The new season of Doctor Who has shown us the silly, and it’s shown us the serious. Now, it’s showing us the scary. Doctor Who 14×04 “73 Yards” draws on several longtime Who traditions for a seriously eerie episode. And, in the grand Who tradition, “73 Yards” leaves us with more questions than answers.
Doctor Who 14×04 Is a Showcase for Millie Gibson
Longtime fans know that there are a few “types” of episodes we always get from time to time. One of those genres is the episode where the Doctor is barely there. Think Season 3’s iconic “Blink” or Season 4’s “Turn Left” (or Season 2’s less-iconic-more-infamous “Love and Monsters”). Sometimes, these episodes focus on brand-new characters, while others times, they’re companion showcases.
Doctor Who 14×04 “73 Yards” is the latter. After the Doctor stumbles into a fairy circle on a Welsh cliffside, he vanishes as Ruby reads the messages in the circle, including a cryptic, “Rest in Peace, Mad Jack.” Locked out of the TARDIS and totally alone, Ruby has to figure this one out on her own. Soon, she realizes she’s being followed by a strange old woman who always stays at a distance, but haunts her every step.
Millie Gibson drove a central part of the plot in last week’s “Boom.” Now, she’s proving that she can carry an entire episode on her shoulders.
Alone in the World
One of the Doctor’s defining traits is his loneliness. After all, he can have all the companions, but eventually, everyone leaves, and he goes on. Doctor Who 14×04 “73 Yards” flips the script, highlighting Ruby’s own loneliness in an even more horrifying way. Her first stop after the Doctor’s disappearance is a nearby Welsh village. At first, it’s creepy but a little fun, as the local mess with Ruby by spinning tall tales about the supernatural.
Soon, though, she’s forced to leave the inn. Ruby had asked another person to go talk to the mystery woman for her, but instead, that person refuses to return, and the innkeeper kicks Ruby out. This starts a pattern for Ruby. Throughout the episode, anytime someone speaks to the woman — who Ruby figures is exactly 73 yards away — they want nothing more to do with Ruby and flee in terror. The most heartwrenching example of this happens when Ruby returns home to ask for her mother’s help. Instead, as soon as Carla encounters the woman, she ditches Ruby. It’s gut-wrenching when Ruby pleads for her mother to tell her what’s going on, only to be met with the coldest response possible: “Even your real mother didn’t want you.” Gibson is phenomenal in this sequence, and you can’t help just wanting to give Ruby a hug.
Ruby gets a brief moment of hope when Kate Lethbridge-Stewart (Jemma Redgrave) of UNIT shows up, more than a year later. Kate explains about UNIT and theorizes that there’s something wrong about the current timeline, linked to whatever is happening to Ruby. Kate authorizes her agents to apprehend the woman, but the moment they do, they — and Kate — are affected by the curse, abandoning Ruby.
A Political Thriller
Doctor Who 14×04 then follows Ruby through the decades, constantly trailed by her stalker, exactly 73 yards away. She leads a lonely life, unable to shake the mystery woman or focus on much else. Then, the episode takes a turn into the political thriller.
When she’s 40, Ruby hears about a Welsh politician in the running to be prime minister: Roger ap Gwilliam (Aneurin Barnard), who the Doctor offhandedly mentioned would one day take the world to the nuclear brink — and who tells a story on TV about having the old nickname “Mad Jack.” In 2046, he’s leading the “Albion” party, a thinly-veiled riff on right-wing nationalist parties. Ruby embeds herself in his campaign, determined to stop whatever terrible thing from happening. Roger proves himself to be a skillful campaigner — and a total creep, preying on staffers and plotting behind the scenes.
After his win, Ruby and other top campaign staff accompany Roger to prep for a speech at a stadium in Cardiff. Ruby learns that the new PM has bought Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and is about to leave NATO. Marti, the volunteer Roger has been harassing, says she thinks he plans to launch the nukes, not just own them. That’s when Ruby realizes her moment has come. Ignoring threats from security, she walks towards the PM, positioning herself exactly 73 yards away. It’s a clever — a downright Doctor-worthy — ploy: using the rules of her “curse” to achieve her goals. After the woman speaks to him, Roger flees and resigns.
I Think I’ve Seen This Film Before…
That’s not the end of Doctor Who 14×04, though. Ruby is still stalked for the next 40 years of her life. We catch up with her as an old woman, visiting the overgrown TARDIS. Finally, she awakes in a nursing home, only for the old woman to be right in her room. Ruby reaches out for her… and promptly finds herself on the cliffside the day the Doctor vanished. She is the old woman. This time, Ruby stops the Doctor from disturbing the fairy circle, and it seems the timeline is fixed.
We’re left with more questions than answers. How did Old!Ruby go back in time? Why did she stalk her younger self, and why 73 yards? What did the old woman say to everyone, and what gave her such power? How did she seemingly never age? Perhaps we’ll get answers, perhaps not. It’s not the most satisfying ending, unless you like a ton of ambiguity. The rules don’t entirely make sense, but at least the emotions do.
Despite being mostly a standalone, Doctor Who 14×04 evokes of several past storylines. Ruby’s “bad timeline” horror adventure feels a lot like Donna Noble’s frightening journey in “Turn Left,” which also ends with an “it was me all along” twist. The storyline of a rogue PM stopped by the cleverness of a companion brings up memories of how Martha Jones stopped Harold Saxon, aka the Master in disguise. And, of course, Ruby’s own mysteries — her origins, the constant snowfall — seem to combine the “Bad Wolf” motif of the Rose Tyler era and the mystery of Clara Oswald, the “Impossible Girl.” I appreciate how Russell T Davies works these parallels in, without a heavy hand but giving longtime fans something to hang our theories on.
TARDIS Log
- Perception filters are a fun part of Who lore, and it’s great to see them back. It’s a helpful bit of sci-fi lingo to explain how the TARDIS can “hide” in plain sight. And, similar to other shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it plays on the idea that humans don’t really want to see things that disrupt their reality.
- I can’t be the only one who thought that random close-up of Kate’s red-polished nails was strange, right? It looked an awful lot like the strange woman whose hand picked up the gold tooth containing the Master after the Toymaker’s defeat in the 60th anniversary specials.
- If the start of Doctor Who 14×04 felt weird, it’s because there was no theme and credits sequence. The last one (and the only other one, to my knowledge) was the Twelfth Doctor episode “Sleep No More” — also a horror-tinged episode.
- The hiker who directs Ruby to the village is — you guessed it — the mystery woman played by Susan Twist. This is the first episode, though, where she directly impacts the course of the story. And again, I repeat: who the hell is she?
- Kate’s line about UNIT dealing with aliens and, lately, more of the supernatural could be a throwaway. But I don’t think so. This season’s episodes have had a more fantastical tinge to them than usual, and it seems intentional. I keep coming back to what Fourteen said in “Wild Blue Yonder,” where he panicked over the consequences of evoking superstition at the end of the universe. Could all these weird beings and strange happenings be linked to that?
- Ruby’s neighbor Mrs. Flood — the one who recognized the TARDIS — briefly appears again this week.
