Doctor Who: The Church on Ruby Road

Well, that was a very Russell-y special then. It’s always a good idea to keep in mind that the Christmas episodes tend in general to be lighter and livelier and more silly than the show typically gets, the better to be consumed during such a festive period. So as a story, the whole thing is once again a bit sloshy, but in terms of tone and fun and spirit and style, it was pretty good. I’ve heard a few people compare it to ROSE, the episode that kicked off the new era of the show almost twenty years ago now, and there are certainly similarities: the Doctor already on the ground investigating the weird thing that’s going on and intersecting with the life of a seemingly-ordinary 19-year-old blond girl in the process. But for all that it was the same, it was simultaneously delightfully daft.

Millie Gibson as Ruby Sunday is perhaps sketched a bit more thinly than Rose was back in the day, but we do get a good sense of her. She seems a lot more go-with-the-flow than the norm, in part because Russell doesn’t want to stop the action at any point to have her react in shock to what’s transpiring around her. But she’s got a family and a home life and some friends, which is more than I can say about most of the more recent companions, who didn’t appear to have any worthwhile life to miss while off on adventures with the Doctor. I like that grounding, and I like when the events of one impact in some way on the other. This is part of what made that very first season so memorable, the fact that the people Rose left behind felt her absence. So getting back to some version of that is a solid move. I also thought that the chemistry between Gibson and Gatwa was strong, which meant that even when they didn’t have a whole lot of meat to work with, they could make something out of their scenes.

Gatwa himself was a lot of fun. I don’t know that his persona has entirely shaken itself out, but he seems a lot more overtly fun-loving, danger-seeking and swashbuckling than most of the recent Doctors. A lot more physical. He didn’t get much in terms of deep or heavy moments to play (though I did like the Doctor telling the policeman who followed him back to the TARDIS what he’d deduced about the man’s impending proposal and how that would play out) so once we get there, I think that’ll tell the tale. The couple of hints (“I wonder if I’m the bad luck”) seem well within his wheelhouse.

As an antagonist, the Goblins were a bit perfunctory, and clearly the Goblin King was limited by being a mammoth construction that wasn’t going to be able to move around a whole lot. Shades of “The Snowmen” with the ladder ascending into the clouds. They got dispatched a little bit easily, but I chalk that up to this being a Christmas episode–sustained jeopardy isn’t really the formula here. I did rather like the Intelligent Gloves and their multiple uses throughout the episode. I don’t know that I quite bought the Doctor not going after Ruby’s mother in the distance to find out who she was. Granted, that would have been a pretty simple resolution to ruby’s life’s quest, but depending on where Russell is going with it, I could see a version where the Doctor went after her and learned her identity but it wasn’t revealed either to Ruby or to the audience–a mystery to tantalize. It’s still a mystery now, but a simple one, and one with a bit of a too-easy resolution given that the Doctor has a time machine.

The rest of the cast was perfectly fine as well. Carla and Cherry were fun–I enjoyed the change in Carla after history had been rewritten and her foster children wiped from existence. I’m sure they’ll be filled out as characters as they reappear through the season proper. For now, they were good Russell “types”, the sorts of broadly-drawn characters that he can sketch quickly and give some real life to (with the help of the performer, of course.) I did feel that we got to the end premise a bit too expediently, as though both the Doctor and Ruby know that she needs to be coming with him. That said, after so many years, it’s difficult to find new avenues into that standard set-up, and it’s required every time a new regular joins the cast. And I’m sure there’ll be something going on with the neighbor, Mrs. Flood, though to be honest, I’d also be fine if her final line to the camera about recognizing a TARDIS was simply a festive fourth wall-break and not some dire portent of the future.

I will say, the one thing I’m not wild about with the way Disney+ has been handling the show is them not including the NEXT TIME trailers. It’s easy enough to hunt them down on YouTube immediately after the episode, but I feel as though I shouldn’t have to go to that slight extra effort. (In the same way, I wish they’d put up the trailers before the episodes dropped, rather than afterwards. That’d help get new viewers in the door prospectively.)

So as pilot episodes go, this wasn’t quite in the same class as ROSE, THE ELEVENTH HOUR or THE PILOT. But it was still charming and entertaining, if a bit dodgy around the edges. And it feels like Doctor Who again, with the right sort of velocity and that old sense of dropping an unexpected emotional moment on top of you in the midst of the monsters and madness. So I’m a lot more engaged by the program than I have been through most of the Jodie/Chibnall years. And I’m ready to see what happens next in a few months.