Posting body note as a comment to avoid unnecessary detection. So, there it is, the end of the first season with a new Doctor! We witnessed the largest “polarity reversal” in all of (and across) existence. And what’s with the 4th wall breaking Mrs. Flood??
Mrs. Flood is only important because we want her to be important. Nothing actually matters.
What a disastrous piece of writing that was. In one line you can basically undermine anything you have written or will write and destroy your audience’s faith that the breadcrumbs of a storyline you’ve laid down are actually meaningful.
Not entirely clear what The Doctor actually did to beat Sutekh. Sutekh has been attached to the TARDIS since the 70s, but dragging him behind the TARDIS again reverses his death-sand and sends him into the time vortex for real this time?
When Kate died in the first minute I was sad, then everyone else died, and all of the tension went out of the episode, because the stakes became too ridiculous to actually be worried about.
I don’t think the callback to 73 Yards did anything to improve that episode. All we got was a reference to Gwilliam, that didn’t need an episode of setup, and a confirmation that the perception filter of the TARDIS is 73 feet, which explains… nothing? About what happened in that episode.
Sutekh’s master plan was brought low because… He wanted to know who Ruby’s mum was? The God of Death who destroyed all life in the universe so he could sit in silence cared about who some pregnant teen was? Am I to believe that there was never any other moment in The Doctor’s travels that left Sutekh with an unanswered question? He didn’t show up when Bad Wolf kept cropping up? Or when there was a crack in Amy’s wall? But this rando human is enough to spring him into action?
I don’t know how I feel about the reveal of Ruby’s mum. I get the narrative reason for her to not be special, but it then raises so many questions. Such as why Ruby can make it snow, which is a phenomenon that was strange enough to give the Eldritch God of Music, Maestro, pause. Or why she pointed at the Doctor, because I don’t buy that she was ‘naming’ Ruby. She was alone on the street, saw a random guy, and pointed at a sign. None of which could possibly have influenced the people who found Ruby to name her in that way.
Also not a fan of The Doctor basically telling Ruby that her mother is a bad person who doesn’t deserve to know her, while taking Ruby to see her mother.
that she is departing the show already, but the character reason felt sincere and believable. Her arc was complete.
I do not give a damn about Mrs Flood anymore. There is only so much edging you can do with fourth wall breaks and sinister old ladies before you lose all sensation. No reveal is going to live up to the mystery that RTD seems to be trying to set up.
I didn’t think I had as many issues with this episode as I did until I started writing this. The season was a bit of a letdown, which is a shame because I love certain aspects of it so much. Gatwa is an amazing Doctor. I actually love that he is The Doctor who Cries. It shows a deep emotion that I appreciate from a character that has seen so much and could be jaded. Gibson’s stint as Ruby was perfect for the introduction to a new Doctor. I am disappointed that she is departing the show already, but the character reason felt sincere and believable. Her arc was complete.
Despite all of my complaining, I am still hopeful for future seasons to grow out of the first-season funk that a lot of Doctors have.
When Kate died in the first minute I was sad, then everyone else died, and all of the tension went out of the episode, because the stakes became too ridiculous to actually be worried about.
I saw it in the cinema and a number of people gasped “no!”. I thought this would be a good way of changing the status quo and putting UNIT and the Doctor on a back foot, so they have to fight back harder (and a less competent UNIT would be more interesting for a spin-off). Then you see the great wave of dust wiping everyone out and you realise they are going to come up with some way to resolve this by the end of the episode. A real rollercoaster ride, unfortunately one leading to disappointment.
I didn’t think I had as many issues with this episode as I did until I started writing this.
Yes, the more my thoughts crystallised discussing the episode, the more I realised how much I disliked it.
I think sutekhs decision on when to return was related to the whole thing about the Susan Triad on Earth being much more powerful due to the doctor coming back a lot. And Ruby isn’t departing the show.
The season had a rather flat start but had just enough for me to stay with it. Thought it was rather good from episode 4 onwards and ended really well.
That was a really fun buildup and coda. The resolutions to the conflict with Sutekh and the mystery of Ruby’ mum were underwhelming, though. If you’re going to have the big bad simply be put on a leash and dragged through the time vortex, you better have a gut punch up your other sleeve. But they didn’t.
The central conceit is fun but half-baked. Turns out after ages and ages riding the TARDIS, Sutekh had become a scoreboard fanboy like any mortal Whovian who’s been watching since 1975. Everything that happens to the Doctor has to make sense to him (maybe Ruby’s mum is the Rani?!) and he simply can’t kill off the Doctor or Ruby without learning who left her at the church, so he can continue building headcanon from there while the universe spins into entropy. This finale has really been about playing against viewer expectations but I didn’t expect it to be the basis of Sutekh’s defeat…
So now we know Ruby’s mum was a nurse in Coventry all along. That is a nice reversal, of course, and plays into the Doctor’s conviction that everyone is special (see “Space babies,” among others). Good thing Sutekh is gone though, because he would be furious at this development… There’s no complex cosmic puzzle to be solved, Ruby’s birth and abandonment dovetails perfectly with real life statistics as Kate told us last episode.
After a season of teasing Susan Foreman, I found the Doctor’s and Ruby’s talk outside the coffeeshop to be revealing. Trying to talk her out of reconnecting with her mum, he’s really talking about himself abandoning his granddaughter, and rationalising why he never went back for her. That is pretty damning if not for his admission to Kate in the last episode that he might bring disaster on Susan if he were to find her.
I liked those thematic strands and the way they set up for next season, and the general storyline if this double feature finale —but the boss fight might have needed a bit more workshopping before making it to production…
I am kind of surprised that so many people noticed the racism metaphor in Dot and Bubble but no-one (including Russell I’m guessing) noticed the uncomfortable AIDS allegory in the last episode, especially with the first queer actor for the Doctor… “While you were having fun around the universe, everywhere and everyone you were with were infected and now they’re going to die”
I feel bad for the memory TARDIS. It was the MVP and saved everyone, then I guess they just dumped it as soon as they got the proper one back.
It’ll probably end up getting its own Big Finish series or something though.
This season was kind of a letdown for me. There were way too many cringe things.
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