This is a spoiler-free review of Boom. A full review will follow the broadcast on BBC One.
It will be of no surprise to any long-term readers of this blog that I was over the moon when it was confirmed that Steven Moffat would be coming back to write for Doctor Who in its new guise. Moffat’s episodes are amongst my favourite and his era as showrunner is my favourite of the revived show’s era. For those who are new to Doctor Who, Boom shows another facet to a show that is not the same week after week but revels in the opportunity to change tones.
All of that is to say that Boom thoroughly delighted me. It takes a fairly simple premise, the Doctor been stood on a landmine and therefore not being able to move for the majority of an episode, and makes into a captivating and enthralling forty-five minutes of television. With the Doctor, who has trouble staying in one place for too long stuck, the story has to bring the action to him, and Moffat finds good and organic ways of bringing the relatively small cast to him. Whilst the story doesn’t move geographically that much, Moffat finds ways of stopping the audience by ratcheting up the tension another notch and liberally peppers his script with nods to his themes, past work on Doctor Who and pinches of black humour. There are elements of this story that don’t work as well as the central concept, but I think that I will delve into those in the full review out later today. All I will say here is that they did not take me out of the episode or detract from my enjoyment too much.
Whilst the majority of the episode is confined in a crater, the story is well directed and at no point lets you forget the peril the Doctor is in. There is a well-defined sense of stakes and consequences, thanks both to the writing and the direction of Julie Anne Robinson. The story does get the opportunity to show off the increased budget at times and looks really good in doing so, but this is pretty minimal here. Boom has been filmed using Volume (also known as StageCraft), which rose to fame being used on shows like The Mandalorian, which did cause me some concern when I first heard this, as overreliance on it can feel quite artificial, but I think it worked well here.
Boom gives us yet another new facet of our relatively new Doctor, showing him running towards danger, rather than away from it as we have seen in Space Babies and The Devil’s Chord. Gatwa continues to ooze charm but also shows some fire behind the facade, which feels almost as though it’s been hidden in the last few episodes. Steven Moffat clearly feels strongly about the story that he has written and the issues contained in this script, and I think that gives Gatwa something different to what we’ve previously seen him do as the Doctor, and he does that with aplomb. The Doctor gets to give a really good speech, the first that we’ve got to hear this Doctor deliver and Gatwa does really well with it. Ruby gets a chance to show more sides of her character here, and she too shines on screen with Gatwa. There are moments here that distinctly mark her out as worthy companion material here and I feel as though she is a great character in her own right.
In summary, I would be really surprised if Boom was not my favourite episode of the series by the end.
For more spoiler-free reviews:
The Impossible Blog 
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