It’s hard to believe that we’ve hit the halfway point of the latest season of Doctor Who! So far, the season has managed to give us a variety of looks and flavors, and this week is no exception. In place of CGI goblins and fast-talking babies in souped-up strollers, we get a mysterious figure gesticulating in the distance. Instead of a neat and tidy lesson or a flashy easter egg, we get a complex puzzle to both delight and confound Whovians.
’73 Yards’ offers up the first proper Doctor-lite episode since ‘Turn Left’ back in the Tennant era and gives Millie Gibson’s Ruby Sunday a chance to shine. Ultimately, apart from a meme-able attempt to age Ruby up with spectacles and a wine glass, the experiment is a success. We get to see her range: Ruby navigates cruel ribbing at the hands of mean Welsh townies, becomes a competent investigator, and even puts herself in the line of fire to ward off nuclear war. While Gibson is successful in the role, actress Amanda Walker steps in at the end to portray the elderly Ruby who ultimately finds peace with her situation and sticks the landing.
We open on Team TARDIS stopping off in Wales to check out the coastline. Upon their arrival, The Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa), accidentally breaks a fairy circle. Ruby further defiles the site by reading one of the secret messages and mistaking the site for a memorial to someone named “Wild Jack.” In short order, The Doctor disappears and Ruby gets a new best friend: an arm-waving elderly woman who supernaturally maintains a perfect distance of 73 yards from Ruby at all times.
Of course, this presence feels sinister for most of the episode. Apart from the built-in spookiness of the ghoulish figure, every time a person gets close enough to interact with the figure, they run away in fear. Upon questioning, victims of this creepy visage are unable to explain what they’ve heard; they simply respond that curious folks should, “ask her” (Ruby).
This gimmick moves from creepy to downright painful when we learn that not even Ruby’s kind and loving adoptive mother is immune to the force of this being. After encountering the figure on Ruby’s behalf, Carla takes off in a vehicle with all emotion or love for her daughter drained from her face. After a quick time-jump, we learn that Ruby has been locked out of her former home and that her mother has filed an injunction against her.
While that broken relationship is the biggest gut-punch of the episode, we lose additional hope following a cameo from Jemma Redgrave as Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, the head of UNIT. She offers Ruby assurances of both safety and financial security before the ghostly being casts its spell once again; the entire UNIT squad peels rubber off the scene. Again, Ruby is alone.
Then, time passes. We get a mini montage of Ruby’s failed romantic affairs. It seems the ghostly visage dominates her attention and keeps her from forming safe and meaningful bonds with others (although, in a fun moment, she assures us that “the bed thing” was never a problem). Finally, Ruby gets a spark when she hears the name of an up-and-coming politician named Roger ap Gwilliam, a man The Doctor previously described as the most dangerous Prime Minister of all time – a man who would bring the world to the brink of nuclear war. Ruby embeds herself in Gwilliam’s campaign until she can find the key moment to spook him out of power by positioning her specter in his path.
It works. Ruby is still alone, but has come to accept her creepy lifemate. Furthermore, she has found hope in the figure. She believes that they did important work together and that a key moment is coming in the future. As Ruby approaches, presumably, the moment of her death, the figure inches closer, but before we get a full reveal, Ruby ports through time to the cliffside in Wales where the whole saga began. She is able to gesture and whisper her way into the mind of her younger self and keep The Doctor from breaking the fairy circle. Old Ruby disappears and young Ruby can no longer remember the third time she visited Wales. We are left to wonder if it was a simple mistake or the vestige of a memory of an alternate timeline.
It’s certainly a spooky and confounding episode, but it stands up on its own magical timey-wimey logic as well as any abstract episode of Doctor Who. Everything hinges on the magical exposition from Enid Meadows, the Welsh author Ruby meets in the bar. Not only does she coin a term for Ruby’s relationship with her curse (semperdistans: always distant), but she provides an info dump on the lore of the episode:
The cliff tops are a boundary between the land and the sea. A liminal space, neither here nor there, where rules are suspended.
It was established back in Wild Blue Yonder and The Giggle that The Doctor’s choice to “invoke a superstition” at the end of the universe (another liminal space), allowed The Toymaker and Maestro to break through and terrorize the universe. We’ve also seen goblins come to life, and Ruby seems to be some sort of magical puzzle box herself. All this talk of liminal spaces and unexplained forces has opened up an absolute tidal wave of complex theories and connections. We have theories about six-time recurring actress Susan Twist, Classic Who’s Susan Foreman, the very suspicious Mrs. Flood (who makes a fresh cameo in this episode), and even The Trickster from The Sarah Jane Adventures. However you feel about the latest season of Doctor Who, you have to acknowledge that the show laid more than enough track to prepare the way for a magical fairy circle. If nothing else, “73 Yards” further establishes the magical chaos at work in the latest season of Doctor Who.
Most importantly, though, this episode works as a character study that gives us a peek beneath the surface of our new companion. Ever since her first appearance, Ruby has been quick to apologize and reluctant to advocate for herself. She is used to disappointment, and keeps trying to accept the open question of her ancestry with a smile on her face. Her journey in this story is perhaps most interesting if we consider it as part of a personal punishment she built for herself. Details like Roger ap Gwilliam and “Mad Jack” are easily attributed to her brief chat with The Doctor at the start of the episode. It’s OK that we can’t definitively answer the question of exactly what that apparition was saying to folks to make them so terrified, what matters is that this fairy circle has manifested Ruby’s greatest fear: abandonment. Ruby has to suffer a lifetime of abandonment while still finding a way to do good and make peace with her personal demons. Only after completing that penance does she earn an opportunity to travel back in time to save her younger self.
Our final Ruby at the end of this episode has no memory of her cursed alternate life, but she does hold on to the notion that she has been to Wales three times before (even if she can’t remember the last one). As far as this reviewer is concerned, this is clear evidence that some of that emotional growth and strength still lives on in our companion.
If that’s not satisfying enough for you, just remember that we’ve already seen Ruby remix memories and manifest magical snow – so it’s certainly possible that she will unlock these memories as well. Perhaps her exploits with her personal demon and her face-off with Roger ap Gwilliam will be essential to the end game of the season.
Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter if ’73 Yards’ is essential to the arc of the season or not. If Doctor Who wants to keep bending the laws of time and magic to tell creative stories, who are we to complain?
Doctor Who, ’73 Yards’ is now streaming on Disney+
