Storytime with Rachel F Hundred

A frustrating finale as the first series with the Fifteenth Doctor comes to an end

Spoiler Warning

After last week’s The Legend of Ruby Sunday I decided to wait on the second part before writing a review of the finale overall given its two-part format.  I think that was the right decision because narratively, this is one story with the first episode little more than a series of questions with the second providing the answers. 

Well. 

Not all of the answers and let me start there.

Mrs Flood remains a fourth wall breaking mystery.  Who is she?  Hints are given.  The Doctor talks about the Time Lords hiding themselves with regeneration, and Mrs Flood says she’s always hiding herself away.  She calls him a clever boy.  Somehow, she knows more about the threat of the reappearing Big Bad then a normal human being would.  There’s a callback to the outfits of Missy in her final message that the Doctor’s story ends in terror.  Is she another incarnation of The Master?  Could she be the Rani?  Is she the real Susan?  Clearly this is one mystery Russel T Davies is content to carry over into the second season as an interesting and intriguing hook.

Some people may be dismayed by the lack of an answer here, but I don’t mind this.  I’m not a fan of the fourth wall breaks with the character but knowing that there is another season already in the works helps mitigate any frustration (although I will be annoyed if there isn’t some kind of attempt to resolve it in the future).  I’m also comfortable given the other mysteries posed this season with Ruby and the mysterious woman who appears everywhere that this one remains unresolved as part of this two-part storyline.

Getting to the topics covered in the two-part finale, I found the linking of the two mysteries that are tackled to be incredibly, incredibly clumsy.  The bridge in the first part of ‘we see this woman everywhere’ but also ‘we don’t know who Ruby’s Mum is’ and we need to find out the answers to both…it’s just very lacking in any kind of narrative cohesion.  Had there been some kind of precipitating event shown in the preceding episode – something which caused the Doctor to think there was a viable link…it might have made more sense.  As it is the Doctor’s arrival at UNIT ostensibly to find answers seems to come out of nowhere given there is really no openly expressed urgency on either mystery from the previous adventure in Rogue.  It’s not a particularly satisfying start – clumsy.

While it is always great to have the character of Kate Lethbridge-Stewart back (continuing to be excellently portrayed by Jemma Redgrave), the Who’s Who of characters at UNIT felt overdone.  Whether the reasoning was to continue showing a diverse cast or to seed characters who may turn up in the UNIT spin-off TV show, who knows, but more could have been done with less and many of the UNIT characters end up with very little to do and are no better than human props.

The returning Rose Noble, for example, is given very little to do beyond standing in the background – so very little that the question has to be asked why she was there at all.  Morris, the new scientific advisor played by Lenny Rush, at least had a role to play in delivering the technobabble, but if the show was intent on replacing the previous advisor that the audience had been introduced to in the 60^th Anniversary specials, why the role couldn’t have been combined with the ‘H. Arbinger’ character of Harriet, I don’t know. 

Outside of Kate herself, only Mel gets a substantive storyline, and it was good to see Bonnie Langford reprise the role and have something more to do than simply be in the background making notes.  It was great to see her continue to have something of a role into the second part even if she only ended up being used by Sutekh as a possessed spy and acolyte.  I loved the moment between her and the Doctor when they go to see Susan Triad and he’s stewing in his own frustration.  I only wish there had been more of these type of moments between Ruby and the Doctor across the series.   

I will say that there are a lot of great story moments in the return to UNIT across the two episodes.  I loved Kate’s moments with the Doctor – both in comforting him about Susan and in her justified anger at the loss of her agent because the Doctor asks him to move having explicitly said for everyone not to move.  I liked the banter between the UNIT characters – the great joke at the end with the tea (very British!). 

The UNIT Time Window concept though is also a very handy Deus Ex Machina, first in the whole ‘going back to examine the moment Ruby was left’ without actually going back in time, and secondly in providing a way for the Doctor to gain another TARDIS when his is appropriated by the Big Bad. There is also a very convoluted plot contrivance that Sutekh used the Doctor’s concern over his granddaughter to plant the idea of this same woman turning up everywhere the Doctor went to finally tempt him back to Earth for the big reveal with Susan Triad being a partial anagram of TARDIS…only to have an even more convoluted contrivance that the company name is really heralding Sutekh.  Then there is the additional Plot Armour of the Doctor and Mel managing to evade the dust cloud which consumes everyone else in its path…these things provide conveniences which seem narratively lazy. But then, I found the finale to be narratively poor in execution. 

Sutekh’s desire to rule over an Empire of Death is a little nonsensical and there is nothing interesting here in the villain’s motivation.  This isn’t helped by his only being embodied by a CGI monster who is clearly a CGI monster (which fair enough the love for Doctor Who was built on the shaky effects and the audience knowing the monster was only a man in a costume). While it was great Gabriel Woolf returned to voice him, it may have been better to have recast and had the monster shapeshift into a humanoid figure that the Doctor could have bounced off a la the Toymaker and the Doctor in The Giggle. Keeping him as a CGI monster lessened the impact of him as a villain.

Additionally, the mechanism of dusting was very reminiscent of the Disney Marvel franchise and the events of Avengers: Infinity War (2018) and for me less impactful because of that.  This was compounded by the fact that we haven’t really spent any meaningful time with many of the characters who were dusted for it to emotionally impact.  Where there was an emotional impact was in Ruby’s reaction in realising that she had lost her family and the scene with the alien woman on an unknown planet who had lost her daughter. 

That scene was both good and yet problematic.  On the one hand, it was good to be shown the Doctor out in the universe discovering for himself the impact of Sutekh’s grand plan, the heartbreak of a mother losing her child, the glimpse of lives lost elsewhere other than the dust cloud taking out Londoners.  But.  How did the Memory TARDIS manage to keep its form for long enough that it travelled through time and space to this planet and then onto the future to do a DNA search?  Again, some of the narrative plot connective tissue seems to have gone missing. 

The whole denouement doesn’t make a lot of logical sense.  It was a fun sequence for the Doctor using a whistle to signal orders to the TARDIS console (very Doctor Who), for him and Ruby to trap Sutekh so they can take back control of the actual TARDIS and use it to drag Sutekh back through the time vortex.  But I’m not logically buying that Sutekh was really all that invested in Ruby’s mystery nor that the Doctor’s repeated insistence that ‘bringing death to death, brings life’ is math that maths. 

However, I will say that the idea that Sutekh represents Death, that the Doctor represents Life, and that their roles have to be flipped in order to resolve the situation is interesting.  The moment when the Doctor closes the door on Sutekh setting him loose to burn up in the time vortex is very well done, and Ruby’s comforting of him afterwards a nice moment between them as characters.

If I found the Sutekh storyline very contrived and riven with plot devices galore, the reveal of Ruby’s mystery is also lacking narrative cohesion.  Setting aside that the show attempted to indicate it wasn’t going to give Ruby answers when the Doctor tells her he won’t ever take her back, the Time Window, the reappearance in the Memory TARDIS of Ruby’s memory of the TV interview with Roger ap Gwilliam, the handy DNA register created in 2046…all provide unnecessarily complicated contrivances to get to the answer even if I appreciate some of the foreshadowing and attempted connectivity across the series’ narrative.  

The answer itself, that Ruby’s Mum appears to be just a normal woman who as a girl in an unsafe situation abandoned her baby to the safety of a church, I like.  This is reminiscent of another of Disney’s franchises, Star Wars, and the attempt by Rian Johnson in The Last Jedi (2017) to suggest that Rey was simply an ordinary girl with no prominent lineage who just happened to be powerful in the Force.  This is executed better. (However, what about that reappearing snow?? What was that all about?) 

The scene of reunion is touching and does emotionally impact, and I love the positivity here of Ruby choosing to ignore the Doctor’s caution and to be brave in meeting with her mother.  I love that Carla and Cherry welcome Ruby’s birth mother and that there is the sense of a happy ending.  It was all very well acted by Millie Gibson.

What was also well-acted was the goodbye with the Doctor, the slow reveal in that scene that Ruby had another more important adventure on Earth to take on, leaving the Doctor to travel alone again.  Gatwa’s acting as he struggles with his emotions in that scene is superb.   

Series conclusion

The primary weakness of this season has been its length.  If it had more episodes, such as the typical thirteen of the Nine to Eleven Doctors, or even the Twelfth’s twelve-episode series, it may have had more opportunity to narratively weave better connections and stronger connectivity in the series’ story-arches.  The bones of what was intended can be seen in what we got, but it wasn’t enough to fully deliver and we ended up with a finale which, while it had some good moments, twisted itself like a pretzel to contrive its revelations and solutions. 

Additionally, more episodes may have helped to have shown more of the relationship between the Doctor and Ruby to give the ending even more poignancy.  I like the pairing, but I’m not in love with it because I’ve seen so little of it.  That said, I like the underlying idea of the Doctor working through his angst about his own origins and idea of family with Ruby who has so little knowledge about her own origins and yet has a strong family in Carla and Cherry.  Again, perhaps if they’d had more episodes, they could have shown more of this rather than just alluding to it.

Ncuti Gatwa’s performance of the Doctor feels more assured through the series than in the Christmas Special.  I like his rendition.  There is a joy and vibrancy that he brings to the Doctor which is very enjoyable to watch.   

I will say that I think there are some mixed messages here though narratively to where the Doctor is emotionally.  Fourteen was a Mess and needed therapy to deal with everything that had happened to the Doctor in the lives that preceded him.  Fifteen was meant to be a Doctor who had achieved some level of healing (The Giggle) while still struggling with his angst over his origins (The Church on Ruby Road).  While portraying the Doctor as more emotionally open and vulnerable is a good thing to validate the former, crying every episode to show that he is more emotionally open is not as it loses impact. 

Overall, this has been a decent season.  It didn’t start strong and, in my view, it didn’t end strong, but there was some great story-telling in the middle, with the acting and production throughout very good indeed.  Dot and Bubble will remain my favourite episode of the season.  With the mystery of Mrs Flood still to be explored, there is an interesting hook for the future and I’m certainly hooked to wait with eager anticipation for the 2024 Christmas Special and Fifteenth’s second season.