Mrs. Flood out there breaking the fourth wall like it’s made of eggshells…
Recap
The Doctor and Mel run from Susan Triad, who is now an agent of Sutekh (Gabriel Woolfe). All of Sutekh’s minions begin spreading the dust of death, which wipes out the entire population, Mel manages to get the Doctor to Ruby in the Time Window, and her memories allow the TARDIS within the Time Window to grow stronger so that they can board it. The console room is a very hodgepodge affair of the memory of all previous TARDISes packed into a pretty tight space. Sutekh shows up and tells the Doctor that he has been following him throughout the universe, latched onto the outside TARDIS, and planting his own agents (copies of Susan) that the Doctor couldn’t see due to perception filters. They are now destroying every place the Doctor has been to, taking up the majority of the universe.
The Doctor, Ruby, and Mel escape in the remembered TARDIS. The Doctor uses “intelligent rope” (similar to the glove he made) to keep the ship stable and materializes in space, mourning the loss of the universe. An unknown amount of time passes and the Doctor arrives on a world that is only half-gone, meeting a woman (Sian Clifford) who can barely remember who she is, or the family she’s lost. The Doctor asks if she has any metal and she gives him the last bit in her possession—a spoon. He thanks her and promises to use it to save the universe.
Back on the TARDIS, the Doctor uses the spoon to repair a screen from the Time Window. It only responds to Ruby’s questions and sends her bit of video, including footage of her mother’s blank visage, and interview from Roger ap Gwilliam. The Doctor remembers that Gwilliam made DNA testing compulsory, so they can go to the future and find out who Ruby’s mother is; apparently this mystery has been haunting Sutekh as well. As a being who has been able to see all of Time and Space, not being able to see Ruby’s mother is driving him mad. They land in 2046 and go looking through the DNA records right as Mel finally falls prey to Sutekh’s control, and she transports them all back to UNIT HQ with the answer to Ruby’s parentage.
Sutekh demands the name of Ruby’s mother, and she makes to offer it, but smashes the screen with her identity at his feet and attaches the intelligent rope to his neck. The Doctor attaches the rope to the console and they drag Sutekh through the time vortex, forcing him to undo all that he’s done. Then the Doctor tells Sutekh that he must be life’s champion if Sutekh is the bringer of death, but the God has made him a monster because he must kill him now. He releases Sutekh into the time vortex, where the god disintegrates.
Back at UNIT, the group brings up the file on Ruby’s mother, Faye McKeever—just an ordinary woman who had Ruby when she was fifteen years old. It turns out that Sutekh only believed that she must be the key to defeating him because of the mystery and attention Ruby placed on her; their belief that she was important is what made her so. The reason that she was pointing in the Doctor’s direction on the old tape wasn’t to make note of him, but the street sign: She gave Ruby her name. Ruby wants to go meet her mother, and the Doctor suggests that perhaps she shouldn’t because the woman never attempting to contact her. Ruby ignores him and introduces herself at a coffee shop, prompting a tearful reunion. Faye comes home to meet her family and they get in touch with the man who was her father as well. Ruby wants the Doctor to come meet everyone, but the Doctor knows that she needs this time to herself. He promises that she’s changed him and that he will see her again, leaving in the TARDIS.
Mrs. Flood is one the roof of the building, telling us that Ruby got a happy ending, but the Doctor’s story will end in terror…
Commentary
Look, I know it’s convenient (and less gory) to vanish everyone in a puff of dust, but it hasn’t even been a decade since the Marvel Snapture, so it’s still abjectly hilarious to use it.
The mechanics of the episode are pretty downright silly, which is a usual thing for these finales. Of course we could only see the Susans now that Sutekh’s power is reaching some sort of critical point. Of course Sutekh is completely defeated by his own hubris and could have easily avoided this issue if he’d only come into his power a little earlier or a little later. That’s how the universe looks after the Doctor, and we should count ourselves lucky, really. And it still results in a wonderfully neat ending that harbors very few loose ends. The ones that we’ve got will likely be ported to next season anyhow.
The Doctor has to have his moment of agony over the idea of being a murderer, and Gatwa does a beautiful job acting that moment (as always), but it is a little goofy how the character gets caught up in the idea of murder only some of the time. Technically speaking, he murdered Sutekh the last time he defeated him (or thought he did, at any rate)… the only difference is that he thought Sutekh was going to die of old age within that time tunnel, cut off from the universe. That’s still ultimately a form of murder! Just really slow murder, one where Sutekh is pointedly all alone for the rest of his life, which seems crueler? I dunno, it just seems like a thing that Doctor could stand to examine a little more carefully in the future, if they’re gonna get all angsty about it.
The reveal that Ruby’s mother is just a person, that they are responsible for giving her power, is a great theme that Davies in particular loves to highlight in Doctor Who. The Doctor himself always has a love for people, but it is fun to track the balance on that scale, and how often they counter by railing against their pettiness and stupidity. (Eleven and Twelve were not Doctors blessed with much patience for humans, which is saying something when you consider how grouchy Nine could also be.) But bringing the point out here, in this story, at a point where the Doctor has been connecting with his friend over the idea of needing family, of wanting to understand where he comes from, of longing for those reunions himself, is a gorgeous place to end the season.
Of course he doesn’t want to stick around for the aftermath, but he says it outright—Ruby has taught him about family in a way that no one else could. And she’s coming back at some point in the next season, according to promotional materials, so he’s not going to leave her be forever, another comfort to take from that teary ending.
The clue as to who Ruby’s mother is ultimately came from Carla in the last episode, and I still think it’s a such a powerful choice: She’s the one who notices a scared young woman in tears, and she’s the one who talks to her like a person across time and tells her what she needs to hear. Carla always knew that she was probably just some scared kid and never loses sight of that, no matter how magic or otherworldly the situation gets. Absolutely beautiful.
And I love that the Doctor tries to stop Ruby from connecting with her mother when they find her. It’s… such a perfect mistake for him to make. One that he thinks is fair and pragmatic and kind, but is actually selfish and a bit jealous and centered around a decision that he should absolutely not insert himself into.
It’s so in keeping with what we know about the Doctor throughout his entire history: trying to stop Amy from going to find Rory in the past; attempting to hide that they’ve (finally) landed at the airport from Tegan; sulkily dropping Sarah Jane off across the country from where she needed to be. The Doctor is terrible at letting people go—and that’s without taking into account that some small part of him must fear never getting this moment for himself. Never finding out where he comes from and whether or not there are people out there who love and miss him.
Ruby doesn’t let him stop her and I have such respect for it. For knowing what she needs and deserves, and taking the chance that this encounter will go poorly. For being that brave despite her very best friend telling her not to be. That might say more about her character than the entire season has, when all is said and done.
There are so many great little bits in this episode. The hodgepodge console room that I want to be real at some point in the future. The intelligent rope acting as a leash? The “cultural appropriation” comment to hang a very large lantern on the racism in the original serial. The suggestion that the Doctor might be coming around to the idea of seeing Susan again one day.
But my absolute favorite? Mel cuddling the Seventh Doctor’s sweater vest and clutching at the sleeve of Six’s rainbow coat.
Bonnie Langford is an absolute MVP all the way around of late, but these moments in particular really zero in on one of the most heartbreaking aspects of the show in a way that nothing else can: that the Doctor is always the Doctor, but when they regenerate, that piece of them is truly gone. It is an actual death, the way the Doctor always insists it to be. Mel isn’t napping with Seven’s sweater under her chin because Fifteen won’t let her snuggle up—she’s doing it because she misses him specifically. Those Doctors were hers, and she loved them, and they’re gone now. When Fifteen is gone (and Fourteen too), if she’s around to see it, that will also hurt. Being in the position to be a friend to this strange immortal being comes with all sorts of weird grief built-in. While it’s painful for the Doctor to feel unseen when they change, there’s another kind of sadness that happens on the other end. And all they had to do to communicate that was focus on Mel’s need to touch a few pieces of clothing.
Time and Space and Sundry
- The one major mystery left over is Mrs. Flood, of course. I’m guessing that Cherry barely remembers anything the woman said (Kate claimed she only recalled flashes of the end), which accounts for her being so happy to see her when they both reconstitute, but it would have been much funnier if she’d shoved the woman out of bed. She’s dressed very Mary Poppins there at the end, which has echoes of the Master, of course—Missy loved the Poppins look. But Flood also has godly connotations as well as nihilistic ones. Après moi, le déluge, and all that.
- The Doctor riding on the back of Mel’s orange scooter. That is all.
- So Sutekh has just been clinging to the outside of the TARDIS all this time, which means that when Jack Harkness was doing the same thing, he was probably pretty displeased to share the space.
- Kate kvetching about the bullets dissolving to dust is a callback to her father, the Brigadier, who always complained that bullets never work on alien threats. Which is good for UNIT, honestly. Be more creative, y’all.
- Okay, but the idea of Ruby’s mom pointing to the road sign to indicate her name was a bad idea, though. Come on, you could’ve given us something more interesting than that. How would the monks even know she—you know what, I’m leaving it alone. It will only upset me if I think too hard about it.
- Moments like this in fiction are everything to me: Ruby gives her name for the coffee. The whole conversation with her mother is prompted by the guy calling out her name to hand her the drink. Which means that while this tearful reunion is taking place, that guy is still probably standing there like… do you want me to hold on to the cappuccino? I—you know what, you’re busy. All good. I’ll just… leave it here.
And that’s the season! See you over the holidays, I suspect…
I felt this one was too over-the-top in how bad things got. As soon as we saw the whole supporting cast killed, my immediate reaction was “Of course it’s not going to stick,” so it took away all the suspense. And destroying literally the whole universe after that was just more of the same. Take things to such ridiculous extremes and it’s just hard to invest in. The way it got reversed at the end didn’t really make sense anyway; it was one of those things that worked because the script said it worked, which is all too typical of this season.
Conversely, I did like it that the explanation for Ruby’s origins wasn’t the big epic mystery we were led to expect, but just a perfectly ordinary, mundane origin that was only lent importance because everyone expected it to be important. It seemed to be a deconstruction of Moffat’s companion-mystery arcs and the expectations fandom builds up around such things, and I approve of that, even if the explanation doesn’t really add up. (I guess the snow that kept showing up was some side effect of the memory window linking the TARDIS and Ruby to that night, even though it hadn’t happened yet from the Doctor and Ruby’s POV.) It’s really a better fit for Russell T. Davies to write a companion who’s just an ordinary person than one who has some super-special unearthly backstory or destiny.
Although actually, it turns out that Davies meant it as a deconstruction of The Rise of Skywalker:
https://gizmodo.com/doctor-who-ruby-mother-rise-of-skywalker-rey-palpatine-1851556879
I agree with him entirely on that, and I actually thought of it when Ruby’s origin was revealed.
But how the heck does Ruby’s mother pointing at the sign work? Nobody was there to see her pointing, except the Doctor. So how does that constitute naming her?
“The hodgepodge console room that I want to be real at some point in the future.”
We’ve already seen it — it’s the set used for the frame sequences of last year’s Tales of the TARDIS specials on the BBC iPlayer, which showed cut-down classic episodes with frame segments with the original actors reuniting in the “Memory TARDIS” set to reminisce. Davies teased at the time that the Memory TARDIS was canonical and would be explained at some point, but the explanation we got doesn’t fully account for the contrivances of the frame segments, like aged versions of the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Doctors somehow still being around to reunite with their old companions. https://tardis.wiki/wiki/Tales_of_the_TARDIS
“…sulkily dropping Sarah Jane off across the country from where she needed to be.”
In the Doctor’s defense, he didn’t do that on purpose. At that point in the series, his control of the TARDIS’s navigation was erratic at best, and he was lucky to land on the right planet in the right century.
When Kate died, it’s like “oh no, not Kate!” Then everyone else dies and it’s “oh good, she’s not going to stay dead.”
For me, it was when Rose Noble died first — “They wouldn’t kill her off so quickly, surely.” Then Kate died and I realized “No, of course this isn’t going to stick.”
Really, I thought as far back as “The Stolen Earth”/”Journey’s End” that Doctor Who needed a moratorium on “end of the universe” crises, which just escalated the stakes to a ridiculous extreme. But how many times has the universe ended since then?
And Sarah Jane didn’t ask to leave either, the Doctor has to return to Gallifrey where humans were not allowed.
Well, there was no problem bringing Leela to Gallifrey in “The Invasion of Time.” And technically, the Doctor never said in “The Hand of Fear” that humans weren’t allowed on Gallifrey, just “I can’t take Sarah to Gallifrey.”
I heard a compelling fan theory recently that it was the Doctor’s own choice not to take Sarah, because he was afraid the Time Lords would erase her memories of him like they did to Jamie and Zoe.
I read the same theory, and really like it, and also saw an explanation for Leela being allowed on Gallifrey was that she was travelling with the president-elect at the time.
I think 13 says something about ” no humans on gallifrey” in the The Timeless Children.
Ooh. I really want to make that my headcanon now!
I liked this episode, but Ruby referring to her birth mother as “… my Real Mum” represents a tendency I quite ardently dislike: your Real Mum is the loving, supportive, present parent who’s been with you since long before the start of this series, young lady!
…
At this point, I should admit to being cross that I’m apparently a year or two older than Ruby’s parents, on top of being years older than the current Doctor.
STILL, calling somebody your “Real Mum”, after decades of radio silence, when your actual Mum is within earshot is just RUDE.
It should also be admitted that Mrs Flood’s little epilogue is all that saved me from thinking this episode ended much less strongly than it started (A delightfully old-school Fairy Tale finish that was).
Totally agree. This really ticked me off and actually put me off the rest of the series. We had been shown a loving foster/adopted family and then she meets her “real” mum. And its all hunky dory. No trauma to be dealt with. Ughh. The only slight compensation was showing the four women together at the end. But such a bad depiction for anyone looking for their birth mother. Sure, don’t be worried, you won’t need counselling, it will be fine!
This was addressed by RTD in “unleashed” when he said that it was a character mistake in the moment and excitment of finding her birth mother. I feel this was a mistake by RTD on two counts. Firstly, there isn’t a chance for Ruby to later correct herself in the story, so we are left with error. Secondly, I think Russell had his social soap opera writing hat on and not his family sci-fi hat on and he shouldn’t be doing that on this type of show.
I really enjoyed this one while I was watching it, but its climax didn’t really hold up to scrutiny, so yeah, typical RTD finale. I have to say that I was never more relieved to see the world end, because I was worried for just a moment that they had actually killed off Kate. As for the way they brought the world/universe back, it was basically the cosmic version of reversing the polarity, which was kind of hilarious but not particularly satisfying.
However, I was satisfied by the revelation that Ruby’s mom was just a teenage girl (albeit with a flair for the dramatic, apparently). A lot of fans are up in arms that the explanation for the weirdness.going on around Ruby amounted to “the power of myth” + “causality loop,” but I really liked it, and I don’t mind admitting that I teared up both times I watched her reunion with her birth mom (who, by the way, looks a lot like another Miller the Doctor once knew.
I liked it, the best part was the Memory Tardis. there are a few things i was wondering about, besides Mrs Flood and Susan (ofc). we haven’t heard about “mavity” I think Fifteen mentions it. also, he is supposed to be more in touch with his feelings (he is) & express it more (eh why didn’t he say anything when Ruby told him she loved him?) I like his version of the Doctor, he actually moved a couple of them down a notch. but when he & 14 mentions that they didn’t know what family is or means, I shout at tv “what about Rose & her family? and Amy & Rory with & without River? and others?” now we got a long wait for next season
Reading Jo Walton’s monthly reading article this month she mentioned that she has a problem with some recent books where the authors take more care with the emotional impact of the story than anything to do with the worldbuilding. I tend to feel this way about a lot of Doctor Who season finales.
If the finale of this season had been about Ruby’s mother and that mystery alone, and something released as a result of trying to solve the mystery, it would have worked. But Sutekh is a Doctor issue and requires more investigation than crossword puzzle in one episode, bumped off the next. If Sutekh is the greatest of the Pantheon and the Doctor just destroyed him with bungee cord, why should we care if the others turn up? (This is also reminiscent of the change in Davies’s attitude to the Daleks, absolute horrors that can’t be beaten in the first two series, and then a bit of a joke in the series 4 finale.)
But also as Christopher Bennett points out, things just happen because the script says so. Nothing in this finale was seeded during the season that preceded it. Davies used to know this, so I don’t know if it’s the reduced episode count that has him on a back foot? Did the original finale get a note that it needed more oomph and he went oh, Sutekh then?
At least the reason why Mel was used is a bit more apparent here. I thought her previous comments about being an orphan might come into play, but she gets to be the character we might care about who gets turned to the dark side, but at that point we already knew it would all get reset.
(to be honest I was quite happy to see Kate go, and a bit sad she had to come back. The character has no internal life like the Brigadier developed.)
And this was the episode where I did actually go, oh is the Doctor going to cry in every scene? I like the idea of examining a more raw Doctor who is open to their emotions, but it doesn’t fit with the closed off bits in the script (given 14 could say he loved people, why has 15 moved backward? Is it Rogue?) I didn’t buy the monster monologue much either – the Doctor has always been ready to do what needs to be done (Genesis of the Daleks maybe an outlier in this, although that’s more about why the Doctor doesn’t just go back and stop every monster coming into existence) so presumably this is more about this Doctor than the accumulated experience. (After all 10 wiped out the Racnoss without much guilt.)
But the performances were good, they have been all season. There were good bits in there, but I wonder if it’s time, especially with such short seasons, to give the arc and season finale a rest.
” Just really slow murder, one where Sutekh is pointedly all alone for the rest of his life, which seems crueler?”
I guess he was marooned in realtime.
“She’s dressed very Mary Poppins there at the end,” – she’s actually dressed like Romana (in episode Ribos operation). I’ve seen somewhere a theory that all Mrs. Floods dresses are those of Doctors companions. I am very curious who she actually is. I don’t think she’s Susan or Rani or Romana or Clara or… I don’t have a theory.
I did love a quiet little moment nobody else seems to have pointed out: When Doctor tells Ruby to remember Tardis to make it real – I believe it was actually Mel who made it real.
Didn’t she say something to Ruby’s nan about plans to rule the world in the Legend of Ruby Sunday? It doesn’t feel like she’s an ex-companion, unless it’s an ex-companion with a significant power up. It feels like she’s either part of the Pantheon or part of a pantheon at least, although it seems odd she’d stand by and let Sutekh kill everything and not help out a little.
She said “I had such plans!” She didn’t specify. (In this episode. I don’t remember her mentioning plans or ruling the world in the last one.) But before that she said something about ruling – or conquering – heaven? In her own name, which would mean a) Mrs. Flood is not her real name and b) she has some plans to rule – the afterlife at least. She did say “tell your maker,” which would suggest she is not from Earth – but then, why planning to conquer what I assume is christian heaven? (could be another religion, really. All we got was “maker” and “golden gate”.)
My offbeat theory is: she is Morgaine from the Battlefield. But it is based just on feeling; a the way she talked about “telling your maker,” not as an ordinary villain, but as someone with a sense of honor.
Oh I like the idea of her being Morgaine, she must have gotten out of that UNIT prison eventually! I’d naively assumed we might see her in the Beatles episode.
That’s it, I couldn’t remember the exact lines but it felt very non-human stuff she was saying.
And it would fit in with the desire to do fantasy. (Really Battlefield is ripe for a follow up, we’ve never seen the Doctor be Merlin!)
Here’s an offbeat theory: Her name is Mrs. Flood, and Gerald Flood was the voice of Kamelion. Hey, if they cast an actress named Susan Twist as someone who might turn out to be Susan in a twist ending, you never know.
I found this on facebook, I quote:
“Russell T Davies says that we will find out more about Mrs Flood “as we go along”.
He deliberately drew out her story “because Anita Dobson is such enormous fun to work with. I considered telling all earlier, but I don’t want to see her go.”
Davies has teased that “every word she says is significant. How does she know what a TARDIS is? She said about plans… What plans? How did she know what was going on?”
“We will learn more about her in season 2, but she’s a slow burner. It’s not what you think, I promise you that.”
I wonder if he is considering how inventive can fandom be. Also, makes no sense to create a mystery no one can guess; if there is not at least one fan that goes “yes, I knew it!” at the moment of reveal, what’s the point? It’ll probably be some offbeat theory.
I suppose next you’ll say that someone named “Fendahlman” would be the “Man of the Fendahl”” How ovious would that be?
I’m less forgiving of the degree of handwaving in this one. We’ll rebuild the Tardis out of memories because memories are made out of time! Our thinking about Ruby’s mum made her important even though she isn’t! Sutekh is death so by sending him back to encounter himself we’ll make him kill himself!
“The one major mystery left over is Mrs. Flood, of course.” And Ruby’s snow-power, which RTD apparently decided to ignore.
Sutekh in Pyramids of Mars was plausibly terrifying because he was imprisoned — it seemed eminently possible he’d kill everything once he got out. Sutekh wiping out UNIT, as others have said, shows the threat isn’t that bad. And CGI Sutekh wasn’t as interesting.
I like Gatwa’s Doctor but he really deserved a much better season.
My impression was that the Memory TARDIS and the snow were effects of their use of the Time Window to connect to that point in the past. It’s retrocausality, something being caused by something that happens in the characters’ future, but where time travel is concerned, that can certainly happen. Somehow, connecting Ruby through the Time Window to the day of her birth, interacting with the presence of the TARDIS there, created a resonance that followed her through her travels in the TARDIS, so the appearance of the snow around her at key moments was sort of a fore-echo of the Time Window’s projection. Similarly, the Time Window interacting with the TARDIS’s super-timey-wimey powers allowed an echo of it to manifest physically.
More broadly, the reason things revolved around Ruby’s mother, or seemed to, was because they used the Time Window to connect to that point in the past, and it was their own use of that powerful technology to focus on Ruby’s mother that created the resonance around her.
I wonder if the Time Window effect also cancelled out the perception filter the Doctor mentioned that kept them from noticing Susan Triad’s doppelgangers. The Doctor said that Sutekh had been traveling with the TARDIS ever since “The Pyramids of Mars” and leaving a Susan double everywhere the TARDIS landed, but the Doctor and his companions never started noticing them until now.
It was even implied that all of this was somehow connected to the events of “73 Yards,” because that was the radius of the TARDIS’s perception field. And Roger ap Gwyllym turned out to be essential to solving the mystery of Ruby’s mother, although that doesn’t really explain any of it.
Anyway, the idea of memory creating time is a concept I’ve seen before. It was key to the Japanese tokusatsu series Kamen Rider Den-O, written by one of the finest toku/anime writers, Yasuko Kobayashi, who took the show in a very existential, philosophical direction. It was a time travel show where the monsters-of-the-week kept traveling to the past and causing destruction in hopes of preventing a key event, and when Den-O defeated the monsters in the past, the people and buildings and stuff they destroyed were restored — but only if someone cared enough about them to remember them. There was a rather poignant episode about a lonely man that nobody really knew well and who was stuck in a sort of limbo rather than being fully restored. Since then, several subsequent Kamen Rider series have borrowed the idea that someone erased from time can be resurrected if they’re remembered.
I thought that about the coffee as well! So rude, really…
I enjoyed this but also felt it was a bit much in how simple and complete the fix was. Ruby’s mother being so mysterious and unfindable because they just figured she was and so that manifested or whatever — it’s pretty goofy yet consistent with stuff like residual Toymaker energy letting them whomp another TARDIS into existence or the season’s general theme of stories having power. The Doctor has never seemed more devastatingly like Peter Pan to me, even though he is both that concept of the boy who never grows up in a way and rather its opposite, than in his leave-taking at the end.
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