Another amazing season of Doctor Who has come to an end, and oh boy, is it a joy to have RTD back at the helm, with some of the more sensitive and radical writing the modern show has been graced with. He’s not perfect, and every so often there’s a misstep, but we get to see again the Doctor as challenging the system, not merely tinkering at it, the way he was at his best in the Classic Who era.
Speaking of which, there were several neat little nods to Classic Who throughout this season, which fans of the original show (like me!) are sure to have enjoyed.
That said, there were one or two moments where things fell flat or my writerly instincts were left dissatisfied. Or just things that I really had to get my teeth into in a bigger way. I’ve left things to the end of the season rather than responding to each episode for two reasons. The first is just that I’m lazy and didn’t get around to writing up my thoughts. The second (the one I claim is the real reason) is that there was a possibility of a pay-off in the finale. More on that later…
Spoilers abound in the following, so click through only if you’ve already watched the first full season with Ncuti Gatwa as the Doctor.
My biggest quibble with the season is that it was way too short. 8 episodes is not enough to tell a proper arc – back in the 80s, Doctor Who ended up having 4 stories per season, but each one had 3-4 parts (they’d be 2-parters in the modern 45-minute format, so roughly equivalent length, I suppose). The difference was that each story was its own arc, and the next story usually stood separately. In the last two seasons of Classic Who, there was a supposed “Masterplan” to build some intrigue about the Doctor and Ace, and their respective origins, but for me that fell horribly flat both at the time, and looking back on it – more thoughts on that later.
But anyway – a short season. I want more Doctor Who, dammit! And, honestly, I’d love to have a season that didn’t have a massive overarching arc to unravel and just told individual stories again. There were a couple of stand-alone stories here, but each one had at least one nod to the Big Thing (what I’ve heard described as a “mystery box”). But that’s a personal preference, and the season-long arcs have been fun too.
But enough of that. On to the episodes I wanted to comment on particularly.
THE DEVIL’S CHORD
The title is based on the popular myth that the tritone interval was banned in the Middle Ages because it was the “Devil in music”. Adam Neely has thoroughly debunked this in a youtube video, but the TL;DR over-simplification is that the tritone was called “the Devil in music” not because it was literally thought to be demonic, but rather because it was devilishly difficult to use harmonically. It was a metaphor, not an accusation!
Anyway, that little piece of pedantry to one side, my biggest quibble with this episode was the choice of musicians to feature.
That’s right. For an episode about meeting The Beatles, The Beatles turned out to be spectacularly irrelevant to the story. Not only that, but the story itself seemed far more closely linked thematically to other acts (and their songs).
The villain (played most wondrously by Jinxx Monsoon) was summoned by a Devil’s Chord of some sort (most certainly not a simple tritone, but presumably including at least one such interval), and had to be banished by playing the right combination of notes together – a secret chord, if you will.
And if you heard there was a secret chord, that had to do with a deity – if you’re not already thinking Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen, well, I’m here to tell you the song that includes that theme very prominently in the lyrics is Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen. It just feels like it would have been so much more satisfying to have this episode somehow linked to that song!
But maybe that’s a little too on the nose – and maybe I’d have complained about it being so had RTD written the story that way.
But this is also a story about asking who can live without music – in all honesty, what would life be without a song or a dance? And if you hear that line, and aren’t thinking ABBA’s “Thank You For The Music”, well, I’m here to tell you that that’s a quote from the chorus of that song. The second verse even has a line about how melodies can capture hearts. Which, um, is pretty close to the way that Maestro uses visualised music notation to imprison and ensnare their victims.
So why not make this story centre on ABBA instead? That could have been a fantastic way to tie the story’s theme to the musicians in it.
And heck, if you wanted to make a story about The Beatles, you didn’t have to make music disappear to get around the fact that their own songs would be too expensive to license. The Beatles did several cover versions of rock’n’roll standards and having a sound-alike band record original versions of those songs for the actors to mime along to surely would have been an option?
From the point of view of making use of the setting (meeting The Beatles) and story concept (choosing the right music to match with the story) I feel like this is two big missed opportunities.
Which is a shame, because as I say, Jinxx Monsoon is absolutely wonderful as Maestro, and the story gives a nice, subtle nod towards the season finale – if you’re familiar with Pyramids Of Mars, then the scene where the Doctor takes Ruby forwards in time to see what the world looks like if they don’t defeat Maestro in the 1960s, looks a lot like when Tom Baker’s Doctor takes Sarah-Jane Smith forwards from 1911 to 1980 to witness a devastated planet Earthif they don’t defeat Sutekh. I remarked on the similarity when The Devils Chord aired, I didn’t realise at the time that it was a clue. But I have no doubt in my mind RTD knew the reference he was making.
I remarked at the time also that the villain from Mind Robber (name escapes me), the Toymaker, and Maestro seem to represent Story, Games and Music, and wondered what other such entities might have leaked through. That feels like a hook yet to be followed up. And interesting world building all round.
73 YARDS
This episode is one that got a lot of people speculating. The whole thing is chasing a spooky folk-horror vibe,and succeeds exceptionally at that. And as such, I’ve seen some people say that trying to make sense of it is just a wrong approach. It’s pure vibes, it doesn’t need to make sense.
I disagree to some extent – while I certainly appreciate the “vibes” argument, and absolutely admired the way it was pulled off, there are some questions that I feel need answers – or at the very least, fan theories and headcanon.
The first big question is – where is the Doctor?
In the story, Ruby lives a life in which everyone eventually abandons her or is scared away by a mysterious woman who always stays 73 yards away (until the very end). The first person to abandon her is apparently the Doctor, who seemingly disappears as soon as the instigating event happens.
Other people who abandon Ruby just walk or run away (we see her adoptive mother driving off in a taxi after she flees the mysterious woman – and we’re told she took out a restraining order against Ruby after Ruby tried to contact her). They still exist in the world, but they shun and reject Ruby. But the Doctor seems to have just disappeared. If the Doctor had followed the behaviour pattern of the others, he’d have got in the TARDIS and taken off. Instead, he vanishes, Ruby tries her key in the TARDIS lock and it doesn’t work, and the TARDIS becomes a static monument, still there 40-odd years later, covered in moss and lichen. In that sense, it is the TARDIS that is the first “person” to reject Ruby.
The next questions are, who or what is the mysterious woman? And, why does she inspire such fear from those who actually talk to her? So uncontrollable a fear, that even Prime Minister “Mad Jack” Robert ap Gwilliam cannot resist it, causing him to flee and resign from office.
In a recently-published interview in Doctor Who Magazine, RTD gave us a hint that it may be significant that “she’s played by a different actor” (than Ruby), so at least initially, she is not Ruby herself.
The other relevant information we’re given comes from the final episode, Empire Of Death. Here, we’re told that 73 yards is the boundary of the TARDIS’s perception filter that leads people to accept its appearance. The Doctor says, “Funny things happen at 73 yards. People say that you can see things. Sutekh used this field, but he used it massively. He focussed his mind, created a whole new person everywhere I’d land, but perception meant she fitted in.”
(This clearly has not always been the case, in Classic Who, there’ve been numerous instances of people remarking on it, being surprised by it, puzzling over it, and so on. Maybe this was to do with the broken chameleon circuit and is one aspect the Doctor has been able to repair over the years, like the guidance system that he is now able to steer where he likes, usually, as opposed to the randomness he experienced in the early years.)
Finally – what actually happened in 73 Yards? Again, in Empire Of Death, Ruby clearly has some residual memory of the lifetime she lived during the course of 73 Yards, although it’s not clear whether or not she’s lying to the Doctor that she doesn’t know why the memory screen shows her ap Gwilliam, or why she knew that 73 yards was the imperial equivalent of the metric measurement the Doctor gives for the perception filter range.
Any fan theory worth its salt needs to explain why the fairy circle being broken was the instigating incident, why the Doctor disappears (and where he is), and why the TARDIS’s perception field is now linked to Ruby and the mysterious woman. Ideally, it also explains who the woman is, but that to me feels optional.
And, all the ideas I’ve come up with so far fall short on at least one of these criteria. Sorry! But I’m definitely going to be turning it over in my mind and looking for more clues. I had several ideas in mind before, but the reveal in the final episode about why 73 yards is significant, really screwed with them.
LEGEND OF RUBY SUNDAY/EMPIRE OF DEATH
The grand finale episode, and some lovely pay-offs for the season. As mentioned earlier, there was foreshadowing aplenty if you knew what to look for (i.e. in hindsight), and a satisfying Big Bad to delight fans of Classic Who. On top of which, some excellent performances and emotional character writing.
That said, a couple of points kind of tripped me up. One was why the Doctor didn’t explain about regeneration, that “that woman and the man with the hair” (the Doctor played by Tom Baker, and Sarah-Jane Smith) is himself and a former companion – instead saying they “just travelled in the TARDIS”.
Also, having watched back with subtitles (because of the distorted voice) to follow the list of deities given by H. Arbinger at the end of The Legend Of Ruby Sunday, it seems just plain wrong for her to have described Mara as the “God of Beasts”. That was not Mara’s role in Kinda and Snakedance, the Classic Who stories about that particular entity. It’s also very much the case that the list is made up of different types of entity or being, with different claims or relationships to, Godhood.
The biggest quibble I have with this, though, is that the ending felt a little bit trite and contrived. The resolution felt like RTD realised that, having set up the destruction of all life in the universe, he hadn’t really got a way to get out of that corner. “Bringing death to Death” was a cool line, but there was no real on-screen justification of that claim, or visual representation of Sutekh actually being defeated. In terms of the visuals, it looked to me like Sutekh was voluntarily bringing everyone back to life.
One thing I absolutely loved was the exposition of Ruby’s birth mother being a fairly ordinary person, whose cosmic significance came about due to Ruby and the Doctor and others viewing her as being significant.
To me, that felt a vindication of my rejection of things like the late 80s “Cartnell Masterplan” in Classic Who, and the Timeless Child arc in Chibnall’s era of NuWho.
Anything that marks the Doctor out as special among his own people, the Time Lords, feels to me to be a very poor move. The Doctor’s significance is through his decisions, his choices, and the significance he has had for others. He’s just an ordinary Time Lord who chose to be extraordinary, and has had extraordinary effects.
Others have suggested that the “we give things significance” thread has been a constant from the 2023 specials (particularly, Wild Blue Yonder, where it’s set up that the Doctor has inadvertently allowed certain entities back into the Universe). I see where this is coming from, but I feel like that’s a very “don’t look behind the curtain” kind of answer.
It feels very strongly set up that we’re going to see Susan, the Doctor’s supposed granddaughter, in the next season – the hook of Sutekh using Susan’s name as bait for the Doctor is surely heading in that direction. My personal headcanon has been that Susan, and not the Doctor, is the actual Timeless Child. There was a 8th Doctor novel published by the BBC back in the late 90s called “War Of The Daleks”, in which Susan’s life in post-Dalek Invasion London is briefly described. If they do have a reunion with Susan, it’ll be intriguing to see if any acknowledgement of the book is made.
The argument has also been made that this season has been made up of “stories about Story”, something that Neil Gaiman does really well. There is certainly a lot to support the idea that RTD is trying to do that, and in some episodes it even works as Doctor Who. But overall, I feel like Doctor Who is not quite comfortable with that as an overarching theme. It needs to be grounded, which is one reason why there’s nearly always a companion; and why the Doctor isn’t just a wizard: he’s an engineer, a scientist, a technician, someone who sees how things work, sometimes better than how people work (that bit varies from Doctor to Doctor).
CONCLUSIONS
I’ve definitely enjoyed the new series, with RTD back in charge. The ideas and concepts that have flown out of this set of 8 stories have been fantastic, both those clearly intended and those generated by fan theory and speculation. At the same time, I am yearning now for some grounded, self-contained stories that neither add to, nor rely on, baggage from the show’s long and convoluted past.
I know I’m not going to get that in Disney+-era season 2, because we still have a couple of mysteries unresolved from season 1. But I’m sure I will still enjoy it.
Valery North - Writer 