiful view in the skies over Kastarian 3.

There’s even time for the Doctor to mention a “grumpy old man” who told him once that “what will survive of us is love.” That’s a reference to notoriously acerbic poet Philip Larkin’s work An Arundel Tomb, referencing a long-decayed sculpture of two people lying in state. The Doctor mentions Splice may have a bright future ahead of her, and gets ready to head off to their next adventure.

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There’s no good place to address this later, so I’ll add that Varada Sethu has also been cast as a new companion for Doctor Who’s second season. Initial rumors suggested she was replacing Millie Gibson but the BBC said last month the trio would travel together. It’s not uncommon for an actor to play a minor role in one episode and then return as a member of the core cast. Peter Capaldi, Karen Gillan, Freema Agyeman and Colin Baker all played one-off roles before joining as a Doctor or as a companion. I have no idea if Mundy will return, or if Sethu will play a new character, but I’m not sure Mundy was a compelling enough character to warrant a revisit.

Bad Wolf / BBC Studios

“Boom” is a masterclass in perpetually-building tension in a way that Doctor Who has rarely attempted. I wouldn’t want to experience this level of stress every single week, but it’s a wonderful change from the status quo. The one thing that doesn’t quite work with the episode is the uneven pacing. For all the effort put into building the tension, the ending just seems to happen.

I feel like Moffat was straining against the running time, since the last few minutes are just dashed off without as much attention as I’d have liked. Interestingly, the other times Moffat has written stories that are this bleak, like “The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances” and “World Enough and Time / The Doctor Falls,” they were both two-parters. I’m not sure “Boom” needed 90 minutes, but an extra 10 or so might have helped things breathe.

Despite being rooted to one spot for most of the story, Gatwa’s Doctor still commands every frame he occupies. There’s enough chemistry between him and Millie Gibson that the pair’s interactions are entirely believable. The rest of the cast, however, don’t really get as much time to shine, given the limited focus and the stock roles they play in the narrative.

It’s entirely in keeping with Moffat’s style that he’d come back to a show, now equipped with a Disney-sized budget, only to make an episode set in one location. As a writer, he’s always enjoyed tying one hand behind his back and then allowing those restrictions to force him to be better. It was his Swiss watch plotting, smart storylines and snappy dialog that has always ensured his episodes are events. History has also silenced his critics: Last year, Doctor Who Magazine polled readers to rank every episode of the show made. Staggeringly, of the top 10, Moffat was credited with five, knocking Robert Holmes, the show’s greatest writer, off his perch.

And, as I said at the top, “Boom” stands proud as the first bona fide classic of the Disney+ era.

Susan Twist Corner

This week, Susan Twist played the avatar of the sinister Villengard ambulances that roamed the battlefield. Several times, the Doctor appealed to Vater’s AI homunculus on the fact that they are, or were, both fathers. If it isn’t clear, I think the show really wants the audience to know that the Doctor is a father with a child, whereabouts unknown. The hacky premise would be that it’s Susan who has taken the mantle of “The One Who Waits,” or that she’s somehow Ruby. Yeugh.