What’s It All About, JG? Good question. The Doctor steps on a fairy circle after exiting the TARDIS and vanishes. Ruby then spends the rest of the episode haunted by a figure she can’t quite focus on that stays the titular 73 yards away. And whenever anyone encounters the out-of-focus figure, they treat Ruby with contempt and turn away from her, whether random figures in a village, family members, or UNIT. This haunts Ruby throughout her life until she figures out how to use this “power” and takes down a fascist UK prime minister who wants to use a nuke just coz. Eventually, on Ruby’s deathbed, the mysterious figure is revealed to be Ruby herself, smeared across her own timeline. She can then go back in time and is able to stop the Doctor from breaking the charm and it’s all over. Erm. Something like that, anyway…
Is It Any Good? It’s well made, certainly. And if that seems like it’s an opening gambit to cover future thoughts, well, you may possibly be correct. But it really is well made. Little of it makes any actual sense but the folk horror material in Wales that covers about the third quarter of the episode is extremely well put together and very effective. There’s a real sense that the production is being pushed again in a way that it hasn’t quite this season. “Boom” looked good but it looked good in a “we spent lots of money on this” sort of way. That’s not a criticism but this looks properly cinematic again and in terms of the way its shot it’s much closer to the Chibnall-era look, which is a great thing.
That quality is really used to ramp up the pressure on Ruby in the first half too. The scene in the pub where the locals dick about with her for the lolz is a bit bathetic in its conclusion but it’s properly disconcerting and very well shot. Even the moment where Ruby asks to pay with her phone is deliberately played as ambiguous – we don’t know at that point what time she’s landed in so it could be before payments on phones were commonplace or even existed so she might be accidentally putting herself in the firing line. It’s not that, it’s just the pub landlady also dicking around with a clearly-distressed Ruby for no readily apparent reason but the way it’s framed and shot is properly uncanny in a way Doctor Who just isn’t very often. It’s a shame both the phone payment scene and the Mad Jack scene that follows it are both undercut almost immediately and in the same way – once was enough – but they’re very effectively realised.
This is Millie Gibson’s big chance to shine, what with Ncuti Gatwa being away finishing up his time on Sex Education, and the episode – as Doctor-light as it’s possible to get while still actually featuring the character – is clearly geared towards showing off what she can deliver. And she’s… fine? Yeah, that’s the word. Not spectacular, not a disaster, just… fine. There’s certainly nothing to be that critical of but also not that much that deserves a specific call-out either. Maybe that’s damning with faint praise but given this is the Big Showcase Episode there’s just not all that much to get excited about, either in the performance or the character.
Again, that’s not to say that anything is wrong here, exactly. There’s a few individual moments that are really striking and that Gibson does well with. The scene with UNIT (and a surprisingly well-used Kate Stewart) manages to hit the uncanny successfully once more and Ruby’s reaction to it feels genuine. It’s very disconcerting to the audience too – we’re used to UNIT swooping in to save the day and that’s exactly how this is sold to us, right up until the moment it isn’t. It’s a very effective subversion and, unlike the two moments in the pub, isn’t immediately undercut so it really lands and is probably the episode’s strongest moment. It’s also the last moment the episode comes close to sustaining itself but oh well, you can’t have everything.
Still, there’s more to an episode than a lead performance. And what this episode is about it… actually, I haven’t a fucking clue. This is really well made, and Gibson is perfectly fine, but what any of this is actually about I haven’t the slightest idea. There are no explanations for anything anywhere here. The Doctor vanishing when he breaks the fairy circle isn’t explained. Why this creates a mysterious figure isn’t explained. Why Ruby’s haunting figure is always exactly 73 yards away isn’t explained. Why it drives people away from Ruby isn’t explained. Why the figure remains impossible to focus on isn’t explained. Why the figure is finally able to approach when Ruby is on her death bed isn’t explained. How Ruby is able to time-travel along her own timeline to stop the Doctor breaking the charm isn’t explained. Nothing here is explained.
Ambiguity in Doctor Who is a great thing – my favourite Classic-era story is “Warrior’s Gate”, for what it’s worth – but there’s a difference between ambiguity and just not bothering to explain anything and this episode lands squarely in the latter category. “A wizard did it,” would literally be more justification than we get here (and would kind of almost make sense, given this is a season that openly includes magic in its toolbox). This just looks sloppy, as if generating atmosphere and hoping the production will be up to delivering on it is enough to get away with what the episode is trying to do. It isn’t – not even close in fact. You can leave some things unexplained, that’s fine. Leaving everything unexplained is just rubbish.
That leaves the episode feeling fundamentally unsatisfying. There needs to be more to an episode than just looking good, there needs to be an actual point to it. There’s a sense that the episode is wrestling with Ruby’s abandonment issues – her adoptive mother turning on her after encountering the blurred figure, the series of relationships Ruby is unable to sustain because of it, and so on – but the episode doesn’t elucidate anything about those abandonment issues. It just sits there saying, “Ruby has abandonment issues!” Yes, we know! And…? But there is no “and” so the episode ends up being about nothing at all. It’s just 50 minutes of well-produced runtime.
Maybe this will end up being “The Long Game” of the season and watching it back at the end will clarify some of these points but just watching this as an episode in the middle of the season as a standalone episode (and that’s us halfway through now) it’s not a good experience. At least “The Long Game” had an actual plot, even if it was just “Simon Pegg is an evil CGI blob that wants to control people”. What’s the plot of this episode? Random stuff happens to Ruby until she magically fixes it without any explanation or reason.
Good? Na.
Would You Recommend It? For the third time out of four, no. There’s is, to use a well-worn phrase, no there there. This episode wants to be About Things but it can’t come close to landing any of them. The politics – if that’s the right word – is simply laughable, and also often simply simple. I mean, there’s more time spent on it than there is in RTD’s first couple of episodes but it’s still not close to being enough. The idea of a fascist coming to be Prime Minister in the UK is something Davies has already covered in the wildly ineffectual Years and Years and it doesn’t seem like he’s learned any of the lessons from that period. Mainly, that writing politics isn’t really his forté. I’m glad it tries to be about something but that’s not the same as it succeeding.
There’s no sense of real threat from Roger ap Gwilliam at all. He’s played with sleazy Tory smarm well enough by Aneurin Barnard but the character is just a straw man, existing for Ruby to take down for purely plot-related purposes. If that had been the focus of the episode – if this has been a political thriller – then there might have been enough time to make him a genuine threat but there isn’t. “Bad guy wants to use nukes” isn’t satire, it’s not even commentary, since, you know, most people don’t need to be told that randomly firing off a nuclear weapon is a bad thing. It’s just there.
And “just there” is exactly the problem. The episode can’t decide whether it wants to be folk horror, political thriller, character study, or something else entirely and as a result it’s none of them. Everything is just there. It’s all assembled into a single package and the folk horror is both effective and something Doctor Who should return to explore more of at some point in the future, but that’s about all you can say of it. It’s immensely frustrating to see so much good work be in service of so little. I might not be singing the praises of Millie Gibson from the rooftops but she deserved better than this.
And there’s a sourness to this that jars badly. So far, this season has been about fun, and adventure, and excitement, and the Doctor shedding his past. Even if that does end up with your foot landing on a mine (heh). That was the whole point of the bi-generation, to leave all that angst with the Fourteenth Doctor to deal with while the Fifteenth goes on his merry way. But there’s a really sour undertone here that cuts fundamentally against what “The Giggle” tried to do at it’s conclusion. The people in the Welsh pub fuck about with Ruby – a woman clearly suffering and in need of some kind of help – because, it seems, they’re pricks and/or have a chip on their shoulder about the English. And they do it twice, with the phone and the Mad Jack bit.
Mad Jack himself (if that’s who Gwilliam is, and it’s not at all clear that this is the case) is a typical paint-by-numbers fascist. The British public are too stupid to vote for anyone else. And on it goes. It’s all very bitter, which is fine if you want to make that the core of your episode but once again it isn’t because there is no core to this episode – it’s hollow. It just seems to be a side-effect of how Davies is writing and he doesn’t seem to have realiesd. It doesn’t come across well at all, and the near-future setting isn’t letting him off the hook. It all just adds to the strange, random tone of this episode and not in a way that leans into the uncanny – it’s just not very good.
Which is what this episode is. Ultimately well made but not very good. At this point Season “One” is tracking worse than Chibnall’s two full seasons. It’s legitimate to be worried at this point.
Scores on the Doors? 6/10 It’s more watchable than “Space Babies” (fractionally) but then again, so are most things. At least that episode had an actual conclusion.
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