Doctor Who and 73 Yards
The problem was that they needed to start filming before Gatwa was done working on Sex Education. Meaning even though they only doing 8 shows a year now, they had to open the production schedule with a Doctor-Lite episode like it was still 2008. This was the first one they filmed, before even the Christmas episode, so this was actually Gibson’s first time out with the part and on her own for most of it. It’s not clear when they realized this was going to happen, but it feels like it was late in the day, as this has a certain “written at the last moment” quality to it. It sort of feels like this all needs to be in a title card at the start, because I’m not sure much about this makes sense other than as a way to paper over a production glitch.
Opening without the regular titles is a nice touch, since “Doctor Who” isn’t actually in this one, this is the Ruby show. The whole opening act is nicely spooky, in a Kirkland-brand The Wicker Man sort of way. Wales is, as always, gorgeous, and the escalating tension in the pub full of unfriendly locals is a really solid horror movie sequence, with a killer punchline. The strange woman following Ruby is unsettling without being directly scary, there’s a solid rural horror ghost story fully assembled.
And then Davies does one of his favorite tricks, which is to run though the whole premise from the trailer in the first 20 minutes, and then move on and do something totally different. I was not expecting to pivot into a story set 20 years later, so kudos for the genuine surprise.
It’s a shame, then that the actual story feels assembled out of bits of other, better Davies scripts. The main thrust is somewhere between “Turn Left” and Years and Years, the evil prime minster is Harold Saxon plus any number of other evil government figures from past Davies Whos, and even the best part of this is a rerun of Lucy, Saxon’s wife, being abused in the background, except without, you know, the part at the end where she shoots him.
That said, the standout sequence is the scene where Ruby apologizes to the other campaign worker for not helping her earlier because she only had one shot and she had to be sure, and then maneuvering the ghost or phantom or whatever it is into position. That feels like the scene the whole episode was written outwards from.
A recurring theme in Davies work are characters trapped in a world where no one will help them. It’s not quite full-blown nihilism, but Davies has a very low opinion of the average person, and this episode is chock full of unkind, unfriendly, unhelpful people. It’s a tremendously negative worldview, exacerbated by the phantom making things worse.
The phantom woman’s effect on the people who talk to her is always effective, and it’s interesting that fear continues to be a major theme this year, even when it’s not the Doctor being afraid. The hiker, the pub denizen, her mom provide a solid building horror at what that phantom might be.
The best is the brief appearance by Jemma Redgrave’s Kate Stewart who gets to swagger in, show what a UNIT show starring her would actually look like, and then gets to act the hell out of the spell descending on her and becoming terrifying. Kate Stewart has been a recurring character for 12 years now, and she’s never been better deployed than she was here and in “The Giggle” last year, mostly by remembering that Redgrave can really act. And I really liked the beat that Kate knew something was up with the timeline. Here’s hoping some of those spin-off rumors are true!
And speaking of that, one of the rumored (working? code name?) titles for a spin off is something to the effect of “the war between the land and the sea,” which is a phrase that makes an appearance—and that probably means nothing, but worth noting.
(And as a stray comment, I’d be willing to bet the costuming note for “middle-aged” Ruby was “how close can you get to Michelle Pfeifer’s Selina Kyle before she turns into Catwoman?”)
But then the last act slides into the most unearned, garbage ending. As soon as the story skips forward in time the first time it’s clear there’s going to be some kind of closing the time loop reset ending, but… what? It’s not so much that the ending doesn’t make sense, it’s that it doesn’t even try to. The story carefully lays out two rules about the phantom woman: she always stays exactly 73 yards away from Ruby, and anyone who interacts with her runs and shuns Ruby. And the dual resolutions don’t engage with either of these. The evil prime minister, who might be the evil spirit the pub locals made up (?) runs from everything, not just Ruby, and then at the finale, when Ruby gets old enough, she… goes back in time and turns into the phantom? (And if that was Ruby all along, why was she doing what she does? Why are old Ruby and the Phantom played by different actresses? Was it really Ruby in the first loop, or did she replace the original phantom?)
The obvious point of comparison here is “Blink”—a Doctor-Lite episode built around a monster with clearly-stated rules, but in that show, the resolution centered on using the monster’s own rules against them, here the resolutions center around the monster growing new features suddenly.
Since this is where it becomes explicit in the text, we should probably say something about the much-discussed pivot towards the supernatural and paranormal. Mostly, the difference beween “science-fiction”, “science-fantasy”, “the paranormal”, and “fantasy” is a matter of which latin roots you use to make up the fake words with, but here it seems to be an excuse to just not bother about how anything works or wire up the ending, which combined with the “lol, music am I right?” ending to “The Devil’s Chord” is a little worrying.
Most seasons of the revival show seem to have that one episode that isn’t necessarily “bad” or “cheap”, but it’s clear that it got less attention than the ones around it, the one where everyone went, “yeah, that’s fine,” and then went back to working on the cool landmines or something.
The thing it reminded me of the most was “Boomtown”, from the revival show’s first season back in 2005. That was a last second replacement script for one that had fallen through, it was cheap(er), set in Wales, had one good scene in the middle, and had a nonsensical ending that was basically just “a wizard did it.” It wasn’t “bad”, so much as it was clear everyone involved was busy either working on the WW2 gas mask zombies on one side or making the big finale on the other, and just needed to get this out out the door.
And look, I kinda liked “Boomtown,” copout ending non-withstanding, and I kinda liked this with the same hedge. If your weakest episode to date still manages a solid 20 minutes of Welsh horror followed by a ghost preventing an evil spirit from starting a nuclear war, your show’s probably in good shape.å