"Space Babies" is the first episode of the fourteenth series of the British science fiction television programme Doctor Who.

The episode, which takes place immediately after the events of "The Church on Ruby Road", follows an alien time traveller known as the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and his companion Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson), as they travel to a space station and discover a baby farm.

The babies live in fear of the creature down below, which they have dubbed the Bogeyman, and their only caregiver is supposedly an AI named NAN-E.

The Doctor traces NAN-E's programming to a storage room but discovers that it is actually a woman named Jocelyn.

The Doctor locates a refugee planet nearby and vows to send Jocelyn and the space babies to it.

As they return to her adoptive family, the Doctor performs a DNA scan on an unsuspecting Ruby, as it suddenly begins to snow inside the TARDIS.

[6] Twenty real infants were used and were occasionally replaced with dolls due to UK child labour law and actors' union restrictions.

[29] Louise Griffin from Radio Times attributed the low ratings to the episode's launch on BBC iPlayer nearly twenty hours previously.

The website's consensus reads: "Starting things off on a buoyant and eccentric note, 'Space Babies' is an intergalactic bundle of joy as far as introductions go.

"[17] Jack Seale of The Guardian described the episode as "a textbook example of a mid-ranking Who instalment, fun but forgettable and, ultimately, not making sense".

He labelled Davies's political and personal messages as "awkward", and noted that the episode's allegory about the rollback of abortion rights in the United States was "accompanied by the deafening scrape of a crowbar".

He also had mixed feelings on the plot, particularly with regards to the Bogeyman's change of character, which he believed to be "so jarringly sudden" that he wondered whether a scene was missing.

[11] Inverse's Bui Tran-Hoai believed the episode to be a "mixed bag", describing it as "an outrageously goofy sci-fi adventure" that spends too long establishing the Doctor Who premise to its new Disney+ viewers, leaving long-term fans to "twiddle their thumbs as they wait for the good stuff".

[25] Reviewing the episode for the Radio Times, Morgan Jeffery believed the story to be simple, but felt that it should nonetheless please both new and returning viewers.

[19] Vulture's Jennifer Zhan noted the allegory between the thematic element of the baby farm and the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the United States.

Zhan believed that some plot elements in the episode did not make sense, and criticised the CGI animations of the babies's facial movements.