The Church On Ruby Road- N/A (but somewhere around #200)

 

 The Church On Ruby Road

(Christmas Special, Dr 15 with Ruby, 25/12/2023, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Russell T Davies, director: Mark Tonderai)

Rank: n/a (but somewhere around #200) 

In an emoji: 👶

'Now I’d like to sing a little ol’ song called ‘Me and McGoblin McGee, in a medley with my new single ‘Piece Of It’s Heart’. Hit it fellas! – oh by the way, this is my band, Little Brothers and the Holding Company. Now hold that child!!!’

After three 60^th anniversary specials tying up loose ends Russell T Davies really does take off into the wild blue yonder this time around, with an episode that’s his usual style with all the trimmings: an episode that revolves around the regulars, a mad unlikely plot, an unlikely celebrity cameo, a rather clumsy opening voiceover, slightly dodgy CGI and a chase sequence that involves heights. Any worries that the Disney money would spoil this show seem at this stage to be unfounded: far from being a prettier cuter Disneyfied big blockbuster version of our favourite show Dr Who seems very much to be the same it always was. Except, we’ve never had a regeneration story quite like this one before: Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor feels fully formed already following the last quarter hour or so of ‘The Giggle’ and Dr 14 has been living out all the that trauma and doing all that healing so he doesn’t have to (so all that usual wobbly Doctoriness post regeneration is because of mental not physical trauma then? Interesting!) Only Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor ever hit the ground running this hard and he regenerated off screen (in Russell’s ‘other’ big era starter ‘Rose’ back in 2005 when the new companion would have been…blimey… one. I officially feel old). We’ve never had a Christmas Doctor Who episode like this before either (technically our first since ‘Twice Upon A Time’ in  2017 given the Chris Chibnall era stories were all new year’s specials). I fully expected Russell to celebrate getting his old primetime slot back with a very festive episode complete with killer Brussell sprouts, talking Yorkshire puddings and an alien Rudolph with a laser nose beamed in from another dimension where deers are time-travelling demi-Gods, but no: other than the setting and a neat homage to the ‘old’ days with a (near) killer Christmas tree there are no baubles or tinsel here and the setting is pure decoration (notably it’s set on Christmas Eve not Christmas Day too, as if Russell wasn’t entirely convinced he’d get his old slot back). 

I assumed from the trails and publicity bonanza that the main plot was going to play a bigger role in this episode too: the idea of goblins who steal ‘foundling’ children at Christmas is the sort of thing Dr Who has never done in the past but feels as if it ought to have done. They’re kind of cute and kind of scary all in one go and tie into the long-standing myth that there are pockets of goblins all over the British countryside waiting to pounce on ‘lost’ objects from the human world – it only takes a small nudge of Whoyness to make them out to be aliens rather than supernatural folk. Indeed so ingrained are they in our culture that those of you who’ve come to this site from my sister music review site Alan’s Album Archives might remember a long-running gag about the goblins and pixies who kept stealing my CDs whenever I needed to review them (there’s a not-quite-so long running myth that there are lots of ‘hidden’ villages lost to goblin populations that can be seen on old maps; actually they were an early version of copyright by Victorian cartographers who were fed up of people copying their work without crediting them so used to leave in random made-up towns to go ‘ah ha you stole my work!’ but a rumour sprung up that they were genuine worlds enclosed by fairy circles. No seriously. I know all this because one of them, Argleton, is right nearby to my house. Presumably there’s a hidden village next to Ruby Road too). The goblins are great, all child-catchery nastiness and doey-eyed cuteness just like Beep The Meep and their ability to time travel and keep going back to nick more babies from earlier eras after the Doctor thinks he’s stopped them is a neat trick we haven’t seen many aliens do before. I wish we’d learned more about them though – why they need babies, why they need Earth babies in particular, why they’d decided to come to this particular place and time when there are so many easier less policed eras in human history to steal from when children are less likely to be reported going missing (I mean, King Herod’s time with babies in hiding is surely a time for them and Christmassey to boot), what the story behind the Goblin King is (and why does he look like so different to the rest – Breeding? Genetics? Because Royals are always fat and ugly?!? Poor diet? He must have been eating babies who’ve just been on full fat milk to look like that). This all feels notably series five-like, the one that Steven Moffat was in charge of after Russell had to step down from running the show he loved: an orphan (like Amy) on the run from fairytale-like aliens (‘Prisoner Zero’ ‘The Dream Lord’ ‘fish vampires’) who are part Brothers Grimm part Salvador Dali, in a story that backs away shaking from the kitchen sink reality TV of the Russell era. Oh and the plot revolves around a giant crack in the wall of course – that surely can’t be a coincidence given that its only happened in two Who stories, of which this is the second. Could it be that this is Russell with folk memories of sitting at home watching the first episode made without his involvement (‘The Eleventh Hour’) and thinking ‘Gee, I wish I’d had a chance to do that – and if I were to do that show then I would do it this way’ and now realising he can? (Especially as series 5 didn’t actually go as far in that direction as we expected after that first story when we thought it was going to all be for children and full of magic rather than science).  

One thing you’d never have got in series five, though, is a villain who make such a song and dance about everything. Literally: talk about doing something we’ve never had before! The wonderfully named Janis Goblin (right that settles it, someone on this production team has definitely been reading my music books!!!) doesn’t talk about her evil plan the way most rapscallion aliens do, she sings it, with a whole choreographed routine about stealing babies. Well, that beats a villain standing around talking about stuff in a way that seemed to go on and on in Jodie Whittaker’s time. And then, gloriously, the Doctor and Ruby join in, wildly improvising lines as part of their distraction technique. They sound good too: my only regret is that we didn’t get a scene like this with the 6^th Doctor (who has the best singing voice of all the Doctors – an even more bonkers Big Finish story, ‘Dr Who and The Pirates’ got there first). It’s all madly monkeynuts and very Dr Who somehow, even though the last time we had any of the Doctors or companions singing (as opposed to a villain) it was Ian Chesterton busking his way through The Beatles’ ‘Ticket To Ride’ back in 1965. Do I want every Dr Who story to be like this? Uh maybe actually. Can you imagine how much it would cheer up, say, ‘The Monster Of Peladon’ (‘Aggedoo doo doo, he’s a hairy brute too and he’s coming just for you!’) or ‘Orphan 55’ (‘Benni my Benni, of hubbies I haven’t any, just a bunch of aliens who seem to shop at JC Penney’!) while ‘Time and The Rani’ is practically an overlong 1980s music video anyway, complete with leotards, pink bubbles and special effects (‘Yo I’m a rapping Tetrap and that there is the Rani, and that is Bonnie Langford’s character who shops at a very 1980s Armani, while the new Doctor is dressed up just like a carny!’) Anyway, for this one villain in this one setting it does kind of fit and it’s not as far out of left field as many of us fans (OK, mostly me) were worried it would be. Last I heard the single of the song scored as high as #4 on the UK charts during Christmas week too (not sure how it did o the international or indeed intergalactic ones yet, though rumours are its gone from ten to two on Skaro’s ‘oldies’ chart), the best any Who-related singles have done since ‘Doctorin’ The Timelord’ in 1988 (or Billie Piper in 1998 if you want to stretch a point).

Arguably this story needs something to brighten up the middle, though, as otherwise it’s a very gentle, very muted, even meandering kind of episode. This isn’t like Russell sories of the past like ‘Rose’ or ‘The Christmas Invasion’ where we got to know the new Doctor at speed in a few short scenes – this is  more like ‘Deep Breath’ or ‘The Woman Who Fell To Earth’ where everybody stands around talking and only get round to interacting with the main plot occasionally, when they feel like it. There’s a big chase across the rooftops, a crawl through a ventilation shaft on an alien spaceship for old times’ sake and a big (but brief) finale when a church spire crashes through the bottom of a giant goblin but that’s about it: everything else in this story is talking, in what might well be the most static of all of Russell’s stories (in embracing his colleagues’ writing styles Russell is in danger of forgetting what works so well about his own). Even with all the talking I still don’t feel as if I got to know Ruby Sunday very well, by Russell regular character standards anyway – the background of her being found on a church on Christmas Eve is rather hammered home and the (also very Moffat and Clara like) big mystery of who she is considering she has no recognisable DNA is lit up and underscored with fireworks so we don’t miss it, but that’s no substitute for a few lines of nuanced characterisation that suggests a past we don’t see on screen (something Russell’s an expert at usually). I like the very new sort of family relationship we have going on (Ruby’s an orphan like Amy and Bill sort of were, but with a bigger family by association of having so many foster-siblings– Russell’s clearly got tired of all the mother-in-law jokes from the first time round and once again the ‘Timeless Child’ arc is woven into the story with more care and skill than when Chibnall created it, with the Doctor ‘recently’ finding out he was brought up an orphan himself), with a poorly Granny upstairs and a hard-working foster mum downstairs and the brief ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’ element that  Ruby being alive changed the lives of the people around her for the better when the goblins steal her away (we could have done with more of this actually: it’s not like Russell to have a character in such flat denial as Ruby’s foster-mum or as callously doing something for the bankbook rather than from the heart as she is in a post-Ruby world– even Mrs Foster treated the adipose better than that! – a line that all she really wanted a daughter who would stay and grow old with her but it’s too late now would make all the difference and it’s not like Russell to miss a chance to tear at our heartstrings like that, especially with Murray Gold on board who turns in surely his most muted and understated music score too). As much as the script revolved around Ruby and as promising as Millie Gibson is in her debut, it still feels as if we know Ruby less well than we knew, say, Rose mark II from ‘The Star Beast’ or even the policeman getting engaged at the story’s opening, The way she enters the Tardis at the end is weird: why did the Doctor stand waiting for her the way he did rather than just flying off or asking her along outright? (Ruby’s not shown that much companion material in what was admittedly a rather trying day the way Rose, and Martha did and he doesn’t owe her a ‘favour’ the way he did Amy)? The end of the story just kind of gave up and as Tardis reveals go this one of the blandest and more generic, without the sense of awe and wonder we get from the best of these companion-joining scenes (not least because the Tardis interior looks better and better every time we see it).

Dr 15 though is lovingly written and already feels like an old friend, despite only turning up in the last few minutes of ‘The Giggle’. Ncuti Gatwa is warm and suave, sociable and cool in a way that none of his predecessors have ever been (I mean, the 3rd and 6^th Doctors would have happily argued to you that they were ‘cool’ but in a demanding, posturing way that’s the opposite of cool, while the 8^th and 11^th Doctors were kind of cool while being totally utterly oblivious to that fact, but Dr 15 is the first one who knows it). We’ve never had a Doctopr who was calm before – indeed, most of the last lot seem to have been on the verge of a nervous breakdown at times, which makes for a nice change. And which has made me wonder. If you’ve joined us for this review  and haven’t read the 60^th anniversary special ones yet then I put it there, dear reader, that they’re about the trauma and grief of Russell giving up  the show he loved to care for the man he loved, husband Andrew Smith. Dr 14 returns with David Tennant’s face precisely so he can go through the healing process first started when Andrew got sick during the making of series 4, with Dr 10 a substitute for Russell as he gets too big for his britches thinking he’s at the peak of his powers and nothing can stop him (‘Waters Of Mars’) till fate turns his even his words his big success in life against him (‘Midnight’), he has to imagine a future without the Doctor in his life (‘Turn Left’) and ends up saying the words ‘I don’t want to go’ (‘The End Of Time’) before all these years later going through the scary grieving process during the ill health and loss of someone you love (‘Wild Blue Yonder’) and realising that fate gave him the chance to do both: have those extra eight years with his husband who was at one point given just weeks to live and the chance to carry on with a new lease of life on the show afterwards (‘The Giggle’). Now that we’re in the new phase for the show proper and I’m seeing more of him, I suspect that Nucti is Russell writing Andrew into his work, so that the showrunner can keep the memory of his loved one alive and keep him company while he writes these scripts. On the behind the scenes of ‘It’s A Sin’, Russell’s inter-Who series about gay sex in the 1980s era of AIDS, he talks a lot about being a shy gauche sheltered teenager who spent the time his friends were dating staring at the TV, watching so many warm and charismatic people living their best life and his slow acceptance into that scene. What he didn’t mention then but has in a handful of other interviews (particularly his Desert Island Discs’ one) is how much it was Andrew in particular who did that for him, taking him under his wing when he knew nothing of this mysterious, exhilarating world so different to where he grew up in Swansea. A lot of fans have been scratching their head over the scene when the Doctor and Ruby first meet in a bar because it has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the plot and they meet again soon after on a rooftop anyway. Well, I think it’s there because it’s the story of how Russell and Andrew met, their eyes locking over a drink in a club (and if Russell is anything like as clumsy as he says he was or as clumsy as, well, me, I can well believe he went through what happens to Ruby in this story. I tell you, I’m definitely cursed by those goblins, it all makes sense now). Ncuti’s Doctor, then, isn’t the awkward antisocial alien outsider we’re used to (particularly in modern Who) he’s warm, smart, funny, brave, loyal, and above all cool and experienced, the best of humanity all in one parcel, because that’s what the person who inspired him was like, in Russell’s eyes at least. He’s also very free and open with his emotions, in a way Russell’s Drs 9 and 10 in particular never were, crying at the drop of a hat – will that go for the baddies too? Will the Doctor cry tears for, say, Davros? From what I’ve read that sounds very like Andrew too – it was Russell who carried that slight dark reservedness  of his earlier doctors with him when he wrote while his partner was the open one who gradually brought that aspect pout n his partner too over the years. Whatever the inspiration, so far at least, it’s working: Nctui is already my favourite Dr since Matt Smith and no 11, he has a warmth we haven’t had from the main role for ever such a long time, the grandfatherly crotchetiness of the Hartnell-Capaldi years long gone but the twinkle in the eye remaining. I think those character traits will come in handy too: with so much of Earth’s history being as racist as it is they can’t possibly avoid mentioning the Doctor’s skin tone at some point in the stories to come. With the socially awkward type of Doctor, as per Jodie Whittaker, or the bullying sort of Doctor as per Peter Capaldi, that could spell trouble in certain areas of fandom. A suave cool confident timelord comfortable in his own skin whatever the colour running rings around pale male stale colonialists though? That’s a story I’d like to see. 

One intriguing character is Anita Dobson as Mrs Flood. She starts out like a snoopy gossipy neighbour (I thought she was going to fulfil the Jackie Tyler/Francine Jones/Sylvia Noble role at first) but by the end there are hints that she’s much much more than that, with her cryptic comments about timelords and time travel. Presumably she’s the new ‘bad wolf’, the story arc that runs through the next few stories (unless she gets forgotten again, like the salt and mavity gags of ‘Yonder’) But who is she? Her name hints at River Song, which would make this a real plundering of the Steven Moffat toybox. Or maybe she’s a more sentient version of The Flood, from ‘The Waters Of Mars’ (now the Toymaker’s come back following a one-off wiped story from 1966, honestly anything could happen). Is she an older Ruby? An older Doctor? Or the usual suspects?!? (The Master/The Rani/Susan/The Doctor’s mum/Chancellor Flavia/The Doctor’s wife/a Jo Martin style Doctor/The Valeyard/someone we haven’t met yet). Only time will tell.

Ah yes, time. One of the other aspects that suggests Russell’s been playing close attention to Steven Moffat’s work is the way the plot revolves on a circular arc, so that the person we don’t-quite-see dropping off baby Ruby at the start is the Doctor, having retrieved her as a baby from the snatches of the goblins, after they stole her rather than the baby she was meant to be looking after. Confusing/ You betcha. It’s the sort of thing the more normally clearcut Russell would never think to do in his scripts the first time round (not least because he wouldn’t want to clash with Moffat’s favourite style) but now his friend has gone it’s as if Russell is trying to keep the flame of those sorts of stories alive alongside reviving his own, perhaps because he knows what it’s like to sit at home as an ex-showrunner and think ‘aw, Dr Who doesn’t look the way it did when I used to write for it’. That aspect’s a clever idea that again isn’t quite made enough of here the way Moffat would have centred the entire story round such a concept: it might have been better for the plot if it had been more like ‘Father Day’, with hundreds of doctors trying to restore timelines and being ambushed by hundreds of goblins. As it is the baddies all seem to give up and go home very quickly. What’s to stop them just kidnapping baby Ruby again one day when the Doctor’s back is turned? He can’t keep doing this or he’ll have regenerated into Dr 16 before he’s had a chance to do anything! Davina McCall is under-used as this week’s big name guest (another Russell trademark; her appearance is another homage to the ‘old’ days as she presented him with his first big award for Who, a Bafta in 2006) and the whole issue of the goblins creating bad luck and it being a ‘new language to decode’  is never quite explained – we get some guff about there being no such thing as coincidence but nothing to say how or why the goblins are doing this, except that they can (and do in folklore). Does it all fit in with that mysterious bit about the thrown salt in ’Wild Blue Yonder’ causing bad luck again?  But that’s in the future from here…Isn’t it? How can they fit? One other plot point by the way: presumably if Ruby is in the same family as a load of vulnerable foster children she’d be CRB-checked, at least when she turned sixteen or so. They in turn would have her DNA on file to check she is who she says she is – if there really was an anomaly of her not existing or having non-human DNA (as is hinted) that would have had social services round quicker than you can say ‘carrot juice, carrot juice, carrot juice’. And if Ruby was really that desperate to know who her mum and dad are you think she’s have made enquiries there and then. And why leave her at a church? Presumably it’s there for the ‘nativity’ theme of a baby being taken in at Christmas, but in practical terms the Doctor’s better leaving her in a police station or the foster family’s own doorstep  (he’s not exactly the religious type). 

The pieces are moving into place for a great new era then, but they aren’t quite here, not yet. ‘Ruby Road’ is a nice little episode that does some nice new things we haven’t seen in the series before, along with just enough flashbacks to times past and it cements the new Doctor’s character nicely. I just wish it had done a little bit more with everything else: the goblin plot comes and goes, there’s a lot of nattering and not much doing and everything gets solves in time for tea as simply and harmlessly as possible. For the moment that’s kind of nice: including ‘Power Of the Doctor’ we’ve had four big epic powerhouse productions in a row now and everyone needs a rest from that from the Doctor to us at home. I kind of expected that to happen next time round though, perhaps in episode two of the next series proper (and what are we calling that by the way? RTD2.1? Series 14? Semester 1?!) – going small feels wrong for a Christmas episode.

This is the biggest timeslot of the year, when the whole family are watching, not just fans or curious people hooked in by the lure of seeing David Tenant all over again. Back in the olden days Russell used to be great at using this timeslot for standalone episodes that  summed up everything this series was at the time and where it was heading next, with adventures that refused to let you look away from your Christmas Dinner for a second in case you missed something and demanded you tuned in when the series returned. Like the Doctor, this story plays it cool. In fact this story doesn’t feel as if it has quite enough to keep you from your post-Christmas Dinner conversation and n places is about as dynamic and exhilarating as The King’s Speech  (now there’s a Christmas episode I’d love to see: with those ears and stilted speech he just can’t possibly be human). It’s a story that desperately needs a tighter middle section, or at least something – anything – extra to happen and a song and dance number is nice and all but it’s not enough to cover up how empty the middle half of this story is. While not as forgettable as ‘Wild Blue Yonder’ this is not exactly Russell’s greatest moment as a writer, the way he used to hit peaks more or less every time he sat down to write in the olden days, even if it has lots of nice bits in it. Uniquely for a Russell T Christmas story it needs more gravy to beef it up a bit – though equally it’s a rare chance to take stock as it were and a lot more digestible than ‘Voyage Of The Damned’ (where so much was going on it burnt the turkey). In other words it’s good – not great, not superb in a ‘this is proper Dr Who this is’ like ‘The Star Beast’ or most of ‘The Giggle’, but it does the job: the new era is established, they hit a new button on the CGI computer, throw in something whenever thought we’d see in this show and just about get away with it and far from facing another lengthy ‘wilderness years’ post Chris Chibnall the way we were fearing Dr Who feels like a series that’s healthy and loved again. That’s enough reason to celebrate, even though I think ultimately ‘Ruby Road’ will become seen as a stepping stone towards that goal rather than a magnificent episode in its own right.

POSITIVES + The rooftop chase is well done and the part of the story that most looked as if it benefitted from Disney money compared to the olden days as it really looked as if the Doctor and Ruby were leaping from roof to roof. Even a few years ago they’d have struggled to do this quite so convincingly and it’s a worthy place to put all that extra moolah rather than wasting it on something we didn’t need. In fact, given the Disney link it wouldn’t have surprised me if a load of chimney sweeps had started singing ‘chim chim cheree’ while they ran (perhaps with Missy as a ‘bad Mary Poppins’).  

NEGATIVES – That said, The Goblin King was just a lump that looked as if it needed a bit more money spent on it, not that far advanced from, say, the Mighty Jagarafess from ‘The Long Game’. It never felt as if it was ‘real’ or in the same scene with the very physical Goblins, even though the Goblins too were computer creations for the most part and the Goblin King is a real puppet. Hmm…Sometimes CGI is more and this is one of those times.  

BEST QUOTE: ‘It’s a brand new science for me and I love it – the language of luck. For what is a coincidence but a form of accident? Two things bumping into one another unexpectedly – like you and me’.