Doctor Who Series 14, Episode 4
“73 Yards”
Posted by Kim
Like a good portion of the internet, I feel like my thoughts can be summed up best using the immortal words of Master Detective Benoit Blanc:
Honestly, I couldn’t put it better than that.
For about 85% of “73 Yards,” I was IN IT and really enjoying it. I thought it was an excellent showcase for Millie Gibson, who easily held her own while Ncuti was off fulfilling his commitments to the final season of Sex Education. I thought the episode was incredibly moody and atmospheric with absolutely gorgeous cinematography. And I thought the script gave us a deeply unsettling horror story that felt more X-Files than Doctor Who. As the kids say, the vibes were good!
Until they weren’t anymore.
The plot is actually relatively simple. The Doctor and Ruby land on a remote cliff in Wales, dressed to impress and ready for wherever the day may take them. The Doctor almost immediately steps on a mysterious faerie circle, breaking the boundary. Ruby kneels next to him, picking up the various bones and trinkets (BONES! Why would you pick up bones, Ruby??) and reading the little notes left there, including one that says “Rest in Peace, Mad Jack.” She looks up and realizes the Doctor has just…disappeared. Poof! Gone. The TARDIS is locked and her key no longer works. There’s an old woman in the distance, gesturing at her and clearly saying SOMETHING even though Ruby can’t hear it. Every time Ruby tries to get closer to her, the woman backs up, maintaining the same amount of distance between them. (A distance of 73 yards as we come to learn later.) Ruby goes in search of help and the woman follows, maintaining the same distance. She encounters a hiker on the road (our pal Susan Twist) and unlike her, the hiker CAN approach the old woman. The old woman says something to the hiker; the hiker turns back and looks at Ruby in horror and runs away in the opposite direction.
The pattern continues, with the woman following Ruby wherever she goes, always 73 yards away. Whoever speaks to the woman, be it Kate Lethbridge-Stewart’s (!!!) highly trained UNIT operatives or Carla freaking Sunday, turns and looks at Ruby in horror, and then runs in the opposite direction, never wanting anything to do with her again. Whenever they are pressed about WHY they are acting this way, they simply reply, “ask her.”
Like I said, it’s deeply unsettling and horrific stuff. And while I guessed about 20 minutes into the episode that the old woman was ACTUALLY Ruby, I was still very much along for the ride, eager to see how Ruby would manage to get out of the paradox/time loop. But then it felt like the script ran out of gas in the final act and Russell just kind of hand waved the ending because he was out of time. Look, as a die-hard defender of Season Six of Lost (the finale made perfect sense, you philistines!), I am not the type of viewer that always needs concrete answers. I don’t really care about what exactly Old Ruby said to make everyone abandon her younger self, so Russell saying that we’ll never find out won’t haunt me in the way that say, the unknown message Josh Lyman wrote in the book he gave Donna for Christmas does. That’s not the kind of detail that will leave me unsatisfied because frankly, it’s the not knowing that makes it scary. What leaves me unsatisfied with “73 Yards” is the lack of clarity when it comes to the ultimate resolution. How did it all happen? What was the point of it all? NO ONE KNOWS.
I understand that Ruby experienced some sort of self-extinguishing time loop that started when the Doctor broke the faerie circle. But why did the time loop make the Doctor vanish but force Ruby to live a solitary (but not solitary) life where everyone she loved was taken away from her? How is Ruby, at the moment of what I assume is her death, able to transport back to that bluff in Wales and link her consciousness with her younger self so she can warn her to not step on the circle? Old Ruby’s “I’m sorry I took so long” line makes no damn sense. None. I just feel like the ending let down the rest of the story. The build-up didn’t match the resolution and it pretty much ruined the episode for me.
Don’t get me wrong, there was a lot I loved in the episode. I had a great time watching it and I’m still more excited about the show than I have been in years. As I said at the start, Millie Gibson DELIVERED with this performance, expertly capturing Ruby’s confusion, fear, anguish, and strength. I love the concept of a companion being left to their own devices in the middle of an adventure, leaving them to figure out how to get by on their own. (Why am I so endeared by Ruby just getting on a train back to London after she finally came to terms with the fact that the Doctor wasn’t coming back???) I enjoyed seeing Ruby be resourceful and how she never let the horrible things that happen to her break her spirit. I always love when Kate pops up and I genuinely hope Ruby gets to meet her again in the restored timeline. I thought the showdown with Roger ap Gwilliam on the football pitch was thrilling, even if the whole plot with him ultimately felt a little underbaked.
What I didn’t like was that the resolution of the time loop made it feel like we were psychologically torturing Ruby Sunday for the sake of just torturing her. I HATED that once again Russell chose to use Carla Sunday the way he did, giving Carla another personality transplant and having her completely disavow her daughter. I just keep being like…this is how you are writing an adoptive mother, my dude? I expected more from RTD and I’m disappointed. I get that this whole story is supposed to be some sort of manifestation of Ruby’s deepest fears. But the thing is, we haven’t been given any concrete evidence that Ruby WOULD have such deeply seeded abandonment issues, especially regarding Carla’s love for her. Ruby wanting to find her birth mother and know more about where she comes from does not negate that Carla IS her mother and I fear that these two very different wants are being conflated in a way. It just lacks any sort of nuance and sensitivity and the longer the story goes, the less I feel like it’s going to have any sort of satisfactory ending.
We’re officially halfway through the series y’all and it just feels like we’re spinning the wheels a bit. We can have standalone episodes in short seasons (just look at how good the standalone episodes in the revival seasons of The X-Files are), but “73 Yards” doesn’t feel like a standalone because it’s still sprinkling in little teases about Ruby’s origin. It just feels like we’re piling on more questions and more vagaries instead of starting to pull it all together and that’s concerning. At the risk of sounding like one of those Lost fans that I HATE, I am going to need to get some clarity and some answers soon. If we don’t, I fear the whole story may collapse under the weight of the expectations it set for itself.
Timey Wimey Observations:
- Justice for Ncuti’s ADORABLE outfit and the fact that we were robbed of an entire episode with it. Some are saying bitch stole Nardole’s look, but I prefer to think of it as a Paddington cosplay.
- We’ve now had three out of four episodes where either Ruby or the Doctor steps on something and sets off a cataclysmic chain of events. Did this happen in “This Devil’s Chord” too and I just missed it?
- I did chuckle at Ruby accusing the Doctor of peeing behind the TARDIS.
- We have NOW ACKNOWLEDGED Susan Twist popping up in every episode!!! I don’t really know what’s happening here, but I like it!!! Her little smile when she said “I don’t know, have you?” is too knowing to just be a fun gag at this point.
- The scene in the pub was hysterical, from the whole paying with the phone bit to the way the regulars all ganged up on Ruby to scare the shit out of her. How many tourists do you think they had done that to over the years?
- Charging five quid for a COKE is highway robbery.
- This parallel is KILLING ME.
- I beg of youths to touch grass and also learn what 40-year-olds look like. Sure, it was a little laughable that they slapped a pair of glasses and a wig definitely borrowed from Season Two of Loki (IYKYK) on Millie Gibson to show us that 20 years had passed, but that was better than doing the kind of old age make-up on her that the internet was seemingly screaming for. Most 40-year-olds don’t have WRINKLES or SAGGY FACES and who knows what kind of beauty innovations have been made in the year 2046?
- I cackled when Ruby told that man HE was the reason their sex life was not satisfying.
- I thought the subplot implying Roger had been sexually inappropriate towards Marti was unnecessary. It was already established that he was a monster who was going to unleash a nuclear war, we didn’t need that too!
- The whole “It never snowed again” was very Edward Scissorhands but in reverse.
- I LOVED the aesthetic of this shot:
What did you think of “73 Yards”? Let us know in the comments!
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