After space babies, self-aware AI, and Bridgerton cosplayers, Doctor Who 14×07 “The Legend of Ruby Sunday” brings this season near to a close with a classic, epic adventure. We’re back to basics, with a story hinging on season-long threads. It’s creepy, emotional, and sets up next week’s finale in a big way. Let’s dive in!
Reunions All Around
Doctor Who 14×07 “The Legend of Ruby Sunday” starts off on a happy note, with the Doctor and Ruby arriving at UNIT HQ. They’re immediately greeted by Rose Noble (Yasmin Finney), Kate Lethbridge-Stewart (Jemma Redgrave), and the rest of the UNIT team. While Rose seems to already know Fifteen, it’s the first time the others, like Kate, get to meet this new face. It’s a charming moment — and thank goodness for that, because things are about to get dark.
The Doctor and Ruby are at UNIT to ask for help figuring out who Susan Twist is. Fortunately, UNIT recognizes her as a tech billionaire in this era: Susan Triad. The Doctor quickly notices that “S. Triad” is an anagram for TARDIS; hilariously, UNIT has already figured this out and are monitoring her for use of secret alien tech. Mel (Bonnie Langford) is undercover as a member of Susan’s team, and she reports that her only real discovery so far is that Susan is really nice.
The TARDIS anagram is one thing, but it’s the “Susan” that gets to the Doctor. He reveals that’s his granddaughter’s name — something viewers have pointed out for weeks.
Doctor Who 14×07 Is a Family Affair
Broken families (and mended ones) have been a key theme all season long. Doctor Who 14×07 “The Legend of Ruby Sunday” brings it all together. The other impetus for the Doctor’s visit to UNIT is to get their help understanding Ruby’s origins. Because the Doctor has already been there once, though, he can’t return in the TARDIS without causing a paradox. Instead, Ruby volunteers to go home and bring in the VHS tape of CCTV footage from that night. She (and Rose) head out, and soon return, VHS and mom Carla in tow.
Meanwhile, the Doctor fixates on the possibility of a regenerated Susan. He and Kate reminisce about her father, the Brigadier. More significantly, he reveals that the non-linear life he’s led means he knows who his granddaughter is, but he doesn’t know his child(ren) yet (or, presumably, who their mother is). Mel arrives with a DNA sample from Susan Triad, which turns out to be human. Morris (Lenny Rush), the 13-year-old UNIT genius, identifies a high probability that the whole Susan thing is a trap, but the Doctor wants to meet her anyway.
Carla gets her first peek at UNIT — and a more in-depth look at what Ruby has been doing. Doctor Who is at its best when its companions have lives outside the TARDIS and when we care about their loved ones. When Carla later realizes that Ruby’s birth mother is crying in a memory of the past, we see more clearly than ever where Ruby got her empathy and instinct to connect with people.
A Window to the Past
Back to the Ruby mystery. Using the Time Window — a piece of time tech that UNIT isn’t “supposed” to have developed — the Doctor “projects” himself and Ruby into the VHS tape and memory, along with UNIT Colonel Winston Chidozie (Tachia Newall). It’s devastating, as Ruby fruitlessly calls out for her birth mother and tries to see her face. When her mother gets close, though, the video skips, and no one inside the Time Window or back at the controls can see her face. The Doctor holds Ruby back as she sobs. Then, things get weird.
The “memory” of that night keeps changing, at least for the Doctor. This time, Ruby’s hooded birth mother points right at him — or at the TARDIS? Chidozie goes to investigate, then vanishes around the TARDIS. A massive cloud of black dust and red light begins swirling around the TARDIS in the past, as the TARDIS makes that weird groaning sound it’s been making all year. Morris identifies the cloud as being “everything”: hot, cold, radioactive, and dead.
Chidozie speaks from within the cloud briefly, just long enough to tell them he’s “in hell.” The Window shuts down, and Kate rushes in just in time to see Chidozie’s body, desiccated and turned to dust. Doctor Who 14×07 just took a dark turn, and it’s about to get worse. The UNIT team realizes that, if the being was attached to the TARDIS in the past… it might still be there, just invisible, in the present.
A devastated Doctor blames himself, and Mel pep-talks him back into the game. She takes him to meet Susan, but when he does, he’s disappointed. He shakes her hand, and there’s no Time Lord recognition. He does, however, notice her mention of “bad dreams,” so he asks her if she dreams about all the versions of her we’ve seen. Her unsettled, stammering reaction tells us everything we need to know.
The One Who Waits
All season long, Doctor Who has been distinctly more supernatural than usual. Instead of just aliens and mad scientists, the Doctor has fought mythical beings and gods. Remember: in “Wild Blue Yonder,” Fourteen temporarily fended off the Not-Things with a salt line, then immediately panicked over the potential ripple effect of invoking a superstition at the end of the universe. Now, it seems like that fear has come home in Doctor Who 14×07 “The Legend of Ruby Sunday.”
As the Vlinx scans the being attached to the TARDIS, UNIT staffer Harriet begins creepily monologuing. She rants about some mysterious being “hidden in the howling void” and how the “Lord of Time was blind and vain and knew nothing.” The Doctor quickly demands to know Harriet’s last name, which is Arbinger. As in, H. Arbinger — another Harbinger, like the one that preceded Maestro.
Susan Triad attempts to deliver her speech, but both she and her teleprompter begin glitching. The Doctor orders Ruby into the Time Window, but without any further instructions. Meanwhile, Harriet and Susan’s monologues finally get to the point: introducing the real baddie. It’s Sutekh, the god of death, and a previous villain from the famed Fourth Doctor adventure “Pyramids of Mars.” Susan turns into an avatar for the god and turns one of her aides to dust, while the cloud around the TARDIS solidifies into a glowing, gloating demon-dog creature. Sutekh brings “the gift of death. For you, and for all in your tiny, vile, incessant universe.”
Aaaand cliffhanger! That’s all for Doctor Who 14×07 “The Legend of Ruby Sunday,” and we’ll see you next week for the season finale!
TARDIS Log
- Fifteen asks Rose about how her mom and “uncle” are doing. It’s never going to stop making me happy that Fourteen got the one thing the Doctor so rarely gets to have: rest with a family.
- Harriet isn’t the only minor character in Doctor Who 14×07 who seems connected to Sutekh. Mrs. Flood — the nosy neighbor who recognized the TARDIS — creepily announces to Cherry Sunday, “He waits no more.”
- Ruby learns about regeneration for the first time in this episode. The Doctor’s very sweet response is to assure her he’s keeping this face for a long time. And oh, I hope so — Ncuti Gatwa has been amazing this year.
- One thing I’ve loved about this season is how very classic the structure of most episodes has been. We’re introduced to something weird, the Doctor investigates, there’s a red herring, and, as “The Devil’s Chord” reminded us, “there’s always a twist at the end.”
- There’s a great throwaway joke that heavily implies a certain rocket-launching, social-media-platform-owning tech billionaire is actually an “evil genius with secret alien software” who UNIT just hasn’t quite been able to nab just yet.
- There’s another great throwaway joke that the Prime Minister isn’t allowed to just walk into UNIT. It works both as a comment on real-life political figures and on Doctor Who‘s history of PMs secretly being villains.
- The Doctor’s explanation for why he can’t go back to Ruby’s abandonment echoes another tragic storyline. The Eleventh Doctor’s “The Angels Take Manhattan” separated the Doctor permanently from Amy and Rory for the same reason.
- Did anyone else catch the Master’s theme music playing over the big Sutekh reveal?
- In the original “Pyramids of Mars,” the Doctor ultimately defeated Sutekh by trapping the god in an infinite time wormhole — but Doctor Who extended media revealed he escaped into the Void.
- So many questions still left! Why did the Doctor encounter Susan throughout time? Was Sutekh chasing him? Who is Ruby’s mother, and what is her connection to all this? Who is Ruby, for that matter, and what’s up with the snow?
