Warning: Contains Spoilers!

In the Doctor Who Unleashed connected with this story, Russell T. Davies opines that Rogue is the ‘episode that everyone will be talking about’. If he means because it is riffing off Bridgerton, I think he has an exaggerated view of the part of the Venn Diagram where Fans of Doctor Who and Fans of Bridgerton overlap, in much the same way that John Nathan-Turner wrongly assumed that every 90s Doctor Who viewer was as big a fan of EastEnders as he was. If, on the other hand, he was talking about the queer romance element – well, anyone who wasn’t expecting that to crop up at some point mustn’t have been paying attention for the past 19 years. Either way, in a season that contains Boom, 73 Yards and Dot and Bubble, I think that Rogue will struggle to stand out from the crowd.

Rogue starts with the Doctor and Ruby all dressed up and dancing at a regency ball, with Ruby commenting that it’s “so Bridgerton”. We don’t see them arrive in the TARDIS, which is a good move as TARDIS scenes and TARDIS-emersion scenes often seem tacked on and the modern series struggles to do anything new with them in the same way that the classic series struggled in the mid-80s. We know that the Doctor and Ruby travel in the TARDIS, so we don’t need to see their arrival reiterated in every single episode. It’s not all serenade and sarabande at the regency ball, however, as a bunch of bird-like alien shapeshifters called Chuldur have crashed the party and are assuming the guise of various high-ranking guests. Unfortunately, their shapeshifting process involves murdering the person they replace, leaving an easily detected trail of carnage. They ain’t no Zygons!

The Doctor’s Sonic Screwdriver (nicely underused in this series, but hideously still looking like an upscale 90s VHS remote) detects an anomalous presence in the house, but it isn’t the Chuldur, it’s an extra-terrestrial bounty hunter called Rogue, played by renowned stage performer Jonathan Groff. Okay, cards on the table – Rogue is Captain Jack Harkness 2.0, there’s no convincing argument to the contrary! Sure, he doesn’t have the swagger and arrogance of the earlier character and he’s not such an insatiable horndog, but everything about his background and character screams Captain Jack. His spaceship is exactly as they would have done Jack’s ship in 2005 if they’d had the budget and, romantic developments aside, the character snugly fills the void left by John Barrowman. It’s been commented that RTD is matching many of the beats that worked in 2005 and it’s easy to imagine Rogue as the new Jack. He’ll probably have his own series soon.

But whereas the Ninth and Tenth Doctors only had limited tolerance for Jack’s lechery, the Fifteenth falls head over heels in love with an alacrity that makes Ten’s romance with Madame de Pompadour look almost long-winded. I can imagine that the two-handed scenes between Rogue and the Doctor in the former’s spaceship will be beloved by many, but they really do go on for an awfully long time and slow the narrative down to a crawl. That, I would have to say, is where Rogue falls down for me; even at 44 minutes, there is such a lot of padding. Yes, I get that you’re exploring the possibilities of a same-sex relationship for the Doctor. Yes, I get that you want to spend time showing off the gorgeous regency setting with its costumes and its dances. Yes, I get that you’re making a point about the zeitgeist of cosplaying. But it’s a paper-thin story and it’s spread so fine that a lot of it feels like space-filling.

The design of the bird-like Chuldur is very nice, pitched somewhere between the Jacondans from The Twin Dilemma and Peri’s bird metamorphosis from Vengeance on Varos. I appreciate the fact that they all look different, like exotic birds of paradise, although it is quite apparent that they are played by the same actor as the human that they happen to be cosplaying at that very moment (let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that some of the DNA lingers for a while). Indira Varma puts in a wonderful performance as the Duchess of Pemberton / the head of the Chuldur family, pitching it just right for an amoral spoilt alien brat. The other Chuldur are largely cyphers, but they fulfil their purpose and make for an interesting new alien species. Will they ever return? Should they ever return? Who knows.

Anyway, the bright young thing that Ruby has befriended turns out to be one of the Chuldur and seemingly takes her over, but the fact that it occurs off-camera strongly suggests to any TV-literate person that all is probably not as it seems. The Doctor and Rogue confront the Chuldur ‘family’ and the Doctor is horrified that Ruby has seemingly been taken over. Strangely, he does not seem to feel at all guilty that he was spending ages making goo-goo eyes at Captain Wonderful instead of seeing to the wellbeing of his 19-year old companion. Some chaperone you are, mate! This is my main problem with this story – the Doctor is so damn passive, taking the back seat (not a euphemism) to Rogue at almost every stage of the story. If something had happened to Ruby, would he be responsible? Yes, he would! You don’t abandon your friend when the first handsome pair of tight britches comes along.

Rogue makes good by rescuing Ruby from the ‘impenetrable’ trap that he’d set for the Chuldur by barging her out of the way (hmm), but he’s caught in the trap and confined to another dimension with the bad guys. Another of the Doctor’s flings trapped in another dimension! Seriously boys/girls, if you don’t want to get stuck in a netherworld for all eternity, don’t enter into a relationship with this dude! The Doctor vows to find him and I feel fairly sure that he will in a future episode, but to be brutally frank, I’d be quite happy if he didn’t. Nothing to do with it being a same-sex relationship, I’m just bored with the Doctor’s romances and the 7-year old me still lurking in the back of my mind just wants him to fight the baddies and save the universe, with none of that kissy stuff. Yuck.

Rogue wasn’t a bad story, it was better than Space Babies and possibly The Devil’s Chord, but it felt like a retrograde step after Boom, 73 Yards and Dot and Bubble. I mean, it’s a matter of personal choice; who am I to say what is good and what is bad? I’ve never seen Bridgerton, so I’m probably not the target audience for this particular episode. But I’d rather see the clever/twisty-turny stuff to the dance/scandal/cry stuff and that’s just a personal preference, which we’re all entitled to. The joy of Doctor Who (available in a plain wrapper next month with intimate illustrations by Chris Foss) is that it can give you all of these things and that is how it should stay. The moment when we start telling people what to like and what not to like is the moment that we become the bad guys from last week’s episode Dot and Bubble, if you see what I mean.

‘Doctor Who – Rogue’ is available to stream on BBC iPlayer in the United Kingdom and on Disney+ throughout the world.