How do fairy rings work when you’ve got a time machine? The same as always, it seems.
Recap
The Doctor and Ruby land in Wales, which Ruby says she’s been to a couple times before. The Doctor mentions that there was one really evil Welsh politician named Roger ap Gwilliam, but stops himself from continuing because that’s in the future. He accidentally stumbles into a circle that looks like a fairy circle and breaks the thing. Ruby reads one of the notes in it, which tells “Mad Jack” to rest in peace. An old woman (Hilary Hobson) appears at a distance, making a series of gestures that Ruby doesn’t understand and the Doctor vanishes. The TARDIS locks and she can’t get in, so she walks toward town. The old woman follows at the same distance away, and Ruby stumbles on a hiker. She asks the hiker to tell the old woman that she’s sorry if she upset her somehow. The hiker approaches the old woman and is told something that makes her run from Ruby in fear.
In town, Ruby heads to a pub and tells the locals what she and the Doctor accidentally destroyed. The group begins to tease her by suggesting that she did release a fairy spirit named Mad Jack, saying the old woman is his herald. After Ruby realizes they’re taking the piss, one of them goes to speak to the old woman: He also flees in fear. A couple days later Ruby is kicked out of the inn and decides she should just go home. The old woman follows, always at the same distance from her. She tells her mum (Michelle Greenidge), who insists that she’ll keep Ruby on the phone line when she goes to talk to the old woman. Ruby still can’t hear what she says, but it results in Carla running from her and then later changing the locks, leaving Ruby homeless.
Time begins to pass and eventually Ruby makes contact with U.N.I.T.: Kate Stewart (Jemma Redgrave) believes this is some sort of branch in the timeline, but thinks they can help her. They’ve figured out that the old woman is always 73 yards from Ruby, and that she can’t be properly photographed. When the troops approach the woman, they all run away—and so does Kate. Ruby is alone again. Time continues to pass and she eventually sees the politician (Anuerin Barnard) the Doctor mentioned, who says on television that people used to call him “Mad Jack” when he was young. Ruby enlists in his campaign to keep an eye on him and sees how horrible the man is firsthand, but no one does a thing to stop him. He becomes prime minister and gets his hands on nuclear weapons. Ruby knows he’ll use them and finally figures out what to do; she enacts a plan that allows her to be 73 yards from him, and the old woman says something that makes him run away and resign from office.
Decades pass and Ruby grows old (Amanda Walker). The old woman is always there, and Ruby sometimes goes to visit the TARDIS and place flowers nearby. One night, as she’s about the die, the old woman finally approaches and when they make contact. Ruby wakes in Wales all those years ago and sees herself exit the TARDIS with the Doctor, in the place of the old woman now. She knows what must do this time, whispering a warning to herself not to let the Doctor step into the fairy circle. Ruby stops him just in time and the two of them observe the circle, but don’t touch it. Walking off, Ruby tells the Doctor that she’s been to Wales three times before, but after two examples she suddenly realizes that she can’t remember what the third was…
Commentary
That was nearly brilliant, but it whiffed the ending for me. I might be alone in this, but I think the atmosphere’s didn’t entirely mesh by the end for lack of a little explanation. I love a good folk story, but then you need to actually tell the story? And this one doesn’t get there by the end.
I’m a little worried that pieces of this episode will come back up in later episodes to fill a few things in, but this one wrapped so abruptly that it’s hard to be sure what we’ve just seen. It’s fantasy now, yes, but fantasy has just as many narrative rules as science fiction! And if you’re not going to plant a few, then I’d like some extra grist in the seasonal mystery build as a distraction.
There are too many questions left hanging in the wind by the time we’re through. For instance, why does Ruby have to live out her entire life before the cycle resets and she gets a chance to stop what happened in the past? (Davies has claimed that the reason was her needing to live a “life of penitence” to earn forgiveness for the Doctor’s mistake, but there’s never any indication given that penance is a part of this.) Did they realize that it would be easy to assume that Ruby was the old woman giving herself warnings throughout life if you never see the figure’s face? What about our Mad Jack? Is that politician being subsumed by a malevolent fae, or is he the full entity magicked into being once the circle is disturbed? Are the two things technically unrelated for the purposes of the story? Why does everyone have to approach the old woman directly to hear her except for Kate?
I’m not saying that the episode couldn’t leave anything down to mystery, but it feels like we’re missing a step somewhere. Just a few more hints could have solidified this plot into something gorgeous. It was so close. I was enjoying myself thoroughly and waiting for the payoff, and then we got absolutely nothing. A whisper across a field is a letdown. Would I have liked it better if she’d shouted to them? Yeah, maybe! A little more real-world urgency would’ve helped matters.
There are a few other goofy conceits, like giving Millie Gibson ridiculous wigs in an attempt to make her look older (and that failing utterly). At the same time, the progression was there, the steps were in place, and Gibson did such a great job with the piece. It was nice to spend some time with Ruby and get to know her better. And she made an adorable old lady too.
But I really don’t like that this is the second time Ruby has been robbed of her mother and grandmother. She’s already got a story wrapped up in despair over not knowing who her birth parents are, but we’ve been presented with this family as a counter to some of that pain, and then every time something goes squiffy, she loses them immediately. Keep them around! This episode would’ve been just as effective if they’d stayed a part of her life—it didn’t need to be total isolation in order to get the sadness across. There’s sadness in the people who love you being unable to help, and then we get more of their family dynamic, which I’m desperate for because no one is as good as that as Davies.
Also, I’ll say it: alt-timeline stories where everything reverts to square one should be banned at this point. Doctor Who (and plenty of other shows) has done far too many as is, and they’re cheap. If someone living out their whole life is forgotten in an instant, then what’s the impact for the viewer? It won’t have any bearing on the character going forward, so count me out. And if it is going to have an impact, you need to make that clear before the episode ends.
Part of the season arc mystery has something to do with Susan Twist, of course—she keeps popping up all over this place, last week as the ominous ambulance, this time as the hiker Ruby encounters. Ruby nearly recognizes her too, but she’s too distracted to put two and two together. And we see the mysterious Mrs. Flood again as well…
That said, I really enjoyed everything I watched up until the very end. With just a little more connecting the dots, this could’ve been a standout piece of television.
Time and Space and Sundry
- This is few of the few episodes to not bother with the title sequence. There were a couple in Thirteen’s era and one in Twelve’s which was also notably more horror based. I’m not sure what it achieves? It’s fine.
- We haven’t had a Doctor-lite episode in a long while, though. Thirteen didn’t really have those, which I appreciated because we didn’t get enough of her, but they’re fun for the show to do.
- Okay, but during this whole affair, was the Doctor supposed to have been taken by the fae? (Presumably yes, since the TARDIS stayed put.) Because I would love the inverse episode here, with him tromping around fairyland, trying not to eat the food and getting increasingly annoyed that he can’t leave.
- I kind of wish that we’d gotten more horror bits like the people down at the pub messing with Ruby. It was so effective, more of that would’ve been great. It also would’ve been a great place to seed the actual folktale aspect, like I mentioned.
- There is a fun throughline here with Davies creating evil prime ministers that must then be erased from public consciousness via a timeline shift. (That “Albion” moniker is as hilariously over-the-top as the Master using Harold Saxon as his human name.) Will Ruby have to stop him all over again in the regular timeline? I guess we’ll find out…
See you net week!
This was a somewhat effective eerie psychological-horror tale in the moment, but once I reflected on it, it all seemed so arbitrary and random with no reason for any of it, even by the standards of eerie Twilight Zoney dark fantasy/horror. Like, if the purpose of all this was so Ruby could save the world from ap Gwyllym, why did it require everyone running away from her in horror when they spoke to the mystery woman? And why did it have to persist through her entire life, except that RTD wanted to tell the story that way? And why did it have to be 73 yards? In the payoff of that, she had to find her way to that specific distance, so it’s not like it could’ve only worked from that distance.
For that matter, why did this even end ap Gwyllym’s career? The upshot of the story is that people who talked to the mystery woman perceived Ruby Sunday as anathema and avoided her like the plague. But Ruby Sunday was just a volunteer in ap Gwyllym’s campaign. How does fleeing from her translate to giving up politics altogether? It just doesn’t hold together even by its own surreal logic.
I’m reminded of Shyamalan’s Signs, where the final twist felt artificial and forced since it was so blatantly, self-consciously constructed to be an “explanation” for all the random bits of weirdness set up before, rather than the seemingly weird things making perfect sense in retrospect because they arose organically from the missing piece of the puzzle, as in The Sixth Sense or Unbreakable.
Also, it’s an incredibly forced coincidence that the Doctor just happens to mention ap Gwyllym moments before Ruby is sent on whatever fae-folk-generated mission to stop ap Gwyllym. And it just felt so incongruous to combine eerie fae-folk magic with a political thriller about staving off nuclear war.
Even the gag scene about the Welsh people in the tavern playing a trick on Ruby didn’t hold together. I mean, their stated rationale was that they were critiquing English people’s “racist” stereotyping of the Welsh as superstitious. But Ruby didn’t do that. She just mentioned the fairy circle. She didn’t start to wonder if there might be something to it until they acted as if they took it seriously and spun the Mad Jack tale unprompted. So it just makes them come off as mean-spirited and defensive, rather than making any real point about stereotyping the Welsh.
Incidentally, did they even show the series title this week? Usually when a show skips the title sequence, they at least show the title logo briefly at some point. But I didn’t notice it at any point here.
I think this is a fair summary but, after all, it DOES work in the moment. And I think the lack of sense is more acceptable in fantasy than in science fiction.
Consider the mine in the previous episode, Boom. Mines are real things, that work by real physics and engineering, and serve a real purpose, which is generally to make it difficult and dangerous to pass into or through an area by surprising and killing people who attempt it. So mines blow up to kill people passing near or over them, or attempting to defeat them. If you stand on a real mine it doesn’t “blow up unless you stand on one leg while controlling your blood pressure, and then explode after a time limit anyway”. It either explodes and kills you or waits for someone else to surprise. So you can criticise Boom on the grounds that mines don’t behave like that, the characters shouldn’t expect it to, and the only reason it does is that the writer wants it to. (Compare the Bosnian film No Mans Land, which has a slightly similar premise, and a perfectly real mine.)
On the other hand, it is meaningless to talk about how real magic fairy circles work, and absurd to expect Ruby to know how something that doesn’t real exist works. So we don’t have to know what the rules are, and Ruby doesn’t have to either know what they are at the start or discover them during the story.
After all, in the days when people believed in magic, they knew they were ignorant of the rules by which the world worked. No one criticises Lord of the Rings because Frodo doesn’t know how magic works in the world he lives in.
Yes, in general, inexplicability and illogic are allowable in a fantasy or horror story; sometimes the sheer lack of rhyme or reason is the source of the terror. But there are better and worse ways to do it, and genre is not a universal excuse for being nonsensical. Perhaps the key is not to pile on too many nonsensicalities in one story. Or at least to be consistent about it. Saying that there was a specific purpose to Ruby’s ordeal that required her to stand exactly 73 yards from ap Gwyllym implies that there should be a logic to it, yet there’s no reason given why it has to be 73 yards, since she ends up having a whole ball field to play around with. That makes it feel less like the supernatural forces being arbitrary and more like the writer being arbitrary.
Your “Boom” analogy doesn’t work at all, because as fanciful as the mine was, the story explained why it worked the way it did and portrayed it consistently. It doesn’t matter that it’s different from reality; what matters is that a story play fair by its own rules, and that it at least feel like there’s a purpose to it all rather than the writer just making up random crap to mess with the audience.
The episode doesn’t say that “there was a specific purpose to Ruby’s ordeal” though? Stopping ap Gwilliam is something she does in her life, taking advantage of the weird spectre that’s haunting her, and she thinks at one point that that’s the purpose of what she’s going through, but the episode doesn’t validate her in that assumption.
To be fair on the Welsh people scenes, they make more sense in the cultural context of the UK where the different national stereotypes are something people bash up against regularly. So they’re assuming that Ruby is like other English people. I’m not quite sure what commentary Davies is attempting because they do come across as belligerent as a result so it dents any point about cultural assumptions, but maybe that’s the point, that a lot of people don’t have the regional assumptions any more but the weight of the cultural past is still causing people to perceive it.
Cultural context has nothing to do with it, because the cultural assumptions in question were explicitly stated right there in the dialogue. So you could get everything you needed from the scene itself, whether you had prior knowledge of it or not. The issue is that the way the scene was written made them come off as irrationally paranoid about being stereotyped, which feels like dismissing the minority group’s point of view. Doctor Who should not punch down.
I think I haven’t properly communicated what I mean, because it doesn’t feel to me like we’re actually interpreting any of this differently but your reply seems to indicate we are. But just to clarify, what I mean is, for a UK viewer this hits differently because there is a history of these microaggressions that explains why a group of Welsh people might jump to assume that an English person is going to patronise them. While that info is available in the dialogue, to have lived through similar scenarios gives a different perspective that colours how the scene is perceived.
As I pointed out, I also aren’t sure that the scene as portrayed on screen does much more than make the people in the pub seem intolerant of Ruby through their assumptions. I’m not sure it’s punching down, partially because RTD is conspicuously Welsh and proud of it, so I doubt he sat down to write a scene to punch down on the Welsh as a people. I think it’s one of those scenes that show how some reactions have become knee jerk, but is probably also answering some complaints that could come if the Welsh were shown to be a magical people, rather than just modern people. It could as easily have been set in rural Scotland or in rural England (since Ruby is from Manchester) and would have played into similar tensions. And also it plays into and heightens Ruby’s isolation. The acting of it could have been softer.
Every culture has its minority groups that are stereotyped and marginalized. It’s a universal practice, and I doubt the way the British stereotype the Welsh is fundamentally any different from how Americans stereotype, well, probably every minority group we have. Heck, America probably has more different minorities that get stereotyped, persecuted, and marginalized than any other single country on Earth. So it’s pretty ridiculous to suggest that only British people can understand a scene about cultural stereotypes and microaggressions.
“I also aren’t sure that the scene as portrayed on screen does much more than make the people in the pub seem intolerant of Ruby through their assumptions.”
Yes, but that’s exactly what’s wrong with it, that it portrays the fear of prejudice as irrational and wrong. To me as an American, that lands very badly, because there’s a long history here of right-wing pundits and opinion makers insisting that victims of racism are unjustified in calling out the racism, that the “real victims” are the white people being accused of racism. It’s a way of avoiding the issue and pretending the dominant culture is blameless by claiming the minorities are the real aggressors.
Yeah, while I really liked elements of this one as I was watching it, the more I think about it, the more it falls apart. What exactly did Old Ruby say that drove everyone into such a frenzy? It’s probably left a mystery so that people can imagine the weirdest, worst possible explanation, but it doesn’t work given the reveal.
I did assume that Ruby was living out some sort of penance for violating the fairy circle, but I feel like that’s an assumption I brought to it from other media, not something ever truly explained in the story.
Except the Doctor was the one who stepped on the fairy circle, so why would the penance fall on Ruby?
She opened and read the letters. Notice when the Doctor doesn’t vanish, he stops her from doing so and says it would be disrespectful.
I suspect the lack of opening titles was a way of stressing that Ruby Thursday was on her own, this episode: those opening credits are, in essence, a weekly reminder that this is all business as usual so the lack of same stressed the aura of uncertainty apparent throughout this episode.
On a less serious note, I hope we’re all looking forward to checking in on Ms. Millie Gibson as she hits the various birthdays depicted in this episode (All the better to find out how well or how badly the production team have done as they attempted to give audiences a glimpse into the future).
Completely agree, this was atmospherically so fun and intriguing, and then the ending just whiffed. I’ve been feeling let down ever since I finished it and hoping something will come along later to make it make more sense, but I’m afraid they just dropped the ball on this one. Huge paradoxical plot hole no matter what else you make of it.
/grumble
Well, it was always a given that it would end with a reset to the beginning; Kate even said that UNIT believed they were in a timeline anchored to Ruby’s “event.” It was just a question of how they got there, and like everything else in the episode, it pretty much just happened because it happened.
Davies’s thing this season seems to be that the release of the Toymaker has brought magic and supernatural powers into the world, and I don’t think that’s really working out that well. Usually in Doctor Who, even the most fanciful things are presumed to have some kind of science behind them, even if it’s the “indistinguishable from magic” kind of science. So there’s at least a vague logic to it. This anything-goes approach feels like a bit of a story cheat, using magic as an excuse for the plots not to hold together.
I loved this episode–and it’s one of the few times where the ambiguous, confusing, or seemingy unexplained plot elements (looking at you, several Eleventh Doctor eps written by Moffat) didn’t bother me.
Maybe there’ll be some explanation later on, but I think Kate telling Ruby that we often will try to make a confusing situation make sense in our minds when we don’t have all the information was about as obvious as anything that whatever obfuscation there may have been in the story, it was intentional.
FWIW, my theory (cobbled together from my own thoughts and those of others) is that the Doctor swapped places with Mad Jack, but someone on the outside had to “put things right,” so Ruby was sentenced to a life of penance for it and/or sentenced to being the one to set things right. And that penance took the form of living a life suffering due to her own worst fear. (Makes me wonder what form that would take if another companion with a different fear was there instead of Ruby). Since abandonment is Ruby’s biggest fear, that’s what form it took.
As for the Old Woman (aka Ms. 73 Yards)–I don’t believe it was Ruby the whole time, or rather, I think it was some sort of projection from the future into the past of the moment she eventually appears. I think Ruby really only experiences seeing her younger self just the one time on the hilltop at the end of the episode. (There’s no rhyme or reason as to why the form of the thing that haunts her is a future version of herself, but I’m not bothered by it, either). Someone pointed out that the gestures and movements of the Old Woman actually match up fairly well with what old Ruby says at the very end, too.
And what of the thing that the Old Woman says to everyone to make them run away? Well, I don’t think they say anything, really–but rather a personalized “projection” of fear for each person who encounters it/her. The Old Woman (which, again, I’m convinced is some sort of power or gollum or entity borne of the broken circle) projects invisibility until noticed, and then projects into the mind of whomever approaches whatever personally would make them want to abandon Ruby. (Indeed, I think what it does to those people–seek out what their worst fear is and tell it back to them to get them to avoid Ruby–is what it did to Ruby as well).
As for any repetitive elements this episode had with others this season or even prior RTD eps from other seasons—I think repetition has been very, very intentional this season. This is the 3rd episode the Doctor stepped on something he shouldn’t have (a butterly in Space Babies, a landmine in Boom). We’ve got the repetition of Susan Twist.
I also can see how the cruelty of what happened to Ruby feels more so in context of the rest of the season, but it’s still compelling as a standalone episode.
It was Ruby who stepped on the butterfly, not the Doctor. The Doctor was watching in dismay as the thing he’d just said would never happen immediately happened.
And Easter-egg repetition has always been a trademark of RTD Who. In his first season, it was Bad Wolf. In his second, it was Torchwood; in his third, Harold Saxon. In his fourth, I think it was the teases about Rose Tyler coming back. This time, he seems to have two of them, the snow and Susan Twist.
Trivial but agitating:
* Who, in their 20’s uses yards as a measurement of distance? Is this due to the age of the writer or is it deliberate? Everyone uses kilometers or some, miles, but no-one except oaps, yards.
* What was the deal with stepping on the grass at the stadium? People with rifles were ready to gun Ruby down? What did they think she was going to do that she couldn’t do, positioned elsewhere in the stadium? Especially as she was walking away from the pm too?
* Did she need to step in to stop the PM? The Doctor must have known how they were stopped and it wasn’t to do with Ruby (or the Doctor would have indicated this). Perhaps what happened in the original timeliness would have happened in the one we watched too?
Regarding stepping on the grass, it brings to mind the fairy circle (and isn’t the pitch a sort of sacred ground?). Don’t cross the line is like don’t step on the thread of the magic web. Ruby breaks the spell of his security perimeter, allowing her future self to give him the warning message.
Oh, that’s right. I’m an American, so it didn’t occur to me that yards are an antiquated measurement in most of the world. Of course, she should’ve said 67 metres. (Well, 66.7512, but it would no doubt be rounded.)
Really, I’d think even RTD’s generation would’ve grown up using metric units. Heck, even America’s been officially, legally metric since the 1970s.
I’d think that staying off the turf in a stadium would just be about leaving it in good condition for whatever sporting event comes after, and the guards were just trying to enforce the rules. They didn’t raise their weapons until she refused to obey their orders, so it was that disobedience that made them think she was up to no good.
And presumably this was always what happened to defeat ap Gwyllym and the Doctor just didn’t know the details. The Doctor hasn’t been everywhere; a lot of their knowledge of a given time is probably stuff they learned as history sometime in the future.
British use of the metric system is … odd. Most things went metric in the 1970s, and anyone “millennial” or younger will, for instance, have always bought food in kilograms and grams, not pounds and ounces; but a few exceptions were left behind, such as pints of beer and milk. (To confuse international travellers further, this is a different “pint” than is used in America.)
One such exception is miles, which are the official measure on all UK road signs, so are far more universally understood than kilometres. For smaller measures, metres are generally widely used – but those mile-based road signs measure things in yards. Bizarrely, a sign marked “200 yards” might actually be positioned 200 metres away – the two units are close enough in size that they can be used interchangeably if you don’t need to be accurate.
Yards are also referenced widely in sports – a football (soccer) pitch, for instance, has an “18-yard line”; nobody would ever refer to it as “the 16-and-a-half-metre line”, even if that’s now it’s official definition. It’s not unreasonable to apply the same logic here – this is supposed to be some kind of ancient fae magic, so if Ruby measured the distance as just over 66.75 metres, it’s not a huge leap for her to notice that it was exactly 73 yards.
As a Brit born in the 70s, it’s imperial for driving, beer/milk, football and personal height/weight, metric for almost everything else.
I also think that the 73 is irrelevant, it’s just the distance to the vantage point/tree and that the tree is important, particularly if it’s a hawthorn as hawthorns can be ‘fairy trees’ (in Ireland at least not sure about Wales)
She doesn’t look that far away when looking from the flat window unless it’s a Spinal Tap level tortuous route to get out of the building and measured that way
Something I just found out: “Susan Twist” isn’t some kind of credits joke, it actually is the actress’s real name. She has a long career in stage and TV going back to 1980. I’m betting RTD saw her in a play or something and thought, “I have got to find a use for someone with a name like that…”
I assume the Albion reference is a British thing as that was lost on me. Res was .. fine? .. Not great but interesting.
I didn’t get it either. “Mister Saxon” is an anagram for “Master no. six,” so maybe the Albion name is an anagram?
Both “Albion” and “Saxon” are used to refer to an imagined “pure” historical Britain, just the kind of thing far-right / ultra-nationalist politicians love to reference.
“Saxon”, or “Anglo-Saxon” refers to the Germanic people who conquered / settled southern Britain after the withdrawal of the Roman empire, and formed the kingdoms which eventually became “England” (“Land of the Angles”).
“Albion” has slightly more mythological connotations – rather fitting for a fairy story. It’s often used in connection with myths of pre-Anglo-Saxon Britain, King Arthur and Camelot, and so on. Notably, Welsh national culture is rooted in Celtic, rather than Anglo-Saxon, tradition, so that fits as well.
See (presumably) “Storm Saxon,” dystopian racist show within the dystopian racist setting of V for Vendetta.
Albion is an ancient name for Britain often used to refer to it poetically. Its use by ap Gwyllym’s party may have been meant to convey a sense of nationalism and traditionalism, the sort of rhetoric fascists like to use.
Metatextually, it could possibly have been a nod to “Perfidious Albion,” a traditional phrase to describe misdeeds by British monarchs or governments in their own self-interest.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion.
At the risk of just repeating what others are saying, this is another episode that I enjoyed right up to the ending. I don’t mind the supernatural in Doctor Who, and think it’s something that could be done really well. And this episode does it to a point but both RTD and Moffatt have always had a problem with endings and we see it again here.
And it could have been avoided! We needed a bit of an info dump about fairy circles that could have explained it at least in part. Or remove the scenes about Ruby after her 40s and have the timeline reset at that point.
Having sat with it for a while I can make the fixes in my head – this being fairy magic, when Ruby dies, she takes the place of the mysterious woman (who was a different person in the timeline to this point) and is able to then redirect herself and the Doctor to not break the circle. Then again do we know that the woman is Ruby, or is that just a representation of her being taken back in time (but if it is, why?)
Or, like Emmet says, it gets resolved later on when we find out the full extent of Ruby’s powers.
But it does leave other questions. Is Roger Mad Jack? If so what was the fairy circle doing? The Doctor mentioning Roger becomes a problem there as he already knows about him so he can’t be an entity released by the circle and the circle can’t be stopping him, because the Doctor has seen his effects on history.
The woman pushing people away from Ruby is usual cruelty for a folklore curse, as well as serving to force her to fix the problem she caused by releasing Mad Jack (but only if Mad Jack escaped at that point and wasn’t around already). None of that is inconsistent and it works well.
The disappearance of the Doctor is just weird. It’s needed for the story (similar to last week’s issue of an army waging a war with no verifiable evidence) but the lack of an explanation is weird. I saw somewhere else someone say it’s implied the Doctor leaves Ruby, but I don’t think that’s implied or why would he leave the TARDIS? The point is that it’s a showcase for Ruby like Martha crossing the world to gain power for the Doctor, or Donna giving up her life to save the world. Again it’s not insurmountable but a scene later on where Ruby talks about having looked into fairy circles and theorising on what’s happened would have made it all a bit easier to feel like the writer knew what was going on. (Which I realise is my problem with last week’s fake war, if it had been established that there had been life on that planet in the past, the “haven’t you realised, there are no aliens” would have been more a revelation than just an add on.)
But Millie was great, the whole conceit was great. I didn’t need to know what the entity was, but like others have said, something about implied rules would have helped it feel less like the writer didn’t know how to end it.
this was a really weird one but i liked it, and i cant explain why
I’ve been told that this is the first episode they filmed and it’s Doctor-lite because Ncuti Gatwa was still filming something else.
And Kate heard the old woman via her comms link with the soldiers.
I’m with the sentiment that there was a lot to enjoy in this episode but it doesn’t quite hold together. We never got any translation of the semper distens lady’s gestures that I recall. I found the gag of the innkeeper feigning ignorance when Ruby asked if she could pay with her phone kind-of weird, as only Ruby and we the viewers might suspect that it meant she was in an era before such things existed — I’m not keen on that sort of wink going on long (cf. “Bruuuuce Wayyyyyne” in The Batman). I’ll agree that some of the creepiness factor and weight of destiny was nicely done. I just think we didn’t get quite enough in the way of answers even allowing for the mysteries of timey-wimey stuff and the supernatural.
I think the phone gag worked because from the innkeeper’s point of view, she was making fun of the English tendency to see the Welsh as backward and out of touch — as if they were figuratively in the past, which made Ruby and the audience briefly wonder if she was literally in the past.
Well, at least it worked in the sense of its internal logic. Whether it worked as a comedy beat is more subjective.
One thing that I got a little stuck on is that we have had 2 episodes in a row featuring the Doctor stepping on something accidentally that set up the rest of the episode.
Maybe Ruby’s stepping on the butterfly was more than just a throwaway ‘A Sound of Thunder’ joke?
I found it extremely random and disappointing. There were so many plotholes and just pointless conceits that weren’t even internally consistent for the most part:
Why would everyone need to run away when she speaks to them (my best guess during the episode was that this ties in with her mystery parent, who is presumably some kind of eldritch horror – but then at the end when she becomes the old person she explicitly states she never found out who she is. So what could she have said that’s so scary that people like Kate (and possibly the Doctor, who appeared to have locked the Tardis from inside) would run away from Ruby on her unsupported word?)
Why exactly 73 yards? Why 73? Why yards? Not to mention that when she’s in a moving vehicle, the figure stands still and makes weird motions before moving to a new spot – definitely not maintaining a constant distance.
Why the crazy level of security on the grass, of all things?
And so on.
The timeline reset has been done before and better – Martha (walking the Earth), Donna (in Turn Left), Amy and Rory (in various episodes) and so on.
Maybe some of it will prove relevant to some long convoluted season-ending plot. I devoutly hope not; I intend to just forget this episode ever existed (as I did for basically the whole of Flux, for example). The good thing about Doctor Who is that there’s only a loose connectivity from one episode to the next, so it could bounce back quickly. Fingers crossed.
This felt like half of a great episode to me. I loved everything before the time jump, but that’s when I assumed it was going to have a better payoff than it actually did. The Welsh PM was a nothing character. We’re never given any reason as to why he wants to bring the world to the brink of Armageddon other than the suggestion that he’s “mad” (whatever that means) or how he actually managed to seize power in spite of being an obvious nutter (Simm’s Master was a nutter, but he was also hypnotizing the country) aside from some vague words about inflation. At any rate, I never took him seriously as a character, so it didn’t really matter when he was defeated. Then everything gets erased so it never actually matters, even to Ruby, who just lived through it all, and for a companion sorely in need of development, that was disappointing.
This might be my favorite episode of the new Doc thus far. I was on the edge of my seat the whole time trying to puzzle it out. I did miss Ncuti, but I think I’ve had too much treacle this season and needed a more complicated savory. As others have said, we are certainly on an arc with Ruby and this will no doubt make more sense when we land. Also, did anyone else think of the image of Death from The Seventh Seal when looking at the Woman?