The Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and Belinda Chandra (Varada Sethu) arrive on the space station that is hosting the Interstellar Song Contest, which is being held at Harmony Arena. They watch as Mrs. Flood (Anita Dobson) observes and collects data from the Vindicator, a device the Doctor thinks he can use to return Belinda to Earth. The arena is hijacked by Kid (Freddie Fox) and Wynn (Iona Anderson), a pair of horned Hellions who deactivate the oxygen dome. Everyone including the Doctor is sucked into space, though Belinda and a few others are trapped on the station.
The Doctor experiences a vision of his granddaughter Susan Foreman (Carole Ann Ford) and he is revived by a nurse named Mike Gabbastone (Kadiff Kirwan) and his husband Gary (Charlie Condon), a local technician. They hack into the station’s systems, while Belinda and a contestant named Saint Bavier Cora (Miriam-Teak Lee) try to do the same.
The Doctor communicates with Kid, who tells him he is looking for revenge against the contest’s sponsor, who exploited his home world Hellia. The Doctor threatens him in a fiery speech. He does everything but mention that he has “a particular set of skills”. Cora is revealed as another Hellian who hid her cut-off horns because as a Hellian she would not be allowed to sing. Kid intends to send a signal that will destroy the brains of three billion people. The Doctor manages to stop this. Angry as we have seldom seen him, he tortures Kid until Belinda arrives and stops him.
After Kid and Wynn are arrested, the Doctor recovers the people ejected into space so the Gabbastones can revive them. Cora sings a song about Hellia and receives a standing ovation. The Doctor and Belinda learn from a hologram of Graham Norton, British late-night talk-show host, that Earth was actually destroyed on 24 May 2025, which explains why the TARDIS was unable to go there. But using the Vindicator, they are able to transport to the area, where they hear an ominous explosion outside the TARDIS doors.
In a mid-credits sequence, the Gabbastones revive Mrs. Flood, who undergoes bi-generation, becoming two women, one of whom is the Ran (Archie Panjani), an old enemy of the Eighth Doctor in the Eighties.
The episode was written by Juno Dawson, a best-selling author who had previously written for Doctor Who in the Jodie Whitaker days. She had been watching since she was ten. The episode was directed by Ben A. Williams. Showrunner Russell T. Davies had authorized a plot around “Die Hard Meets Eurovision.” It used half the soundstages available, and several songs were written by Dawson, Davies, and long-time Who composer Murray Gold.
It received positive reviews for its script, its humor, Gatwa’s performance, and the return of Susan Foreman and the Rani, but it was criticized for its breakneck speed. Some of the songs received a cult following. Graham Norton appears as a hologram of himself. Carol Ann Ford had not appeared as Susan Foreman since 1983. The aliens were produced by a mix of masks and prosthetics. The Harmony Arena can hold 200,000 people but only one hundred were used and digitally increased. Some critics were up in arms about the Doctor’s use of torture, but it was great to see this Doctor, who is generally charming and cute, turn into a raving angry thug as the mass-murderer reminds him of his own destroyed planet of Gallifrey. Are Kid and Wynn supposed to remind us of Wint and Kidd, the two comic villains from James Bond’s Diamonds are Forever?