What’s The Episode? The two-part season finale The Legend of Ruby Sunday and Empire of Death.
What’s It All About, JG? The Doctor returns to UNIT and meets up with Kate Lethbridge-Stewart (Jenna Redgrave), Mel (Our Bonnie), and assorted other UNIT bods. Kate wants help finding out who the mysterious Susan Triad, head of S Triad Technology, is – someone the Doctor and Ruby have been encountering in various different forms on their travels together. Mel’s undercover and investigating and while she does that, Mrs Flood (Anita Dobson) pops into take over caring for Cherry while Ruby’s Mum Carla (Michelle Greenidge) joins the shenanigans at UNIT. Turns out they have a Time Window, a device that lets them look back in time and they use a VHS of the night of Ruby’s abandonment to try and figure out who her biological Mum is. This overloads the Time Window, taking a UNIT Colonel with it. Susan (Not That One, despite the play) prepares to give a speech to the UN but before she can, a UNIT employee – the perfetctly-dreadfully named Harriet Arbinger – announces that The One Who Waits has in fact stop waiting and it’s Sutekh, who turns up for a nice end-of-episode reveal. Which is nice.
And following on from that reveal, Sutekh turns the world to dust (maybe Thanos was busy) and then, eventually, the whole universe. The Doctor, Ruby, and Mel escape in a “remembered TARDIS” and try to come up with a plan to put things right. This involves finding out who Ruby’s Mum is because this mystery apparently annoys the God of Death so much that he’ll stop at nothing to resolve it. The Doctor and Ruby travel to 2046, the time of fascist PM Roger ap Gwilliam from “73 Yards” because everyone’s DNA is on a database and find out who she is. Ah but it turns out Mel’s been taken over by Sutekh as well and apparently that’s a step too far so the Doctor puts Sutehk on a lead, drags him to his death in the Time Vortex, and this apparently fixes the whole universe being dead. It says here. And then there’s a coda, where it turns out Ruby’s Mum was just a 15-year-old who got pregnant and ran away to escape from an abusive family. They reconcile, Ruby decides to stay behind with her newly-discovered birth mother, and the credits roll.
Is It Any Good? 50% yes, 50% no. So it is, in other words, a typical RTD finale where lots of absolutely excellent work is done in part one only to piss it all away with a stupid finale in part two. As far as part one goes, and working very much along the better-late-than-never lines, RTD has finally, actually, genuinely produced the goods and delivered an absolutely rock-solid episode that actually feels like Doctor Who in a way this season has really badly struggled with. It helps, of course, returning to a familiar Earth setting, with Kate, Mel (Mel!) and even Rose Noble (Yasmin Finney) all being present and correct. Familiar settings do help with things feeling… well, I hesitate to say “normal” but feeling like Doctor Who at the very least.
Returning characters aren’t the only thing that makes this feel familiar and cosy though because it does have to be acknowledged that, to an extent, Davies is playing his greatest hits here. Which to an extent is fair enough. If this is being seen as Season One and introducing the show to a whole new audience, there’s a logic to showing them how the Big End Of Season Two Parter works. So we have someone’s Mum getting embroiled at UNIT (just like “Army of Ghosts”), we have the whole “anagrams” thing (just like “Utopia”), we have the Big Reveal of who the baddie really is at the end of the episode (also “Army of Ghosts”) and so on.
These are all very familiar beats to anyone with even a passing familiarity to the show but they’re done here with such panache and skill they never really feel repetitious. This is distinct from some of the Greatest Hits played out in “Boom” – Stephen Moffat tended to go for little details in his Greatest Hits package so they stuck out more and felt less satisfying, more like checkboxes than anything else. Davies is going for Big Swings here, and they pretty much all land. Sure, we’ve seen this structure before but there’s a reason it works – it’s a good structure. After so much muddled experimentation throughout this season, it’s just incredibly refreshing to get back to a here’s-h0w-it-works episode that actually delivers on all it sets out to. I’ll never argue that Doctor Who shouldn’t experiment, because of course it should, but there’s a simple pleasure in seeing the show do something it’s great at incredibly well and that’s what “The Legend of Ruby Sunday” is. If you want to argue it’s all set-up, well, that’s true but it’s pretty spectacular set-up all the same.
And in the middle of that to that is the big show-piece centrepiece – the Time Window. This sequence is just straightforwardly brilliant, at times deeply uncanny and unsettling in a way that really lands the threat the episode is trying to deliver on. The solid TARDIS, the hooded figure that cannot be seen, even the death of a redshirt Colonel, all do an incredible job of ramping up the tension. Murray Gold is nicely restrained during the whole sequence, adding to the feeling of terror rather than dictating how we should feel about it, and because we never cut away from the sequence, the tension is allowed to build and build without being broken, a simple yet incredibly effective way to deliver this sequence. It looks incredible too, the grainy VHS adding to the strange, etherial feel of the entire sequence, even down to glitching tracking lines. It’s a bravura sequence and feels like exactly what this season has been needing.
Now if you want to argue that actually not a lot happens in this first part, then you’re not exactly wrong. The Doctor turns up at UNIT and spends an inordinately long time getting to the plot. Then we get the Time Window, then there’s a long time of faffing before we get the big End Of Episode reveal. But this is all handled so well it’s hard to be too churlish about it. Not a lot happens in terms of actual plot but the Doctor just messing about with UNIT or trying to work out the best way of dealing with Susan Triad is just fun. And for possibly the first time this season – maybe with the exception of Boom – we get a whole episode where Ncuti Gatwa is actually the Doctor and we’re not left watching The Adventures of Ncuti Gatwa In Space. That’s incredibly pleasing and it’s just lovely to see him inhabit the role in this way. He’s suitably delighted at turning up at UNIT, suitably Doctorish in the Time Window (especially when laughing at how primitive it all is) and suitably terrified when confronted with a CGI Scooby Doo. It’s a great turn from him.
Millie Gibson’s pretty great here too. Ruby has struggled through most of the season to be anything other than generic but here, given something a bit more meaty to get her teeth into, Gibson proves she’s up to the task. She’s been fine up till now, if fairly unremarkable, but the Time Window sequence really gives her a chance to be the centre of attention and she does a great job with it. Her absolute desperation to find out who her mother is and to understand why it’s so impossible for anyone to see who’s under the hood comes across incredibly well and the whole sequence is given exactly the sort of dramatic charge it needs.
Then part two turns up and it all just falls apart. Or actually, that’s not even quite accurate. It doesn’t fall apart, it just amounts to nothing. None of the Big Reveals come to anything at all. Sutekh, a great big CGI woof-dog, looks incredibly cute and whereas before he was a massive threat using just his voice and a bloke in a chair, here the CGI does the character no favours at all. Now fair enough, the bloke in a chair routine isn’t going to work in the 21st century but by reducing Sutekh to just another CGI blob it also just makes him seem like Any Other Bad Guy, rather than a truly special threat. Remember earlier in the season when we had the “Pyramids of Mars” riff, with the Doctor taking Ruby to a ruined London to establish threat? That needed to be in the first episode, directly linked to the events unfolding now, not orphaned away at the far end of a season. Gabriel Woolf does his best to recapture the essence of the original character but nothing can get past that CGI.
And the mystery of Ruby’s Mum is just feeble. Turns out she was just some young girl who got pregnant and scared. The thing is, that’s a great idea in principal but in practice it doesn’t land at all. That’s because the mystery of who Ruby’s Mum is has been hyped up to such a level that “just some girl” isn’t enough to cut it. We’ve spent the entire season being told that this is the mystery, that it starts snowing when Ruby’s Mum is in her thoughts, that there’s a special connection.
But in the end it all boils down to, “na, nothing”. It’s incredibly deflating. Had the mystery of Ruby’s Mum been less overheated this reveal could have worked but we’ve spent the entire season being told that this is the revelation we need to look towards and to end it with “eh, fuck it” is just crap. So, what’s with the dramatic, ominous pointing we see in the Time Window? Not how most scared 15-year-olds behave after scurrying away from a church having abandoned their baby. Why did it start snowing every time Ruby’s Mum was mentioned? No reason (or even explanation). Why were we ever led to believe that any of this was more than a traumatized teenager trying to cope as best the could? Just cuz.
The whole adoption angle niggles in this episode too. At the end, before Ruby meets her birth mother, the Doctor points out that, “all those years and she never got in touch”. Yeah, that’s not how adoption works. Until the child is 18, parents who give their child up for adoption don’t have the right to contact them. How old is Ruby? If she’s the same age as Millie Gibson, that’s 20, which means there’s been all of two years that Ruby’s birth mother could have got in touch. It’s also incredibly offensive to have the Doctor imply that the only reason Ruby’s birth mother didn’t get in touch was she didn’t care. in fact, many parents who give up children for adoption don’t get in touch because they don’t want to disrupt the life of the child they gave up – they have no way of even knowing if that child knows it’s adopted. Or simply because they believe that the decision should rest with the child and that they can reach out as and when they are ready. The idea that lack of interest is the only possible reason is unbelievably poorly judged.
Oh, and did you know that killing a CGI dog reverses death? Because it does, you know! In one of the dumbest sequences we’ve had in a long time, the Doctor defeats Sutekh by sticking an “intelligent rope” – read: lead – on him and taking him for walkies in the time vortex until he eventually dies. From the moment Kate Stewart and everyone on Earth crumbles to dust, this was obviously going to be undone. Which is fine, because the manner of the undoing can be interesting. Here, though, it’s not. It’s Davros’s fucking Reality Bomb all over again, where the whole Universe is pointlessly destroyed just to be brought back with a bit of a handwave. The Doctor angsts a bit about killing Sutekh where, just as with Davros, we wander stupidly into the world of false equivilances, but the writing doesn’t remotely support him and Gatwa can’t make it sound even slightly convincing (not his fault).
The ending of this, after such an incredibly strong first part, is, like the revelation around Ruby’s Mum, just incredibly deflating. There’s no feeling of stakes and, other than puttering about in a remembered TARDIS for a bit, there’s no sense that defeating Sutekh even causes the Doctor all that much bother. It’s fixed, Ruby and her birth mother are reunited and it’s off to the next consequence-free episode at Christmas.
Remind me why we’re supposed to care about any of this?
Would You Recommend It? I’m going to give a very, very, very reserved yes to this because, although the finale is nothingburger of monumental proportions, there’s still some grace notes which are worth appreciating in both episodes. The remembered TARDIS is lovely little piece of design, incorporating little bits of previous TARDIS console rooms and is just a charming, whimsical image that this version of the show could stand to have a little bit more often. Mel’s rather lovely look when she finds her old hair bow and the Sixth Doctor’s coat is a delightful performance from Bonnie Langford, who’s an absolute trooper throughout this.
Because, though it’s great to have Our Bonnie back, the truth is there’s nothing about this that actually requires this character to be Mel. She doesn’t have any emotional or cathartic conversations with the Doctor the way Ace and Tegan did back in “The Power of the Doctor”. There’s nothing about her experiences with the Doctor that helps her resolve the plot. Honestly, the character could just be some UNIT scientist – loathe though I am to suggest a return for Osgood, if it had been her rather than Mel very little would be different. That’s not to take away from Langford, and it really is lovely to see her back, it’s just a shame the writing didn’t make more use of her.
Evil Mel of the future is a great look to, her hair slicked back and a skull-mask covering her. The Doctor’s sadness when he admits he already knew she was gone because of how cold she was is another great beat from Gatwa, though given they’re in a dead future with no people left, one does wonder how thick Mel/Sutekh must be when the Doctor sends her out of the room prior to finding out who Ruby’s Mum is to stand guard. From whom, exactly? Oh, and one other little moment of note was Mrs Flood, not making tea for Ruby’s Nan and referring to her as a “tiny woman”. It’s a small beat, but it’s well executed.
Anyway, the other near-perfect scene in the second episode comes from the Doctor finding a rare final survivor of Sutekh’s death dust and borrowing a spoon from her. Sian Clifford plays Kind Woman – never gifted a name – perfectly with a fantastic, distracted performance and Gatwa responds in kind, showing off the Doctor’s deep well of compassion as he negotiates for what is apparently one of the last bits of metal left. It’s a pitch-perfect scene, a quiet moment that really brings home the devastation Sutekh has wrought far more than scowling-but-cute doggos or sycophants declaring the universe silent. Selling the drama of a situation with nothing more than a tent and two good actors is exactly what Doctor Who is good at.
But there’s just so much trash in that second episode those notes of quality really do get drowned out. And there’s so many questions just left unanswered. We get told the perception filter range in the TARDIS is 73 yards and that “strange things happen there”. This explains precisely nothing about the episode “73 Yards”, it’s just a pointless reference to it. OK, so the range is 73 yards. And…?
Similarly, that future the Doctor and Ruby go to so they can investigate the DNA database? Firstly, if everyone is killed in 2024, how does the database even exist (there’s no hint of “alternative time-line” here, as there was in “73 Yards”)? Secondly, maybe not a great look to have the solution to your problem be dependent on the work of a fascist. “Well, he’s evil but at least he helped us find your Mum!” is not the win that perhaps RTD thinks it is.
And why does Sutekh become so obsessed with who Ruby’s Mum is anyway? We’re never actually given a reason beyond, “the plot demands it”, although it barely even does that. It’s just another contrivance heaped upon other contrivances. And the pointing-at-the-sign to name Ruby is just stupid beyond words. Who saw her? Who picked up on that? We should be grateful she’s not called Subway Sunday, since who knows, maybe there was a sandwich bar there too.
And all this is frustrating because of just how good a job the setup is. That first episode runs like gangbusters, a perfect example of how to do a first part, have your big reveal and still have enough mystery to have viewers coming back next week. The reveal of Sutekh gives us the drama, the question of Ruby’s Mum keeps the mystery running. That’s also why the reveal of the Mum situation is unsatisfying – in the end, it’s just used as cliffhanger fodder. We get a whole season being constantly reminded of How Important This Is and How It Signifies Something, re-enforced by the ominous pointing and the cowl (why did a 15-year-old abandoning their baby choose that outfit?) then in the end we get a cliffhanger and a “yeah, it was all for nothing” rug pulled out from under us.
And then, right at the end, we get Anita Dobson as Mrs Flood in a big white coat telling us directly to camera that the Doctor’s journey will end in terror. Will it? Will it really? Because you know what, after this season, it really is difficult to care all that much. You’re working hard to convince us we should but yeah – good luck with that, love.
Scores on the Doors? 5/10 – great first half, shit second half
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