Doctor Who Season Premiere Pits Babies vs. Icky Bogeyman — Grade It!
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Doctor Who kicked off its new season with a ship full of babies, a far-future cellphone data “plan,” and a literal booger monster. (Ewww.)
Last we saw the Fifteenth Doctor (Sex Education‘s Ncuti Gatwa) and Ruby Sunday (Coronation Street‘s Millie Gibson), they battled goblins, endured a musical number courtesy of said creatures, and saved a child from temporal deletion. With the groundwork laid and a core dynamic established, “Space Babies” gets right to it: Aboard the TARDIS, Ruby and the Doctor travel 150 million years into the past. They arrive without a hitch, at which point Ruby, all giggles and grins, bolts off to drink in some prehistory. She stops just shy of the TARDIS exit and turns back to the Doctor with a question: “Is it safe?” The Doctor assures her that it’s safe and that her fear of stepping on a butterfly and altering history is outrageous, giving her the green light to explore.
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A gobsmacked Ruby beholds dinosaurs, ventures away from the TARDIS …and immediately steps on a butterfly. Her appearance changes, and in the blink of an eye the young, excitable woman transforms into a confrontational alien. The Doctor, keen on avoiding alien-Ruby’s sudden wrath, gingerly cups the butterfly in his hands and coaxes it back into the air. The alien reverts to Ruby and they return to the TARDIS.
With one crisis averted, the pair travels to the far-future, where they find themselves aboard a seemingly vacant space station. The moment Ruby and the Doctor leave the TARDIS, though, a monster (Robert Strange) springs upon them. They evade the beast by ascending a few floors, but the Doctor is unsettled. For whatever reason, the monster terrifies him, and he vows to find out why.
The Doctor realizes they’ve stumbled onto a baby farm, segueing into a tender exchange in which he explains to Ruby that his greatest joy is witnessing their adventures through his companion’s eyes. He then uses the sonic screwdriver to “upgrade” Ruby’s phone so she can call home regardless of where she is in time or space. She calls her mom at the foster home, further confirming the screwdriver’s abilities and granting Ruby some much-needed comfort. They hear a voice around a nearby corner, and before they can guess its owner, a baby speeds around the corner in what appears to be a self-driving stroller. Despite his youth, the baby appears completely self-sufficient; he speaks full sentences and knows terms such as “pressure” and “temperature fluctuations.” The child notices Ruby and the Doctor, excitedly declares them mommy and daddy, and zooms off.
They follow the infant to a room teeming with baby-controlled strollers. The tot running the space station, a girl named Captain Poppy (voiced by Shola Olaitan-AjiBoye), reveals that they were abandoned there and have survived in part because of the ship’s nanny. The Doctor is still keen on finding the monster from earlier, so with Ruby close behind, he heads for another section of the station.
The Doctor suddenly remembers the night that newborn Ruby was left on a church’s doorstep, that fateful Christmas Eve we glimpsed throughout last year’s Doctor Who Christmas special. He shakes the scene out of his head only to find that the snow from the memory has joined them on the space station.
The ship’s nanny, formerly a disembodied voice tending to children, reveals herself to be a woman named Jocelyn (Golda Rosheuvel). She explains that the baby farm was shut down six years ago, leaving its “produce” to fend for themselves. Originally hired as an onsite accountant, she stayed aboard to watch over them, but could never care for them in person because she was afraid to watch them suffer.
Meanwhile, Eric (voiced by Sami Amber), one of the “space babies,” travels to the bottom floor to confront the monster. Ruby and the Doctor rush down to save Eric, only to find him gone and his stroller in smoking ruin. They find Eric hiding nearby, at which point NANI tells them to get out of there. Now dubbed The Bogeyman, the creature attacks them and corners them at a dead-end. Captain Poppy and her thumb-sucking, rattle-swinging brethren scare the Bogeyman off with a flamethrower, then scurry off to safety.
The Doctor and Ruby investigate the monster and discover that the farm’s technology created the Bogeyman to feed the children’s appetite for fiction, and that the creature itself is literally composed of “bogeys” — or boogers. Like the babies, the monster exists because of the ship. Unlike the babies, it was designed to be scary, explaining the Doctor’s mysterious phobia.
Desperate to keep the children safe, Jocelyn remotely traps the Bogeyman and attempts to blast it out of the ship’s airlock. The Doctor, recalling an earlier conversation in which he told Ruby he was the last of his kind in the universe, decides to save the Bogeyman. He understands what it means to be the only one of a kind and sees the monster as another child of the space station.
Having saved the children (and the Bogeyman) and sent them off to their home planet, the Doctor invites Ruby to be his full-time companion and travel across space-time to her heart’s content. The only condition? They can never use the TARDIS to stop Ruby’s birth mother from delivering her to the church on Ruby Road.
Initially hesitant to accept this stipulation, Ruby agrees and introduces the Doctor to her foster family. Before the Doctor gets re-acquainted with the family, he discreetly analyzes Ruby’s DNA inside the TARDIS, where it begins to snow….
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