Doctor Who: 73 Yards

I had heard a bit about this episode ahead of time, so I wasn’t caught as flat-footed by it as many seemed to be. And I was given a warning: it’s a Twilight Zone episode, my source said, but once you work out the ending beat, the whole thing kind of falls apart. And I’m afraid that they were right on the money. I thought that this was a great episode for about 43 minutes, and I was invested in the mystery and the suspense. And then, we got to the end, and the entire enterprise collapsed. I sometimes refer to this with Marvel’s writers and editors as “Building a Bridge to Nowhere”–an instance where you start to tell a story in a given direction, adding clues and incident, but without any particularly satisfying climax. And then, at a certain point, the bridge collapses under its own weight. For a bridge, a story, to work, it needs to stick the dismount.

This is a thing that I’ve been a bit concerned about ever since Russell T. Davies began talking about steering the show further into magic and the supernatural. I don’t have a problem with that per se. But what that sometimes turns into is a feeling of freedom that the stories don’t have to maintain an internal logic to them, that things can just happen when they need to and the explanation is “magic.” I find that lazy and unsatisfying. And that’s what unraveled this otherwise-excellent episode: having been presented with an ongoing mystery of the woman who stalks Ruby Sunday throughout all of her life, always remaining a constant 73 Yards removed from her but following her absolutely everywhere, in the end, this figure turns out to be an older version of Ruby herself, who joins in the last seconds of life with her present day self, then inexplicably finds itself back at the beginning of the story, where it is able to intercede and prevent any of these events from ever taking place. Why? How? No idea. There isn’t even really a gesture towards a reason for any of this. It just happens because it happens. Magic. I’ve heard some fans theorize that this whole thing was something Ruby did to herself with her mysterious snow-powers, a reaction to hearing the Doctor’s story about Prime Minister Roger Ap Gwilliam and setting all of this in motion in order to stop him–but that seems like a stretching attempt to connect some dots without any true knowledge of what Ruby’s snow condition is all about.

But let’s take a look at what was good in this episode, because there was an awful lot of it. To start with, i was absolutely wrong-footed by the opening, with its lack of the typical DOCTOR WHO title sequence. It’s a small thing, but it immediately gave a sense of disquiet, that the regular rules of the show weren’t in force here. Millie Gibson was pretty strong throughout this, carrying the entire narrative with Ncuti Gatwa away wrapping up his commitments to SEX EDUCATION. I haven’t really connected with Ruby this season, she feels too much like a sketch of a character to me somehow. And this episode didn’t really remedy that. But it helped. It was especially good to see her return home and interact with both her mom and grandmother, which helped to ground her as a character a little bit. The sequence where her mother speaks to the mystery figure then runs away and glares at her daughter with hatred and disgust is genuinely chilling, especially since it hits so close to home. I still don’t quite feel her as a legitimate character–do we even really know what her job is? Barrista? Until she’s 40?

But Gibson definitely conveyed the strangeness of the situation, the dread and fear of the Doctor’s disappearance and the strange figure stalking her. Also good were Jemma Redgrave as Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, despite the fact that she wasn’t given much more to do than drop a bunch of exposition. But she’s also fantastic in selling Kate’s turn upon hearing whatever the mystery woman says, and she does it all wordlessly. She’s quietly turned into a reliable supporting player, much as the character’s father the Brigadier had been, and it’s nice that she’s been getting a bit more range to play under Russell.

I also really liked the tonal shifts in the episode, where it changes from Welsh Horror into something more akin to Russell’s other series YEARS AND YEARS. Those changes of tone and tempo maintained interest in a way that I’m not sure that attempting to hold to the Welsh Horror vibe for the whole production would have. And I thought that Ruby’s solution for how to prevent Roger Ap Gwilliam from starting a nuclear conflict was very clever (although I don’t know that I buy that she’s thereafter watching the news in her flat, rather than having been arrested and charged given her actions at the Stadium. True, there wouldn’t be anything specific to charge her with, but she definitely would have been held and questioned for as long as was legally allowable.)

So really, the entire episode was unique and cool–right up to its climax. And I find that somehow almost more frustrating than an episode that just didn’t work. Because in this case, the tension had been built up expertly across the entire show, like pumping more and more air into a balloon. And then, rather than popping in the climax, instead the air was let out and the entire thing deflated. My wife and I were both left asking ourselves, “So what was the point?” The story had a strong BLACK MIRROR flavor to it, but without a satisfying resolution, no payoff, no closure apart from a perfunctory one.

I also find myself feeling like the show is continuing to fall into a bad habit that plagued all of the Jodie Whittaker years: not letting the hero be the hero. For the third episode in a row, the dram isn’t resolved by something that either the Doctor or Ruby does, but rather by circumstance, or by the efforts of other characters. So far this season, only in “Space Babies” does the Doctor have an impact on teh climax: deciding that he can’t let the Bogeyman be flushed out of the airlock and risking his own life to save it. I don’t always need the leads to be the Deus ex machina of a story, but I want to see them win out because of their cleverness and determination and guts. But we seem to be in a period where their problems are getting resolved all around them by other people, almost regardless of their involvement. You can certainly do that from time to time as a change-up pitch, but I don’t know that I think doing three back-to-back in a new Doctor’s tenure is a great idea.

So this one was a proper mix, a great episode for most of its run time let down by an underwhelming ending. A bridge to nowhere.