Things happen fast in this 2024 Doctor Who. A coupla-o-posts ago we remarked that having ‘only’ 8 episodes to run versus the 13 episode ‘full’ seasons which constituted the norm starting in 2005 necessitated speeding up the narrative arcs which RTD has been ever-so-clever in seeding his era(s) of Doctor Who with. In Boom we have the echoes of 2008 in play, but stylistically what Steven Moffat has glommed onto was what RTD put down in Midnight, a mini-masterpiece of tension which, in the case of David Tennant, took away his command and voice, quite literally, in an increasingly dire situation.
But Midnight is really towards the back end of the Tennant era, whereas this is only Gatwa’s fourth outing overall, which we hope will eventually be seen as quite early in his run, so what did Moffat glean as something to strip this particular Doctor of? It was his feet, or rather that exuberance which we noted in writing about Space Babies, that Gatwa just exuded energy of movement, and in Boom, that was gone.
This would require much from any actor as so much expression can now largely only be done facially, and we’re happy to say that Gatwa was there for it. Having said all that, and for an episode that almost runs in ‘real time,’ it did seem that this effective concept was also a little thin, and Boom struggled to fill its running time, with an odd proto-romance wedged-in in awkward ways that seemed almost unnecessary, but those are nits not worth sneezing about.
Something Gatwa couldn’t afford to do in Boom. Images and caps for Boom are now online.
