Part of the issue is that Ruby seems pretty together, all things considered. She’s got her gran and two loving mums (three if you count Kate Lethbrige-Stewart, as Shirley points out in one of the episodes’s best lines). She’s tentatively pursuing a new relationship, which is arguably a healthy thing to do, even if this particular one doesn’t exactly end well. Even her ‘fight or flight’ state of mind, which she ascribes to PTSD, is well founded and isn’t shown to be disrupting her daily life – she’s not constantly jittery, finding aliens and monsters round every corner. All we really see is her responding to an elaborate prank in a way that feels completely logical given her experience.

Unfortunately, this ends up undermining the emotional throughline of the story. What is Ruby’s character arc meant to be? Seeking out others with some understanding of her experiences makes sense, and the episode doesn’t seem to be suggesting that she is trying to fill the Doctor-shaped hole in her life in an emotionally unhealthy way. Conrad seeming like a bit of a Doctor fanboy is the only real red flag, but he’s sweet and attentive otherwise, and you can see why she falls for him. So while her monologue at the end of the episode about needing to be on her own for a while certainly makes sense as a reaction to what she’s been subjected to by Conrad, it doesn’t really feel like a payoff to what’s set up at the beginning.

Which brings us to Conrad himself. In a way, Conrad is a more successful version of the villain the show tried to give us in “The Robot Revolution“, though the misogyny is more subtextual here. The performance is much stronger, which helps, and Jonah Hauer-King effectively sells Conrad’s mid-point heel turn with that casually malevolent “nailed it”. The twist is pretty effective, as it initially seems like Conrad’s Doctor obsession is what’s going to drive a wedge between him and Ruby – it’s certainly a better example of subversion than the show inadvertently coming out as pro-Amazon in “Kerblam!“, also written by Pete McTighe.

However, once the episode has pivoted to show Conrad’s true colours, it runs into the curious problem of being simultaneously too specific and too general. In the hellscape that is 2025, we are unfortunately far too aware of the various types being explored here – the amoral grifter exploiting people’s insecurities, the true believer conspiracist soaking in dangerous misinformation, and the furious reactionary driven to commit terrible acts of violence. The problem is, the episode can’t seem to decide which of these types it wants Conrad to be, so it tries to make him all three, which doesn’t really work. Not because there could never be any crossover between those types, but because the episode doesn’t have the time (or, seemingly, the inclination) to dramatise the progression.

So by the time Conrad is breaking into UNIT, stealing a gun and shooting people, it’s hard to parse his true motivations. Is it about money and self promotion? Is it revenge because they didn’t give him a job? Has he actually started to believe his own hype? During his climactic conversation with the Doctor, which Hauer-King plays with cold psychopathy, I was half convinced he was going to turn out to be the Master, publicly speed running online radicalisation for a laugh. There’s a version of this that could have worked – feinted at with comically underdeveloped UNIT stooge Jordan – where Conrad’s thoughtless grifting ends up radicalising somebody else into doing something horrific, but having one character embody every facet of the issue just ends up making him feel inconsistent.

The uneasy balancing act of translating these topical real-world dynamics to the world of Doctor Who also applies more broadly to the episode’s engagement with conspiracies, disinformation and online witch hunts. I’m generally of the mindset that it’s wise not to get too invested in continuity and canon when it comes to a 60-year-old show in which time travel is a major factor, but it’s difficult not to wonder how, in a world that has seen so many alien invasions, the anti-UNIT meme could take off so fast and have such immediate and catastrophic ramifications. Governments overreacting to public opinion and doing something stupid? Believable! People convincing themselves that a world-shaking event – like, I dunno, a pandemic – didn’t actually happen? Also believable! But in the context of this specific fictional universe, it just raises a few too many distracting questions.