Doctor Who Waits for Death, and Not Much Else

Physician Who, in fact, is king of the cliffhanger. For a present that thrived on needing to get individuals to tune again in subsequent week as storylines stretched throughout a number of episodes, few ongoing sequence have mastered the artwork of a final minute hook screaming into the closing titles that will have you ever seated this time in seven days. “The Legend of Ruby Sunday”, the penultimate episode of the present season, has that. And it’s actually good. It’s simply obtained a reasonably muddled episode earlier than all that.

A lot of “Legend” is essentially about biding its time for that remaining reveal—the darkish entity who’s behind each little crumb of teasing throughout Physician Who’s newest season, the whole lot from bizarre groans the TARDIS has been making, to only why Ruby’s start mom is such a thriller, and to, in fact, why Susan Twist has been displaying up as essentially the most persistent visitor star of a Physician Who season in years. Very out of the blue, the Physician has determined this can be a factor he now has to right away care about, however he’s additionally determined it must be the time he has to right away care about Ruby’s parentage, even when she’s been randomly making it snow all season lengthy. And so, our heroes are off to UNIT to say hello to their previous buddies, and ask the large query they need to’ve been asking all season lengthy: has anybody seen Susan Twist currently?

Conveniently, they’ve—Susan is now enjoying one other Susan, Susan Triad, a world tech head making ready to introduce some extremely obscure software program to the world that guarantees to alter the whole lot. We by no means know what, how, or why, “Legend of Ruby Sunday” shouldn’t be truly on this. It simply wants you to know that Susan Twist is Additionally Right here. And so, inside just a few scenes, the episode is already getting away from itself, pulling in a bunch of sparsely interconnected instructions: the Physician and Ruby are at UNIT as a result of they hope UNIT can use billions of kilos value of presidency tools to have a look at some CCTV footage from the evening Ruby was left on the Church that will give her her title. They additionally want to assist the Physician work out why his personal TV present retains casting the identical lady, however then not solely is that lady already right here, she… is likely to be the Susan, as in, the Physician’s granddaughter Susan, a concept floated virtually solely on the idea that “S. Triad” is a clumsy anagram of “TARDIS.”

What this implies is that out of the blue the Physician and Ruby are out of the blue pulled between three potential big storylines—the (potential) return of Susan, whoever Susan Triad actually is that if she isn’t a Time Lord, and trying to make use of UNIT’s doubtful “Time Window”, which primarily seems like a Quantity set however is a window in time and house, to determine the id of Ruby’s mom. There’s additionally an enormous solid to cope with impulsively with the return of UNIT—acquainted faces like Kate and Mel, and Rose Noble (who now has a job there, looking forward to potential shoplifters which… looks as if a wild misuse of UNIT sources!?), and newcomers like scientific advisor Morris (Lenny Rush), archivist Harriet (Genesis Lynea), and troopers like Colonels Ibrahim (Alexander Devrient) and Chidoze (Tachia Newall). So in the long run, irrespective of how briskly the TARDIS comes crashing in within the opening, what “Legend” is sort of solely about is having this big solid shuffle about as we look forward to that climactic disclose to click on into place.

In some methods this works—there may be a lot up within the air all through the episode that there’s a lingering sense of dread that’s efficient, as you and the Physician and Ruby alike attempt to race by all the probabilities of what’s actually occurring. However in lots others, it’s largely irritating. There’s an absence of circulate to “Legend” that pulls the Physician and Ruby between all these warring plot threads—one minute they’re having this emotional frustration that it doesn’t matter what they struggle with the Time Window, they’ll’t see Ruby’s mom in its gateway to Christmas Eve. The subsequent, the Physician and Mel are racing over to Triad Applied sciences to attempt to sus out Susan earlier than her large, extremely obscure keynote speech to the world, and they’re additionally attempting to navigate the Physician’s discomfort on the chance that his personal granddaughter is not only nonetheless alive, however a possible risk.

Every certainly one of these threads on their very own may’ve made a compelling episode, however collectively they jumble into one thing that feels incoherent, and the place not one of the emotional beats you’re meant to really feel for the Physician and Ruby—who themselves have struggled to really feel like a extremely tight friendship this season in a number of methods already—get the time to breathe or actually land. And since all these threads can’t truly lead someplace aside from the reveal on the finish of the episode, alongside the best way there’s simply little narrative momentum aside from poor Morris annoyingly having to yell “chance of a lure!” with more and more increased percentages to remind you that is all constructing to one thing.

Fortunately, that one thing is fairly killer. Push and pulled between UNIT HQ and Triad Applied sciences, the Physician realises all too late that he and UNIT alike have been wanting on the fallacious anagram: Susan Triad was a purple herring, and Susan Know-how was there in all of it alongside. This nice evil, this groaning pressure that has been hiding across the TARDIS in plain sight, this mystical pressure that has each reworked Sue and even Harriet—full title Harriet Arbinger, a herald of the pantheon—into skull-faced heralds of its arrival: Sutekh (as soon as once more voiced by Gabriel Woolf!), now a god of dying made flesh, the legendary villain of “The Pyramid of Mars”, again to menace the Physician as soon as extra. And it’s legitimately a unbelievable reveal—that lingering dread that’s bubbled up all through “Legends” and its myriad plot threads pays off in basic model, an excellent cathartic launch that’s the whole lot you need out of a Physician Who villain reveal: the little puzzle, the physique horror of Sue and Harriet’s transformations, a fully horrifying dying when the previous touches somebody they usually flip into skeletonized mud.

It’s adequate, even, that you just form of neglect within the second that it’s primarily Russell T Davies riffing on previous work—Sutekh’s reveal here’s a fascinating mirror to the Professor Yana/Grasp twist in 2007’s “Utopia”, which aired on this precise weekend 17 years in the past, proper right down to the truth that Murray Gold re-leverages a few of the rising and falling strings from that reveal’s soundtrack. That you just even neglect, maybe extra importantly, that nothing that occurred within the 40 minutes beforehand actually mattered all that a lot as compared. Was the legend of Ruby Sunday solved? TBD. Did it matter the Physician thought his granddaugter had returned? Probably not. Did UNIT truly assist at any level aside from the actual fact Mel obtained to bike the Physician to Triad Applied sciences and Morris may preserve yelling about lure likeliness? Nicely… they did present just a few mooks to die and ramp up the strain, I suppose. That was considerably helpful in an episode that, by and enormous, felt prefer it struggled to seek out an existence past establishing Sutekh’s reveal.

Which largely implies that, as nice as that 5 minutes is, we’ll have to attend till subsequent week to see if it was value it—or reasonably, that Physician Who can justify a little bit of aimless arrange right here with a deliciously villainous efficiency. If there’s any basic villain the revived model of the present hasn’t performed with but to do it, Sutekh is up there: “Pyramids of Mars” is a basic for a cause, and the reason being Sutekh’s horrifying, emptied feeling of simply how far past he was when it got here to the Physician and humanity. A chilly and calculating villain, the large monstrous type we see in “Legend” enveloping the TARDIS in roars and cackles, hidden beneath mysterious puzzles and anagrams, already looks like a mixture of the acquainted and the brand new.

If subsequent week’s finale can pull off Sutekh as an all-time villain for the trendy period of the present, then perhaps we are able to forgive “The Legend of Ruby Sunday” for being little greater than a stepping stone. If it might probably’t? Nicely, at the least we obtained a reasonably unbelievable cliffhanger right here—and generally with Physician Who, that’s one of the best you may hope for.

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