73 Yards: Ranking N/A (but around #115ish)

"73 Yards” (15^th Dr, 2024)

(Series 14/1A episode 4, Dr 15 with Ruby, 25/5/2024, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Russell T Davies, executive producers: Julie Gardner, Jane Tranter, Joe Collins and Phil Collinson**, director:Dylan Holmes Williams)

Ranking: #115ish reviewed 26/5/2024

On seeing the title: 'Gee, I hope this is a story about the Doctor owning 73 Totter's junkyards spread across the galaxy where he's lived out similar lives to the one he had with grand-daughter Susan and there's a temporal nexus point linking each one made up of his parallel lives that's then altered by an alien monster reversing the polarity of his timelines!'

On seeing the episode: 'Whose that batty old woman then? Oh...'

 

Well, that was an odd one. We seem to have been saying that rather a lot lately in the Dr Who community. So much for the Disney money meaning that they’re playing it safe this year! ’73 Yards’ is, at least, like lots of other Dr Who stories stuck together rather than something totally new: there’s the spooky ‘Wicker Man’ style folk horror and witchcraft of ‘Image Of The Fendahl’, the sense of being a perennial outsider Bill feels in ‘World Enough and Time’, that feeling of grief seen in ‘Hell Bent’, the watcher from ‘Logopolis’, the confusing internal logic of ‘Warrior’s Gate’, the anger and impatience of ‘The Girl Who Waited’ and the sense of life beyond the Doctor touched on in ‘Turn Left’, all stirred in a cauldron and left to implode, as if Russell T Davies has spent his time away from Dr Who watching his successor Steven Moffat and his increasing collection of blu-rays from the 20th century and gone ‘Ooh I wish I’d done that when I had the chance…Wait, why don’t I try them all?!?’. More than anything, though, this story resembles my favourite of Russell T Davies’ non-Who series from 2019 in which an ordinary happy world gets out of control one bad step forward at a time until we go from a life that’s recognisably like ours (to the extent that there was a voiceover made over the opening the day before transmission mentioning items from the new years, even though it had all been shot months ago) to one that had we come to it cold would have seemed impossible, with its right wing politicians, wars and robots. It’s an extraordinary bit of fortune-telling about Brexit, about Putin, about AI technology, about covid, about communities who used to be close turned on one another because they took a wrong turning somewhere, with a warning to us at home to make sure what steps we take and to stay alert to things around us, because one day that might be us. A lot of fans are calling it a ‘Twilight Zone’ story with a bit of ‘sapphire and Steel’ but honestly it’s not logical enough to fit the former or bonkers enough to fit the second: if anything it’s like ‘The Omega Factor’, the 1979 series Louise Jameson did straight after playing Leela, in which it’s left up to the viewer whether the paranormal investigator’s wife dying in a car crash is the result of meddling with witchy forces or a natural disaster and his grief in coming to terms with her loss and the world being even stranger than he thought it was when researching telepathy and telekinesis.  

 

’73 Yards’ (the distance it takes for a figure in the distance to  become  blurry, as measured by Russell himself from atop a Welsh pier when writing this story) looks, from first viewings on my timeline, the sort of story that you either ‘get’ or you don’t, a divisive tale that makes little logical sense in a scifi sense but which simply ‘feels’ right, working to its own internal spooky logic that ghost stories do. Me? I liked it, probably a little more than the other 15th Doctor stories so far, although I think I liked what I felt it was trying to say more than what it actually did if that makes sense: I love the fact that my timeline is full of fans desperately trying to work out what the heck ’73 Yards’ was all about, each one with very different versions of what this story meant because I love it when Dr Who is ambiguous to do that and it makes a great change from the other stories this year whose plots have all been so simple they can all be reduced to a single sentence (‘the one with the Beatles’ ‘the one where the Doctor steps on a mine’ ‘Space Babies!’) while still being a bit narked that there wasn’t just a little more logic inside there to stick it all back together again. For instance I’ve seen fans complain that the ending is the stupidest thing Dr Who has ever done and others who think it’s the single greatest twist in the history of the franchise; had this been by Chris Chibnall I’d have found it clumsy and had it been by Steven Moffat it would have been too clever by 7/8ths, but because its Russell T making the most of the wider palette his successors have left him and something he absolutely totally wouldn’t have done back when he had the keys to the Tardis the first time round it’s a surprise that works when you’re watching it, with its own internal instinctive feeling of being ‘right’ that makes no sense when you sit back and think about it. Like the story it’s an idea to like, even love when you’re watching, but which is also so far out of Russell’s usual strengths as a writer it also feels as if you’re strangely removed from it all, at a distance of perhaps 73 yards or so. 

The Doctor has been putting his foot in it a lot lately hasn’t he? There’s a lot of joking within the story about how it’s nearly like last week’s episode ‘Boom’ all over again, where the Doctor steps on a landmine (interesting in itself given that this story was recorded first – and is, in fact, Ncuti and Mollie’s first recorded episode even before ‘The Church On Ruby Road’, to cover for the fact that Ncuti still had the final episodes of comedy series ‘Sex Education’ to film before joining the cast fully). But ’73 Yards’ is very different to ‘Boom!’; whereas that story was Moffat playing around with typical Davies ideas (an emotional story from a ridiculously simple premise, of stepping on a mine) this is Russell nicking from Steven, a gutpunch of a life spent lived in fear and isolation as a result of something that feels like a fairytale.  The Doctor accidentally breaks a magic fairy ring on top of a Welsh clifftop and Ruby reads some scrolls she found there, turning around to find the Doctor gone and an old woman standing staring at her from 73 Yards ago. Like ‘Boom’ it’s sudden and violent, an act that comes out of nowhere to take everything that seemed safe and cosy away in an instant, just as the Doctor and Ruby are happily riffing off one another like a brother and sister who know each other really well, and then he’s gone, vanished as if he never existed. Instead of her best friend she was so close to there’s a stranger following her around, always at a distance, scaring off everyone she talks to. The rest of the episode is Ruby, a character who like Amy Pond before her is an orphan with abandonment issues, coming to terms with the fact that she’s now alone, abandoned by everyone she used to know in her old life by turn, a stranger in a strange land that once seemed so familiar. Ruby is distraught, never able to allow herself to get close to anyone in ase they get scared of, sometimes using that isolation to try to live her life small and empty, sometimes freaking out, sometimes trying to use her days for good such as the time she becomes an ‘insider’ in the campaign of a right-wing politician intent on causing harm. Only nothing works until she dies, a lonely old woman wondering what it was all for, until her death releases her ghost who sees how she should have lived her life, warning her just in time to take a step back from the wrong turning she took at the start, the one mis-step that haunted the rest of her life. Far from being the supernatural story about local Welsh weirdo Mad Jack who placed a curse on her, the way we’re led to think from the opening moments, it’s a story about how we can become our own ghosts, our own mistakes haunting us for the rest of our lives.       

   
On the one hand it’s a story about how we live our lives through how other people think of us. Ruby realises early on that she can’t get close enough to this mad old woman to talk her properly (a bit too quickly: it might have been better had we had an extra scene where she tries just that, rather than merely looking up after walking towards her to find the woman is still the same distance away). She sends strangers to talk to the woman who then run away with fear and a look of disgust over at Ruby, whose powerless to make them listen to her (including the mysterious Susan Twist whose in this episode again! That has to be a series arc clue but we still don’t have the first idea what that might be just yet). Ruby walks into the local pub to find that the locals don’t like strangers and talk to her as if she’s from outer space – despite thinking she’s an ordinary Londoner. There’s a fun bit where we think the Tardis has landed out of time because the locals act as if they have no idea about how you can use your phone to pay for things and then laughing say they were messing with her, only to charge her a fiver for a soft drink which seems extortionate even with austerity inflation to take into account, but no: apparently Ruby is back in her own time and they’re just ripping her off. They don’t like strangers in these here parts and can’t wait to get rid of her. So Ruby goes home, devastated to find out that even her mum rejects her. Then she’s befriended by UNIT in a welcome surprise return of Kate Lethbridge-Stewart who comments on how she’s used to looking after the Doctor’s strays and it looks as if Ruby’s going to be alright again – only the whispering goes on and soon our old friend is abandoning her too. Ruby turns hard and isolated, breaking up a romance because she can only see it going wrong before picking up on a throwaway reference the Doctor made in the last thing he ever said to her, about a right-wing politician from the future who puts everyone in danger and has just appeared on TV. Ruby uses her ghostly powers for good, getting the old scary woman to frighten him off as well and destroying his political career, so she at least manages to do some good from the curse that’s been placed on her, the isolation and damage she feels. You feel, given that this is Dr Who where karma is usually a thing, as if Ruby has done enough to break the spell, but no: she dies alone, still unloved. 

On the other hand this is a story about unresolved trauma and grief, the sudden shock of someone you love dying that cuts up your life in your tracks and what an isolating experience that is. Strangers whisper when you’re around and run away, even the people you love can’t get close to you and run away in disgust because you’re not who you used to be.  Like Bill being turned into a Cybermen you feel the same person inside but people treat you differently because all they can see is the monster they think you are and which you sometimes think yourself to be,  the ordinary person whose seen something so extraordinary terrible that it’s the first thing people talk about when you walk into a rom. Tragedy becomes your identity to the point where it both follows you around as your closest companion and keeps you at a distance from everyone, unable to get close in case they abandon you too. Whereas Moffat spent a whole episode of having the 12th Doctor re-living the same day, waking up and remembering the grief of losing Clara while playing hide and seek in a giant castle in ‘Hell Bent’, an episode every fan seems to love except me, Davies is more emotional about it: we see Ruby’s pain firsthand more readily than the Doctor’s, there are no ginormous and clumsy bits if symbolism and this feels less like a mystery that demands we solve it than an awful thing that just is, because awful things can happen in life. The fact that Ruby has to live with what happened to her, for the rest of her days, without the Doctor isn’t quite as heartbreakingly done as Russell’s own ‘Turn Left’, because we haven’t had a full chance yet to see what Ruby’s life might have turned out like without the Doctor there, but it still packs a punch. Equally the story isn’t quite as relentlessly cruel as ‘The Girl Who Waited’, where Amy once spent a lifetime in a separate time-stream waiting for the Doctor to save her. However you feel every turn and twist, especially the two moments when we think it’s finally going to be okay, that Ruby has found someone safe to be with, only for her mum and Kate Lethbridge-Stewart to abandon her too. Russell has had his own share of trauma, giving up his Who job the first time round primarily so he could nurse his partner Andrew Smith who was dying of a brain tumour and who passed away in 2018, nine years after his last Who script was finished (one of the last was 2008’s ‘Turn Left’ which is sort of this story in reverse, Russell’s story about having to give up Doctor Who and a love letter to how his life might have turned out without it). He knows the atomic bomb that losing someone close causes in the rest of your life and how you never get over it. 

Could it be too that this is Welsh native Russell T Davies despairing at the position his country has been left in by repeated decisions by the English at Westminster. The moment when the lady at the pub talks about fairies and spirits and how they live in Wales before her disgust at this London interloper putting her foot in it by not respecting local traditions is the sort of thing Russell’s hinted at before but never as strongly as here. It could just be a character saying the sort of things a character in her position would say and yet the fact that later in the story we have a clearly English politician talking from a mostly English government about blowing people up with nuclear weapons rather emphasises her point. Wales has been a separate country to England a lot longer than it’s been part of a union. For the longest time the English were the neighbours from hell trying to invade it every five minutes. Suddenly they think they’ve invented isolationism and want to be left in peace at just the point when being part of Europe is benefitting Wales (by making programmes like Dr Who): that’s beyond aggravating for many locals who have felt for many years that Britain’s democracy never speaks for them. After all, the rest of the story makes clear through Ruby how isolation and keeping your distance is bad for you. Brexit is one of those big British issues of the past ten years Russell’s been watching from the sidelines that wasn’t there in his Dr Who days but we know from ‘Years and Years’ and various interviews that he’s not a fan: after all most of his Dr Who stories are about the importance of community and co-operation. Ruby’s isolation could easily be a Brexit metaphor, the awful whispers that everyone else talks about her to strangers exactly the sort of hate the ‘leavers’ were engineering with their lies about the damage other countries were doing to Britain 9when really they were doing it to themselves). Although I wish Russell had thrown a lie written on a big red bus just to whallop the point home as if this is what he was trying to say it all got a bit lost in the metaphors.  

Goodness knows that’s enough to be going on with; I do feel as if there’s even more than that though. Russell’s story is quite a sad one when you know it – ‘the only gay in the village’ in Wales who was ostracised by so many for his sexuality (this is a rare story that actually has Wales as Wales after all, where Russell grew up long before Dr Who adopted it as ‘home’). There are endless moving interviews where he talks about how lonely he was in his teens, unable to find any people who were like him in the valleys, isolated while people talked about him behind his back (because it was the 1970s when people did that), whispers following him wherever he went. From what I understand his family were always supportive and he found his own friends on moving to London in the 1980s, people who were just like him (his series ‘It’s A Sin’ pays tribute to a lot of these friends) and yet it must have put a strain on every relationship he ever had; the people who started avoiding his own parents while they whispered and snickered, everyone keeping their distance from him. For a while Russell finds a community amongst Whovians, as represented by Kate Lethbridge Stewart, presumably chosen to represent us all as she’s the character who has the best overview of all the people whose lives have ever been touched by the Doctor; you would have thought a uniting programme about an asexual alien who believes in justice and fairness for everyone and who doesn’t even judge monsters from other planets would be a source of support (and mostly it was, judging by interviews and Russell’s open love letters  to the series in his other stories) but I’ve been around this community for long enough to know that there are always pockets of people who think the show is for ‘them’. As late as 2005-2010, when Russell was showrunner, there was a baying mob who complained at the show having a ‘gay agenda’ and were horrified Russell had been put in charge after writing other TV series about gay young men, even though that ‘agenda’ consisted of Captain Jack 9) bisexual character invented by Moffat) and a chaste kiss between lesbian cats in ‘Gridlock’. Suddenly Dr Who no longer felt like a safe space either. So there Russell is, a creative whose spent his life at a remove from everyone else, trying to use it as his ‘super-power’, allowing him to talk about what the world gets ‘wrong’. In this story that’s summed up by young gammon Brexiteer Roger, an MP who seriously thinks that Britain is better off in isolation and threatening people with nuclear warheads, even though the writer knows how important community is and how we should be closer to people not further away from them. If this reading is right (and, you know, it might not be – this is a subtle a script, at least compared to the rest so far this year) then it’s a sad ending: Russell thought that using this super-power and putting the world right would be enough to stop people whispering and kept apart from him but it isn’t; the world is as divided and prejudiced now, in the present time, as it ever was and how he might never escape it till death.  Would he really want to warn himself from choosing this path though? And how can it even be a path he chose to take, rather than the only one that’s open to him? 

Could it be, then, that this is a more general story about being a creative who finds it hard to fit in? Creatives scare people who only see what’s directly in front of them with our knowledge of the past and fear of the future – most of us live by intuition rather than fact, a spooky ‘sixth sense’ that means we can sense what’s about to happen in the world and our constant need to warn people about it, doomed to only be heard once it’s happened (I’m convinced that’s what ‘Years and Years’ is about). We don’t live in the ‘real’ world and walk around with the power of life and death over our characters (a lot of the 2009 specials feel like Russell’s paranoia all this writing was giving him a God complex). Goodness knows being a writer isn’t a vocation most of us would choose (and I add myself there even though I’ve sold a mere infinitesimal fraction of what Russell has because it has nothing to do with success): it’s low paid, unbelievably stressful and only other creatives respect you – everyone else thinks you ought to get a ‘proper’ job and should stop mucking about. It leaves you always slightly removed from the world, always looking at it through distant eyes, as if you’re a character yourself. No one else, however close to you, can truly join in with the party going on in your head at all hours and as Russell’s head includes Oods, Slitheen and The Moxx Of Ballhoon I’m willing to say that his inner world is every bit as weird as my own. There you are, taking a difficult path that you didn’t actually choose for yourself but did because it was the only one open to you because this is a vocation that very much chooses you not the other way around (and, let’s face it, most writers are pretty hopeless at day to day life and normal jobs, myself very much included). Everyone else thinks you’re mad for taking it, because they can’t share in that vision in your head that keeps you writing and haunts you like a ghost that lives inside you, demanding to be fed. The only thing you can do is tell yourself you’re doing good, pointing out the world’s mistakes and offering warnings for other people who are too busy living their normal lives to see it, like Ruby does with the MP. But even then it never quits, never lets you go, never lets you return to join ‘normal’ people. If that sounds far-fetched then maybe it is, but it would be at one with how Russell left us the first time around: I’m convinced ‘Turn Left’ is about Russell’s despair at having to give his favourite job up and that ‘Waters Of Mars’ was his punishment for refusing to, with the finale of ‘The End Of Time’ touching on all those things Russell felt he had left to write. It’s ‘Midnight’ though that this story reflects most: every moment he stays in his job, instead of being with his poorly husband, is poison, the Doctor’s own words and creative processes turned against him. One clue: Ruby makes it snow, again. Something that used to appear in so many of Russell’s stories (especially his Christmas stories) that it became a running gag. The line where a dying Ruby tells her nurse proudly ‘I made it snow once’ and she simply sighs ‘yes dear’ disbelievingly while plumping up her bed and doing something practical is the sort of end all creatives fear, their good work all for nothing in the ‘real’ world. Russell is, of all the showrunners and script editors who’ve ever worked on Who, the most instinctive, the one mostly to write what’s rolling around his sub-conscious simply because it sounds right: he’s less logical than Moffat or Chibnall, or for that matter Dicks or Bidmead or Cartmel (the closest is David Whittaker, right at the start, with ‘Edge Of Destruction’ a similar tale all round with just as controversial an ending. But even he never let his imagination run away with him quite as far). Of all the people who’ve worked on the show Russell is the one that’s learned to listen to his inner voice the most – it’s perfectly in keeping to turn that into a character that stares at him from a distance his whole life, as if he’s a character in his own story. Perhaps this is Russell in the interim showrunner years wishing he’d never brought back Dr Who (this is a story all about trying to live without him after all, just like ‘Turn Left’) and being a witness to all that magic because he’s been forced to live a boring ordinary life without him and it hurts (a mirror to Turn Left’, about how much he knew he was going to miss it). 

Even more than that, like ‘Boom!’ last week I think this is all a covid metaphor, Russell too writing about the single biggest world event since he was showrunner. For Russell the world has always been a brilliantly happy place full of a network of support and one or two wrong ‘ums who cause things to go wrong, but there we were stuck in isolation, apart, that community that Davies loves so much falling apart. From what I understand he spent most of it alone in his flat, two years after losing his husband, broken only by the odd Dr Who tweetathon. Just look at how the old lady is always a set distance apart from Ruby, how she can’t get close to anyone old or new and is always going home alone, the way even after lockdown ended people were wary of one another, the way the locals are in the pub when Ruby walks in. You only need to talk to any under tens who lived through the lockdown (or those of us unfortunate enough to be immuno-compromised, for whom every day is still lockdown, because covid is still killing and disabling thousands of people every day, folk) to know how differently they see the world after a set period of their life where they had to grow up independently, without their friends and peers around them; even with adults there’s a level of distance and remove still there. For someone as open to the collective conscious and world suffering as Russell covid was inevitably going to feature in there somewhere but he doesn’t see it as a mine to  be stepped on so that everything blows up, the way Moffat did, he sees it as something more abstract, a ghost that haunts everyone.

The result is a story with many great moments: Ruby’s mum glaring at her daughter from inside a Taxi to Ruby’s great despair, the moment Kate listens in to what her soldiers are telling her and leaves in disgust even though Ruby pleads with her not to, the final oddly brutal moments in the hospital ward where Ruby figures her life is for nothing before her ghost goes on walkabout. Millie Gibson is extraordinary: I still can’t believe this was her first story filmed (not least because her performance in the first one we saw, ‘Ruby Road’, was so awful, pure soap opera acting): this one had nuance, panic, a world-weary despair that actors decades her seniority and experience would struggle to pull off. You really believe that Ruby is older and in her forties by the time she starts working as a volunteer for Roger; far more than the actually pretty awful makeup job (I thought the one in ‘The Girl Who Waited’ was disappointing in 2011, but this is just a wig and a pair of glasses). A lot of this episode’s brilliance is down to Mollie and she rewards the faith Russell put in her, when Ncuti was unavailable, a hundredfold. 

It does feel, though, as if this story was rushed despite the fact that it was filmed as long as two years ago (the single worst thing about being showrunner the first time round was how close everything was to deadlines and what a rush it all was, so Russell isn’t going to fall into that trap again, at least filming wise!), something in common with Russell’s other scripts so far this year. The old Russell was more nuanced and detailed a writer, less broad than the current one who’ll sketch a scene in and leave it at that. The opening scene with the fairy ring is muddled even allowing for the fact it turns out to be largely a red herring and merely means to set up a different sort of a story the whole thing about mad Jack and the scrolls and the curse is poorly explained. It feels like an afterthought, a desperate attempt to work this central idea into a story. Dr Who has done witchy stories in the past (not always successfully ‘Fendahl’s mixture of science never quite worked, ‘The Witchfinders’ is too historically inaccurate and empty to do much and the ‘K9 and Company’ pilot ‘A Girl’s Best Friend’ is absolutely bananas). There’s plenty of room for another, especially one that leans into the ‘Wicker Man’ stylings of this story’s opening few minutes, with a village cut off from the rest of the world still practicing pagan witchcraft. It’s a bit clumsily done though: surely the obvious thing for Ruby to do would be to go to the nearest library and research the curse to see how to break it. I mean, I wouldn’t head to the pub first thing: for a start Ruby doesn’t know if she’s putting everyone in immediate danger while I wouldn’t have dared leave the Tardis, even when locked (and why is it locked, even with her key? It would be easy enough to say that the Doctor simply hadn’t given Ruby her own key yet, but no – they make a big song and dance about that in ‘Space Babies’). I wish too the watching lady had been spookier: more like Logopolis’ ‘watcher’, a harbinger of what’s to come from an alternate timeline, the fickle finger of date that can’t be avoided. The ending is convoluted (there’s always a twist at the end!) and confused: surely Ruby would be able to recognise something about her future self, even at a distance of 73 yards. I mean, even older and with – apparently – an entirely different build (the downside of using another actress rather than Millie under ‘Sound Of The Drums’ style aged makeup) she still has the same mannerisms. There’s one great plothole too: how come the Doctor and Ruby listen the second time round when they didn’t the first time? It’s sad, tool that effectively the episode is all for nothing from Ruby’s point of view: she effectively killed that other self, just like the older Amy did in ‘The Girl Who Waited’ and Donna did to get the Doctor back in ‘Turn left’ in a similar scenario, but you really feel those sacrifices because they were made knowingly. In emotional moments of sudden realisation. Here Ruby’s ghost just discovers that she can do this at the point of death. The world isn’t saved by her actions (except for the MP with nukes bit – is that going to happen for real in this timeline now?), and her character doesn’t remember any of her experiences to learn from them. Honestly, great as this story was, Phil Ford’s Sarah Jane Adventures episode ‘The Curse Of Clyde Langer’ did being an outcast better – and Daniel Anthony was even  better at being a typecast scapegoat, despite being a ful five years younger than Mollie (someone give him a leading role – he’s the first person I’d cast if I was running a show of my own!) 

I do admire this story for being different though. It would have been easy for Russell to take the Disney money and rest on his laurels by giving us lots of lazy animatronic CGI monsters and the same recycled plots. Instead there isn’t another Who story quite like the atmosphere of this one – for all it has elements from other past stories. ‘Warrior’s Gate’ is the closest, a tale of time gone wrong and being separated from your real self by the mirror of your mind, but even that one doesn’t quite work like this: far from time being weird here it’s the enemy, eating away at Ruby in her Doctorless life. Heck, having the Doctor absent at all just five episodes into this brave new era is courageous enough, as is choosing not have the opening sequence (as far as I can tell only the third story ever to do that; this story is about the Doctor’s absence after all – it would be wrong to go from the Doctor disappearing to seeing the Tardis spinning through time and space). I’m not the biggest fan of either Ruby’s mum or Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, who are amongst the more one-note of Dr Who actors, but they both give their best performances here. We get Susan Twist’s biggest cameo yet 9so much for there being a twist at the end – this time she’s at the beginning) and you’re clearly meant to think that the plot is finally going to reveal who this mystery person is who keeps turning up across time, but nope – it’s another red herring as he runs away from Ruby never to be seen again (and surely she can’t be Susan, unless she lost her memory, as she sees the Tardis). The story really does belong to Mollie Gibson though and wouldn’t work anywhere near as well without her to pull it all together.  

In other words ’73 Yards’ is another ‘nearly’ episode, one with a lot to admire and one that’s arguably head and shoulders over Russell’s other comeback stories so far (though I still think ‘The Star Beast’ is the best script that owed its ideas more to Pat Mills and John Wagner who wrote the original comic strip it was based on) but which still leaves me feeling slightly removed from it, unlike the real emotions I felt from, say, ‘Turn Left’. There’s too much talking in this one and not enough feeling, not enough understanding just what Ruby’s been through – because she can’t and won’t talk about it. For me it’s not the classic half the fanbase are calling it – and yet neither is it the incomprehensible disaster others say it is, at least not to me (I reminds me of how I felt as the only fan who didn’t like ‘Hell Bent’, a story far clumsier than this). How strange that an episode partly about division and isolation is dividing so many fans! For me this story is a mere few yards short of a classic  (not 73 but a few) , the plotholes and loopholes getting in the way. However the fact there’s a story worth getting out teeth into again, one that asks questions in a way Chibnall never could and so far Russell in his comeback hasn’t tried, is a wonderful thing to be savoured. At last, ironically by charting the great unknown and doing weird unexpected things again, ‘Dr Who’ feels more like ‘Dr Who’ than it has in a long time. Let’s hope the rest of the series makes good use of the momentum it’s gained now and that we don’t just go back to normal next week. Though judging by the trailer that seems unlikely…     

POSITIVES: The spooky clifftop in Tenby (so not the one in ‘Power Of The Doctor’ where Dr 13 turned into Dr 14, which was Durnble Door – and thus wipes out a theory that it was really Jodie Whittaker who kicked this timeline off by stepping into a fairy ring then) makes you wish this really had been a witchy type of story, so atmospheric is it. The bent-over tree that appears in so many of the location shots is a gift for the story: it has nothing to do with it, sure (despite fevered speculation following the series trail) but it feels as if it belongs here, a bit of natural life withered away and bent double by time. Of course there’s a fairy ring here. How could there not be? 

NEGATIVES: The whole MP and Albion party (the olde name for England) was a real lost opportunity. Had this been properly integrated into the script, had all the plot elements of Ruby’s life story been leading up to this moment, had it had more than a mere five minutes screentime, it could have been great. After all, the idea of taking down megalomaniacs who put their own prejudices ahead of the lives of people they’re supposed to be responsible for is very Dr Who: just as with ‘Years and Years’ it’s all a scarily plausible part of our future and having Amol Rajan, currently host of quiz show ‘University Challenge’ but back in 2022 still working  mostly as a news reporter and interviewer as per here, is a nice throwback to old times when Russell used to get cameos from real people to sell his fictional premises more (weirdly Amol is far more natural made up to look like an older version of himself nd reading a script than he is in any of his current appearances improvising). Having Ruby take him down with a mere word recalls the ‘don’t you think she looks tired’ line of ‘The Christmas Invasion’ that brought down Harriet Jones, all about the power of ordinary people (and timelords) to take down people who think they’re bigger than ‘us’. But it’s all so clumsy: we’ve never had even one inkling of Ruby’s politics before now: for all we know she’s as rightwing as he is. She somehow manages to wangle a job close to Roger despite starting as a volunteer: in a mirror of Ruby he’s not the sort to let people get close to him and it’s unlikely anyone without a background in politics could have wangled such a job with such an important person, even across years. It’s never made clear why Ruby only decides to ‘activate’ her whispering stalker when she does: Roger’s already admitted to wanting to use nuclear missiles but it takes a quick word with his underlings and how badly he treats them for Ruby to finally activate a detonator of her own. Surely if Ruby is close enough to be at this meeting, weirdly taking place on a football pitch (because football pitches are…wait for it…73 yards in length) she’s seen firsthand how badly he treats people. And isn’t threatening people with nuclear weapons enough of a reason to take him out already? It’s all a bit of a muddle, a draft away from greatness which is unusual for Russell (who, unlike Moffat or Chibnall, tends to get the most out of his ideas before they go before the cameras); if this really was the story Russell started writing then why not get a few mentions in of Ruby’s politics and Roger before this? Roger too is a caricature and nothing more, too young to be scary (despite the showrunner’s comments on the ‘Unleashed’  behind the scenes programme that this is the way politics are moving I haven’t noticed anyone like him – most of the scariest politicians look ancient even when they’re not; they do say hate ages you after all – just look at Davros). He doesn’t feel a real threat, just another rich kid with more money than sense who believes in his own brilliance yet is also easily talked out of what he says. It’s as if Russell’s forgotten how to write in both his big bads and his ’bad wolfs’ both. The irony of them announcing a general election two days before this story by the w\y (even though it was written two years ago and scheduled ages back): let’s hope we all heed Russell’s warnings this time…

BEST QUOTE: Kate Lethbridge-Stewart: ‘It’s what we do all of us, we see something inexplicable and try to make it work’.

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